🌠 Visual Notetaking Guides & Demo Vaults for Managers

Obsidian Updates

• There was no release in the last week, but the team is planning on shipping 0.16 early next week. They're super excited for this one and jam-packed it with new features (like tabs!). Since it's such a big release, though, it might be a bit disruptive. There are likely to be some broken themes, and it will be a desktop update, not mobile. Most plugins aren't affected, but if you're in the middle of anything critical, you might want to turn off the insider build option until you're ready. Insiders can check out this preview of the new theme from @kepano. I've been using it for a week or so now and it's very nice, but I did have to tweak some of my settings to make sure I wasn't syncing my theme between desktop and mobile.

In The Community

• @ladle was inspired to write and record an album by the Obsidian community. Here it is on bandcamp.
• The folks working on the Kindle Highlights are hoping to improve user experience over the next couple of months. They want to interview users of the plugin to get a better understanding of how the plugin actually gets used and do a discovery of other interesting problems that we can solve. DM @hadynz#0075 to get involved.

Plugin News

Pending (as of Friday morning)

Note: Not all new plugins are available in the community list yet, as they need to go through code review first. You can manually install plugins that aren't in the community list yet by using the Beta Reviewer's Auto-update Tool. That this is not as safe as waiting for them to go through code review.

• Obsidian to Reader by @joerncodes lets users publish Obsidian documents to the Readwise's read-it-later service, Reader, which is currently in beta. It allows you to publish to Reader your Obsidian notes for later perusal, highlighting and reflecting with many settings and front matter options to finetune how you want your documents to show up in Reader. I spoke with Erin, the community manager over at Readwise, and she said that they're transitioning to an invite-based, self-serve onboarding for existing Readwise subscribers. If you shoot her an email at  erin@readwise.io and let her know I sent you, she said she'd get you set up. I use Reader for all of my longform newsletters and articles I want to take notes on. If you don't already have a Readwise subscription and want to try it out, this link should get you a free month.
• Embed Code File by @almariah  allows for embedding code files.
• Script Launcher by @AlessandroRuggiero  allows you to add scripts shortcuts on your bottom bar and launch them with a click.
• Embedded Note Paths by @b0o  inserts the note file path above each note, similar to how the Show Current File Path puts it in the bottom bar.
• Literate Haskell by @jajaperson  makes it easier to integrate .lhs files into your vault.

Updates

If you want a comprehensive list of what plugins updated this week, check out this plugin updates index by Ganessh Kumar.

• Podnotes launched on ProductHunt, which I think is pretty cool. If you use it, go upvote! But also, it now lets you create notes and timestamps without any extra plugins, and define your own templates. You can even download episodes for offline listening. It supports any local audio file.
• Tasks 1.12.0 now supports regular expressions.
• Excalidraw 1.7.14 allows you to embed and link to parts of images, just like linking to paragraphs of text with block references. Here's a walkthrough video and @TFTHacker on why this update is great.
• Dataview 0.5.42 got some documentation improvements and tag queries are now case insensitive. There's also support for nested inline fields, custom date formats for task completions, and more.
• Another Quick Switcher plugin v6.2.0 added an option to alphabetically sort.
• Path Finder 1.1.1 now supports the Style Settings plugin.

For Developers

• Folks who contribute to the Tasks plugin should check out this discussion about reformatting and rearranging the source code.
• The developer of Gruvbox and Nord, @insanum, is looking for help updating these themes.

Feature Requests

• Apparently you can use Obsidian URIs to save searches... but there are definitely some ways that functionality can be made easier to use, if anyone is interested in picking up that project.
• Improved behaviors for filtering searches would be handy.

New Themes

• Tomorrow Night Bright by @gbraad is very dark.
• Omni by @librity is very purple.

Guides

• Dan Allosso, a wonderful history teacher who runs an Obsidian book club, put out a How to Make Notes and Write handbook. Digital copies are free.
• Here's how Nicole van der Hoeven studies using Obsidian.
• Denise Todd wrote a great guide to tag-related plugins aimed at new users.
• Here's a guide for using the pick four goal-tracking system with Obsidian, along with a downloadable vault.
• Zsolt, creator of Excalidraw, had a really wonderful video about how we shape our tools, and our tools shape us, and how to recombine the ingredients we all have into a personalized notetaking systems. As you might expect, it has a lot of wonderful graphics. As you might not expect, since I famously struggle with audiovisual content, I actually watched the whole thing.
• He also met with Nicole van der Hoeven about visual personal knowledge management which is a bit less of an overview and a bit more about his personal methods. You can see an example of this where he created a "book in a page" for How to Take Smart Notes.
• Here are three ways to keep a project list
• Here's a guide to project and task management with Obsidian and Dataview.

Discussions

• Reddit had a nice discussion about why you should take a just do it approach to taking notes.
• Here's a lengthy discussion about how and why to use tags.

Showcases

• Here's a workout plan using the Advanced Slides plugin.
• Here's a video of @alexdavidwright using Obsidian to read a paper and take notes for academic purposes. Here's a similar video from @vglau showcasing how to use Obsidian to take notes for novel research.
• Here's a demo vault for software developers and managers working on the corporate world. It's very opinionated but also very thorough. It uses Dataview, QuickAdd, and several other plugins to divide workstreams into applications, contacts, journals, and meetings.
• Here's a nice showcase of someone's specific use cases and zettel types for maintaining a zettelkasten.
• Here's a collection of Obsidian vaults & starter kits.

Ancillary Tools

• The Sample is a fun indie newsletter aggregator that sends a random blog or newsletter meant to align with your interests. I've mentioned them before, but they've had a bunch of updates. You can now flip through samples at your leisure, and the developer recently put together a reading app meant to work with RSS, ebook, Pocket, and Twitter. It's still in the early days, but the developer is responsive and feels very strongly about open internet principles.

Housekeeping

• Ghost, the software that I run this newsletter with, now supports native commenting features. If you'd like to leave a comment on any of the articles or roundup editions, click the "view online" button and scroll to the bottom. You need to be logged in to comment, but you don't need to be a financial supporter. Login uses "magic links" so you should be able to sign in with whatever email address you use to access the Roundup. Folks who prefer RSS but want to comment can just register and unsubscribe to emails. I'd love to know which item in this week's Roundup was most useful for you!