Bike 1.9 (112)

  • Changed Focus Mode keyboard shortcut to ⌥⌘F
  • Fixed check panel results border drawing in dark mode
  • Fixed inconsistencies with keyboard focus and text caret visibility

Previously in 1.9 Preview:

  • Added back View > Show Context Menu
  • Disambiguate window titles when document is open in multiple windows
  • Use Option-Return in checking panel to replace, close panel, and restore selection
  • Fixed missing icon on macOS 11
  • Fixed missing rows after animations
  • Fixed guide line and handle animations
  • Fixed memory leak introduced by status bar
  • Fixed checking panel bug where Change action would sometimes advance to far
  • Smoother wrap to width layout and scaling
  • Move text checking options to popover in panel
  • Make text statistics selectable in popover
  • Format text statistic numbers
  • More changes to status bar:
    • Split menu into “Options” and “Navigation” items
    • Options highlights when you have an option set
    • Navigation highlights when you focus into row
    • Added a message area used to show link urls
    • Moved text statistics to right side
  • Added View > Status Bar
  • Added View > Text Statistics
  • Changed formatting to only work on visible text
  • Changed transforms to only work on visible text
  • Fixed crash while editing same outline in two views
  • Added View > Text Wrap
  • Added View > Focus Mode
  • Added View > Typewriter Mode
  • Added 50% bottom padding
  • Added top padding when text wrap
  • Added font size adjust when text wrap & window width
  • Added Settings > General opt-in error reporting
  • Changed to always have visible menu bar
  • Changed find / checking panel background material
  • Changed to less bright block selection color
  • Changed File > New Tab (Option-Command-N) to make new document
  • Added Window > Duplicate Tab to clone view (same document)
  • Adjust font when resize window with wrapped text
  • Fixed strikethrough alignment
  • Fixed crash when performing autocorrect
  • Fixed where scroll up speed didn’t match scroll down speed
  • Fixed View > Focus Mode > Paragraph

To get preview releases through Bike’s software update select: Bike > Preferences > General > Include “preview” releases.

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Thoughts and notes…

With this release I’m trying to make Bike a better place for writing. There’s now column text wrap, typewriter scrolling, and text focus options. This makes Bike a bit nicer for longer form writing and also makes working in fullscreen mode nice.

Right now these features are all global (effect all open documents) and available through the “View” menu. I expect that I’ll eventually add some UI to each window to set these modes, and allow different windows to have different settings. I’m not sure if that will get into the 1.9 release or not.

For this release I’ve also done a lot of work on animations. Probably you won’t notice changes since animations happen pretty quickly, but my slow-mo debug mode looks a lot more consistent now. Hopefully in the back of your mind you’ll find them just a little nicer… along with that is there are a number of animation bugs … probably you will notice them. I’ll fix them in following preview releases, just wanted to get something out today. Progress!

Update

Also if you are experiencing any crashes please enable Settings > General > Send Error Reports

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Thanks for all these additions! They are very welcome.

As far as focus: focus word and focus sentence work fine for me. However, focus paragraph doesn’t seem to focus on anything. (Or put differently, it always focuses on “everything”). I don’t know if this is a bug or I have a faulty understanding of what focus paragraph should be doing.

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Oops. Yup that’s a bug. That was the easy one to implement, so I just skipped it :slight_smile:

Rich harvest of additions !

Have I understood View > Focus Mode > Paragraph ?

It seems hard to notice the difference between that and View > Focus Mode > Focus Off


View > Focus Mode > Sentence doesn’t appear to relate to period marks, and seems to highlight a whole row, which is what I think I would have expected the Paragraph focus mode to do.

I’m probably missing something obvious here :slight_smile:


UPDATE

Yes I am. Sentences need to start with a capital letter in English,
like they tried to explain to me at school :slight_smile:

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That first one is a bug, I just forgot to enable styling for focus paragraph… and yes focus sentence should be working on sentences as detected by cocoa natural language framework. Generally it works pretty well, but I’m sure there are some cases where it will get things wrong.

