This isn’t a feature request, just a general discussion point but there doesn’t seem to be a category for general topics.
I’ve found no mention of the new species of whiteboard/note apps being developed currently. Hepta base, Scrintal, Obsidian’s Canvas for example.
Personally I’m finding them very helpful, even though they’re at an early stage of development. Better for brainstorming, working out sequences and relationships and integrated with as much text as you want. The Heptabase table/kanban feature using tags is something I don’t recognise from anywhere else. Probably more designed for researchers and factual writers than fiction.
Well, then there’s a lot of different software out there for taking notes, brainstorming, and storing and linking data of all kinds. Actually, a classic use case since computers have been known. Just more and more user-friendly, respectively tailored to certain kind of non-technical users. Isn’t that just great?
However, I personally wouldn’t want to depend on a provider who keeps my data on his own server in exchange for regular payments.
Not to be misunderstood: Something like this can be well worth the money if you take advantage of the added value of sharing between different devices and users. However, your work then depends on the success of the company. If it disappears from the market, all could be lost.
A while back, there was a story outlining software called Storybook that was quite good by the standards of the time. When the program started, it connected to the vendor’s license server. But this company disappeared from one day to the next without a trace from the web, and the paid version of the software could no longer be started. There was still a free trial version, but it had some impractical limitations.
The whole thing then had a happy ending: after several years, the code of the software suddenly reappeared as an open source project, which was even further developed. The application is still freely available today under the name oStorybook, but is hardly known anymore.
Very good. For me, it looked like a subscription model at first glance, but I may have been wrong.
For systematic collections of information and for my writing journal, I use Zim, which also saves its notes as individual files in a Markdown dialect. It doesn’t have such a fancy user interface, but it’s free. And for loose finds that I want to link and retrieve via keywords, I use Zettelkasten, which is exceedingly powerful, but has a learning curve.
To let the thoughts run free, I don’t know anything better than Scapple.
Canvas is free with Obsidian.
Hepta does have a subscription and it’s not cheap, but the data files are local unless you choose also to sync them to the web. It doesn’t count itself as being available to the public yet - there will be a free trial when it is. But it is very stable and functional and usable, though still having features added.
The new programs are a completely different type of design combining notetaking with whiteboards. Programs like Scapple, zkn3 or zim - or indeed Aeon - don’t duplicate their features and workflow. Whether it’s useful, will vary according to the individual. And the target audience (Heptabase and Scrintal) seems primarily to be researchers. So they also have document handling, PDFs etc.
Hepta is far more polished than Canvas. Scrintal is too, but I’m not so keen on it and can’t really comment on workflows in it.
Hm yes, just had a look at Obsidian. Looks extremely tempting, it has a reasonable concept, a programming interface, plugins… this could easily become my new hobby…
Actually, I wanted to get away from the tools because playing around with them keeps me from working more than it really gets me ahead. Have already thought about documenting my research with the word processor again, like in the good old days.
But Obsidian looks really nifty, so I might actually be tempted again.
I strongly suspect that for many, many users Obsidian is a time sink that satisfies all possible demands for fiddling procrastination.
It is possible to keep it simple, and the core features are straightforward, but most users are into plugins, themes and eventually dataview.
But it does work, it is very popular (especially with CS students and researchers, and even more especially with those who play RPG), and there’s a lot of help available if you get stuck.
Personally I now use the much simpler Tangent Notes, which uses the same wikilinks and can be used on the same folders and notes as Obsidian. (If I need an Obsidian only feature, I just open the notes in that.) It has no plugins or themes, and there’s very little user configuration available.
The Obsidian Discord is extremely active with many channels (forum is fairly active too). TTRPG is hugely active, but the Creative (writing) channel is pretty active too and authors like pdworkman post frequently.
How nice that there are even several applications for the Obsidian data structures. However, I don’t see the big leap yet with Tangent Notes compared to Zim.
Well then, I’ll keep that in mind (with a purely mental note), and try to be strict and finish my current novel first. Thanks for the tips, anyway.
You can do many of the same things in Zim, but I never like its organisation. Tangent is much better for focus modes. And Zim features don’t begin to approach the possibilities in Obsidian.
There are many ex Zim users in Obsidian. But transferring the data from Zim has been generally problematic.
So then programming a data converter will be the first thing, should I ever start with Obsidian …
EDIT Here it is
It works for me with my Zim notebook containing about 1,770 notes.
However, it seems to me that the big difference between Obsidian and Zim is the Canvas whiteboard. This is a nice visual aid to create links between notes, as long as there aren’t too many.
What reference do you see here to Aeon Timeline?
You should also take a look at Zettlr or maybe also Joplin (database based with great sync options and plugins).
