January 9, 2017

TextNut Reimagines Zen Mode

TextNut Mac Icon

TextNut is a note-taking app available from the Mac App Store. It has an iOS version and a macOS version. I had reviewed TextNut on November 2, 2015.

It occurs to me that applications are not static creations. Specially when developers keep updating them, refining them, and tweaking them. TextNut is one of those apps which gets regular update love from its developer. I am going to periodically revisit the apps I have written about to get a feel of where they are in their current iteration. This gives me an opportunity to revisit my review and check the progress of the application.

Let me tell you that TextNut surprised me. It is much improved over the iteration I reviewed a little more than a year ago.

Note-taking apps have two components to them:

The Feature Set. This is the usual list of things which are build into these apps. Markdown support, or rich text support. Which flavor of markdown they are supporting. Where the files are going to be stored. What format the files are going to be stored in. Import and export features. How do you import a list of files you have, what kind of formats are supported in the import feature. Do tags automatically come along? What formats can you export the documents in?
The Usability Component. How satisfying is it to work in the program? The note-taking apps see a lot of use for the inveterate note-taker. It is an app which tends to be always active on the users machine. How convenient is it to work in? What are the additional touches the developer has included in the application to make the act of note-taking pleasurable and easy?

Looking at my review from 2015-11-02 I find that the feature set of TextNut was competitive in the marketplace. At that point, it lacked an iOS version and that was something I thought needed to be launched for the product to be useful. There is now an iOS version and iCloud support. Thus, it is a cross-platform complete note-taking solution.

My main complaints about TextNut was the usability component of it. I am going to quote from my writing on a feature which TextNut highlighted, Zen Mode.

I don’t see the benefits of Zen mode. It does not include typewriter scrolling. It is just an attempt to take away the chrome from your editing window. In zen mode, the title bar disappears and the sidebar disappears. Seems to me that this is a pretty standardized implementation in almost all of these markdown based editors. Byword, iA Writer, and a whole host of its competitors do a much better job of providing an environment for you to write in. Zen mode in TextNut is an imperfect and incomplete implementation of an old idea. Ulysses the main competitor to this product does this in much more innovative ways.

I was not done.

Again, it seems to me that TextNut is aware of a feature in this space, but doesn’t care enough to implement it with any degree of precision or thought. If you have a three-panel application, it is not at all unusual to hide two of the panels and focus on the editor panel. Every application in this space does this. Calling it “zen mode” is just marketing hogwash and lazy. There is nothing zen about this mode. Just hiding the chrome around the window and the panels doesn’t equate to any zen you are going to be happy in. How could this be improved? Add typewriter scrolling, focus on sentence or paragraph, let me implement typewriter scrolling at any point I want. Try to provide an environment which lets me write better: then you can call it zen.

Sometimes, I get the feeling that my innate grumpiness comes through in my writing. I don’t know whether that is a good thing or a bad thing. It just is.

Well, back to zen mode. My suggestions were:

Add typewriter scrolling. Done.
Focus on sentence or paragraph. Done.
Implement typewriter scrolling at any point I want. Done.
Provide an environment which lets me write better. Done.

TextNut Zen Mode

As you can see zen mode is now much better. It is a great place to write. It has moved from “marketing hogwash” to a feature set which is useful and adds value to my writing life. I like working in TextNut, in zen mode.

TextNut gives me the ability to have multiple folders in my note-taking program. It lets me work in markdown. Markdown implemented well. It provides a fantastic writing environment in zen mode, and that helps me be productive. It is at this point a true competitor to Ulysses and Bear.

Comparison with Ulysses and Bear

Markdown. TextNut implements markdown better than Ulysses. Ulysses can’t make up its mind about markdown. Their support of markdown is abysmal. If you don’t use markdown, and write in plain text, Ulysses is a great solution. For markdown? TextNut beats it handily.
Proprietary database. Both Ulysses and Bear maintain their documents in a proprietary database. TextNut deals with text files with a markdown extension. Being reliant on text files and having amassed a bunch of them over the years, TextNut is the preferred solution for me. I don’t like depending on an applications existence to have access to my files. My text files are not dependent on any one program, they are always accessible. I prefer that. Both Ulysses and Bear do a great job of providing you with the option of exporting the files out to a text file but I am not sure I need that extra step.
Writing environment: Ulysses and TextNut are both great places to write in. They both provide you with the added polish of a writing environment devoid of friction. Bear is new. They have been busy implementing features. I am sure they will get to improving the writing environment, but they are not there yet.

