The option to change things, order things, filter things per user choice is an important and valuable thing.

This same principle can be applied in multiple contexts. Some examples:

1. I was listening to John Gruber and Craig Hockenberry talk about this in the context of the app Tapestry. And how you can choose the items you want to follow, and filter out things that you don’t want to listen to. Algorithmic feeds don’t provide that option, usually.
2. In the Apple Photos app, you can rearrange and customise the things that matter to you. I have moved the Featured Photos, just below the photo library for example.

Story time

Today, while using Obsidian Mobile, I wanted to add a code block. I searched for it on the mobile tool bar, but I could not find it. I scrolled through to the end, trying to guess what the icons meant, and found a wrench symbol at the end. The wrench means settings.

I did not know this was possible. That I could customise this.

I write in Obsidian mobile almost everyday. I use the toolbar often, mostly to insert markdown links to things on the web. By default I needed to scroll a bit, before I found it. Still it was something I needed to do many times while writing and it was useful enough that I continued using it.

I arranged and simplified it today, to include just the things I wanted in here. It’s marvellous.

Now I don’t need to scroll to insert links. It’s just there!