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Comment by d4rkp4ttern | Hacker News Reader

Last I checked there was no good way to do quick capture of articles from mobile iOS to obsidian. Scenario — I come across an article on my iPhone, and I just want to dump title + URL (maybe even the text content) into obsidian. This is a must have for any note taking tool. Anyone have a good workflow for this, please share. Ideally an iOS shortcut.

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In the spirit of HN always recommending, to my absolute infuration, "Org-Mode" to noobs usisc Windows when it is clearly a non-solution, I'll offer my own non-solution. Don't take notes on your phone.

My relationship with my phone is the best it has been in a decade, because I fucking despise using that thing. It's cramped, limited, inflexible, addictive and disposable. It's an awful machine to do anything non trivial. So, now my phone just serves as a calendar reminder for upcoming meetings, maps, and messaging. It is no longer a "constant companion". I use it for less than an hour a day on average. I don't even have a browser on it. I love this. I love my superior smug face when I'm on the bus and every other pleb is buried deep into his/her screen, while I ride astride with my zen halo glowing brightly, taking in the world, paying attention to squirrels being chased by cats and so on.

There is more to life than increasing it's speed. Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished. Do fewer things, but cherish them more. Throw the phone into the trash, and wait till you're in front of a laptop or a desktop.

I actually do all of those things you mentioned but also like to keep things simple and take my notes on iAWriter on my iPhone which syncs with iCloud and is very conveniently available on my iPad and Mac as well. Haven’t found a more simple and markdown supporting application in years. You don’t need to dump all functionalities of your phone to enjoy life.

Fair, fair. My comment was pretty tongue in cheek anyway.

I was going to suggest to the GP that they take a screenshot, and then process it later on, when they do their weekly review or something. If the URL isn't fully captured in the screenshot (because smartphones are woeful pieces of dogshit remember), then they could search for the article. Adding that extra friction is a Good Thing in my opinion, because it forces you to consider whether accumulating all that extra burdensome information is worth the friction. But your solution is smoother :)

This is exactly how I felt when trying to use my smartphone for ‘productivity’. The screen is so damn small and most apps zoom in so damn close there’s no space to do anything non-trivial. It feels like I’m operating in a workspace for ants. It’s impossible. So I concluded that experiment and now exclusively use the phone for stupid cat videos.

My main gripe with Obsidian. That, and the fact that it costs almost $100 to have the mobile app sync with the desktop. That's insane to me, and feels vindictive. I'm all for paying for the platform. Seriously. These ventures need bottom - up support. But, syncing is a basic feature that any mobile app should have baked in. Charge for 24-hour support, something that actually requires the time of the team.

Just download the app make a vault. Same it in iCloud or google drive. Now use your desktop pc and copy the files over. Done and a accessible vault in your smartphone.

Note that iCloud Drive on the Mac is a bit random about when it decides it wants to sync files. I ended up abandoning that setup after too many times of being somewhere and finding my laptop never pushed up the latest version of a file.

Thank you for the insights. I have not experienced it yet, but am moving to another cloud solution for my peace of mind ;-)

You can't just save the vault in Good Drive on your phone, because the vault is looking for a folder on your phone to sync to. The Drive option simply isn't there. From what I've seen you have to download another, third party sync app, to do that, and that just sounds clunky af. Obsidian charging $90 a year(!) for sync is just super lame. I can wait til they realize that.

...syncthing

try vim on your laptop and VPS, and Markor on your phone. sync them up with rsync or syncthing and you have free magic

Here’s the Obsidian Webclipper iOS shortcut I use that I modified from someone else’s on the Obsidian forum. You’ll need to modify it to fit your folder structure, etc. https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/0d542087f367494fb7f2282b7e4...

Copy the link. Open Obsidian and quick add. If you aren't aware of it, there is a plugin called Quickadd which can be customized for these things

Have you tried Markdownload? It's a browser extension that saves and downloads web content as markdown. I use it all the time on my desktop but it's a browser extension and supports Safari, so maybe it's helpful for you too.

https://github.com/deathau/markdownload

I made a web clipper bookmarklet for Obsidian that works on mobile https://gist.github.com/kepano/90c05f162c37cf730abb8ff027987...

By mobile do you mean iOS or Android?

I can’t seem to get it to work on my iPad in Safari…

Pasting the url gives me:

  Cannot Run Script
  Safari cannot run the script
  because JavaScript is not allowed
  to be used this way.

I found the issue, this was caused by Safari being in “private mode”.

I assume the bookmarklet uses some javascript that’s blocked by Safari in Private mode.. :)

It’s working fine now!

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