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Quiver for Mac gets a hefty update
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Posted by MadaboutDana
Feb 11, 2015 at 05:49 PM
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
Posted by jamesofford
Feb 11, 2015 at 08:46 PM
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
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Feb 12, 2015 at 12:17 PM
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.
Posted by MadaboutDana
Feb 12, 2015 at 01:22 PM
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
Posted by Paul Korm
Feb 12, 2015 at 01:47 PM
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.