One way to grow a small, bootstrapped start-up is to build a platform that others can add to and enhance with plug-ins, templates and more. Obsidian has done this very successfully. It’s personal knowledge management application now lists over 1,600 plugins that extend this great tool in many new directions.
Last month, the developers Obsidian took this open platform to the next level: they announced that its popular visual canvas is now called JSON Canvas and is being positioned an open source platform for visual notes.
Staying true to its principles
One of Obsidian’s founding principles is to enable its users to control their data. Every note you create in Obsidian is stored locally as a text file in markdown (.MD) file format, a widely accepted standard for text-based data. This ensures that your notes are stored in a format that’s easy to read, retrieve and share with other applications.
But when Obsidian’s developers launched its infinite visual canvas last year, they created a proprietary file format that couldn’t be easily shared. JSON Canvas is an attempt to remedy that, following the company’s guiding principles.
JSON Canvas makes it easy to import and export visual data with Obsidian. It’s already supported by three visual thinking tools:
- Kinopio
- Flowchart Fun
- Hi-canvas
Here is the JSON Canvas website, which describes this platform and contains resources related to it.
Potential implications
I think this is a move in the right direction. Based on what some users were saying in the Obsidian Reddit group, they were reluctant to use the application’s Canvas because it stored visual maps in a proprietary format.
It will be interesting to see if this open source initiative stays on the fringes of the visual thinking tools space or if it becomes part of the mainstream. Imagine if a major mind mapping or diagramming tool developer adopted the JSON Canvas standard for sharing visual maps with Obsidian and other tools?
If it happens, I predict it would be one of the newer tools with a smaller user base or a developer that already has an open-source leaning philosophy, such as Xmind.
I’d be much more excited if JSON Canvas wasn’t just focused on interoperability between apps that offer an infinite canvas but also a toolbox that enables developers to build enhancements to the canvas itself.
Still, it’s an interesting development that should be of interest if you’re a user of Obsidian, as I am.
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