Patreon exclusives: Canvas Candy Tutorial + giveaway

More than a year ago, the Obsidian team released Canvas as a new core plugin. Canvas is a way to visually arrange your notes, media, and even embeds of external sites on a wide, infinitely scrolling space. It's supposed to mimic that feeling of spreading your notes out on a kitchen table to work on them.

I've always liked the idea, but it's been a little limited for my use cases. I've heard people bemoan the lack of customisation options for how elements on a canvas appear. In this video, I'm showing off a tool called Canvas Candy that improves on this experience.

Canvas Candy is a paid tool that I got for free, but its developer, TftHacker, has no idea I've even made this video and I received no compensation for it in return. I'm not sure I'll make a public video on this yet, because I want to use it a lot more and see if it makes its way into my workflows, but I thought I'd show you all what it looks like anyway!

Interested to hear what you think. Is this something you'd use?

Readwise summary exports

Fairly recently, Readwise introduced a new feature: AI-generated summaries of things you've already read. The day after you read something, they send you an email with a summary of it. I've found it quite useful as a reminder, and it's helped me remember and contextualise what I've read.

Yesterday, they announced that this feature is finally available as an export variable! What this means is that you can now use the variable {{summary}} in your Obsidian export settings to get these summaries included with your highlights and saved in your vault. I've updated my Readwise Obsidian export settings to add a new section for this. Here's what that looks like in a note.

Note that because of the way that the Obsidian Readwise Official plugin works, these summaries are only exported to your vault after you've read and highlighted an article. I look at it as an addition to my workflow, not a replacement for reading critically. I'm quite enjoying it!

Patreon giveaway: Obsidian Publish or Obsidian Sync for a year

Obsidian just announced the Gems of the Year winners for 2023, and I'm very honoured and humbled to report that I'm one of them! It means a great deal to me, and I am so grateful to you all for your support, especially in the last year. 

The Obsidian team gave me 3 years' worth of Obsidian credit, to be used for either Obsidian Publish or Obsidian Sync. I would like to offer these to you Patreons as thanks for your support.

I've already given one away on my Patreon Discord channel, and I'm going to give another one out here (I'll do the third at another time to make it fairer for those in other timezones).

If you'd like a year's credit of Obsidian Sync or Obsidian Publish, reply to this with a comment, and I'll message you with the details for how to redeem it! I'll give it to the first person to reply.

Edit: This is gone now! Congrats to indivisuell, who got a year's worth of credit!

Thank you again for all the encouragement and motivation!