But none of them have the same level of network graph view as Obsidian, with the Juggl plugin for Obsidian you can actually save a json of the graph and open it in Cytoscape if you need to do analyzes…
Another text analyzing software that can import a “vault”/or folder of markdown and have great text analyzing features are Infranodus, but you will need neo4j if you want to install it…
And there is also Foam for VSC, and with Visual Studio Code you get another level of plugins, e.g., the FrontMatter plugin… and with a little over average level of interest, you can get all of them to operate together, or most of them…
Foam also use the same structure and linking as Obsidian, including aliases etc.
So, there is a lot of great Markdown Notebooks that can be used for research, but it’s harder to get them to interoperate or get some interchangeable functions with other software, mostly because other software vendors doesn’t like to “share data”.
I use Obsidian and Foam for all my research, using a 100% folder structure for my Notes, but using wiki links and aliases to link Places, People, Events, Vessels, Documents and Sources together.
The great thing about this when doing research on massive amount of data is that you can link both structured and unstructured text relatively easy…
e.g., If you know that you have a name for a person or a ship or a place in 2000 places in 1200 Notes including some tables etc. you can first import the csv to markdown tables (works well both in Obsidian with plugins and in Foam with VSC plugins), then you can just use a “search and replace” for “Jupiter Two” and replace it with e.g., “[[…/folder/Jupiter2.md|Jupiter Two]]”, as an example…
I usually links my md notes to the right object in other software I use, e.g., Gramps for storage of data. or Aeon for timelines that can’t be done with any of the timeline addons in Obsidian.
There are also maps addons for Obsidian so you can show your notes on a map in a note…
Thanks for the recommendations. It is really amazing what is now available to collect data and knowledge. Should a corresponding use case arise for me one day, I will definitely take a closer look at all of this.
For fun, I have transferred my Zim wiki to Obsidian, which was not difficult with the appropriate scripts. In the process, I noticed the fundamental difference: Obsidian has a pure folder structure, while Zim builds a document hierarchy, with the folders “under the hood”. In direct comparison, Obsidian initially does not support index pages for the folders, as they are automatically created during the conversion of Zim. But I see there is a plugin for that. I find such comparisons always enlightening, because they open the view on the conceptual ideas of the developers.
However, as noted earlier, it all too quickly ends up in procrastination.
yes, index pages in Obsidian are actually just a page with a collection of wikilinks.
I don’t use indexes in my research, either I browse within the folder structure (I have the same structure as collections in Zotero and any other software I use), or I use free text search, or the graph.
I also have a YAML header for all my note types, different templates for different “objects”/“subjects”.
Obsidian is mostly made for a flat folder structure… type; -“all in one folder and use tags and wikilinks to find your documents”.
I am more of the “old school” and use an extended folder structure, but try to not extend to more than 5 levels in the hierarchy.
To be able to do so, you most likely will need to enable the 32-bit file path feature in Windows…
I really wished it was a way to a better usage of markdown notes in Aeon 3, at the moment all I can do is to link the Notes to the different objects in the timeline…
I’m thinking about making a script that creates an Aeon csv from the MD notes, utilizing YAML and other data in the notes…
But to import/export at any change I do either place is a lot of extra work…
I am enjoying this discussion. I wondered if there was an Obsidian plugin that was developed to integrate with AT3. Someone posted the same idea on the Obsidian site. Thoughts?
The thing is, “integration” is a somewhat imprecise term. In Aeon Timeline 3, it often seems to mean the export or synchronization of the “narrative” or other items and their properties.
Export is not that hard; two months ago I wrote an experimental Python script for it. If you want, you can modify it to output the data not as a single document with different heading levels, but as a directory structure with individual Markdown files. Or you just postprocess the original output in some way. However, it seems to me that no one is seriously interested in doing this.
Of course, a more attractive option for users would be an Obsidian plugin. Such plugins would then probably have to be programmed in JavaScript or TypeScript, which should not be too much of a challenge due to the JSON formatted data of the .timeline files. Maybe just a diligence task. But according to my experience so far, not exactly a thankful one.
Agreed. Makes me wonder if the AT devs would have an incentive to create the plugin – surely it would drive more customers to AT3. Anyway, I need to focus on my novel writing. This kind of thing it way too tempting.
I have already looked at you “to markdown” script… I am not a developer, but it might be that I actually try to do something with it when I got some time… at the moment I just use a csv to markdown script I found on github, but I use other software to so somehow, I need to do something that makes the Markdown research notes more of an automated hub for communication/interchangeable data for all of them, or starting to use neo4j or orientdb and figure out how to “integrate” that as data store for the other software I use…
