Super FR: Visual/Spatial Note Taking - Whiteboard - Mind Map - Concept Map

Feature archive
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One thing that’s attractive about Miro is its aesthetics, it is very well designed. Although Microsoft Canvas is a free tool for Windows users, I still can’t move on from Miro.

85

Thanks for sharing this. At first sight, this looks brilliant.

87

The idea behind http://condensr.de/ is just brilliant.

  1. Create plain txt notes
  2. Drag drop them into the whiteboard
  3. Move and connect these however you see fit
  4. Save the file as HTML
  5. When you have more related info drag the HTML file into the whiteboard and add the related info either directly in the app or by drag dropping txt files.
  6. Save again as HTML
  7. Reiterate

Sure there are many rough edges but this seems like a brilliant model to emulate and build on top of it.

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The closest thing to my vision for ultimate infinite board/concept map is heptabase and software ideas modeler(https://www.softwareideas.net/)
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There’s also some neat note taking/concept map app from Russia called knowflow KnowFlow. Unfortunately all of their servers are in Russia and they have not made any update since 2020, so using it probably will be risky.
Trilium notes also have mapping/diagram system which imo is better than native obsidian, but it’s not that good compared to heptabase.

For infinite boards for textbook annotation, I think noone could beat marginnotes, although I never used it I could tell how useful it is.

Long-long ago there also exists a topic maps movement(The TAO of Topic Maps) that promotes the implementation of topic maps for knowledge management. But I guess the movement is already dead, or at least have gone through research winter. Until now I haven’t found a single topic maps software that could be easily used by common people.

Infranodus(https://infranodus.com/) has many intriguing ideas for text visualizations, but unfortunately it fell short when faced with pictures/irregular texts.

Freeplane is surprisingly quite good for concept mapping/infinite board, but it’s weird node cloning features makes it not an attractive option for me.

You could use fibery for infinite board, but imo it would be overkill and not worth the effort to learn how to use it.

xmind/mindmeister/Ioctopus/mindmaple/mindomo/mindnode/mindmanager/…almost all of existing mindmapping software: Super meh, sometimes I wonder how could someone looked at existing market for mindmap software and thought it would be a good idea to release the same c**p.

Thinkcomposer: Have some interesting ideas, but its dev quitted long time ago, and the software is outdated and buggy.

Visual Understanding Environment(VUE): No need to concern yourself with this, obsidian + excalidraw is better.

Compendium(Compendium Institute): Could’ve been something special if more people interested in maintaining/developing it.

Tiddlymap: Not recommended for non-tiddlywiki users

Flying logic: Too complicated

Southbeach Modeller: Too complicated

2 Likes
89

In my opinion, good digital whiteboard should’ve at least four features:

  1. Decent annotations: Good annotation for pdf is a must.
  2. Separation of views. Good digital whiteboard should allow conflicting new arrangement of thought, without destroying the existing arrangements.
  3. Ability to embed/transclude and interact with a whiteboard from another whiteboard.
  4. Ability to draw hypergraph
2 Likes
90

This is implemented in v1.1. If you have any further suggestions regarding Canvas, please search/open a separate FR and follow the FR template.

https://forum.obsidian.md/t/obsidian-release-v1-1-0-insider-build/48954

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