Recommendations for improvement

TextNut could be improved by:

Fix the bugs. The program has a few bugs in it still. Once in a while the screen redraws and it is distracting. Adding a large number of files through a linked folder makes the program crash once in a while.
Give us the ability to add notes to the program without making TextNut the active application. A system wide keyboard command which brings up a modal dialog box where I can add content. The note gets saved in an inbox for later storage or I choose the folder I want to save to right in the dialog box.
Give us more themes. Or let users share themes between themselves. This will increase the stickiness of the program too.

Conclusion

TextNut is heartily recommended. If you are looking for a note-taking program which deals with multiple folders of files, deals with text files, and has a fantastic environment to just write, TextNut is clearly one of the leaders in the market space at this point.

I recommend TextNut heartily.

macosxguru at the gmail thingie

macOS TextNut Writing

January 5, 2017

Revisions for Dropbox Is an Essential Addition to Dropbox

Product: Revisions for Dropbox
Price: Free (In-App purchase adds some features $6.99 -$9.99)

Revisions Icon

Thanks to my mixed iOS and macOS workflow, I use Dropbox a ton. All my document files are hosted by Dropbox.

Revisions

Revisions is an application which displays all your Dropbox edits, shows exactly what changes were made, and provides unlimited undo going back 30 days (or more).

Revisions Folders

Revisions lets you select any folder in your Dropbox (including deleted folders) and displays a list of edits of files in that folder (including any subfolders).

Revisions Options

You get to view, restore, download, or compare every version of the document. The comparison is done by apps like Kaleidoscope, Araxis Merge, Changes, TextWrangler or BBEdit. I use Changes for this and one these days I am going to write about Changes.

Why Is Revisions Better Than What Dropbox Provides?

The Dropbox web interface gives you an useful Events page which provides a timeline of edits. Revisions is a better solution for the following reasons:

Revisions lets you select an arbitrary folder to inspect.
Revisions lets you compare two versions of a file to see the changes.
In Revisions, you can revert a large set of files to some earlier point in time, in one shot. You can do this one file at a time in Events but not a batch restore.

Revisions is just a better thought out tool to provide versioning capabilities to your Dropbox storage.

Recommendation

This is the best solution to manage the versioning feature in Dropbox. If keeping track of edits and changes are important to you, this is an essential tool for Dropbox users.

Update 2017-05-22

The developer of Revisions has made the product free. It is in maintenance mode at this point.

macosxguru at the gmail thingie

macOS Dropbox Revisions Versioning

January 2, 2017

Single Application Mode

I find writing on the iPad different from working on the iMac. Writing on the iPad is distinguished by being immersive. The immersion is a function of what is called Single Application Mode. On the iPad, you are by default, working on one application at a time. The environment is less prone to distraction and that makes me productive.

HazeOver an utility I have talked about earlier, gives me the ability to do this on the macOS with little friction. However if you feel that $4.99 is too high a price to pay for this feature, you can achieve the same effect by using the Dock.

For this to work, you have to launch the applications from the Dock.

How do you add an application to the Dock?

There are a lot of ways you can add an application to the Dock.

The easiest way, drag the application to the Dock.

Keep in Dock

If you want to add an application to the Dock after the application has been launched, right click (⌃+Click) on the application icon in the Dock, select the Options drop down menu and select, Keep in Dock.

There are a few other ways, but these two should do fine for the time being.

Enabling Single Application Mode from the Dock

Hold down the ⌥ and ⌘ keys and click on an application icon on the Dock. The application will launch and the windows from the other active applications will be hidden. This technique achieves two things—it launches the application and hides the open windows of other active applications.

You can use this shortcut even if the application is already open. Hold down the ⌥ and ⌘ keys and click on the application icon on the Dock and the open windows of the other active applications will be hidden. Of course, while in your active application, you can use the keyboard command ⌥+⌘+H to hide all other application windows. This is an universal system keyboard command for Hide Others.

