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I love me some Obsidian, but one of Obsidian’s weak spots has always been it’s Shortcuts support (or lack thereof).
That’s where Actions for Obsidian comes in.
Actions for Obsidian serves as the bridge between Obsidian and Shortcuts on the Mac, resulting in almost native support for Shortcuts actions that allow you to do some pretty neat things with the text you send to Obsidian.
To call Actions for Obsidian an app is a bit of a stretch. It’s a macOS utility that serves as a graphic interface for adding over 30 additional actions to Shortcuts that Obsidian doesn’t support out of the box. It also includes a tutorial for setting up Obsidian to take advantage of them, and gives you a link to an Actions & Workflow Library where you can download some pre-made example Shortcuts workflows to download and use instantly.
When you first launch the “app” you get a window with three options: 1) link your Obsidian vault, 2) open the Shortcuts app to use the actions, and 3) visit the Actions & Workflow Library to download pre-made workflows.
In order to use the new actions, the first thing to need to do is to link Actions for Obsidian with your Obsidian vault.
Click the blue button, and the app walks you through a short wizard that helps you set everything up and make sure it’s all connected.
Once you link your vault, the next step is to go into Obsidian itself and enable a specific plugin that allows Obsidian to receive and act on the requests that will be sent to it from the Shortcuts actions. If you’ve not used community plugins before, it will show you exactly how to enable them first.
Once community plugins are enabled, Actions for Obsidian walks you through installing and enabling the Actions URI plugin needed for the Shortcuts actions to work.
Once everything is configured, Actions for Obsidian will perform a test to see if instructions can be sent to Obsidian (and whether it can also send information back using callback URLs). Click the blue Ask Obsidian to call back button and you should see a confirmation prompt if everything is working correctly.
Once everything is good to go, you can start to use the additional actions by creating and editing shortcuts from inside the Shortcuts app. You can find the additional actions by looking for Actions for Obsidian under the Apps section.
The actions are split into five sections:
Some examples of things you can do with these additional actions are creating your Daily Note using a shortcut to help start your day, adding events to an appointments section of your Daily Note from your calendar, and even getting results from a Dataview table (another very powerful third-party plugin that can query your entire vault and return results in the form of a table).
While this does add a nearly-native level of Shortcuts support to Obsidian, there are some limitations. For example, the additional actions currently only work on macOS. The developer is working on adding support for iOS, but it’s not surprising that there are some additional technical hurdles to be overcome there with iOS sandboxing. So right now you can build Shortcuts and fire them on iOS, but the extra actions will break the moment they need to communicate with your Obsidian vault.
Regardless, I’m thrilled this app exists and find it fascinating that a cross-platform Electron app like Obsidian can offer such extensive support for Shortcuts — with a little help from a utility like Actions for Obsidian.
The distribution model is interesting too, as Actions for Obsidian is free to download on the Mac App Store with an in-app purchase. There are three different price tiers to choose from based on how helpful you find the app, starting at $9 USD and going up to $15 USD.
I think this is a really interesting business model for a really interesting app. I hope it’s successful, and I hope to see others create extendable Shortcuts like this for other popular apps. I know Obsidian is well-suited for this because of the third-party plugin architecture, but I think power users of apps like Notion or Craft would absolutely be willing to pay to have a little more automation power at their fingertips too.
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I’ve been spending time playing with infinite canvas apps lately, and there are a lot of great options available. In this article, we’ll compare and contrast the features of each of these apps to help you choose the one that best fits your needs.
An infinite canvas app is a digital board that gives you an unlimited virtual workspace to create and organize your ideas, sketches, notes, and other types of content. Think of it like a virtual whiteboard, but with no predefined pages or fixed dimensions so you never run out of space (hence the term ‘infinite canvas’).
Infinite canvas apps are particularly useful for creative professionals, artists, designers, and educators who need to brainstorm, sketch, or plan their projects in a flexible and unrestricted way. They can also be beneficial for personal use, such as for note-taking, mind mapping, or laying out the different parts of a large project.
The goal of an infinite canvas app is to provide you with the space and tools to think more creatively about things. I’ve spent a bit of time with three of the more popular ones as of late:
What surprised me is that these three different apps really have three very different scenarios where they shine. Here’s how they stack up and where they really shine.
Miro is a collaborative online whiteboard platform designed to allow teams to work together on brainstorming, planning, and visualizing ideas. It is primarily focused on visual collaboration, allowing teams to create diagrams, mind maps, flowcharts, and other visual representations of information.
When you create a board in Miro, you have the option of using a pre-made template to help get you started. There are templates for meetings, kanban workflows, flow charts, product roadmaps, presentations, and much more. If you can think of a business use case for collaboration (i.e. a SWOT analysis or department-level OKR tracking), there is probably a pre-made template you can use.
