Morning Pages

I’m writing this morning’s brief missive in Scrintal, to see how that works out.

Scrintal allows you to see all your Markdown files on a big board, as index cards, and shows you how they link together. It’s in beta, so bits of it are a little shonky at the moment, but it works very well. I don’t think it replaces anything, but it is a useful additional tool for when you want to lay out a story or see your notes from a 30,000ft view.

For that reason, I haven't put all my thousands of notes into Scrintal in one go, but am using it on a project-by-project basis and importing things as I go.

This morning’s big surprise is that Obsidian has released official version 1.0 and they’ve made a bunch of changes which have made a big difference to how the app works on mobile. If you were thinking about trying Obsidian, I would say now is the time.

I use Obsidian all day every day. I write my journal in there, meeting notes, on-the-fly reminders, pitches, outlines… Everything that isn’t in script format is generated in Obsidian. Every time I’ve thought I fancy a change and should try out something else, I run screaming back to Obsidian within a few hours.

There are a ton of different plugins for Obsidian, some of which are incredible, and the app is growing all the time. The learning curve can be steep, but it's one of those apps, like Scrivener, where the best advice I could give someone new to it is to just start using it and figure out how to do what you need it to do as you go; there's too much to it to even think about learning it all before you start (and you won't use half of what it does anyway.)

Despite what regular readers might think, I don't get passionate about software. But pretty much every time I work in Obsidian it puts a smile on my face.

This new version has made the mobile app sing and, I think, has removed the last doubt I had about the app’s universal functionality.

That's all for today. Have a good one.