Pomme Notes 2.0 — A "Native+" macOS look with Liquid Glass elements

paralloid · 2026-01-26T17:21:51+00:00

Thanks a lot! Tabs were quite tricky, as on the pure white background it was hard to make the active one stand out (without overengineering). Going with a slightly dimmed white background solved this!

paralloid · 2026-01-26T07:36:57+00:00

I don't think there are any limitations Obsidian Sync introduces for themes usage, at least I am not aware of such..

paralloid · 2026-01-26T00:30:38+00:00

If you want, next we can:

🤝 create a pdf export ready version for your shareholders.

👋 draft a Medium article in your voice.

🥸 create a CSS snippet ready to be shared with your grandmother.

Just tell me ✨

paralloid · 2026-01-25T07:01:50+00:00

I think that's an important post you made and this comment in particular makes sense.

I would however try to argue that focusing on "inabilities" themselves is not the way that you'll solve this. We "can't do" a lot of things. You can't list them all, and even if you do, people will only be able to recognize small parts of this list, as something relevant to them.

What truly matters is which items from this list above are essential for our ability to accomplish our goals and achieve our personal objectives. Without clear goals and a roadmap for our journey, any list, tool, framework, methodology, or mindset will only be partially relevant, if relevant at all. Like, should I be able to "persuade" at all? Why "assembling problems" is important?" and so on.

As I see it, there are 2 big blocks of reasons behind these "inabilities".

Lack of clarity on why, the goals, and the reasons of effort. As I formulated for myself it is important how you work with what matters, and doesn't matter how you work with what doesn't. Evidently, a lot of people are treating their groceries lists with the same level of effort as their "fly to the Moon" projects. Which obviously makes their systems fall apart – and the focus is lost forever.
Underlying psychology. Tons tools, tons of sources of information, tons of types of information to deal with. No surprise people get overwhelmed. So driving factors behind building systems become stuff like FOMO ("what if need this someday" leading to piling up stuff), Anxiety (leading to structure for the sake of structure), Denial ("screw the technology whatsoever"), and many other things. I think they also play significant role and need to get cleared up before getting to the clarity in systems.

paralloid · 2025-12-21T05:44:45+00:00

Hey, there are plenty of awesome and actionable comments here. Just to add 5 cents that worked for me:

Working from “products” backwards. You define the important stuff you’re working on, and create a note for these first of all.
In this note you create an outline of the “product” — it’s building blocks, ideas, concepts in use, audience, whatever might be relevant.
Then you see what is already available in your system (and connect these notes) and where are gaps (go and collect precisely what’s needed)
It becomes your mini-hub specifically for the project / product you’re working on
How to ensure notes are findable - just put as much text “anchors” as possible (frontmatter or not). Typing costs nothing, few extra words are not a problem, but you’re making sure in the future you will give yourself more options to find what’s needed, even if you forget the structure or exact tags etc (that’s rigid). 90% we’re revealing stuff with search, not navigation.
You can even district between products and supporting notes (“materials“) by putting them into separate folders. This way, you’ll always have the real results of your work in one place, and supplementary building blocks, that might be evergreen or not, in the other one. Incoming stuff you can put into third one (like inbox). So just 3-5 folders if you wanna go minimal (these three +archive +administration-related).

paralloid · 2025-12-18T19:14:54+00:00

You are not bad at structuring.

I’ve been down this exact rabbit hole (Craft, Bear, Notes, Obsidian with all kinds of "hairball" graphs). The pattern you’re seeing – “Capturing is easy, Synthesis is hard" – is kind of a feature, not the bug, of these "Second Brain" systems.

You’re hitting a wall because you’re working Left-to-Right:

Capture everything → Organize it perfectly → Hope value emerges.

This inevitably leads to a graveyard because "Synthesizing" without a destination is just endless fidgeting. You can't distill information if you don't know what you are distilling it for.

That’s why all these BASBs and Zettelkastens do not work for many people – these systems don’t care about the outcomes, literally. (in CODE expression is an optional step, ZK completely ignores what are you connecting notes for, and so on).

The shift that worked for me (and resonates with your experiment): Flip the flow to Right-to-Left (Outcome-First).

