Hi! Please feel free to ignore for now: I realise this is a very busy time, what with Bike 1.0 just going out the door…
… but, I’d like to put a hand-in-the-air for a couple of (hopefully) simple feature requests.
Overscroll — I’m much too often bumping off the bottom of Bike’s window, and I don’t really like having to create rows just to make some breathing room.
Font select.
Congratulations on the launch, and good luck!
Here’s another vote for the “Overscroll”. Thanks.
Perhaps some degree of transparency on floated windows? I find that, especially when working on a smaller screen, a completely opaque floated window feels a bit overbearing.
This is pretty polished, I love it. Seems like the intent is to keep things simple and nimble, so I will try not to suggest anything that would contribute to bloat. Just a few things:
I do appreciate the controls for line spacing and colors. that goes a long way.
And that’s really it. Couldn’t be happier to see a native Mac outliner that is so focussed on getting out of the user’s way.
Is there any plan to add tags like in task paper?
I expect to do it, but no hard plans or timeframe right now.
My current thinking is: bug fixes, small often requested features like font setting, then rich text (bold, italic, code, links). Then decide what’s next. Maybe a big job like plugins or iOS, maybe a smaller job like tags. Depending on choice there’s a big time range.
Great release, bought the app yesterday to support the project and it works smoothly and looks fantastic. Great work, I already see I will be using this a lot. After extensive testing yesterday, I find the simplicity of the app is part of it’s power. However, I see that the following features would be important for the next releases.
Key missing features:
Autosave function (this is absolutely key, to avoid lost work);
When on fullscreen, allow for indentation/centre text block/word wrapping (the lines become really long and everything is indented to the left). More control for focus is key.
Desirable feature:
Simple Markdown support that can be ticked on or off in the menu (just highlight or italicise whatever is wrapped in asterisks, etc.)
This should already be working. Bike is built on the macOS document system, and that provides autosave.
I agree, other things still have priority, but better fullscreen and padding is on my list.
This is less likely. I want to take a rich text approach for formatting text in Bike. Import/export of Bike’s rich text into Markdown is more likely, but low priority (Since Bike itself doesn’t do rich text yet :)).
What an amazing app!
My requests:
I love it.
Save as and checkboxes that we can strikethrough would be amazing. In a way, merging TaskPaper with Bike!
@Jerzy_Golota @ppasquet The functionality of Save as is still there.
It’s just the name/implementation that’s changed. Use Command-S and that will call the menu File > Duplicate, then you can save that duplicate document where you want using the format you want.
I think that behavior is logically cleaner and easier to understand than the old Save as behavior. It’s clear that after the operation you have two different documents. With that said it confuses me too.
All this behavior (old save as) and new duplicate behavior is provided by the underlying macOS frameworks. Bike just uses behavior provided.
My current thinking is: bug fixes, small often requested features like font setting, then rich text (bold, italic, code, links). Then decide what’s next. Maybe a big job like plugins or iOS, maybe a smaller job like tags. Depending on choice there’s a big time range.
Love the focus on font settings and rich text first.
I was going to add a suggestion for each row being able to have multiple lines for things like code snippets, etc. Do you envision that as part of the rich text support or something else?
Also like the idea of #tag support. I’ve built in a custom script that uses your lovely scripting support to very quickly pull out all tags from a file with a keyboard maestro keyboard shortcut.
If I implement code highlighting (and pretty low priority at moment), I expect it would be still implemented as one line per row. The syntax highlighting would just consider other nearby rows. Anyway not sure it will even happen, but I generally expect rows to stay single lines of text.
I do expect some sort of tags support. Not sure when, but much more likely then code highlighting.
One other thought I had for a request was jump history so you can navigate around the jump stack. Perhaps there’s a buffer that remembers your row locations so you can navigate back and forth via a menu command.
Thoughts? I think that would enable some nicer ux.
Also: small nit, but it’d be amazing if Bike remembered where you were in the document when you re-opened. Basically, saving the selected row state between app opens.
A simple Print function. I can easily use other methods when I need to print, but my less-technical friends will have a problem with it not being there.
Rich-text-first approach 
: would it be possible to keep plain-text editing as an option at the very least? This is what I am enjoying the most about the app right now, just concentrating on outlining and not having to worry about styling or distractions.
Personally, I do not see myself using the app that much in the future if I am not able to rely on some kind of a plain-text approach. But that’s just me.
Autosave works great. Also, great to know fullscreen fixes are on the way (not fussed about these atm, though).