I use handwriting a lot. And I have a favorite tool for it (it’s Concepts, but it really doesn’t matter, as it’s personal preference, and the idea works for every other tool).
Excalidraw has been a blessing for my use of Obsidian, and don’t get me wrong, I’m still using it, and have been finding more ways to operate on it every month.
However, it’s not as refined as my fav tool, I can’t rotate, writing is not as flowy, sometimes it struggles (much better with 2.4.3, however!). So I’ve been playing around with different kinds of pipelines, tried to append pencilkit to electron, use Dropbox.
Until today I found out how stupid I was not knowing what Apple has done with their “Share with…”
Turns out, if you have a .concept file in Obsidian, and you click on it, and choose Concepts as a tool, it’ll open the file, AND KEEP SAVING THE FILE TO THE SAME ORIGINAL LOCATION! Yes, you read it right.
Not only that, when you close Concepts, it’ll forget the file existed, so no garbage or duplicates left behind.
That’s it, folks, that’s the whole thing. I know it doesn’t sound like much, but in case someone googles for “how to use an external handwriting tool on iPad with Obsidian”, I just wanted to put this note out there, would love to have found it earlier myself.
PS: You may ask - but what about previewing it in Obsidian? Well, I just do “export to SVG”, it’s a 2 click action in Concepts, and then Obsidian opens up and nicely asks me if I want to add a link to the accepted .svg file into the daily note or currently open note, so I get that link for free.
PPS: I do thing called “programmable drawings”, if you have ever tried doing the same, you know how easy SVG is for operating in code, so that’s something I’ve been playing around with too - a lot of stuff is autogenerated in my Obsidian, this thing seems more alive with every passing day, of course it isn’t… yet.