I’ve been contributing to Logseq for a couple of months now, as a backer — meaning $5 monthly donations to the team, who’s been doing a great job. This has already entitled me, in the recent past to testing their sync feature, which has been working like magic for me, allowing me to write or capture thoughts, texts and snippets in my iPhone and have them appear in my Windows PC, or vice-versa.

But the one feature I’d been wishing for this Christmas was the app’s whiteboard. Just a couple of days ago, Obsidian released their canvas, and they’re both meant for the same use case: having an infinite mindmapping, brainstorming or creative space. No matter how far you move or how much you add there, Obsidian and Logseq, and their respective canvases and whiteboards will encompass what you have in your mind.

Trying Obsidian canvas is something I haven’t done yet — it requires the 1.1.0 application version which, as I write, is an insider-only build. But I’m very impressed with what I saw tonight in Logseq’s whiteboard.

I am no specialized critic or anything, but one thing I know for sure: I’ve always been in love with canvases, mindmaps and brainstorming. As of lately, I was thinking of acquiring a version of Scapple, just to be able to use its wonderful canvas. I’ve been trying to improve as a writer, so it would help me placing story elements where they belong. But Logseq whiteboard feature has just made me realize I don’t need any other tool besides it.

I could place squares, rectangles, freeform text. Arrows and boxes, color them. Bold the text and make links to internal pages (which, once linked, opposite to what I have heard about Obsidian canvas, already appear on the page as backlinks). I could also remove the background of the drawings and paste images copied straight from my Google Chrome browser to Logseq, and it worked very fine.

Logseq is such a marvelous piece of software. It made me rediscover my writing, my ideas and made me start to feel like creating a digital garden somehow. I’m really looking forward its further development to see where things are going. But, for tonight, just because I have this new canvas to play around with and unleash my creativity, I’m the happiest man I could become so far.

It’s like getting an anticipated Christmas gift.