Canvas is less of a piece of drawing software and more of brainstorm/mindmapping/idea workbench software. Excalidraw will satisfy different use case than Canvas and you can definitely use both!
I was using Excalidraw for (maybe unconventional?) mind-mapping, and one feature that I learned to appreciate is the ability to introduce unstructured objects into the diagram (e.g. add a box grouping arbitrary links, drop an image etc). I wonder how Canvas will hold up for such use cases.
We considered many options to use Markdown but came to the conclusion that Canvas is not something that can fit into a readable Markdown file. Either the Markdown file would so messy that it becomes pointless (i.e. you would never open it in Typora to edit), or it would severely limit the power of Canvas.
After much internal debate we chose the JSON format. We stay committed to keep it as open and easy to work with as possible. Plugin developers are already parsing and modifying the JSON file to programmatically change a Canvas view, and I think that's a fantastic start!
Now that you crossed that line, I hope the next "custom format" will be a "real" outliner. You are surely familiar with outliners ;-) It is about full block-level support really, and all what that allows (API, backlinks, query, aliases...)
Opportunity cost. I wrote on your forums about the decioson of using plain markdown. Consider other formats to stop bloating(yaml and dataview variables) markdown files. Now you have bloated md files and another format. Now i am saying you will add sqlite after one or two years. Waiting for extra file formats making existing files ugly.
Also obsidian needs multi user vaults. Start to think what extra file format needed for this.
The new editor in Obsidian was made possible by CodeMirror 6, and it has been powering both the Live Preview mode (like Typora) and the source mode in Obsidian ever since.
It can be a bit overwhelming to get into first, but as we experimented more with it, we found it to be extremely extensible and powerful. It's also highly performant for large documents. Another major reason we chose CM 6 is that it's also one of the only code editors that work decently on mobile.
While developing the new editor, Marijn was also amazingly responsive in investigating and fixing all the big and little things we ran into, even relatively niche issues like IME input bugs.
Huh Pixi JS. I used to be a contributor many moons back. It's a great little library. Would love to read about challenges with d3 force and your wasm approach if obsidian has a tech blog.
We'll give at least one month of advance notice before ending the discount, so as long as you receive news from us (Twitter, Discord, forum, etc) you should be good!
App Store allows external code if it strictly runs under WebKit and JavaScript Core. There's a few more general restrictions (like the additional functionality must be free or use IAP).
Hi HN! After months of private beta, Obsidian is now finally available for Android and iOS!
Obsidian is a personal knowledge management app that works on top of a local folder of Markdown files [0]. Because "local" often means your computer, for the longest time, it has been a pain to access these notes on the go.
Our original plan was to build fully native mobile apps. Instead, we decided to build hybrid web apps. Hybrid web apps gets a lot of hate, and for good reason. There's heavy performance penalty for running JavaScript. Animations are often janky. A lot of native capabilities are restricted.
We know everyone's favorite argument for using the web stack. "We're a small team, and it's just not possible to....". Sure, we're also just two developers, but that excuse gets old.
We see it in a different way. We leverage hybrid web apps not as a shortcut, rather, we use it to put power in the hands of our users. This has always been a key principle driving Obsidian's development.
Obsidian is one of the few apps out there that lets users customize every aspect of the app. Themes and CSS snippets let users completely change the interface. Plugins [1] let users augment the GUI [2], run macros [3], build databases [4], synchronize with other apps [5], and much more.
It's unprecedented for users to have access to this kind of power on their mobile devices.
We have a vibrant community of passionate users: lawyers, database engineers, dungeon masters, medical students, CEOs and CTOs under their alternate identity. You can find them on Discord and our forum at https://obsidian.md/community
https://obsidian.md/canvas#protips