PKM Weekly - 2025-07-06
A look at the latest Personal Knowledge Management PKM news from the past week.
Hi Everyone,
We are back with another episode of PKM Weekly. Let’s see what is in store for us today.
Obsidian
Obsidian Bases Update - NEW Card View + Template Generator & Practical Uses
This video covers the latest updates to the Obsidian Bases Core Plugin: 1.9.3 & 1.9.4, demonstrating a range of minor updates along with the two major ones.
Obsidian Bases effortlessly turns your notes into a database, without the need of plugins like Dataview or cloud-based apps like Notion. If you've been waiting to switch to Obsidian from Notion, now might be the time!
Obsidian vs Tana
Sebastian presents us with his thoughts on he’ll never switch from Obsidian to Tana.
Tana and Obsidian are both awesome. But not for everyone. Here are the reasons why I choose Obsidian over Tana.
https://www.dsebastien.net/the-reasons-ill-never-switch-from-obsidian-to-tana/
The usual suspected reasons are there (offline and local), but there are a few more that I had not considered, so it is well worth the read.
On the other hand, there is this post titled "5 Reasons I Left Obsidian For Tana," which presents the topic from a slightly different perspective.
What are your thoughts? Would you leave Obsidian for another app?
Working with Flashcards in Obsidian
Interested in using Flashcard in Obsidian, this may help
Flashcards are an important part of knowledge work, as a tool to transfer information to your brain. I’ve been using Obsidian as my primary tool for knowledge work for a long time, and after trying a lot of different approaches, I've settled on a workflow that I think is worth sharing.
You open up Obsidian and your flashcard app side by side and write down the first question, "How many limbs does a human have?". Over in Obsidian, you see a heading where underneath is all the relevant information.
Your actions:
Place your cursor at the heading in Obsidian.
Hit shortcut A
Go over to the flashcard app and place your cursor on the backside of the flashcard
Enter textexpander keyword.
A link will appear that will take you to the relevant location in your vault. Done!
Check it out in full here.
Obsidian Notebook Navigator Plugin - Like Apple Notes?
Looking to bring the clean, intuitive feel of Apple Notes to Obsidian? In this video, I walk you through how to install the Notebook Navigator plugin using BRAT, configure it, and explore its powerful navigation features—perfect for both folder and tag lovers.
Capacities
Capacities 10k members in Discord.
Well done to Capacities for achieving this incredible milestone through their hard work, quality app and great dedication to growing the community.
Here’s to the next 10k members.
Queries and Database Improvements
The team recently requested feedback on what the users wanted to see improved in terms of Queries and Databases. The feedback collection phase has now finished for this round, and the team commented:
Thank you, as always, for your insightful feedback. For full transparency, we have been working hard on database and query improvements, which you will see reflected in an upcoming release. 👀
We have read and saved all of your responses so we can discuss them internally and implement any that make sense with our current roadmap. Many were already on the list of features we were working on!
We see a big overlap with our roadmap, and most of your requests will become part of Capacities over time. We can see that Kanban view is your most highly requested feature; our database and query improvements release will lay the groundwork to be able to properly develop Kanban views in Capacities. So we hear you, and we're working on it!
TANA
Tana Office Hours With Matt, Olav and a few other guest appearances
A great update from the Tana team with lots of insights into what the team has been working on / will be working on in the near future.
There were a few sneak peeks:
The showcasing of some building tools such as triggers and async command processing, command execution document, agentic, tool-calling etc.
Tana Lens
Tana Publishing 2.0
Tana View
Lots of quality things coming soon (hopefully)
Still too complex?
A Slack user posted: This is one of the single most complicated messes I have had the displeasure to try to learn. Nothing behaves the way you expect it to. I’m just trying to create two supertags that reference fields in the other tag. and it’s an absolute nightmare.. not intuitive at all! This app will not succeed until it is more intuitive.
They were attempting to implement features like auto-population, which is notoriously complex, but this highlights that users are still struggling in certain areas. It will be interesting to see how the devs can make Tana simpler while keeping the powerful and robust system behind it.
How to Build Your Perfect Task System in Tana
Build a tasks and todos management system in Tana (from beginner to advanced).
In this video, we go from using the basic features of Tana, to advanced setups with live searches, multiple supertags and dashboards tailored to your needs. Tana is the next generation all-in-one workspace built for AI and voice. You can easily create powerful custom apps and workflows, that use AI and voice to automatically capture, organize, and resurface information. Unlike other workspaces where knowledge goes to die, Tana is built to resurface information for you.
Logseq
Changelog (2025-06-18 to 2025-07-05) Thanks Danzu!
