Obsidian Canvas core plugin (new in v1.1.0)

One of the things that I missedfrom the old analog days of note takingis the tactility of a physical note.If your use case back thenwas more like having separate notebooksfor maybe separate subjects,
then an app like Obsidianprobably works pretty well for you today.Because in Obsidian every note
is saved as a separate fileso you can open that file on its ownor you can open multiple notes at a timeby dragging them to the rightand creating a new tab group.

You can also use the stack tabs featureto kind of open all of your notesand browse through them like a book.However, if you were the
kind of analog note takerthat wanted to have different sticky notesand then a page from your notebookand an image from an old library bookall open on the same
table to be rearrangedand interconnected in some
sort of creative masterpiece,then Obsidian can't really do that.Until now that is.

The Obsidian developers
just released version 1.1.0to insiders and alpha testers.That means that it's not
quite open for the public yet.But it usually only takes a few weeksbefore these features trickle
down to the public release,so you just have to wait
a little bit longer.And I'm going to update the
first comment down belowto let you know when
it's publicly available.If you're an insider or
you're looking at this videoafter the release has been made public,

then you can go into settings heremake sure that your
current version is 1.1.0or turn on automatic updatesand consider turning on
receive insider buildsif you are an insider,and this should be just
done automatically.Otherwise, if this is a different versionthen you can click on check for updatesand you'll see whether your
app is up to date or not.Once you do that, you
can go to core pluginsand you should be able to see
this new Canvas core plugin,

which is the biggest
feature in version 1.1.0.Make sure that that is enabledand then exit out of the settings.Now let's create our very first canvas.To do that, we're going to
hit command P or control Pto open up the command
pane and then type canvas,and there's now a new command in itcalled Create New Canvas,which you can of course
assign a hot key to as well.Otherwise just click on it from here.It'll ask you for a note title,

so I'm going to call this
Demo Canvas and hit save.Now you'll see it opens
up what looks like a note,but it's like in this gridded format,and that's to just make
it a little bit easierto align notes on this grid.But we don't have any
notes here right now,so let's take care of
that by right clickingand then clicking on Add note from Vault.Now let's say I want the,
"Principle of Atomicity" here,this is a note that already exist.

So now it shows up here as a note,but it's only part of the screen.If I want to edit it, I can click on it.Double clicking enables
editing of the note itself,so then I can type something
here like I normally wouldand then I can create links
from this note to any other notejust as if I were editing this note.I can also set the color here.So let's say I want this to be purple.Now the outline and the
background is this purple color.

Just to make it a little
bit more distinguishablefrom other notes.If I didn't want to right click,I could have actually just gone down hereand you'll see I have
the same three options.Drag to add note from vault,add media from vault and add card.So if I click on this
and I drag it over herethen I can choose something else.Now this is the, "Zettelkasten."Now because I put the note here,it's bleeding over to the side of the page

so we can then use Zoom controlsto zoom out here or zoom in,or you can also hold down
command and use a mouse wheelor you can do control and the mouse wheelon Windows and Linux.I can also move this note
really pretty much everywhere.Now if I want to move to somethingthat's off of the screen,
I can use my track pad.So right now I'm using a Magic Trackpad,so it's a little easier
for me to move around.But if I don't have that,I can just hold down space
and then click and drag

to move to wherever I want to.What if I want to say that
these two are related?Well, there's this little
pink node here that comes upwhen I hover over the
side of one of the notes.And then I can just attach itto any one of these four
nodes of this other node.That makes more sense to put it here,now these two are connected.And if I move this, the arrow
changes with it as well.So that's adding a full note,

each of which I can color separately.Let's say that this is a yellow one.It's nice and different from that one.Then again, I can also scroll down hereor make changes if I need to.But what if I want to add a picture now,not the entire note.I'm going to go over
here and drag this thingto add media to the vault.I'm going to look for an asset,let's call it the thumbnail
for one of my videos.

It's a little bit big hereso let me move over to that,and then I can also resize it here.Now what is it really connected to?It's connected to the "Zettelkasten" note,so again, I'm going to
connect them like this.And then when I move it,
the arrows move as well.Now let me zoom out a little bit.That is looking good.So now I have two notes and a thumbnail.So I know this thumbnail
actually corresponded

to a particular note.If I open that up,it's actually called "How
to Make Your Notes Visual"and it has this video in it.What if I just want a part of it.Like this part where I'm talkingabout related videos and resources.Maybe that's the part
that I want in my canvas.So then I can drag another card here.I can just type in the title of that noteand then I'll put a hashtag

so that I can choose
between the headings here.And what I was looking for was
related videos and resources.That's the part that I want to add here.And let me zoom in a bit here.Now I have all of these
links available in my canvas.Now because this is related to this video,let me connect to the two.And now I'm starting to developquite a little network hereof ideas that are all interconnected.But I know that I've made other
videos on processing notes

and maybe that's useful as well.So let me open up one of those notes.Here's one on how to
process notes in Obsidian,and also here's an iframe
that I put within this notethat embeds the YouTube video.Maybe that's something that
would be cool to put here.I'm going to drag to add another card hereand I'm just typing
command V to paste that in.And then it's a little small right nowso let me make it a bit bigger.

