In my pursuit of feeling more at ease about usingAI , I decided to use Claude/Cursor to create a web clipper chrome extension for Obsidian.
Why?
Some already exist, I know that. There’s something insanely dev-heavy and ugly about almost everything Obsidian. Many tools for Obsidian are inaccessible, largely because I can’t speak the code language (read: this thing is for devs). But it’s something between accessible but not customizable and inaccessible but hyper customizable that I find value in and I can’t let it go, which I pretty much rant about in Switching from Notion to Obsidian.
Anyway, I want to make this Web Clipper for myself because I care about it being easy to use and easy to look at. The usual designer yearning.
Current Obsidian clippers are frustrating to use because the language feels inconsistent with Obsidian’s terms, that I’m not really sure what I need to add:
Again, maybe not for me. What I liked about Notion was how easy it was to do things and connect to things.
Technical limitations
- AFAIK: There’s no Obsidian API. I’m not really sure how they’ve gone this far to not have this. Though I wonder if it’s by design, since it’s meant to be a local thing, but maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about.
- Can’t use the URI in a Google Chrome Extension. I think it was a security reason, I can’t remember here. Should investigate later.
- I know nothing about building a Google Chrome Extension. That’s it. Full stop. I came into this thinking I could use Cursor to help me build the thing the same way everyone else on Twitter is trying to do this. Nope.
I’ll write more later, but pretty much TLDR:
- I scope creeped myself and had too many features I wanted to add but I don’t know the first thing about building an extension or asking for help; a lot of what Claude suggests are things that I can’t gauge are right or wrong/inefficient, so I go with it but learn nothing from it.
- I think I just want to build something pretty. :(
- Mac App could be a lot easier, but it doesn’t just target web browsers, and I think it’s actually harder to build a Mac app. But it’s definitely way more flexible since it’s able to read all your files on your computer without worrying about the browser or security or cache.
Leanne is typing…