This is one of the many things I like about macOS. There are many ways of achieving the same result, pick the one you like best. If you like this behavior in the Dock, you can configure the Dock to operate exclusively in single application mode.

Enter the following command in Terminal to turn on single application mode:

defaults write com.apple.dock single-app -bool TRUE

Now relaunch the Dock:

killall Dock

Now any application you open from the Dock, opens in single application mode. The only caveat is that the application must be launched from the Dock. Applications launched from Launchpad, Spotlight or from the Applications folder will not launch in Single Application Mode.

If you want to undo this tweak, enter the following commands in the Terminal:

defaults delete com.apple.dock single-app

And relaunch the Dock:

killall Dock

Recommendations

Buy HazeOver.

Learn the keyboard command ⌥+⌘+H. It hides all the open windows in every other active application.

Use the Dock tweak if you want the process to be cheaper.

macosxguru at the gmail thingie

macOS Dock

December 18, 2016

Bear Icon

Bear Is My App of the Year

Product: Bear - beautiful writing app for notes and prose on the Mac App Store
Price: Free with in-app purchases ($1.49/month or $14.99/year)

Bear is a note-taking app for macOS and iOS. It just got an App of the Year Award from Apple and is being featured in the App Store. There is a buzz around this product and I thought that I needed to get on the record with my take on it.

Proprietary Database or the Absence of Text Files

I struggled with this one. I stay away from applications which use a proprietary database to keep its files together. Bear maintain its data in a sql file and that alone disqualifies it for my use. I like text files. Text files give me the ability to use whatever program I want to edit and work on my files. They also ensure that I am not tied to any one program for my work. Bear uses a database file to make it possible to use inline images. This is a feature I don’t care about. So, Bear is not a program which I should be excited about at all.

So why am I writing an article on it? Why am I using it? It is the feature list which got my attention. The proprietary database is painful for me, but the program makes up for it in various ways.

Bear Export

Bear has a robust export system. It gives you the ability to export your file with a plethora of options. You are given the ability to export as txt, Markdown, Text Bundle, Bear Note, RTF, PDF, html, DocX, and jpg. So you are not stifled by Bear in any way when it comes to file formats. Before moving away from this point, I would like to praise the developers of Bear, Shiny Frog, for supporting the Text Bundle format. Text Bundle lets you transport a Markdown text file along with its linked media files as one file. I wish more programs supported this innovative format introduced by Brett Terpstra and the Ulysses folks.

The proprietary database to keep its files is mitigated by the plethora of export options and the other features that Bear brings to the note-taking genre.

Preferences

Bear Preference 1

Bear has its own markup system if you don’t like Markdown. Truth be told, it is very similar to Markdown. I am not interested in learning another markup language, so I am going to stick to Markdown. Bear implements the CommonMark specification. I like the opportunity to assign a keyboard command to make a new note.

Bear Preference 2

The program ships with a few themes which are available to subscribers. I am happy to see my favorite theme Solarized included. The screenshots you are seeing are with Solarized Light as the active theme. An area of improvement would be for the developers to give subscribers the ability to design their own themes.

Bear Preference 3

I love the control Bear provides to ensure that you get the look you want. This is important if you want the user to be using the product for hours on end. Of course, an area of improvement would be to give the user the ability to use their own font. The inbuilt choices are nice but I prefer Operator Mono and miss it when I am in Bear.

Features Which Make Bear Useful

Bear is feature rich for a version 1.0 release. It seems that someone looked at the feature requests of note-taking software, made a list of them, and then included them all in Bear. I am going to talk about some of the features I find useful.

Highlighting Support for Code: Bear provides highlighting support for over 20 programming languages. So your code snippets are syntax highlighted.

Bear Link

Note Linking: You can link notes to other notes. In the note list column, ⌃Click on the note and select Copy Link to Note. Paste in the path to the body of the note you are linking from and you are set. You can also create a note link by just typing in the note title enclosed by four square brackets. This is a feature much requested by people who are serious about their note-taking. I am glad to see it implemented in Bear. This can be used to make a wiki-style knowledge management system in Bear.

Bear To-do

Todos: You can add to-do items to individual notes to keep yourself on track. For instance, in this review I want to talk about Bear’s subscription service, and advanced search abilities, later on in this review. To remind me of that I am going to place a couple of to-do items at the start of the article.

