Has anybody tried the newly released Mac app, Coppice? https://coppiceapp.com

It seems like a notepad with linking features, but this one has a focus on the visual element. It seems to use rich text rather than plain and has more chrome than we've come to expect from recently released note taking apps.

I'm not sure it's for me, but I'm interested what other people might think of it.

Coppice looks nice. If I didn't already have Curio, I'd be quite tempted.

Hmmm... $20 a year isn't that bad...

Have you used it, Drewster?

Drewster wrote:

Has anybody tried the newly released Mac app, Coppice?
https://coppiceapp.com

It seems like a notepad with linking features, but this one has a focus
on the visual element. It seems to use rich text rather than plain and
has more chrome than we've come to expect from recently released note
taking apps.

I'm not sure it's for me, but I'm interested what other people might
think of it.

Hmm, yes it looks tempting. As you say, it appears to be a sort of Curio very-lite, but of course significantly less expensive.

Coppice does something nice, if I understand the paradigm. I haven't downloaded the free trial yet, for fear of buying it.

Coppice has pages, which can be notes or attached files.

Pages can optionally appear on canvasses, and any page can appear on multiple canvasses.

You could have pages for character notes and canvasses for chapters or scenes.

If you update a character's notes, either by modifying it on a canvas where it appears or by going to the page, every canvas shows the current version of the character's notes.

Sort of like what Scapple could produce after a wild night with Curio.

Curio supports aliases in its Organizer (option-command-drag), but doesn't support aliased figures, at least not as far as I know.

I suspect, but do not at this point know, that Curio's tagging and cross-referencing may outdistance what Coppice offers. The jury should ignore that remark, speculation, objection sustained...

For comparison, consider a bunch of notes as an inventory of ideas. These would go in pages in Coppice, each note or related group of notes would go in a Curio Idea space.

In Coppice, you could create a canvas for an aggregation, like a chapter with character, location, and plot device notes. Drag and drop the notes of interest into the canvas.

In Curio, I believe I would create a section for my inventory of ideas, one Idea space per idea. Each of these Idea spaces would have all related info - file attachments, multiple notes, etc.

Then I would create a folder in a brainstorming section for the chapter or scene. Component Idea spaces would be option-command-dragged into the folder.

The downside in Curio is that aliases are not like replicants in Devonthink. If you delete the source for an alias Curio will warn you evil things are about to happen. If you proceed, nothing is broken until the trash is emptied, typically at file close time. Then, aliases to the Idea space you deleted will appear as invalid links.

I think I'm weakening. I may have to try Coppice. A canvas could be like a mind map constructed from a reusable stockpile of ideas. Could be addictive.

Hugh wrote:

Hmm, yes it looks tempting. As you say, it appears to be a sort of Curio
very-lite, but of course significantly less expensive.

Coppice may have bugs, or Big Sur may be causing grief.

I downloaded the free version and got it to hang on renaming a page. Personally, I think it's worth waiting to see how Big Sur shakes out before blaming Coppice.

Amontillado wrote:

Have you used it, Drewster?

Not in any anger. I have downloaded it and played with it. I first tried importing a corpus of about 500 notes, at which point I realised it probably wasn't designed for that. Not that it didn't import - it did - but more that it is 'project' based.

I think it works better as a single purpose workspace, rather than being an archive of everything ever created.

To be honest, I am struggling to find a use for it. I think that is where the website and marketing materials is failing as well. I need some more concrete examples of what I would do with this software and how it might actually help?

It's somewhere in the nexxis of Roam/TheBrain/Curio, but at the moment I'm not seeing the unique selling proposition.

I'd be interested to hear if others have more success.

Hi folks, I'm Martin, the developer of Coppice. If you have any questions please let me know and I'll try my best to answer them.

To answer a few points so far.


Amontillado: You're pretty much spot-on with the paradigm and some of the potential use cases, at least of what I envisioned Coppice being used for. To give some examples of my own use cases, I have Coppice documents to keep notes as I'm learning various new technologies for software development. I also run table-top RPG and use Coppice documents for each campaign I run. I use pages for things like notes on character, locations, items, and maps, and then combine them using canvases (the RPG I'm currently playing is more episodic in nature so I have a Canvas per episode).

As for the hang when renaming a page, that does seem to be a bug in Coppice. I thought I'd manage to catch all those but it seems this one slipped through. I'm going to try and get it fixed this week.



Drewster: The project based nature is a conscious choice I made early on. I had tried using some of the more "single repository of knowledge" apps for my own purposes, but found they never really let me focus on single projects. It is possible to use Coppice in this way, but it wasn't designed for that purpose as I feel there are plenty of existing apps which do a good job at this.

