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

There is the Diagrams (draw.io) plugin available now as a community plugin

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:grinning:

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what is the difference between Corkboard and Juggl?

Scroll down to the animated images showing the Heptabase worflow: https://heptabase.com/

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I would argue against using markdown simply because it’s not at all a tool for the job and one must avoid the pitfall of being tempted to see very problem as solvable by the same tool just because it is the sole tool available.

Markdown shines as a simple (poorly standardize) format that allows to express basic formatting in text fashion. It comes very short when it comes to standardisation, expressivity (even for text), structure (even for tables) and was simply never designed for anything like connectivity, graphs, being parsed unambiguously, or anything else than simple formatted text.

What’s the added value of using markdown versus just another better human readable but specialized language? The page is not mean’t to be editted in the editor anyway. Pushing ackward concepts into markdown will just lead to supporting exotic and hard to parse syntax anyway, i have no doubt it is doable and perhaps language must be expanded, but selecting the right tool for the job seems to me more important than making a text styling language suddenly expanding into representing highly structured data

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I agree that the more and more you try to stretch the limits, the more likely things will start breaking down. But I think there is a difference between enabling completely new functionality with Markdown files (“I want to shoot 4K video and store as MD files in Obsidian!”) and adding new ways of viewing and manipulating our fundamentally textual Markdown content (which is what this thread is mainly about.)

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Scapple, Milanote, Heptabase and now Clover…
Why are all this apps only for apple?

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I would love to see a index card / corkboard view in Obsidian. I’ve tried to emulate this behavior in Excalidraw and Kanban, and while both are excellent they aren’t really intended for this kind of visualization/organization.

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Any update on this, is it being considered by “core” or third party?

I have tried Excalidraw, but could not get into a good rhythm.

I just searched the Discord about this earlier and there’s at least one plug-in coming as well as some existing workflows that are moving in that direction.

Heptabase just raised $1.7M in seed funding so there’s definitely a perceived interest in this kind of function.

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Wow! Heptabase looks like a baby of Obsidian, mind maps, and Prezi (anyone remember Prezi?) :scream_cat:
But: If I remember correctly, Tony Buzan insisted that the branches of mind maps must be capital letter words, not sentence fragments, in order to keep overview and be able to read the idea / concept with one glance, no matter how large the mind map.
In Heptabase I only see a huge amount of tiny text on first glance, and the only memory aide will be space and maybe color coding.

PS: Christin, great to see you here, you were the one that got me to switch from Bear to Obsidian in the first place in our short reddit interactions (my handle is ‘jfhey’). Thanks for that :wink:
PPS: I hope you won’t make me switch to another software again :sweat_smile: (Scrintal looks kind of cool as well btw, similar direction as heptabase).
PPPS: Has anybody taken a look at obsidian markmind plugin? It allows you to watch and even edit your notes as a mindmap.

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Heptabase and Scrintal look really cool for sure but I’m way too invested in Obsidian’s ecosystem at this point to want to try to find replacements for all the components and workflows I’ve put into my system. I do have one project I might toss in Heptabase but with the intention of bringing it back to Obsidian when we get something along these lines.

Glad to see you here too! As for Markmind, it’s interesting and I’m glad I bought it but I haven’t found much use for it yet. I’m rather spoiled my MindNode and iThoughts and Markmind just doesn’t have the UX I expect for mind maps. Outlining works decently though. Tables are cool too. My biggest problem, however, is that it’s similar to the Kanban plug, a note is normal or it’s Markmind and you can’t really mix them if you want the more powerful features. I don’t think it’s the solution to lack of a visual interface either.

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Is there any difference between heptabase and roam’s plugin Roam Spatial Graph?

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Not much I guess, in both you don’t control your data…

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  • There may be need a common format, or tools, just like Adobe to turn the PDF into a generic format, requires an easy to read JSON and text files and rendering it on the graph, Excalidraw is very Like, but it is not enough.
  • If you’ve ever had a garbled text problem, you’ll realize that even if it’s plain text, it’s just a 0/1 binary and it’s still unreadable, but the device you’re using in your environment will guarantee that it’s readable,
  • The difference with traditional pdf files or XML files is that we need not only to be able to render as png, but also to want it to be modifiable, just like plain text, it is an ongoing project, not a one-time exhibition
  • I don’t know when there will be,…

Great idea. Something like Scrintal. That would be amazing. +1

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Yeah, I can’t wait to get some kind of plugin like Hepta for Obsidian.

Re:Markmind, you can of course use the simple mode which is nothing but a markdown note with headers and lists, but the mindmap features are very limited and you can’t change the headers in the markdown note either without breaking the mindmap structure.
I’m sure you are aware of the ‘trick’ to embed mymindnode as iframe in Obsidian :slight_smile:

BTW Zsolt has added a ‘TheBrain’ navigation script for Excalidraw which looks really awesome. Maybe a heptabase-like implementation is around the corner!

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Are you sure you mean Mindnode? It’s a native app on Apple platforms, I don’t think it has a web app and I’m not seeing one on their site. They did do myMindNode for a while but it’s deprecated and read-only.

I did see that The Brain video, it’s absolutely fascinating and I had no idea you could control Excalidraw programmatically like that so I too am hoping that may be a solution for a visual tool like Scrintal or Heptabase. I do find it a bit ironic that someone recreated The Brain’s UI patterns, The Brain is really cool but I gave up on it because I felt the UI was awful in its limitation.

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Probably worth keeping an eye on this:

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Sorry for the late answer. Yes I did mean myMindnode, wasn’t aware that it was deprecated.
There is also Mindmeister of course which is web based and may work in an iframe, but I never really liked it.