Bike 1.11 (120-126)

Cognitively speaking, clumping seems good.

(A long list is a lot to parse at a glance)

Interesting, I hadn’t thought of that.

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:

  1. New Section called “Outline View”
  2. And in that section include the actions:
    • Focus Rows
    • Fold Rows
    • Get Selection
    • Open Find
    • Open Row
    • Open View
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I like it. :+1:

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? :slight_smile:

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.

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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.)


Bike 1.11 (122)
macOS 12.6.4

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.

Let me know if that solves problem.

Needed one more release. I started recreating some of the demo AppleScripts and found I needed to expose more features. The Get Rows action now allows you to get root and also get rows by Id.

The create row action now has a “Find or Create by Id” option. When set your outline will first be searched for the specified ID, and if it exists that row will be returned. Otherwise a new row is created that uses that Id.

I actually liked that you used the default Find Rows action with the predicate builder. It had the same UX like all the other actions for finding calendar events, files, reminders, Things to-dos etc.

Now its just says “Query” which is not helpful.

As I wrote out my argument for why I changed to custom filter I realized I didn’t have to change to custom filter :slight_smile:

Will post 124 to reverse this in 15 min.

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I had to adjust demo shortcuts to use generated Find Rows. Here’s the updated shortcuts for Bike 124:

Bike Shortcuts Demo.zip (38.2 KB)

Thank you for reverting it! :pray:

As I wrote out my argument for why I changed to custom filter I realized I didn’t have to change to custom filter :slight_smile:

Will post 124 to reverse this in 15 min.

This is why I use a small outliner app called Bike. It helps me figure things out. You should try it out, it’s pretty cool. :wink:

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Found two bugs in previous version so here’s 125:

  • Fixed broken autocorrect and selection behaviors
  • Fixed previews and thumbnail generation performance

(in 124) … Last, a text editing crasher bug was discovered and fixed.

Turned out there was an edge case that I missed and that caused problem with autocorrect and selection.

The previews and thumbnails fix is potentially big if you had really big files. I noticed my thumbnail generator was using gigs of memory sometimes… oops. Turned out something was called on a thread I did not expect and that caused a whole host of problems.

To further improve that process I’ve also started truncating the previews. This makes thumbnail generation and previews almost instant even in large 40+ mb files. I think it’s working well, but let me know if you see problems.

I’m playing with Shortcuts at the moment and this one was pretty fun:

Save Link.shortcut.zip (11.9 KB)

  1. Get current Page

  2. Find Existing (or Create new) Links row

  3. Add a new Row with the current link.

    This is the part that got me excited. How to get the page name and URL into Bike as a rich text link? Bike’s “Create Row” action allows you to create your row using Markdown, so I knew I wanted to get the name and link into Markdown format.

    I started by saving each value to its own variable. Then I started looking for commands to concatenate text strings. I was making progress, but it all felt a bit verbose. That’s when I discovered (or remembered) that I could insert values into strings directly.

    I deleted all my variables and thoughts of string processing and instead just typed out the markdown syntax that I wanted, and inserted the values directly as seen in the image above. And it worked. I did it all with zero Google searches. Pretty cool!

Don’t get me wrong, I still think that in many ways AppleScript is more powerful: It’s more compact, it scripts run faster, and has better reuse and modularization options.

Shortcuts on the other hand feels a little brittle. When I created a longer workflow it had scrolling problems… but wow it is so much easier! If you just want to click some things together to create a workflow I really encourage you to give it a try.

Actually, now I have multiple autocorrect issues with the latest version. It seems like Bike ignores the autocorrect/substitution bubble.

When I type a word that would be auto-corrected by macOS, it just gets replaced inline without any “bubble” showing up to dismiss the recommendation via Esc or the small X next to it.

When I type a substitution from keyboard settings, I can insert it with Space. It inserts the substitution and types and space after it. But when I delete back, instead of deleting the inserted space, it reverts immediately to the originally typed text.

I think these are all expected intended behaviors… or are you saying it works differently then Bike 1.10 and before?

Generally I dislike the standard macOS autocorrect interactions. I don’t like the suggestion bubble showing up seemingly random as I type and I don’t like the inconsistencies of when autocorrect happens and when it doesn’t.

My various complaints and design of Bike’s autocorrect behavior are described in this post: Bike: Improved macOS Text Checking

Here’s another shortcut. Similar to “Save Link” but it saves all tabs open in the frontmost Safari window. This is an interesting case, because I don’t think Safari exposes tabs through Shortcuts, so I needed to use AppleScript to get the actual tab values.

I’m not sure what to make of the final result. Since I had to do AppleScript anyway maybe would have been simpler to just do the whole thing in AppleScript. At the same time to write the AppleScript I had to do a few google searches to remember all the syntax… then once I got data back into Shortcuts I just snapped things together without needing to look anything up.

Bike-Save Safari tabs 2.shortcut.zip (12.5 KB)

Is anyone here running macOS 13.2.x or earlier? If you are do Bike’s shortcut actions show up in the Shortcuts app? I have one report that they don’t, but the only thing I can see different is I’m running latest macOS and they are on 13.2.1.

Here’s an improved version:

Bike: Save Safari tabs.shortcut.zip (12.3 KB)

I still need to call out to AppleScript to get the tabs, but the code to get those values back into Shortcuts and sent to Bike is now much shorter.

If you know nothing about shortcuts I might be able to teach you something. I’m still learning too, so don’t tree this as authoritative, but it shows how to bang rocks together to get something you want (In this case steps to create a shortcut that saves current safari tab into Bike):

Yes Jesse I’m finding Shortcuts quite a helpful way of working with Bike and I want to learn more. I’m wondering if you could find a few moments to take all of the work and helpful tips on Shortcuts and collect them all into their own Working with Shortcuts category here rather than in the 1.11 Preview. Just a bit of an organizational request for the forum.

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