Because Miro is first and foremost a web app, it offers integrations with lots of other popular online productivity tools. For example, you can embed cards for tasks from apps like Asana and ClickUp, embed design images to get feedback from apps like Figma and Sketch, and collaborate from other communication tools like Slack and Zoom.
What I like about Miro is that it’s really easy to pick up and use. The templates make it easy to get started, and it’s easy to collaborate with others regardless of the technology they decide to use.
If you’re looking for something strictly based on how easy it will be to collaborate with others, Miro is a solid choice. You can access it from just about anywhere, and the integrations with other popular productivity tools make it an ideal choice if you need to work with others (especially in a corporate setting).
Freeform is an infinite canvas app from Apple designed for creative brainstorming and collaboration. It comes pre-installed on current versions of iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, giving you built-in creative tools on any Apple device.
With Freeform, you can create multimedia boards on top of your infinite canvas that includes photos, video, audio, documents, PDFs, links to websites and map location links, sticky notes, shapes, diagrams, and more. You can use drag-and-drop from Files and Finder and built-in alignment guides help you snap objects into their proper place.
But the big emphasis in Freeform is on collaboration, with the ability to have up to 100 collaborators on each board. You can drag a board from Freeform into a Messages thread, and all members of that thread will instantly be invited. FaceTime is also built into the app so that you can connect in real time as you collaborate in the app.
What I like about Freeform is the ability to sketch and use the Apple Pencil when using it on my iPad. I still like GoodNotes better for sketching, but using Freeform on an iPad opens up a lot more creative possibilities. Unfortunately, it’s hard to use handwriting like this on your Mac, forcing you to use it more like a standard collaborative whiteboard app.
If you’re an Apple Notes user who has ever wished you could just drag things around inside the Notes app, you’ll love Freeform. It’s still a little rough around the edges, but it’s a pretty impressive thinking tool that offers simple collaboration with others — as long as they are fellow Apple nerds.
Canvas is a new feature added to Obsidian that gives you the ability to create an infinite canvas app inside your Obsidian vault. It’s available as a Core Plugin inside the app and is available on both desktop and mobile (but must be enabled to be used).
Once enabled, creating a Canvas allows you to lay out your notes and ideas so you can organize them visually. You can embed your notes alongside text blocks, images, PDFs, videos, audio, and even fully interactive web pages. Canvas views can be embedded in other notes, and even inside another Canvas.
While Canvas files in Obsidian use a different file format from the standard Markdown formatting the rest of the app is built on, it’s still designed with interoperability in mind. By using an open-source JSON format for Canvas files, apps, scripts, and plugins can enhance your Canvas by adding or modifying the cards and connections it contains.
What I like about Canvas is that I don’t have to leave Obsidian. It reminds me a lot of the corkboard feature Scrivener had back in the day, where writers could lay out all the parts or sections of their writing project and move them around visually on screen. There’s something powerful about simply rearranging your ideas visually that can cause things to click.
If you are all in on Obsidian, Canvas is a great tool for helping you make sense of your notes and ideas. The killer feature is the ability to create boards inside your Obsidian vault and make connections between things. But, it doesn’t allow you to collaborate with others, and if you don’t keep everything in Obsidian then it is pretty feature-limited compared to other infinite canvas apps.
If you need to collaborate with others in a corporate environment (or don’t have any influence over the devices your collaborators will use), check out Miro. It offers a free tier, and the large template library makes it easy to get started.
If you are all-in on the Apple ecosystem and feel comfortable using Apple Notes, check our Freeform. The tools will feel familiar, and your boards will sync across all your Apple devices.
If you are a heavy Obsidian user (like me) and use it for note-taking AND writing, check out Canvas. There’s a lot of insight to be had from arranging the contents of your Obsidian notes visually, especially when brainstorming or planning larger personal creative projects.
We spend an inordinate amount of time sorting through hundreds of apps to find the very best. Our team here at The Sweet Setup put together a short list of our must-have, most-used apps for writing, note-taking, and thinking.
Rewind is a pretty incredible new tool for Mac users that bills itself as the search engine for your life, and that’s really not a bad way to describe it. It’s the sort of app that is kind of rare to come across these days, as it feels completely new. Truly, I can’t think of a single alternative to Rewind that does anything like this; it feels like they are charting their own course and we’ll be seeing similar apps trying to match what they’re doing over the next few years.
In short, Rewind records (almost) everything you do on your Mac, and makes that information searchable in the future.
