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Subscribing to Obsidian Sync, to me, means no longer trading usability for an unrealised ideal of interoperability. At last I have a sync solution I can trust!
Ed Vielmetti briefly examines the phrase “Do the simplest thing that could possibly work” (credited to Kent Beck) in this blog post.
When future you will have completely forgotten how you did something, maybe they will also try the simplest thing first and land on the same approach that past you tried.
I like the concept and am seeking it for my personal productivity practices, but I also like tying ribbons on things from time to time. Nothing wrong with a bit of pretty if that brings you joy or helps you focus.
If you’ve been following my writings for a while, you’ll know just how hard I tried to live the plain text life with my files on my back, hopping from one text-reading app to the next, like some sort of itinerant tech-hippie.
The dream is still close to my heart, but it’s a distant one. Time to live in the present and stop trading usability for an ideal that I prophesy will one day be. One day.
And so it has come to pass that I have been an Obsidian Sync subscriber for two weeks now, and yea, it is as good as they told me it would be. Hallelujah!
As I mentioned in a recent PTPL, I’m still sad it was necessary to subscribe to a specialised service in order to access my Markdown flashcards on my phone. That Apple have somehow crippled iCloud so that the free option for people who want to use Obsidian on their iOS devices is unacceptably slow.
People on Mastodon are still telling me that Syncthing or Git could have done the job for free, but I was never able to get either to work—user error, no doubt. Anyway, looking more closely I saw that Sync offers some pretty fine grained options when it comes to version control, restoring deleted files, and what to sync on which device, than the free alternatives ever could.
Now that I have a sync service I can trust, to say that I love being able to seamlessly shift between my MacBook Pro, iPad, and iPhone, confident that the work I’ve done on one device will be there waiting for me on the others, is an understatement!
As much as I dream about complete interoperability between text reading apps, my needs are (apparently) specialised when it comes to flashcards with integrated audio files, and so far Obsidian has proven to be the best option for those. And don’t forget being able to view the full names of files on a small screen! Ian Hayes and myself are seriously thinking about lobbying Apple to fix this, in the name of more complete accessibility.
The only hiccup I’ve had with Sync has been that the audio recordings in .webm format I made for my French flashcards inside Obsidian on my Mac, don’t sync to iOS. I’m in the process of converting and replacing those files. Oddly enough, I can no longer find the plugin I used to use for in-app recording; it spontaneously disappeared from my sidebar. Sharing recordings made in Apple’s Voice Memos to Obsidian has become a more compatible though slightly less convenient replacement.
I’ll end by saying that if you’ve been thinking about buying Obsidian Sync, now is a great time. They’re offering 5 × the storage space (50 GB instead of 10 GB, over 10 vaults) for life between now and the end of 2023, so if this something that interests you, don’t delay too long. They won’t be repeating this offer.
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