Obsidian - Connected Notes 4+

Have been using Obisidan in beta for the past year and in the mobile beta since its inception. The combination is incredible and the Obsidian developers provide huge value for free across multiple platforms. Free full functionality in a data format that guarantees you can never lose access to your work. Support for the developers is only through their publish and sync services, neither is required to use all the functions of the product. It has spoiled me for any other note app. Best functionality is for knowledge management and longer form writing, for both of those it is a distinct pleasure to use. Lot’s of available community add-ons provide a wide variety of options for task management, calendar integration, kanban, data analysis and much more. In my opinion those are higher friction and I’d prefer other tools but if you are a bit technical and like tweaking on your own you will find those useful as well - beware that community plugins can be more hit or miss in the mobile version. With all that - this is THE most valuable tool in the entire Apple ecosystem for my day-to-day work.

I’ve used Obsidian desktop since December and the mobile app for a couple of months.

The longer I use it, the less and less I open other apps. Creating a new note is fast and editing your standard Markdown is fast and easy, enough that I never use the Markdown shortcuts bar.

I use Obsidian for three types of notes. First, I use it for daily notes, much like a digital bullet journal. Second, for project notes and references, and finally for my personal second brain/zettelkasten, and I work on all three types of notes in the same vault without any confusion.

Couple of caveats:

1. WYSIWYG not available yet, so you write in Markdown. You can flip from edit to preview mode to see “pretty” text, but I just look at Markdown all day. I’m ok with that, but it might drive you nuts.

2. App and desktop/mobile synch are free, but I pay a monthly fee for Obsidian’s synch rather than muss about with settings to manage synch myself. Plus it’s encrypted end-to-end.

3. Finally, I think it would be easier if you *started* on desktop and then *also* worked on your phone. I think desktop makes it easier to really get into and figure out the workflow and organization system that works for you.

Whatever you choose, I definitely recommend you commit and use Obsidian for a couple of weeks to really try it out. It’s so flexible, you need some time kick all the tires and see which ones you like.

The reason I'm writing this is because the obsidian mobile app has finally been released, much to my glee. 'Glee', that's a word that I hate to describe myself with because it has an almost humiliatingly over-emotional charge to it, but it's fitting enough in this case. The app is excellent. It's excellent for many reasons that set it apart from any other note taking app:
- Hyper-customizable shortcuts to do almost anything you could want to do in the app as quickly as possible. With keyboard support.
- The same, wonderful network visualization of your entire notebook, complete with tweakable physics.
- Custom styles that can be written in pure CSS or selected from the set of community themes
- Notes are saved to your phone's files as raw .markdown files which you can do anything you want with later.
- You can sync your notes with Obsidian's own "Sync" service, or you can even use Git. iCloud is also an option.
- Third party plugins (you can even write your own!) which allow complete changes to app functionality.

These features combined are, to me, absolutely staggering to see in an iPhone app. The developers of Obsidian, in porting their desktop application to mobile, have simultaneously created what I think is one of the most powerful tools I've ever had on my phone.