2021-06-05: New Themes, Kanban Updates & Dropbox Backups

In The Community

• This video goes over the Obsidian v0.12.3 New Features & Improvements, while this video is an Obsidian v0.12.4 Insiders Build Preview.
• Knowledge Organization, Cataloging and Classification in Obsidian by @bri is scheduled for Saturday, June 5th 11:00 GMT-7.
• Using Pandoc to keep your workflow inside Obsidian by @SkepticMystic has been scheduled for Sunday 13th 18:00 CET
• This discord server exists to help people with questions about the Obsidian Juggl plugin.

Housekeeping

• Please note that some of the following links go to the Obsidian Community discord and will only work if you have joined the server! Find out more on the Obsidian Community page.

Plugin News

New

• Obsidian Dropbox Backups can now be automated.

Updates

• Kanban 0.4.0 was released. It supports pulling in metadata from pages linked within cards, including dataview inline metadata. Cards update when a linked page's metadata changes. This allows nifty things like updating the metadata with Supercharged Links. Important! Update the Kanban plugin if you're on 0.4.1, @doge helped surface a pretty bad bug that is fixed in 0.4.2. Image embeds, pasting HTML, and dropping content onto the board to create new cards were made available in 0.4.3! Kanban 0.5.0 supports dragging cards and lanes between boards, so if you have make a 1-column board into a Workbench (with the Workbench plugin), you can send notes or paragraphs to your Workbench from anywhere in your vault...  and then easily drag them from there to other Kanban boards. (@pjeby and @mgmeyers both worked on it this week, it's been nice to see pull requests and collaboration on the plugins).
• Supercharged Links 0.2.9 brings more flexibility for users to control the styling of their links! and the management of their frontmatter/dataview fields.
• The Obsidian Dictionary Plugin now allows users to click on a new Button in the Sidebar to save the Information of any word to a file locally, which you can use to link to other notes.
• 0.0.9 of block reference counters fixes a bug that added additional blank search tabs to the right sidebar. There's also a new reference view mode. Some people like it, some people hate it, be sure to voice your opinions!
• Tracker v1.6.0 added a new search type fileMeta to retrieve the dates and sizes of files. It's also possible to retrieve dates from various kinds of search types. The plugin now supports bullet charts.

Under The Radar

• Obsidian TOC will generate a table of contents for a file.
• Obsidian Tweaks adds some additional functionality that can be hotkeyed.

Templater Scripts

• This video from Productivity Guru was surfaced as being a good introduction to using the Templater plugin.
• You can add both windows desktop native notifications and also obsidian notifications (notices) with templater.
• The QuickAdd templater script now allows the use of variables. There's also a new property called multi that lets you group choices together and have a more organized menu.
• This templater script can replace all timestamps prepended by a key with a YouTube link.

Workflow Stuff

• @bettyzhang shared their academic workflow, which leverages the Highlights App, Zotero & Mdnotes, Dataview, Citations Plugin, and Zotfile.
• This dataviewjs query allows you to copy all the links found in it. It also displays them in a table below, so you see what you're getting. I've included instructions for changing the formatting, in case you might want to have the links comma-separated or something.
• This forum thread is a useful discussion about how various people leverage YAML metadata in their notes.

Feature Requests

• u/ShikaruBoy on Reddit asked for the ability to exclude specific folders from the quick switcher.

Appearance

• This CSS Snippet increases the visibility of the back/forward navigation arrows in Obsidian.
• This theme enhances Nord by getting rid of colored headers, and adds support for syntax highlight and the presentation plugin.
• My theme, Palatinate, had a major overhaul: it's now just one file (no font downloads required), and pending admission into the community repo.

Ancillary Tools

• Cryptomator was recommended as an encryption tool that offers multi-platform transparent client-side encryption of your files.
• Freeplane was recommended as a quality open source mind mapping program. Evidently the documentation is poor and the website is dated, but you can ask questions on the SourceForge forum, and it's got "10x the functionality of any free competitor and probably most commercial options."
• Calibre v5.18 added highlight/annotation functionality with the ability to export notes from documents in markdown format. It's not as configurable as export/use with Zotero for pdfs, but it does provide custom links directly to the text in the file.
• Miraheze was recommended as a mediawiki alternative.
• @bettyzhang put together this Obsidian and Logseq Side by Side Comparison on YouTube.