Obsidian Canvas is not just a shiny feature, it's a brand new way to think.
You can lay out text, notes, images, PDFs, or even interactive websites on your canvas, and make sense of your ideas in this infinite space.
Very interesting application of the open canvas. I use Arc Easel and customized inbox system in Craft for the similar purpose and can assure it is very useful. Must be more useful in obsidian if you already use the app and have all the docs there to glance at the same place.
This is so exciting to see. Obsidian is by far my favorite note-taking app, and adding this level of diagramming and linking takes it to a whole new level! Congratulations team on shipping such a polished product!
Canvas would be amazing on its own but to have this functionality able to surface my notes and content from Obsidian is a wonderful leap into a different way to work with ideas and connections.
Creator of Obsidian here. We're so excited that Obsidian Canvas is going live today!
Canvas is not just a shiny feature, it's a brand new way to think. You can lay out text, notes, images, PDFs, or even interactive websites on your canvas, and make sense of your ideas in this infinite space.
Thank you to everyone for your support and patience! Thanks all Catalyst members, alpha testers, and moderators who provided feedback and reported bugs.
Special credits go to Matthew Meyers (@mgmeyers) and Liam Cain (@liamcain) for tirelessly shaping Canvas into what it is today.
(@mgmeyers (@liamcain@erica_xu Wow, thank you for all your hard work and dedication that made this launch possible! We are so excited to explore Canvas and its possibilities.
(@mgmeyers (@liamcain@erica_xu This is amazing! It sounds like Obsidian Canvas has endless possibilities when it comes to organizing and presenting information in new ways.
@mgmeyers@liamcain@erica_xu cheers to the creator and the rest of the team who has spent so much time and braincells to finally make this launch a success! All the best!
Life changing. When Obsidian came out, it fulfilled a 6-year-long dream I had for graphically linked notes. But, as it turns out, I never actually made use of the linking and graphing features because I found it too difficult to think about what should link to what, and the graphs were never useful to me because the nodes were arranged automatically/randomly and thus had little significance to me.
So, I now realize that Canvas is what I was actually longing for, now that I see it. There's immense value in being able to manually link notes and visually place them in a sensible, permanent visual space. Of course, Mind Mapping tools have long existed, but never with the slick notetaking functionality of Obsidian underneath it.
Now I'm able to continue with my preferred "technique" of just making a single massive braindump of ideas while I exhaustively explore a new idea, where I don't worry whatsoever about how anything is linked or organized - topics just get vague and redundant headers. Its truly the equivalent of writing a whole bunch of index card notes and throwing them in a box. I suppose we could have always done this with Obsidian, but the difference is that I can now create a mindmap canvas rather than some sort of table of contents, and curate the braindump fragments into their respective cards/notes - all of which can be easily, sensibly and visually found via the main Canvas.
I suspect I'll make very limited use of actual links and graphs going forward. Obsidian is the best.
Conoto