Quiver for Mac (the "Programmer's Notebook") has a new upgrade to v2.1 with a long list of new and enhanced features. Many of these are navigation / keyboard aids. One particular I like is "When exporting a notebook to HTML, all the pages are now linked together." In other words, its a simple matter to build an HTML notebook with an index and navigation. I don't think it's the developer's vision to replace VoodooPad, but many of the changes in Quiver are moving it ahead of VoodooPad -- not so much as a wiki, but from the notebook perspective.

Quiver is $9.99 on the Mac App Store. A trial is available from the developer:

http://happenapps.com

It's definitely not just for programmers.

Thanks, Paul. This is one of my top faves, and the developer has always been very helpful and responsive.

Cheers,
Bill

I just picked this up and so far it's pretty impressive. Feels very polished.

It's wild how much the interface is like the Evernote client - if Evernote's content-editing experience were like this, it'd be a dream come true.

And in fact a new feature, copy link to note, does indeed turn it into the equivalent of a wiki.

And I've just heard, in a sneak peek newsflash from the developer, that he **is** in fact working on a fully functional, all-singing/dancing version of Quiver for iOS (for iPhone **and** iPad). Wow, I'm so excited! That would be absolutely amazing!

Dribble!

Yup, this really is a very impressive upgrade. If you own a Mac, and you don't already have it, you owe it to yourself (and your Mac) to get Quiver!

I've just generated a rather nice little website from one of my notebooks - Quiver automatically inserts next/previous/up links into each note in the HTML output. And you can edit your own CSS if you fancy the idea, although the default CSS is nice and clean.

I've mentioned to the developer that inter-note links don't work in the HTML output - he's promised to correct that. Meanwhile there are easy workarounds.

The support for GitHub-style tasks is still fairly basic (you can't easily tick them in e.g. Preview mode; compare with e.g. Letterspace, which handles Markdown tasks particularly well). But again, this is due for further development in a future version.

I think Quiver is an astonishing achievement, actually, especially when you see how economical it is with system resources. And the thought of a full iOS version fills me with joy!

Cheers from a
Happy Bill

I have only glanced at the software on the developer's webpage. It looks remarkably like Notesuite, which I use on my mac and my iPad. (http://www.notesuite.io/ I have only been using it for grabbing stuff off of the web, but it is nice because the iPad version and the Mac version sync up pretty well. It goes through iCloud.
I have fooled around with a lot of different programs trying to find the "Perfect" information manager. Sigh. I have decided that such a thing doesn't exist. Still, it doesn't keep me from CRIMPing from time to time.

Jim

I've gone ahead and purchased this very reasonably priced license for Quiver. So far I'm impressed with its elegance. It is inviting to use. The way a note has cells, which can contain different styles of "text" is unique in my experience.

(For those who haven't investigated the app, you can create "cells" of material in each note, choosing from one of four types of text: regular RTF-style formatted text, code text, markdown text or LaTex text. And you can mix and match these however you please in a note.)

My question is, if you're not a programmer, how can these cell options be put to use for note keeping? I don't have any need for code cells or LaTex cells, so I'll be using the formatted text cells and markdown cells. Is there an advantage to mixing these types of cells in a single note, or would I be better off just sticking with one or the other type? Markdown text gets highlighted in the editor, but does not convert to formatted text unless you open the separate preview window or export it. So if you are using Quiver simply as a note-taker, -keeper, then you have to be happy looking at the raw markdown. Is there a note-taking advantage to being able to create text in markdown AND add RTF-style formatted text mixed in? I think there well could be.

Another nice feature is that you can open notes in separate windows, and have multiple notes open this way.

When there is an iOS companion app, this could really be a winning note-taking option for me.

Thanks very much for the notice about it!

Steve Z.

I dunno – as you say, there something very inviting about Quiver. Having committed myself heart and soul to Keep Everything for task management, I now find myself using Quiver more and more because of the new support for 'todos', and because it's so flexible – you can copy and paste more or less anything into it, including entire web pages, bits of Markdown etc.

The advantage of cells is, you can move them about really easily. There are all sorts of keyboard shortcuts for cells. I have different notes set up for various task priorities, and find it's easy to cut and paste cells from one to the other. And despite the fact that it's not a dedicated task manager, it has such a clear interface (which can easily be customised further, because you can edit your own CSS for every aspect of the output, including the rich-text, Markdown, code and Preview panes), it's actually much clearer and easier to use than many dedicated to-do apps. I've been running it alongside OmniFocus (which I still use for managing specific deadlines) and Quiver is just nicer to use. And much less memory-intensive! OmniFocus can occupy up to 180MB of RAM; Quiver (in my experience) hasn't yet exceeded 40MB (mind you, that's also true of direct OmniFocus competitors like 2Do, Things and The Hit List).

What's more amusing: you can copy over Markdown, then copy the output from the 'Preview' pane and copy it back into Quiver in elegant rich text! (Basically because under the hood, Quiver is using HTML/JSON). So although Quiver's rich-text editor doesn't support tables, for example, you can create a table in Markdown, view it in the Preview pane, then copy and paste it back into a Quiver rich-text cell. And the table remains editable (although you can't add columns/rows, of course)! Makes me laugh, anyway.

It also handles shared network notebooks nicely (I've been testing one on a Windows server for the developer, and it works absolutely fine – very fast, in fact – over SMB).

