Offline-first is a must-have
Software needs to work offline. Whenever possible, it needs to work off of local files, and optionally sync those files to cloud storage for cross-platform funcionality.
Steph Ango puts it beautifully in File over app:
Today, we are creating innumerable digital artifacts, but most of these artifacts are out of our control. They are stored on servers, in databases, gated behind an internet connection, and login to a cloud service. Even the files on your hard drive use proprietary formats that make them incompatible with older systems and other tools.
Software that lives online, or requires an Internet connection will inevitably fail. The timing of its failure is always going to be bad. Just today, Capacities went down right around my first scheduled time block to triage my list of evergreen notes.
It could've been worse: I'd been using it to write up performance reviews for work. Today is the deadline for submission of those reviews, but I happened to do all of that work in the morning, before the downtime. If I hadn't, I would be a big ball of stress right now, hitting "Retry" on the app's maintenance mode screen.
It was a jarring but a powerful reminder of what tools like Obsidian get right. From their homepage:
Obsidian stores notes on your device, so you can access them quickly, even offline. No one else can read them, not even us.
Meanwhile Capacities has "Steps towards a better offline experience" on their roadmap, but the timeline is fuzzy and it doesn't appear to be a top concern.
I'm note sure this will be enough of an incentive to switch, but it is making me wonder how/if I can replicate Capacities' object based approach to content in Obsidian.
⁂