Tags: The search function and the organization function is built around tags. You use hashtags to denote tags and they can be nested. For instance, I have a hierarchy of tags to manage my blog articles:

#blog/idea
#blog/wip
#blog/ready
#blog/posted

Ideas I have about articles I am going to write are tagged with #blog/idea. Articles I am working on actively are tagged with #blog/wip. Once they are finished, their tag is changed to #blog/ready. Finally, when the article gets posted, the tag is changed to #blog/posted . The ability to use tags and the introduction of nested tags makes the idea of folders unnecessary to the management of documents in Bear. This is a good implementation of a tagging system and it helps me manage my files and workload.

Full Screen: I like working in full screen mode in Bear. The experience could be improved by incorporating typewriter scrolling. I am not fond of looking at the bottom of the screen when I write. The ability to focus on a paragraph or a sentence would make the environment for writing better.

Syncing: Bear provides its multi-device sync through iCloud. In my use so far, this has been instant and reliable and I am happy with it.

Browser Extensions: Bear provides extensions for Safari and Chrome browsers here. Makes the task of adding content you need from the web easy and simple. The extensions give you the choice of keeping a markdown formatted view of the whole page, or just the selected text, or just the title and the URL. This was designed by someone who takes notes themselves.

Bear Copy As…

Copy portions of notes as HTML, RTF, TXT or Markdown: You can highlight a portion of your document and ⌃Click to the contextual menu. The Copy As menu option gives you the ability to copy the selected text as Plain Text, Markdown, Rich Text or HTML. Useful to share small segments of a larger document.

Attachments: Bear notes can take attachments. Coming from the world of text editors I am not used to this feature, but I am growing to like it. In fact, if you are doing research on a topic and want to keep several files which are relevant to your topic together, this is a great way of doing it. You can add a file by dragging and dropping it into the editor or by selecting Format>Insert File (⇧⌘V). The only caveat is that attachments bigger than 250mb will not be synced between devices.

Bear Preview in Marked

Preview using Marked: Bear is attempting to be a good software citizen by building in support for other software like Marked. I like this feature. Unfortunately Bear doesn’t assign a keyboard command to this function.

Bear Keyboard Maestro Macro

I made a KeyboardMaestro macro to make it easier to use.

Bear Change Keyboard Commands

Note: The default keyboard commands to toggle the view of Tags, Notes and Editor conflicted with my assignment of keyboard commands to switch between spaces, so I changed the keyboard commands for Bear and that is what you are seeing different from your install.

Bear Backup

Backup and Restore: For a program which uses a proprietary database, it is imperative that it provides a backup system. This is a feature which made it possible for me to trust it enough to move my work to it. Bear can backup all your notes to a single .bearbk file. The .bearbk file is just a zip file. It contains all your files in .textbundle format. This is a feature which provides me with peace of mind and lets me use Bear without worrying about the safety of my files.

x-callback-url protocol: Bear implements the x-callback-url protocol. For those of you who are particularly geeky, you can go to the X callback url Scheme documentation - Bear - Faq and support, and geek out.

Advanced Search: Another feature which is crucial to a note app is the availability of search. Thanks to its sql base, Bear does a good job of implementing search. If you want to search an exact words sequence you can enclose your sentence within two quote characters “. For instance,”Advanced Search.”

Bear also comes with some special search tokens you can use to filter your notes:

@tagged : shows the notes which have at least one tag
@untagged: shows the notes without tags
@images: shows the notes which contain images
@files: shows the notes which contain files
@attachments: shows the notes with files or images
@task: shows the notes which include at least one todo element, either complete or not
@todo: shows only the notes with not completed todos
@done: shows only the notes with all the todos completed
@code: shows the notes which includes at least one code snippet

The special tokens can be combined with any search term for more specific result: @images @todo “bear faq” will search for all the notes that have images, uncompleted todos and the text bear faq inside.

Keyboard Commands: Bear supports a full range of keyboard shortcuts to make it easy to work without taking your hands off the keyboard. You can find a list of them for the Mac here, and the iOS ones here .