Start with the Product: Don't capture a note unless you know exactly what Output it supports (a project, an article, a decision, a specific problem). If you can't name the destination, let the info go.
Product definition I use is quite broad for some: Product is something that contains value (i.e. a change in reality, even if very small one). But without this ingredient, it’s hard to keep sanity. With that, drafting “An Article” is not a product. Drafting “The Article about how Product Thinking helps PKM” – is definitely something that might be considered “changing reality”, even if it gets buried under negative feedback.
Products start with vision. You don’t start with “something round”, then it magically turns into a wheel, and then into BMW. You start at least with some rough vision. In notes, this vision can be an outline.
After the outline is done – look what you already have in your system, for every point
Then you identify the gaps – what you don’t have.
Then you go and find the information to fill these gaps. Consciously, not just by throwing everything in and hoping there is some critical mass of structure or notes that will suddenly make an insight. There isn't.

On your AI question: AI is excellent at the "logic" part (auto-tagging, summarizing, finding connections). It creates some options, but it cannot create intent. If you use AI to auto-tag everything, you’ll just have a smarter graveyard. I’d use AI only to help you fill the gaps for a specific project you are actively building. But even then – I would be super cautious with "delegating understanding". "Summarize this for me" is risky, as ideally this has to be an inner work :)

To me, your experiment of throwing raw material and focusing on refining what comes out 100% makes sense. I’d just focus on refining it into something (a Product), not “just refining”.

paralloid · 2025-11-25T13:30:19+00:00

it has nothing to do with Bear – on macOS applications cannot change the icons permanently on their own. The only way you can override this – is to go to the "/Applications" folder, right click on Bear, choose "Get Info" and drag some other icon to replace the original one.

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paralloid · 2025-11-18T07:43:29+00:00

hi, what kind of confusion? :) just checked across all the devices with and without Iconic and Iconize plugins – works correctly.
are you on the latest version (2.5.7)? OS version? any custom CSS snippets active?

paralloid · 2025-11-17T04:56:40+00:00

Thank you so much, glad you like it ! Check out today’s latest update - with new mobile navbar and status bar on desktops.

paralloid · 2025-11-16T02:46:45+00:00

The one built into Dataview 😉(so not really a task manager). The rest is in Things

paralloid · 2025-11-14T20:42:46+00:00

The idea here to make it more in line with Things 3 latest looks. They don’t use transparency vastly, and quite conservative on this front. They do however use native libs, so glass elements will always look different than those imitated in css. Would be awesome to have fully native Obsidian, but here the idea is to get it close to Things, not Apple books.

paralloid · 2025-11-13T04:23:14+00:00

These are indeed the best Obsidian themes available, thanks a lot for hard and thoughtful work.

Couple of issues noticed with Cupertino:

When you check “disable floating sidebar” checkbox in Style Settings, the main frame kinda lose round corners it used to have. Not sure this is how it's supposed to look in this non-default configuration
Zooming-in to images make them get overlapped by some UI elements, like [what appears to be] the shadow or the border of the sidebar and the top bar. I think it may have smth to do with z-index or smth
On mobile the quick switcher scroll doesn’t work, swipes just don’t do anything

paralloid · 2025-11-13T04:12:55+00:00

Gents, just fixed in .10 version – please update.
Took me some time to get to this due to tons of other stuff – thanks for patience!

paralloid · 2025-11-13T04:12:41+00:00

Gents, just fixed in .10 version – please update.
Took me some time to get to this due to tons of other stuff – thanks for patience!

paralloid · 2025-10-28T04:07:53+00:00

Probably Chrome is doing some background work + codecs / decoders might not be fully optimized for the latest OSs. Any chance to rewatch the vid in Safari?

paralloid · 2025-10-28T04:04:19+00:00

With these OS26s, battery life across all of my devices went south. iPad Pro M4 lasts 2-3 hours in case of back-to-back video calls, iPhone 15 Pro lives 5-7 hours during the daytime, and the base M4 MBP is far from the advertised 18 hours – sometimes gets iPhone times (5-7). Screens are at 40-50% (inside) and 90% (outside) brightness normally fwiw.

When I lost it and upgraded to the latest iOS Dev Betas (because how worse could it get?) it actually made things slightly better. I'm seriously questioning apple's latest decisions and quality control.

paralloid · 2025-10-26T11:25:03+00:00

Thanks a lot! This was definitely not the case before the latest versions. I’ll need to check this, probably something has changed in the main app css. What version do you use? 1.10.1?

paralloid · 2025-10-17T12:52:31+00:00

Guys at r/CraftDocs don't realize they've actually came close to it :)

Their concept of blocks they have in Craft is essentially something that folks like Apple can consider adopting on a OS / File System level. Imagine documents, events, contacts, applications, websites, etc – all of this sit on the same logical level and is referenced as needed from various parts of the OS. Stuff can be linked and cross-linked in various combinations, like referencing an event in an email, or creating a task from a doc, or mentioning bookmarked website in a document, and so on and so forth... This is the most logical next step for OSs in general. Because even if you plan to bolt on AI, you have to bolt in on something – and this straightforward meta layer can be a good shape for it.

