Apps
- Folders
- Images
- Audio
- Video
- PDFs
- All other file types
- Main settings
- Appearance Settings
- Themes and CSS
- Hotkeys
- Active core plugins
- Active community plugins
- Installed community plugins
- FreeTube - a YouTube viewer
- Bebop - Quick capture notes for Obsidian
- Clipboard Managers - A comparison of Mac clipboard managers - Raycast won
- Blip - a cross platform file transfer app
- Applite - an app store for Homebrew
- Omnivore - a free read-it-later app
- Apparency - a Quicklook plugin for apps
- My Applications - gives you detailed info on your installed applications
- Zavala - a free universal outliner
- Scrap Paper - a menu bar notes app that syncs with iOS
Today on AppAddict - I bought the disk cloning software SuperDuper! in 2004 and have been receiving updates ever since. It’s great for bootable full-disk backups, incremental backups and more.
The Case for Using #Obsidian Sync
When i used iCloud to sync Obsidian, I saved a whopping $4 a month and got next to no granular control over the process. As an Obsidian sync subscriber, not only am I contributing to a company I value, I also get to control all kinds of things I couldn’t do before. Restoring deleted files either singularly or in bulk is supported. I also get tech support for syncing issues.
Selective Sync
I don’t want to sync a number of larger folders on my phone to help Obsidian load faster, so I can exclude those from search. I don’t need my receipt collection or software serial numbers or receipts on my mobile device and now I don’t have to worry about it. This solves the problem many people have about how many vaults to have. If you don’t want your personal notes on your work computer, it’s very easy to exclude them from syncing without having to create a separate vault.
Choose to sync:
I don’t have much audio and video in my vault, but what i do have, I elect not to sync on mobile for speed reasons.
Vault Configuration Sync
If I find that I’ve made some untraceable changes to my settings, I can take advantage of automatic backup of my settings file to restore them to a known good state.
Sync items:
I elect to sync my settings, hotkeys, appearance and theme between devices, but I can toggle each one of these if I choose.
I can turn plugins on and off depending on what computer I’m using. For example, I just want my home computer to do a GitHub backup, so I turn off that plugin off on my work machine.
The plugins sync allows you to have separate settings for core and community plugins on each device. I use two Macs, one PC, an iPhone and an iPad with the same vault with no issue.
77 Types of Notes to Keep in #Obsidian | Lou Plummer (amerpie.lol)
15 Example #Obsidian Vaults from Around the Internet | Lou Plummer (amerpie.lol)
10 Random But Helpful #Obsidian Tips | Lou Plummer (amerpie.lol)
Today on AppAddict - The venerable iA Writer, a well-designed Markdown editor, long a favorite of writers and bloggers, with built in checks for cliches, filler words and redundancies, publishing straight to Micro.blog and other platforms. Its hallmark is its focus mode and plain interface.
For the past six weeks I’ve been on a manic tear, cranking out 16-17 blog posts a week – seven app reviews, seven personal, non-technical posts, a few technical articles on productivity and sharing a photograph from my 100 Strangers project each day. I also started a links blog. Here’s my workflow
Today on AppAddict - HistoryHound by St. Clair Software is the ultimate search tool for your web history. It covers multiple browsers and RSS readers in a single database and indexes the entire page, not just the title. Compatible with most major browsers.
Today on AppAddict - The Many Apps of Sindre Sorhus - Wunderkind, Sindre Sorhus is responsible for more apps on my Mac than any other developer. His mostly free apps include Velja, Hyperduck, Shareful, Aiko, One Thing and Actions.
Today on AppAddict - PopClip is a must have in my productivity stack. It performs a variety of actions on any text I select with the cursor, including sending it to email, messages, Drafts, Obsidian, Google etc. It’s hard to work without it.
Mac Menu Bar is a great resource for recently released apps. Here are the latest ones.
Today on AppAddict - BetterTouchTool Favorites - I go over the basics of BTT and list my favorite use cases.
Today on AppAddict - Keep It Shot leverages AI to rename screenshots in bulk or as you take them and provides a private keyword-based search of your images.
The Most Popular Apps I've Reviewed
I’ve been amazed since I started writing app reviews online at AppAddict Some of the reviews have been viewed thousands of times. I’ve had reviews mentioned on Lifehacker and The Verge. If you’re curious as to what’s been the most popular, here’s a list.
Today on AppAddict - Daisy Disk, the best in class disk space analyzer is still only $9.99. It’s the fastest app of its type and a three-time award winner on the app store.
