Then I saw a YouTube video on a knowledge Base program called Obsidian MD it was a life-changing moment. One of those times when all things came together, and I could see my problem fading away but it's a Mac or Windows program.
I have hovered on the knife-edge between Mac and Google, I have a google pixel phone and my main email is Gmail, but for a number of reasons, mostly to do with CAD, I have a Macbook Pro 15" as my main workhorse, and it's a great machine, handling almost everything I throw at it, except for running parallels to run Revit, this was a big mistake, it just did not work and I had, in the end, to reformat the drive and start again, luckily iCloud saved the day and all my Apple data flooded back.
But, is there not ever a "But", it was the catalyst for change, and I decided to make the Mac home to almost all my efforts. Changing my email was not going to be an option, I have to many old friends so I went to Mac Mail, and dragged in Gmail, together with my Uni email and suddenly I had it all in one place, no more flicking between tabs for my email.
Next, do I switch back to safari, after all these years of Chrome, well half and half, so many links and passwords, so I still work on both platforms, but it's getting more and more Safari.
Next was the Obsidian program, so simple to load, and get going, a couple of YouTube videos later and all was set up, and running, and for the next month I started using it more and more, loading information, linking it getting to use Tags, and watching my knowledge base grow. But the real test, was to search for items like I did for Google Drive, this time every single morsel of information I wanted came up, I could search on the file name, item, tag, and I had it there, and the open graph was just so intuitive, why had I not used it before.
Next is a big test, loading photos in and wait for it, pdf files, now Obsidian will not yet search the pdf, but it will show it in read mode.
What is read mode I hear you ask, well Obsidian has an edit mode for adding text, and using Markdown, the simple language to make all this linking work, it's very easy to use, and when you click on the preview button, then you see what it will look like if your viewing in a browser.
So all is well, I load up all my searches, and have started writing all my papers and articles in Obsidian, ok I am still transferring with copy and paste, the almost completed text from preview mode to Pages, and finalising the layout, and look and feel, but all my information is now linked, easy to find and the Open graph shows all my information and the link between that information, often several links for each document.
Have I fallen into the same trap ad Google drive, not really, the Obsidian files as all simple text, any computer will read it, not like Google drive, I have to download it, in Word, and transfer, it works but not the same.
