I'm a web developer, an avid note taker, and I run a website called Obsidian.Rocks.
Exciting Obsidian updates, using the Minimal Theme and Obsidian
Welcome and happy Friday!
Many of you have never received an Obsidian.Rocks newsletter before. If that’s you, thank you for signing up! I appreciate it, and I’m going to try hard to make it worth your time.
BIG NEWS since the last newsletter. Obsidian is going through a serious overhaul, and as a result many things have changed. For one thing, there’s a new icon for the app and website:
Honestly I didn’t like it much at first. But the story behind it is excellent, and I think ultimately I will love it, despite a rocky first impression. If you want to read the full story, take a look at the new Obsidian Blog.
That’s another new thing: the Obsidian team has completely revamped their website, started publishing an official blog, and they have a new webpage for their changelog.
Exciting stuff!
The app has also received a number of exciting updates. PDFs are now first-class-citizens in the Obsidian app. I’m going to write a full article about that soon, but you can get the Cliff’s notes on the Changelog.
On to OR news!
I’ve been a big fan of the Minimal theme for some time now. One of my top recommendations for beginners is to install and use the Minimal theme, because it makes Obsidian less intimidating at first.
But Minimal isn’t just about simplicity. It’s also a robust and flexible theme, and it has some features that most don’t know about. One of those features is the ability to convert Dataview tables into cards, which is wonderful for those of us who use Dataview often. You can even create complex layouts with it, like this Movie Database:
Minimal also supports image galleries, numerous color schemes, focus mode, progress bars, and more! If you want to learn how to use advanced Minimal features, see How to use the Minimal Theme in Obsidian.
The creator of Minimal, Kepano (also the new CEO of Obsidian), updated Minimal to version 7.0 yesterday, so it’s never been a better time to give it a shot!
If you’re still on the fence about Obsidian, or if you’re struggling to get into it, I just published an article on why you should use Obsidian. I also published a summary of this on Twitter, and it seems to have struck a chord!
This article is a quick analysis of why Obsidian works for me so much better than any other system. I also wrote about creating delight through notes, which may sound odd, but it’s a real thing.
It may take a while to get there, but if you invest enough into your notes eventually they will invest in you, and that is where notes become a passion.
If you want the Tl;DR, I also published a shorter version of creating delight through notes, in the form of a Quick Tip: Use the Quick Switcher to create new notes.
That’s all for now. Thanks again for signing up for this newsletter! If you have any thoughts or suggestions, feel free to reply to this email.
Ciao~
Tim
Hi! I'm Tim.
I'm a web developer, an avid note taker, and I run a website called Obsidian.Rocks.
Hello all! Happy end of October. Hope you are happy and well, wherever you happen to be! This month I've been thinking about email. Love it or hate it, email is a fact of life for many of us. And I can't help shake the thought that Obsidian could make email better, if I could just figure out how. So I looked into it, and found... not a lot of interest. There are a few email plugins out there, but they have very few downloads, clearly not plugins that are in widespread use. What's up with...
Hello all! It's October, which means... a new Obsidian October! What is Obsidian October? Every year, Obsidian holds a community event during the month of (you guessed it!) October. This event always results in a whole host of great new plugins and themes to try out. The results of 2021 were fun, and in 2022 they took it to a whole new level, with seven different categories for entries. You can also see the 2021 results here. A lot of great stuff! The Obsidian team hasn't announced categories...
Hello there! 👋 HUGE news to start off the month. Obsidian Properties, which have been in development for the last couple of months, are now available to everyone. If you're running Obsidian and haven't tried Properties yet, then better update your app! Also, a little humble brag: I wrote an article about Properties four weeks ago (linked below), and at the time I said this: Note: at the time of writing, Properties haven’t been released to the public. If you want access to them, you can become...