Using Rewind requires quite a bit of trust in the developer, as this app literally records your screen at all times, so whatever you’re doing on your computer is being recorded by the app. A few caveats are worth noting here:
Assuming you are okay with this setup (and not everyone is), you can install Rewind and have it silently do its thing in the background. It will record your screen and it will save a hyper-compressed version of that video to your local drive. Despite the compression, it will still look great when you access it later, and the company predicts about 14GB of data that will be stored per month using the app. I’ve been using the app for 2 months exactly and I’ve used 24GB of local storage, for example. If you use your computer for an hour a day, your storage needs will be less, and if you’re on it all day and night, it will be higher. The app lets you decide how long you want to keep your recordings, ranging from 1 week all the way up to forever.
But Rewind isn’t just recording video, it’s also performing OCR on that video to keep a record of what’s on screen. It’s also able to record the audio from meetings (Zoom only at the time of writing) and save everything said in that meeting to your history as well. You can tell the app to automatically start recording when a Zoom call starts, or to prompt you each time to see if you want to record that one. They also ask you to get permission from others in the meeting.
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Finally, you may be thinking that all this constant activity might be heavy on your computer and make things feel slow. The company is quick to try and ease concerns here, and I’m happy to report that on both an M1 MacBook Air, as well as a baseline M1 Pro MacBook Pro, the performance hit is completely unnoticeable to me. I actively monitored its activity in Activity Monitor for a while and saw CPU usage hover around 20% (which they point out is on a performance core, and is a sliver of your overall capacity) and RAM usage would hang out in the 400-500MB range. That’s not nothing, but I also noticed Keyboard Maestro and Pastebot were each using 100-200MB more RAM each, so it’s not out of line with other apps I didn’t even consider would be using considerable amounts of RAM.
Rewind isn’t something I get value from everyday. Some apps — like a password manager or a photo editor — will constantly show why they’re valuable day-to-day, but Rewind is more like Time Machine: it’s constantly working, and invisible most of the time, but once you do need it, it’s pretty awesome.
For example, I do a regular Zoom call with my family and we talk about whatever’s going on with everyone, and last week my brother recommended I check out a band he liked. I said I would check them out, but I forgot to look them up right after the call, and a week went by without me looking them up. I could just message him and ask for a reminder, but that’s annoying and he may have even forgotten as well.
This is where Rewind shines.
I was able to bring up Rewind with the keyboard shortcut I configured (Ctrl + Opt + Cmd + Space is my go-to) and then I scrolled back to to that video call, and used the transcript to find the name of the band. It was an awesome moment that felt like it fulfilled the ultimate goal of computers, which is to help us do things that we could not do on our own. I forgot what was said, but my computer helped me recall it easily.
And since all text on screen is being OCR’d as it’s saved, you can find your way back to things you were looking at that you may have lost. As an example, I may have remembered an article I read about accessibility, but I wasn’t sure when or where, so I just brought up Rewind, searched for “accessibility,” and found the page in seconds.
CleanShot 2023-01-15 at 10.48.07-converted.mp4
Often if it’s a website, you can actually click the moment in Rewind and open that URL again. If that’s not available for any reason, you can at least see what website it was on or how you found it by scrubbing through the video to see how you can get to it again.
One final use case is related to the “connected ideas” trend in note taking apps these days such as Obsidian and Roam Research. Those apps let you connect different notes together that talk about the same things, which can lead to eureka moments as they come together to reveal something else to you. In the same way, searching for a term in Rewind brings up all the things you’ve looked at with that term. So my “accessibility” search above returned the website I was thinking of, but it may have also turned up other articles I’d read or messages I’d shared with colleagues at work in Slack.
This all sounds pretty good, and I wish that this was an easy recommendation to everyone with a Mac, but its cost is currently pretty significant at $20 per month. There’s no annual or lifetime plans, so the investment of $240 per year is pretty significant, and for many people would be the most expensive piece of software they run on their Mac.
This ongoing cost is also a bit hard to swallow when the entirety of Rewind runs on your Mac, not in the cloud. Maybe if Rewind came with an encrypted cloud backup of your data that you could recover if you lost your Mac or just got a new one, that would make the subscription feel better. As it stands, Rewind feels like an app that should either have a one-time cost or a relatively inexpensive subscription to support ongoing development for the app. The fact that it’s a very expensive recurring cost really limits who can become an ongoing customer.
If this overview of Rewind really resonated with you and if you can personally justify the cost, then I think Rewind is a pretty remarkable tool that completely shifted what I expect from a computer and its ability to recall information for me on demand. You can start a free trial today to see if it works for your workflows.
Introducing the new Focus Boosters.
Inside our popular community membership, join us for a the Habit Building challenge (a.k.a. “Booster”). You’ll find out how to make simple changes that will make your daily life better, remove distractions, and create a new simple habit.
Membership Includes: Simple Habits Course, Habit Tracking Templates, Digital Planner, Private Community Slack, 2x Monthly Coaching Calls, and much, much more…
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