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Mea culpa – I was failing to start sentences in English with a capital letter.

The sentence detection works well, with Chinese punctuation as well as with European punctuation characters.

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Ah, got it! Unfortunately focus by paragraph is what I’ll use the most! Really glad to have these additional options.

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I think the old design looks good. It’s simple and clean. I’m curious why you made this change. Is it about the performance or UX? Or is it about that you want to add some UI in the menu bar?

Thank you, Jesse, I use Bike almost every day. This app makes me want to use it more often. I’m glad to have a bunch of new features and bug fixes in this update.

Glad you asked! I was wondering if anyone would notice.

This came about because I dislike when an app fades in/out my app titlebar in the name of minimalism. I feel like that fade animation bothers and distracts me way more than just the titlebar itself.

With that background I also started wishing for “the good old days” when every app had a titlebar with a uniform look and feel. I feel like the any distraction created by titlebars would be greatly minimized system wide if all apps had a simple and standard titlebar style. And that’s when I realized that … I’m an app developer, and my app Bike didn’t have standard titlebar … and so I decided to fix it.

Random notes:

  1. I think Bike’s previous “transparent” scrollbar style looked good for short documents that didn’t need scrolling.

  2. But as soon as scrolling comes into play I think this new standard style works better. Previously scroll text was clipped at an invisible boundary creating a weird effect. Now scrolled text is clipped at the titlebar’s bottom line, there’s some logic to it, I think it feels better that way.

  3. Previously Bike’s fullscreen mode wasn’t very useful. Now fullscreen mode works well, so if you want the full minimal distraction experience you can have it in fullscreen mode.

  4. Previously Bike’s text layout always started very close to titlebar boundary. Now with text wrap enabled and sizing your window a bit wide extra padding is added. I feel like this extra padding makes the always visible titlebar less of a distraction when you are first starting a new document and haven’t scroll yet.

  5. Eventually I will add a matching optional bottom status bar for things like word count. I think that will be better balanced by the current standard titlebar look.

Now with all that said I realize that macOS isn’t going back to standard titlebars everywhere, so that battle is already lost. I also realize that your preferences may not match mine. I expect I’ll eventually add option for various titlebar styles, maybe through menu items or maybe through stylesheet… but will likely keep what I have now as default.

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Thank you for the explanation and the notes. I know about the “good old days” you mentioned. (Although it’s not the same, the annual macOS upgrading always reminds me of those long-gone good designs of the old versions.) I totally respect your decision. After all, I like Bike because of many of your design decisions, not to mention you will add more options for the app’s appearance.

On thing that I find odd is while I really dislike all the titlebar animations and variation on macOS I do also really like the fading (animating!) scrollbar design. Of course it has almost no variation across apps, but there’s definitely animation. Why I like one and not the other I’m not sure.

Paragraph mode should be fixed in latest release.

Let me know if you are seeing unexpected “hangs” in this preview release. I’m seen some reported via the new opt-in error reporting.

I’m not sure if this error results in a crash… or it it just means the app freezes for a bit (2 seconds) (because it’s doing work on main thread) and then goes back to working.

Bumping this thread for the 109 release.

110 is a bug fix release. Feel like Bike 1.9 is getting close. Let me know if you see any bugs!

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111 should be close to ready. Again let me know if you see bugs.

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Most small bug fixes, really I think I’m avoiding thinking about screenshots and marketing text.

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I just tried the 1.9 112 preview version (previously was on 1.8 something), and I notice that all my content is “centered” ? Or, maybe not centered, but there are large left (and right) margins ?

I use Bike for planning / designing (software), and I guess I’m just partial to looking at my beautiful outline :wink: at the left edge of the window. Is there a setting where I can configure that?

Yes, to get the old behavior you can use View > Text Wrap > Wrap to Window. Also thanks for trying the preview!