Quiver for Mac gets a hefty update

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