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.
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