New Feature
Page and Block Management
Added page-block conversion functionality with #Page tag support (2f78ca8, 5f4fa3b) ==> (to be merged soon for alpha testing)
Implemented move blocks feature via cmd+k (dc9f714)
Added support for importing page and block embeds (507ff3c)
Enhanced import functionality for markdown quotes with #Quote support (5b4f43d, 8c6146a)
Tag System
Added extended support for multiple tags with cycle validation (cc39c1c, 9c49f63)
Implemented “p t” keyboard shortcut to set tags for selected blocks (9ea2826)
Mobile Platform
Introduced a new mobile application with enhanced UI and performance optimisations (8de6681, 48da90f)
Update From Logseq Team
This past month, Logseq has been busy on the DB version with bug fixes, UX enhancements, and improvements while also working on some new features.
For full details of what they have been working on, check out: https://github.com/logseq/docs/commit/dd8fe3a5d09466f233296a000f8e00de0b9d0dd1.
Here are the main new features and improvements:
Tags can have multiple parents - https://github.com/logseq/logseq/pull/11965#issuecomment-3033433243,
Library for namespaced pages - https://www.loom.com/share/30a98c7617c349679bb85d239ca549c1,
Plugin API improvements related to properties,
DB graph importer now supports importing assets, page and block embeds and quotes,
enhance(ux): blocks selection with up/down key
Charlie, part of the dev team, posted something the team has been working on - much-improved keyboard navigation.
Check it out here.
AppFlowy
Huge update from AppFlowy after a few weeks of quietness.
Private page sharing You can now add members by email to private pages with
Can View
orCan Edit
permissionsBrowse all pages shared with you under the new
Shared with me
section in the sidebar,View/Edit shared pages using AppFlowy Mobile,
Guest editor collaboration (Pro Plan) With the Pro Plan, you can now invite non-members (guest editors) to collaborate in real time on your pages
Guests get page access instead of full workspace access,
Invite up to 100 guests into a Pro Plan workspace,
After a year of effort and hard work, we completed a new syncing protocol for AppFlowy, optimized for faster, more reliable multi-user and multi-device data sync. The new syncing protocol is enabled in this release
This is considered the most complex and critical foundation for team collaborative software. Its completion enables us to build long-demanded collaboration features, such as version history and push notifications. Also, we'll resume the database iteration and fix related bugs. Many exciting updates will come soon!
Upcoming releases:
Mention a person: @someone in documents,
AppFlowy Web: login with password, AI prompt library,
Paid add-on: Vault (a new type of workspace): private and offline—AI runs locally, no data transfer
self-host-af-cloud launching self-hosted plans soon.
AFFiNE
Want a detailed walkthrough of the app and how you can self-host it? Then look no further than this video.
Let's discover Affine, a free open-source workspace with fully merged docs, whiteboards, and databases. It's a free open-source alternative to Notion. We'll start by installing it with Elestio and then explore the different features of Affine through a platform overview.
Heptabase
v1.60.0
Support global search in collaborative spaces
Add error messages for situations where OpenAI models are sometimes unable to function.
Fixed an issue where Gemini Pro 2.5 was sometimes unusable.
Fixed an issue where opening a deep link to a chat or message might not work.
Also, check out the two new wiki articles on how to use the latest AI and chat features.
Griply
Griply was mentioned by a fellow PKM enthusiast, Daniel, so I thought I would check it out as well.
It is billed as a way to connect your goals, habits, and daily tasks in one powerful, easy-to-use system. Whether you’re starting a business, building a routine, or just trying to stay focused - Griply helps you turn long-term goals into daily actions.
Seems to be working so far.
Thymer
A couple of updates this week for Thymer.
The release date (limited/beta/alpha, etc. - TBC) appears to be in August 2025. The devs commented It sure took longer than we hoped, but good odds for August! In the meantime, we'll keep posting updates on what we're working on, lots to demo that we haven't shown yet ;)
Lots to look forward to.
Customise your notes UI with plugins, vibe coding and hot reload!
Pricing
The devs mentioned their thinking on pricing, and it is not a bad thought at all:
"Our thinking is to have a very generous free plan (free forever for hobby or non-commercial use, within reason), otherwise $7/user/month...
Sync is always included! Sync is free for teams and individuals for non-commercial use. Right now, we have no plans for paid add-ons or other tiers, but that might change."
That’s all for this week. Thank you very much in advance for reading and I look forward to bringing you more PKM news next week.
I so agree with that Tana comment. Like the app has the potential and capability to be the best of the best but the process of setting up the super tags and making your own custom flows is so unimaginably difficult for beginners that >90 of users will likely never get there.
You are completely at the mercy of paying for someone’s premium Tana course (and even if you do that doesn’t guarantee that it “will click” for you) There SHOULD be templates built into the app that are designed around the most common use cases of Tana that can be used as starting points.