I’m pushing this out late, hopefully without too may bugs. Wanted to get something out by Friday, but just decided I will take the day off tomorrow to play… so rushing this out right now!
If you have used Shortcut before please try this version out and tell me everywhere that I’m going wrong. If you haven’t used Shortcuts yet, give them a try. They make simple automations easy.
Try Bike’s “Create Row”:
Open the Shortcuts app
Create a new shortcut and open it.
Shortcuts are composed of one or more actions.
Select Bike in the list of Apps and drag the “Create Row” action into your shortcut.
Run the shortcut and a new empty row is inserted before the current selection.
Click “Content” in the Create Row action and type some text
Now when you run the shortcut a new row with the text you entered is inserted.
Next you can click the actions “Show More”
For “Row Location” click the “Choose” button and you can browse through all top level rows to choose where to create the new row. If the row you want isn’t a top level one then use the “Search” field in that popup to find it.
You can configure relative location to insert before/after or in the children of that row.
The new 121 release is getting a lot closer. I think I have a good set of actions, and they are setup so that I can continue to add features over time, without having to create a new action each time.
I think I will add one more “Perform View Action” (if I can’t figure a better name). That action will allow you to perform various view actions such as expand/collapse/focus/select.
I’m not sure how the “Open Outline” action should be used, but I’m getting a permission error when I’m copying and opening a Bike template file.
It is a shortcut which starts a Tyme timer and creates a new Bike outline for note taking. It does this by duplicating a template and opening the new file in Bike. Luckily the built-in “Open File” action works as well.
@zsbenke (or anyone familiar with Shortcut actions)
It seems to me that the behavior associated with most of Bike’s menu items could also be useful as an action in Shortcuts.
For example:
expand
collapse
select
focus
find
new tab
new window
etc
At the same time I would consider most of these behaviors as “extra”, not holding the same importance as “Create Row” or “Edit Row”. I also feel like if Bike has 20+ actions it would just make it seem complex when you are browsing it in Shortcuts.app.
For these reasons my plan is to create a single new “View Action” that has a parameter dropdown where you can choose from the above list… and that’s the action that will be performed.
I don’t think it’s a problem if an app has 20+ actions. I mostly use the search functionality in Shortcuts when adding a new action, so it can be helpful to see each action separately in these scenarios.
If you still feel it’s too much, maybe you could organize them by a bit more granular categories than a singular “View” action. For example:
Expand and Collapse could be a “Toggle Row” action.
New tab or New Window could be another “Open New (Window|Tab)”.
Find should be a separate action (if you refer to the existing Find Rows action).
Select and Focus also seems to be related.
Also, do not forget about action categories in Shortcuts, which could also organize these actions.
Though it’s true, I have found that as I mess with Actions more I find myself using search more. Also as much as I wanted to have a small number of actions, the label for this “Update Outline View” action is looking pretty ugly and out of place next to all the others.
I was just about to post new release, but I think you’ve convinced me. Better to break functionality out into multiple actions even if it means I’ll end up with quite a few.
How about this for a category. Basically put all view related actions on one place:
I’ve just posted what I think might be the final 1.11 preview release. Try it out, let me know if I’m right?
In the end I decided to leave Open Find and Open View actions out. Can add them later if needed, but decided to only add things that I was pretty sure people would need for the start.
Also I changed the “Find Rows”. Previously it was getting generated by Xcode as a special case. End result was it could do things that my new one can’t. But my new one is better setup to use Bike’s future query language. (not implemented yet, but expected eventually).
Last, a text editing crasher bug was discovered and fixed. Probably 80% of the crashing bugs have been related to the small amount of code that detects word and sentence ranges. I’m not sure if I’m being dumb or the API (I think maybe a combination of both, I know the API is wrong in a few places). Anyway for this crash I rewrite things using a different API and that seems to have fixed bugs and allowed me to take out some special cases… but be on the lookout for oddities while editing text this release.
I can’t find Bike actions in Shortcuts.app
What did I miss?
(This is my first attempt. I don’t know if it only appeared in this version or not before.)
Make sure that you don’t have any other version of Bike installed other than the latest preview. I think that will do the trick. Then maybe restart preview or computer if things still not showing up, but I don’t then I’ve needed to do that.
