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
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.
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
UPDATE
Yes I am. Sentences need to start with a capital letter in English,
like they tried to explain to me at school
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.
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:
I think Bike’s previous “transparent” scrollbar style looked good for short documents that didn’t need scrolling.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 at the left edge of the window. Is there a setting where I can configure that?
at the left edge of the window. Is there a setting where I can configure that?