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Coppice
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Posted by Drewster
Nov 29, 2020 at 03:34 AM
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.
Posted by Martin Pilkington
Nov 29, 2020 at 11:53 AM
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.
Posted by MadaboutDana
Nov 30, 2020 at 02:31 PM
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
Posted by tightbeam
Nov 30, 2020 at 03:39 PM
>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.
Posted by Franz Grieser
Nov 30, 2020 at 03:45 PM
tightbeam wrote:
>I hope he’s contemplating a *Windows* version.
Well, let’s ask him: Martin. What about a Windows version?