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2021-07-24: Showcases, Link Cards, & Better Tablet Toolbars

The QuickAdd developer wants to know what you want to know, TTRPG maps came to mobile, & some nice new notetaking workflows.

Eleanor Konik
Written by Eleanor Konik

I write stories & articles inspired by all eras of history & science... so I wind up putting notetaking software like Obsidian & Readwise thru their paces.

3 min read.

In The Community

  • There’ll be a community showcase for themes, plugins & snippets this Saturday 24th (today!) at 17:00 (CET) (about 4 hours after the roundup arrives in your inbox). It will kick off with @SkepticMystic’s breadcrumbs and @SlRvb’s snippets! To sign up for a timeslot, use this form.

Obsidian Updates

  • Insider 0.12.11 has some nifty upgrades and improvements, particularly for the new Note Composer core plugin, but the main thing seems to be some library upgrades and the very exciting (for developers) API to perform HTTP requests without any CORS restrictions. The API is called request().

Plugin News

New

Updates

  • The lead developer of the Dictionary API is not a member of the Obsidian community, but if you are using the Dictionary plugin, you are using his work—and he needs help! The API is not free to maintain and it’s costs a bunch of money in AWS bills, so if you’re a frequent user, please consider donating.
  • QuickAdd updated 3 times and now has a nicer mobile interface, support for inline JavaScript execution, and a bunch of new macro commands. Most importantly, @Christian is working on a video guide so if you have questions about (or requests for) QuickAdd please fill out this survey.
  • Dice Roller 5.0.0 has support for rolling random blocks of notes.
  • Breadcrumbs can now generate an index for you.
  • The status bar pomodoro plugin can now log completed pomos.
  • Obsidian Filename Heading Sync is back and better than ever!
  • Leaflet is now mobile compatible! Here’s an example of how cool it looks.

Under The Radar

For Developers

  • @Roamhacker put together this diagram of the main css classes in Obsidian.

Workflow Stuff

Showcases

A bunch of people shared their vaults this week, including me!

  • My working vault isn’t so much a pruned digital garden as a raw dump of my working files. I published it to make it easier to point people to examples of things. The raw .zip is also available on my website behind a small paywall, since it also includes my actual WIP articles and fiction.
  • Mister Chad’s beautiful art resources were created for his students, but it’s an absolutely beautiful exemplar of an Obsidian publish vault and has a lot of great visual design resources. Here’s the git repo for the theme.
  • Singlanguages is a vault about the languages of Singapore and has resources for learning a second language.
  • Also, @tallguyjenks has 4 hours of PKM content going live on Monday at 08:30 UTC-7. It’s a comprehensive look into personal knowledge management, with lots of definitions covered, an overview of his system, and a skeleton vault for people to play with.

Feature Requests

Appearance

  • Minimal theme has improved support for iOS.
  • @vainilie shared their snippets and tricks for getting an absolutely beautiful daily note widget over on GitHub.
  • The Horizon theme was added to the community themes list.
  • This css snippet will iteratively color folders.

Knowledge Management

Ancillary Tools

  • Quartz is another option for hosting your digital garden as a webpage for you, with no web experience required. The developer seems nice and its optimized for Obsidian. It even has graph and backlinks support, although I don't think it supports wikilinks yet.
  • YiNote is a Chrome extension that lets you take timestamped notes while watching YouTube videos.
  • The book Professional Git was edited by a community member and comes recommended for people who like textbooks for learning computer concepts. Git is a tool to help manage collaboration and version control that is pretty popular in this community, but can be overwhelming at first. If you want an easy start with git, check out Github Desktop.

Note: There are a couple of affiliate links & codes scattered around, but these always come from links I was already recommending and usually I share them because they benefit you too (i.e. getting you extra time on trials).

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