Bear Info Pane

Bear Style Pane

Some Visual Aids: Bear has a couple of useful pop-up panes available in the editor window. One of them is the Information pane. It gives you a word, character and paragraph count of the note you are working on. The second one is a style bar which has the usual markdown elements and the keyboard commands associated with them. Makes it easy for you to learn the commands as you familiarize yourself with the program.

Pricing of Bear

Bear introduces an innovation in the field of note-taking software with its pricing scheme. You can use the program for free. The free version is not hobbled in anyway. It is very usable without paying for it. Paying for it gives you a few things:

Sync between all your devices. If you intend to use the program across your devices, this is an essential feature. The sync works. Reliably, and instantly.
Application themes.
More exporting options.

It also means that the developers get to eat, live and work on making the program better. It is a subscription model. A monthly fee of $1.49 or a yearly fee of $14.99.

I don’t like subscription models. I prefer the old system of pay a price, then pay a smaller price for major upgrades. But we live in a world dominated by the App Store and the App Store mechanics make it impossible to change an upgrade price, so I am happy to go along with this new scheme. Fifteen bucks a year for a program which has the potential of becoming central to my workflow seems fair.

Some Random Thoughts

I have been describing Bear as note-taking software. It can be much more.

You can write anything you want in it. Blog posts like this one? Sure.
You can create a wiki-style personal knowledge base in it.
It can be the depository of all your writing. Reports, projects, novels, books, all of it. The tagging system and the robust export options will make it possible for you to write, manage, and export anything you want.

Suggested Improvements

I should be able to move lines around by using the standard macOS keyboard commands ⌃+⌘+↑ and ⌃+⌘+↓.
Typewriter mode. Focus mode with a choice of focusing on paragraph or sentence.
Ability to choose documents I want to sync and those I don’t. Selective syncing will make it possible for me to have very large documents on the Mac and not worry about syncing those with the iOS devices.
Let me use my own fonts.
Let me design my own themes.
Support table creation.
I want to be able to use other writing software for specific tasks. I want to open the document I am working on in Bear in Typora. Create a few tables using the fantastic table editor in Typora and bring back the document to Bear. I want to open the same document in iA Writer and do a grammar check and final edit and bring it back to Bear. I can do that now, but it takes a few too many steps. I want it built-into Bear.

Recommendations

At this point, Bear is the best note-taking program in the marketplace. It is well-designed, feature-rich software which is a pleasure to use. I recommend it heartily for anyone interested in finding a home for their notes.

macosxguru at the gmail thingie

Writing Notetaking macOS iOS Bear

December 15, 2016

Adding to the Built-in Keyboard Commands of Caret

Caret Icon

Caret is missing some keyboard commands. There are menu items without any keyboard commands. The three commands I am interested in are the commands for Images, for Mode Focus and for Mode Typewriter. We have to assign our own keyboard commands. This is how to do it.

Caret Image

Go to System Preferences>Keyboard. Click on the Shortcuts tab and then the App Shortcuts on the panel to the left. Click on the + Sign at the bottom of the right panel. In the Application pull-down menu, select Caret.

Caret Image Keyboard Command

Go back to Caret and find out the exact name of the menu item. In this case, it is Image. In Menu Title, type in Image. This has to be exact. Then type a keyboard command in the keyboard shortcut area.

Caret Menu Image

I am going to use ⌘⌥I, for Images.

The Menu Title item has to be the exact name of the menu choice. Some commands have ellipsis next to the command name. In macOS, you get ellipsis by typing ⌥;. Three dots don’t work. It is looking for an ellipsis.

Repeat the exercise for Mode Focus (⌘⌥F), and Mode Typewriter (⌘⌥T).

Caret View Menu

Look at the menu commands in Caret and you will see the new keyboard commands.

Two other things I want to cover:

The code trick. If you highlight the line/s of code and type `. It will surround the line/s in the code syntax for Markdown. Easy and convenient. I wish the developers would add the same ability to ~, and >. The code for strikethrough and quotes. (Hat tip to borekb for the code trick).
The latest version of Caret(1.11.2) has added the ability to make links with contents from the clipboard. If you have an URL in the clipboard, you can highlight a word and press ⌘K for a correctly formatted markdown link. Little usability improvements make me smile.

macosxguru at the gmail thingie

Caret macOS Markdown writing

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