10 Useful #Obsidian Plugins That Won't Affect Your Plain Text Data
One understandable reason some people are hesitant to use community plugins is the fear that the plain text data they’ve worked hard to create will be altered, negatively affecting the portability of their notes, one of Obsidian’s most attractive features. That’s a wise attitude to take for plugins that affect data, but what about plugins that just make Obsidian easier to use? What’s the reason for not trying those? These 10 plugins don’t leave any code fragments in your notes. They just make Obsidian better.
1. Commander
Commander lets you add and remove commands from the Obsidian interface. I use it to create ribbon bar buttons for shortcuts that add content to my daily note and to run the Linter plugin on demand. Commander can also edit commands, hide commands and for sync customers, choose what devices commands appear on.
2. Editing Toolbar
Even for seasoned Markdown writers, having access to an editing toolbar can come in handy for doing things like indenting or unindenting text. It also has very handy undo/redo buttons, superscript and subscript buttons and convenient color pickers for text and highlights. Inserting code blocks or inline code is also a breeze.
3. File Explorer++
One of the most frequently asked questions on Reddit is how to manually order folders and files. This simple plugin lets you both pin and hide folders and files with a click in the file menu.
4. Mononote
Another simple but useful plugin is Mononote, by the same developer who created the super useful Actions for Obsidian, Mac and iOS shortcuts enhancer. Mononote does one thing, it keeps you from having multiple copies of the same note open at once. If you ever looked at your tab bar and seen multiple copies of your daily note staring at you, install this plugin to prevent that from ever happening again.
5. Note Refactor
Note Refactor helps you split and extract content from your current notes. If you’ve clipped a long web article and you want to break it down into smaller more easily digestible atomic notes, Note Refactor is the tool you want. You can preselect the location where you want your notes to go and even chose a naming convention for them.
6. Plugin Update Tracker
I’m not the least bit ashamed to admit that I run between 50-60 plugins in my vault at any one time. Plugin Update Tracker lets me know at a glance if I have any updates and to what plugins. It will let me read the release notes and even wait a specified number days before notifying me when updates become available so that the early adopters can get the kinks worked out. If there are plugins you wish to ignore updates from, you can do that too.
7. Read It Later
ReadItLater collects information from your clipboard and creates notes based on the type of content you have saved there. Videos from YouTube, Billibilli, TikTok and Vimeo will be displayed in an inline iFrame based on the clipboard URL. Mastodon toots and URLs will be imported as complete notes generated from nothing more than a URL on your clipboard. It’s one of the easiest ways to get web content in your blog. For plain text, the entire clipboard will be used to create a new note.
8. Recent Files
This plugin displays a list of most recently opened files in the sidebar. Optionally include paths of files which should be excluded from the list. That’s it. but it’s something I use every single day.
9. Tag Folder
I use Tag Folder primarily to do one thing, show me which notes I have forgotten to tag. It will, of course show your tags as folders and even let you create time-based virtual tags for one hour, six hours, 3 days, 7 days and older than 7 days. You can configure ignored tags and folders if you want to.
10. Tag Wrangler
I use this plugin to keep my tags clean. It makes it easy to correct typos (mis-spellings) and capitalization errors.
Today on AppAddict - If you have an older Mac and you’d like to run a new and unsupported version of macOS on it, you are in luck. Open Core Legacy Patcher will do the trick. Just don’t try it with the Sequoia beta. It is not patched for that yet.
My #Obsidian Wish List
As an enthusiastic Obsidian user, I’m happy with the way it works and grateful to the developers for the hard work they have put into the app. I offer the following wish list in good faith and not as a bitch fest or criticism. Some of my wishes may have security complications of which I am not aware and others may be in the works. Some of these are partially achievable with plugins, I am aware but my desire is for more robust native functionality.
1. A way to send HTML emails to Obsidian
I have a way of sending text emails to Obsidian by forwarding them to Dropbox via IFTTT and then having the Mac utility change them to .md files and move them into my vault, but i would love to be able to figure out a way to het HTML emails into Obsidian with the formatting intact.
2. Notifications when files become orphaned
There are plugins that promise to clean orphaned files, but I’d like a way to be notified as it happens so I can fix the issue that caused them to be orphaned or manually delete them on the spot
3. Print as RTF
I don’t print often, but having to export as PDF in order to preserve formatting is too many steps for my liking. I want to be able to have a print function that renders the note as a rich text file and prints it.
4. Dataview queries that render when pasted (like Waypoint does)
When you copy a Dataview query in a note, the system copies the underlying code, not the results of the query. You can’t paste the results. The Waypoint plugin is different. The links it generates can be copied and elsewhere. I’d like to see that extended.
5. Native PDF searching
The Text Extractor plugin allows you to search PDFs, but it creates a bunch of extraneous files in your .Obsidian folder. If there is a way around that, I’d sure like to see it implemented. I do not keep any complicated PDFs in my vault because of the search limitation, something i was able to do in Evernote without a problem.