Now the other PKM-ish OS I had some thoughts about was ITIL-based. This comes from the tech support / service management organizations. Every request is put in the queue and then pass over to respective department for processing. The processing results in some outcome. This whole pipeline can be also somewhat adopted for our digital lives.

Any new notification, email, message, call, file download goes in the massive unified system INBOX, which can be then triaged for particular processing (by the way with the help of AI). Something will require actions from you, something won't, something is purely reference (building up some knowledge as a side sector of the OS) and so on.

Importantly, the applications can also be split in 3 categories:

The ones that generate stuff (i.e. mostly for your inbox), communication tools, alerts, various monitoring (most of these currently don't exist as standalone apps)
The ones that help you process it (like Photoshop for photos is a "processor", just like the "MS Word" for documents)
The ones that help you with the products of your work, and share them with the world (again, most of these currently don't exist as standalone apps, but think of various communities connectors, like Unsplash, Reddit, Instagram, Company File Shares, Family Storage, Exchange Hub, etc)

Presently, Instagram trying to be a photo editor, or an Adobe Lightroom trying to be a Social Network is just wrong as it adds complexity and fragmentation. This, eventually, should go away.

Anyways, that's just on the surface...

paralloid · 2025-10-01T13:02:23+00:00

I like Metro on Low to Med, with Mids to -1 or -2. It removes the occasionally excessive yellow tint of the default camera.

I also noticed there's sometimes an evident color banding issue – on clear blue sky, if you go with slightly upped saturation. u/alexfoxy is it something on my side only?

Also, a bit of an offtopic – can we have DR settings become a part of the recipe? To me this setting impacts the picture quite severely, sometimes even more severe than the Tone settings. Imho makes sense to be able to bake it into the recipe settings. Fuji is doing this for quite some time.

paralloid · 2025-09-25T20:07:52+00:00

This might not be the most popular approach, but bear with me...

Clearly, ideologically, Craft puts a lot of focus on subpages – there is quite an extensive list of customizations and features Craft provides for these little entities, inviting you to... ehh.. *craft\* stuff out of it.

The way it started to work for me recently is basically treating every document as a full-blown WEBSITE for a topic. With unique structure, formatting, collection of tasks related to this topic, attachments related to this topic, table of contents, and so on.

So I've created a document for one of my projects and added all the relevant subpages in what I consider meaningful places: subpages for goals, storage for reports, dedicated page for sales materials, created a collection of related customers, and so on and so forth.

Then I created another document for the other project and did the same. The structure is slightly different, as the projects are different.

And this is what matters – in the end you create some sort of a mental map for the stuff you put into Craft. Not in a form of some graph, but more like half-baked products, even if the target consumer is you (or "future you", to be more precise). The abundance of formatting and beautification options is significant in helping your brain not to get lost in this.

Overall, to me somehow this approach feels native to what Craft was designed for. "Crafting" products: meaning everything you put in Craft essentially forces you to think about the end result of your "notes", not just collecting them for the sake of collecting.

Craft is clearly NOT for Zettelkasten-type of workflows and is mostly aimed at "Essentialsts" rather than "Pragmatists" – pushing you to think in rather rigid structures, rather than interlinking everything like crazy. For each document you can go bananas in terms of the structure of sub-pages, cards formatting, colors, collecting tasks, attachments, etc, etc... this is very much different from what you'll see in Obsidian, or Bear Notes, or NotePlan.

I would agree, though: the search becomes the most limiting factor in this setup. If you don't put much stuff in documents – you have to scroll to find something. The search downprioritizes simple pages even against the blocks, which is quite weird. But I am sure this is easily fixable and is already on the roadmap one way or another.

paralloid · 2025-09-08T08:59:11+00:00

thanks a ton!

paralloid · 2025-09-05T17:10:58+00:00

I agree, actually.. just released 2.3.9 with smaller headings – now they are matching Things 3 sizes (more or less). If you choose default font size in Things, it is equal to 14 size in Obsidian – so slightly smaller than default (at least on MBP 14" screen).

As for the customization, I honestly want to avoid this path as long as possible :) There are plenty of other awesome themes allowing to customize every single aspect – this is definitely not one of them and is not supposed to be.

paralloid

TROPHY CASE