Feedback on using Obsidian

Basement
1

I have been using Obsidian for a little over a week now and am very impressed. I’ve recommended it to my kids (both currently studying for a Ph.D. at Waterloo, an institution that the Team members know well) and, even though it is free, I would pay for a catalyst (or similar) license for each of them if they told me they enjoyed using it for keeping track of their personal notes.

I know that this is still in beta … but it is very impressive.

Things I like:

  • I had some notes written with Typora; I just open that folder in Obsidian and it just worked. It also made me realize that I should better organize my notes now that I can create links between them. I was eagerly anticipating version 1.0 of Typora … but have now decided to ignore it and just use Obsidian.
  • The default UI is very nice, and very responsive.
  • The preview works extremly well. I’m especially impressed by the preview shown while hovering over links.
  • The UI is customizable and, while Obsidian is young and the documentation is not as complete as it should in an ideal situation, it is easy enough to find information about it. Knowing I can do this on my own is inspiring. I will likey design my own theme, probably taking inspiration of the Twilight theme of SublimeText.
  • Pictures of Sandy and Blaze
  • The obvious enthusiasm of the Team members, and that of many community members
  • The plan to include support for inline LaTeX.
  • The fact that it extensible by plugins. (Is there some documentation on how to do this?)
  • The fact that I can keep my notes wherever I want in a standard format.

Things I would like

  • Being able to combine preview + writing code in a single “view” - like Typora. I understand that this is a possibility (but likely something hard to do well) and will patiently waiting for it. Better to do it right than rush a poorly designed version.
  • Integrated support for diagram tools like mermaid; I know that others have suggested it, but have not seen any reaction to this suggestion.

Something I have questions about

I am a bit hesitant to enter my credit card number without having information about how the information is processed. Is it through a well-known third-party provider (like stripe, paypal, gumroad, etc.) or a custom implementation? If so, how is the security of the information provided guaranteed.

Also: are prices in USD or CAD? Waterloo grads should know that this should be mentioned!! :wink: :wink:
(I’m kidding … I presume it is USD.)

Kudos to Shida and Erica.

André

5 Likes
2

Just a quick note: a Typora-like editor is on the roadmap, though I personally hope to see mobile apps first!

Also, yes, the price was USD for me.

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I saw Stripe mentioned in Discord

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Hello,
payment in US dollar with my credit card. Absolutely no problem.

Oliver

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I am loving it too. This is almost perfect already. I have been using MWeb, which is very good, but I think Obsidian is going to replace it. I love that I could just open my folder of notes from MWeb and it just worked. Inline LaTeX is the one big thing missing for me. I have a few other things I would like like basic figures and music notation rendering which could be handled with plugins I expect. For now I am going to us a shared folder synched with iCloud and use Obsidian on the desktop while still using the MWeb iOS app, until there is an iOS app for Obsidian.

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We like that too.

Guess what will be part of 0.6.5? :wink:

API will be ready by v1.0, before that developers can sign up for beta testing. We can’t really make a stable API without hooking developers up with a dangerously unstable API!

Yes, we’re using Stripe and it’s USD. Another person had to check the code to make sure it’s Stripe – we should have put a “powered by Stripe” somewhere. Our bad! Will clarify both.

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Thanks for the info. I saw that the information about Stripe had been added.

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And thank you for your kind support, André!

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Yes please. Include music notation rendering.