I do agree that I'll need to do more with the website and marketing materials over time. Coppice can be kind of a hard app to promote as it doesn't fit neatly into an existing box, so I opted to focus on explaining the core concepts for now. There is a sample document in the app (accessible from Help > View Sample Document… in the menu bar) that shows a bit more about what Coppice can do, so hopefully that helps somewhat.

Hi Martin,

Good to see a developer in the forum! Coppice is a nice new find – I’ve been toying with it over the past couple of days. There are a few bugs (notably a rather odd one where the width of the actual text inside a (text) page gradually grows narrower and narrower until the app crashes), but on the whole it’s working very well.

Couple of other things to mention: the way branches work is a little counter-intuitive. After you create a link to another page, the branch between said pages doesn’t actually appear until you close one of them and then click the link to reopen it again. Or at least, that’s the way it’s working for me!

And the search function could do with being slightly boosted. I like the list of results in the left-hand bar, but highlighted hits would also be nice (they do briefly “flash” as the search is completed, but then the highlights disappear again).

But overall, looks like a nice addition to the Scapple/idea-mapping space. I hope you’re contemplating an iOS version?

Cheers,
Bill

But overall, looks like a nice addition to the Scapple/idea-mapping space. I hope you’re contemplating an iOS version?

I hope he's contemplating a *Windows* version.

tightbeam wrote:

I hope he's contemplating a *Windows* version.

Well, let's ask him: Martin. What about a Windows version?

Martin, great to see you here.

I know you have about a million hours of hard work in Coppice. I hope it sells like wild fire.

The page-to-many-canvas paradigm is brilliant. Curio won't do transcluded notes, which I've always thought of as a shortcoming.

The shape resizing stuff is probably pretty tricky. Curio has had its share of glitches in that department, too.

Best wishes from a soon-to-be customer!

Martin Pilkington wrote:

Hi folks, I'm Martin, the developer of Coppice. If you have any
questions please let me know and I'll try my best to answer them.

MadaboutDana wrote:

Hi Martin,

Good to see a developer in the forum! Coppice is a nice new find
– I’ve been toying with it over the past couple of
days. There are a few bugs (notably a rather odd one where the width of
the actual text inside a (text) page gradually grows narrower and
narrower until the app crashes), but on the whole it’s working
very well.

Thanks. I'm aware of this bug and have tried to hunt it down but it can be very temperamental. I'm still trying to find a fix for it but I'm hopeful I'll find one soon

Couple of other things to mention: the way branches work is a little
counter-intuitive. After you create a link to another page, the branch
between said pages doesn’t actually appear until you close one of
them and then click the link to reopen it again. Or at least,
that’s the way it’s working for me!

Yeah, that's the way things currently work. The honest answer for why (as with a lot of decisions in this initial version of Coppice) is it's the simplest method to implement and still get the necessary functionality. I wanted to get the foundations of pages, canvases, linking, and branches all in place to begin with, but I have plans to massively improve and refine all of them. Being able to create a link on a Canvas between two existing pages is certainly one of many improvements I want to make in the future.

And the search function could do with being slightly boosted. I like the
list of results in the left-hand bar, but highlighted hits would also be
nice (they do briefly “flash” as the search is completed,
but then the highlights disappear again).

This is sort of similar to above. I do want to improve searching in the future. I'll add this to the todo list and see what I can come up with (though I can't say exactly when I'll get round to searching as there's a lot of work to do all over the app).

But overall, looks like a nice addition to the Scapple/idea-mapping
space. I hope you’re contemplating an iOS version?

I don't have any concrete plans right now as I'm focused on the Mac version, but I can definitely see the potential for Coppice on an iPad.



Franz Grieser wrote:

tightbeam wrote:
>I hope he's contemplating a *Windows* version.

Well, let's ask him: Martin. What about a Windows version?

Unfortunately a Windows version is unlikely, at least for the foreseeable future. I'm primarily a Mac/iOS developer so don't really have the experience or tools for developing on Windows. I can't rule out there ever being a Windows version, but if it does happen it will likely be long into the future.



Amontillado wrote:

Martin, great to see you here.

I know you have about a million hours of hard work in Coppice. I hope it
sells like wild fire.

The page-to-many-canvas paradigm is brilliant. Curio won't do
transcluded notes, which I've always thought of as a shortcoming.

The shape resizing stuff is probably pretty tricky. Curio has had its
share of glitches in that department, too.

Best wishes from a soon-to-be customer!

Thanks. It has certainly been a lot of work getting Coppice ready. It's an app I've wanted for myself for a long time and I'm glad so many others are liking it too!

Yes, the transclusion is a very neat feature – simple but effective (like all the best info management apps).