Let me zoom in and this is
actually going to be playingthe exact video,so I can play it right from this canvasactually if I want to.While that's playing,let me connect that to something else.Now maybe it makes sense to connect itto this "Making a visual
Zettelkasten" again,that'll be connected to two things.Just move this around a bit,put that here,move this one over there,

and it's spidering out quite nicely.Now if I want to make
this a little bit neater,I could enable grid snapping.And now instead of being ableto put something within a grid,I'm only going to be able to
align it exactly to these gridsand so that way I can better
put these two together.Maybe I want these two
to be the same heightand it just helps to make it
a little bit more uniform.But I kind of like this
freeform look to it,

so I'll just leave that off.And the thing is, I don't just
have to put things on herethat are already in my notes.For good measure let's put somethingthat is like an Excalidraw drawing.And I'm going to double click on thatand that brings up the card automatically.So just double clicking on the canvasis like a different way to add a new card.And then I want to embed
an Excalidraw drawing.Maybe I'll put this
Excalidraw drawing here

of my map of content.Let me rearrange it a little bit.There we go, "Dashboards in Obsidian."And I'm going to link thatto "Making a visual Zettelkasten" as wellbecause this is a visual map of content.Now so far I've only put in thingsthat have already been part of my vault.But now I want to put in
something that's just online.Zettelkasten.de was one
of my original resources

for learning about the
Zettelkasten methodology.So let's say I want to add
this into my canvas as well.I'm going to hit command
C to copy that URL.Go back to my canvas,I'm just going to click somewhere emptyand then hit command V,and it actually pasted
it where my cursor was.So let me put it over thereand kind of widen it a little bitso that I can see more of the site.

Now let me put it on
this side of the canvasso that I can more easily connect itto this list of resources.Now that's connected as well.Clicking into it will meanI can actually scroll through the webpage.And if I want to continue reading,I can even navigate into
the specific articles,which is pretty cool.So you might be wondering
how this all shows upin your Obsidian vault,and note is a markdown file,but a Canvas file is
actually a specific type

of file extension .canvas.So if you go back to our demo canvas here,I can right click on it and
then click reveal in Finder.And that way I can show
you what that looks like.You see that it has the .canvas extension.And when I open it up in a text editor,you'll see it's a JSON file.Now you don't need to know any of thisif you don't care about how it's saved.Now, most people probably
won't be interested in this,but I just wanted to show you the formatbecause I know that some people like me

are concerned about future proofing.So this isn't going to
show up as a markdown fileand this is likely proprietary.However I still like itbecause it is like an extra
layer over the markdown files.It is still just kind of embeddingdifferent markdown files
that I already have.And so I think that it is worthwhilejust to have something that
maybe is very Obsidian specificbut will let me pull in
different Obsidian notes

and kind of be like a working board,like a cork board where I can experimentand then maybe not even
really keep the results.All of this feels very similarto another awesome note-taking
app called Scrintal.Which I did test an early version of,and I ultimately decided that
Obsidian was more my speed.But it is very similar in the sensethat I can also visually
rearrange notes and connect them

and see them in this kind of
infinite scrolling canvas.However with the addition of Canvas now,Obsidian is that much more compellingover something like Scrintal,because Scrintal still keeps
your notes on the cloudand then those notes can
be exported to markdown.But Obsidian just saves
to markdown directlyand saves locally by default,which is my preference.I think Obsidian solution
is a really good compromisebecause now I have the convenience

of having marked down notesthat are going to be future proofed.And I still have the abilityto arrange my notes visually if I want to.Now, I can think of all sorts of use caseswhere this might be useful.Obviously anything with
some sort of researchwhere you're trying to
piece things togetherand put things in contextor you're trying to map out your knowledgelike I think in terms of mind mapping,this feature is really awesome.You don't even need to use your own notes,

you can just add cards,which will be saved
within the Canvas file,not within your Obsidian vault.I think this could make a
really good sort of dashboardif you want to have one
canvas for a project,and you could have all the
people involved in the project;all the to-dos, all the project areas,the department heads or
whatever you would like.Maybe even a schedule or
a calendar of some sort,that would work really well for itbecause you're bringing
different types of informationall in one view.

I also think it has some
interesting applicationsfor role playing games.You could have a hierarchy of peoplethat are within the secret organization.Or you could use Canvas
to have a hex crawl,where every note corresponds to a placeand then those places are linked together,so you know that when
players go to one place,then you can have a bunch of optionsas to where they can go next.It's still early days for
the Canvas core plugin,which means that there
are bound to be changes.

And there are bound to
be significant changesbefore it gets released to the public.Typically, I want to waituntil everybody has access to a featurebefore I talk about it,but I was just really
excited about this one.So it's going to have
to come with the caveatthat this is the first initial
release to insiders only.I think that this really shows
how the Obsidian developershave been thinking in
the last few releases.They've been improving Obsidian workflows

and giving us new ways
to work within Obsidianand arrange and visualize our notes.And I think it really shows
that they're listeningto what users like us really want.If you'd like to see the last releaseand all the awesome changes
that came with that,then check out this video that I madeon the version 1.0.0 release.Thank you for watching.Prettig Sinterklaasfeest.