6. Collaboration in the form of shared folders
I’d like an easy way to share data on a per-folder basis with another Obsidian user. There are some hacky ways to do sharing but I want it without the hacking, so I could share something with my mom if I wanted to.
7. iOS/Mac share sheet integration (out)
There are a lot of ways to get data into Obsidian via other apps, shortcuts and plugins, but not so many ways to share data out without resorting to copy and pasting or PDFs. Plenty of other apps have sharing, why not Obsidian?
8. Built-in search and replace across notes
You can use a pluginor third party text editors like BBEdit or Notepad++ to do global search and replace and it should not be difficult to add a feature like that to a text based program like Obsidian.
9. Background syncing on mobile (in the way that email fetches in the background)
Plenty of mobile apps can check for updates in the background, from Instagram to email. Why can’t Obsidian check for updates in the background for people who pay for sync so that we don’t have such an interminable wait when we launch the mobile app?
10. Integration with IFTTT
As a long time IFTTT user, I seeall the integrations that other notes apps like Evernoteand Notion have and wonder why we can’t have the same thing in Obsidian. It would drastically improve automation and data collection in so many areas.
Today on AppAddict - My first negative review. Yep, definitely not recommending MagicMenu from iBoysoft due to limited functionality, bait and switch pricing and lack of an advertised free trial. If you want to add to Finder’s right-click menu, there are better options.
Today on AppAddict - I explore the world of keyboard driven application switchers featuring the FOSS app AltTab, a hidden Keyboard Maestro feature and more.
My 10 Favorite Things About #Obsidian
1. The Fiddling
A pox on people who complain that it’s too tempting to fiddle with your Obsidian setup and therefore their ability to make more widgets for the man is negatively impacted. I love Obsidian because I can never stop optimizing it. If I wanted something that was set it and forget it, I’d used TextEdit and miss out on so much joy.
2. The Plugins
I do not understand the weirdos who take perverse pride in ignoring the 1600+ ways to make Obsidian better. OK, I do get it if you don’t want to affect the plain text functionality of your notes, but refusing to use plugins that do nothing but extend Obsidian’s functionality is just masochism. I love the obscure ones the best
3. The Daily Note
My Daily Note gives me a comprehensive record of a snapshot in time, complete with weather, appointments, a running narrative, a gratitude list, tasks completed and more. It’s fun to complie each day and it provides a great reference for what’s been going on in my life.
4. Writing in Markdown
I do almost all of my writing in Obsidian. All of my blog posts start there. Although I have the editing toolbar installed, I rarely need it any more as Markdown is pretty easy to learn and use. I love the added functionality that plugins like Paste URL Into Selection add to the writing experience.
5. Obsidian Sync
I use Obsidian on two Macs, a PC, an iPhone and an iPad. Using Obsidian sync allows me to have customized plugins on every instance, to omit unneeded folders on mobile, to support Obsidian development by being a paying customer. Since I have a .edu email address, I get a 40% discount.
6. Interoperability
I love how the plain text/Markdown features in Obsidian along with it’s local file storage allow me to leverage other apps in my portfolio to extend the functionality of Obsidian. Whether it’s using Drafts or Bebop for quick capture, or doing a search and replace across my entire vault with BBEdit, there are a big selection of companion apps to make Obsidian more powerful.
7. It’s Better than Evernote
I was an Evernote user from 2009-2023 and loved the automations it offered natively and via IFTTT. I’ve figured out how to send emails to my vault, and import my Raindrio.io bookmarks and every other thing I used to do with Evernote, plus I get all the other Obsidian deliciousness.
8. Tags, Folders and Bookmarks
I started my vault with imports from Evernote and all of my tags carried over. Since then I’ve maintained the tagging habit and it provides a lot of usefulness when combined with Dataview. I also use folders for organization and bookmarks for work in progress notes.
9. The Obsidian Community
Whether it’s Reddit, Discord, the official Obsidian forum or all the various YouTubers and bloggers, there are a ton of resources available to get new ideas and solve problems . I know of no other program with such a depth of material available.
10. Backup Options
I spend a lot of time working on my Obsidian notes and would be devastated to lose any data. That’s why I have a TimeMachine backup, a Google Drive backup, a GitHub backup, plus Obsidian sync. It’s all done with set it and forget it methods.
Today on AppAddict - Applite is like an App Store for the entire Homebre Catalog. It downloads and updates apps. It’s free and open source.
Today on AppAddict - EtreCheckPro, System Report on Steroids - a great free app for finding out more about your Mac. It’s often used in troubleshooting forums and Apple Support Communities to give the experts a peek into what might be causing you issues.
