New discovery! Happy CRIMPer!

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Posted by MadaboutDana
Dec 5, 2014 at 05:44 PM

I’ve just discovered and am now happily playing with a rather good app for MacOS called Quiver. (I know, when do I actually get any work done?!)

It supports all kinds of stuff, including Dropbox and other Cloud services. You can use it as a collaborative tool, it’s got a very clever cell-based page structure that supports different kinds of formatting (e.g. images, Markdown, rich text), it’s got a truly brilliant search engine, comprehensive tag support - and finally, it looks nice!

For programmers, the fact that all notes are held in plain-text JSON format is an additional attraction. They even supply scripts for integrating Quiver with your own apps!

What could I do? It’s not expensive, so seized by CRIMPing cramps, I promptly purchased it. But there’s a trial version, if you prefer…

More at: http://happenapps.com/#quiver

Posted by MadaboutDana
Dec 5, 2014 at 06:40 PM

Oh dear, Quiver has just displaced LightPaper in my all-too-errant affections! It’s got real-time preview, editable CSS… all kinds of goodies! And it captures web pages rather well, too. As for the search function – instant searches across all notebooks, with hit terms properly highlighted. Beautiful!

Posted by MadaboutDana
Dec 6, 2014 at 11:02 PM

Further playing with Quiver indicates that it’s quite like Alfons Schmid’s Notebooks, but different in some important ways.

It allows you to create notebooks, but no folders within those notebooks.
Each note is effectively a series of subnotes (“cells”). The most efficient way to write a note is in multiple cells - writing a very long note in a single cell doesn’t work very well (in terms of screen management). Writing a long note in multiple cells works very well indeed. You can, however, have multiple paragraphs in a single cell (to create a new cell, you press Shift+Return). I’m hoping this means that eventually, you’ll be able to fold notes outliner-fashion, using cells as nodes. But I don’t know what the developer is planning (so far they haven’t responded to my enthusiastic e-mails).
You can open notes in separate windows. You can move these separate notes to different desktops. This is very convenient.
The live preview window (for Markdown junkies, for example, but it also previews e.g. LaTEX markup) works in real time (not in slightly delayed real time, like most Markdown editors). I don’t know how they’ve made it as fast as they have, but it’s fast! It automatically follows whichever note you happen to be editing (even if you’ve got multiple notes open).

The search function is astonishingly good. Unbelievably quick, working across all notebooks, highlighting all search “hits”.
The tagging is similar: very quick, works across all notebooks (so tags are not limited to individual notebooks. Some people might find this a negative, of course!).
The web page capture function is amazing! Even better than Notebooks. Yes, you have to copy web pages manually to insert them, but the reproduction is extremely accurate.

Output is slightly limited. You can output entire notebooks to HTML, or you can print individual notes as PDFs. But if you export multiple notes, they’re each treated as an individual HTML page. Slightly disappointing. However, Quiver is script-friendly, so you could write your own scripts to generate e.g. complete HTML ebooks (in fact, they supply an example of this on their website). I’d like to see the option to output entire notebooks to PDF format, myself. Schmid’s Notebooks can generate ebooks from individual notebooks (including any subnotebooks embedded in those notebooks).

However, Quiver has a rather nice ‘presentation’ mode. This effectively blows up notes to full screen with no borders/controls. It’s limited, because you can’t use arrow keys to move from one note to another. But you can insert your own links from one note to another (there’s a special ‘copy note link’ function). Again, this is something I hope the developer expands in the near future.

We lucky Mac users have an awful lot of nice full-text information managers to play with!

Cheers,
Bill

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