It also has built-in backup, can export to a wide variety of formats (I currently export my to-dos to a Markdown folder in Dropbox, so I can view them in 1Writer on my iPhone/iPad), and once an iOS app is available, will be the go-to ultra-flexible do-anything notebook manager, IMHO. I find myself coming back to it after dallying with other sexy young things like Letterspace and Keep Everything. I generally copy and paste my Markdown articles from Keep Everything to Quiver (in HTML format, of course, so they look nice). It's just... fun!

I've also asked the developer to look at hierarchical tags (like OmniFocus, 2Do, Things, The Hit List, CintaNotes and many others, including ConnectedText, of course), because hierarchical tags are so much easier to manage.

It's not perfect yet, but the small footprint and fast operation suggest some very tidy programming. And the developer is looking at folding text inside cells, too, which would turn it into a serious outliner.

It's still early days for Quiver, but

Steve, I found a trick with the Code cell that results in a backdoor folding text result. If you have a Markdown cell (or create a new Code cell and assign to it the Markdown language type) then any line that begins with # can be folded. Code cells give line numbers to each line, and lines beginning with "#" characters have a little triangle next to the line number that folds the text in the lines following the "#" line. Like I say, it's a trick -- not a highly developed folding feature.

Bill: Since you have a direct line to Oliver ;) Here's a suggestion -- It would be really useful to be able to select several notes (contiguous or discontiguous) in the middle panel and have a composed preview of all those selected notes in the right panel. Some folks call this a "Scrivener view" after that feature in Scrivener.

Quiver looks good, feels good and sounds good, and many thanks to Bill for suggesting it... but I do have a problem with it, although not one of Quiver's own making. It's probably now the tenth or eleventh note-taking app that I've accumulated in the last couple of years (not all, of course, thanks to this forum!). Each has its own unique selling proposition - in terms of functionality or ubiquity, elegance, simplicity and so forth - sometimes of course the uniqueness is only skin-deep - when what I actually need is just one note-taker with a range of functionality whose hot-key I can reach for instinctively, and that will remain top of my list for - well? - at least six months. But I don't have the time to research this niche in the depth necessary to determine which one it is that would suit my requirement! The crimper's constant cry? A problem of abundance?

I know of Brett Terpstra's very useful iOS Text Editor Summary (http://brettterpstra.com/ios-text-editors/ but no similar discriminator for iOS or OS X note-takers. (And I also wonder what business logic it is that persuades developers that this crowded corner of the application market, with its own 500 lb. gorilla in the form of Evernote, is one worth entering - perhaps developing an OS X or iOS note-taker is becoming a useful 'practice platform'?)

Apologies - thanks to Paul Korm, rather than Bill, this time.

You're welcome -- but I believe it was indeed Bill who originally wrote here about Quiver ;-)

Hugh wrote:

Apologies - thanks to Paul Korm, rather than Bill, this time.

Hm, love your workaround – I hadn't realised there was a separate Markdown view in code cells, or that it folded!

I shall certainly suggest the multi-note selection feature to Yaogang (also offered by Ulysses et al.) - I've also come to like the grouped note feature offered by Keep Everything, which effectively gives you a second layer in the hierarchy. Combined with his cells inside notes, that would create a super-flexible system.

Cheers!
Bill

Another feature of Quiver I like very much is that with a bit of modest tinkering in the CSS style sheets (available through preferences), you can actually make some fairly significant changes to the look and feel of the cells. While Yaogang is working towards making cells as "invisible" as possible, for various OCD reasons of my own, I prefer some (very faint) boundaries between my cells (especially in my task lists). This is easily done using CSS. I have also chosen my very favourite font for the editor (which happens to be Optima).

Such little things.

But in a big, complicated world, they make me so happy.

Since I am not much of a coder, and also I am trying to keep my CRIMPing down to a minimum, I didn't have a lot of interest in Quiver. Particularly since it looked very much like Notesuite, which I use regularly. However, I have been following the discussions here and I decided to give Quiver a try. I like it a lot. I particularly like the fact that notes can be organized into notebooks, something that you can do in Notesuite, but not with as nice a presentation as in Quiver. I also like the ability to insert files and links to files into a note.

However, one thing that I like about Notesuite is the bookmarklet that you can install in your browser to copy a webpage to the notebook. I have been using that as my snippet keeper for a while now.

Yaogang-Any chance of something like this?

Jim

It's definitely possible. I have my hands full at this moment with Quiver for iOS and Quiver 2.2, but I have these on my list for future updates.

Although Quiver was built for developers, I have heard from quite a few non-programmers who like Quiver. They mostly use Markdown and rich text, some use LaTeX.

The mark of a great developer-listens to the users, and responds quickly.

Thanks.

Jim

Hi Bill,

Is this website on the publicly available WWW? If so, could you post a link? I am curious what the output looks like.
(I only just redeemed a promo code from the other thread.)

Thanks,
Steve

MadaboutDana wrote:

Yup, this really is a very impressive upgrade. If you own a Mac, and you
don't already have it, you owe it to yourself (and your Mac) to get
Quiver!

I've just generated a rather nice little website from one of my
notebooks - Quiver automatically inserts next/previous/up links into
each note in the HTML output. And you can edit your own CSS if you fancy
the idea, although the default CSS is nice and clean.

I've mentioned to the developer that inter-note links don't work in the
HTML output - he's promised to correct that. Meanwhile there are easy
workarounds.

The support for GitHub-style tasks is still fairly basic (you can't
easily tick them in e.g. Preview mode; compare with e.g. Letterspace,
which handles Markdown tasks particularly well). But again, this is due
for further development in a future version.

I think Quiver is an astonishing achievement, actually, especially when
you see how economical it is with system resources. And the thought of a
full iOS version fills me with joy!

Cheers from a
Happy Bill