However, it doesn’t carry any UI to tell you that you’re in focus mode on the bike, so opening straight into a section of the outline can be distracting. The part after the pound sign is optional and specifies the line that will open the outline in the app’s focus mode, so you’ll only see that part of the outline.īike URL schemes are a useful way to link to outlines in other apps, so you can quickly return to them or to a particular section. The part of the URL before the pound sign is the outline identifier that opens the file you want. There’s no ‘Save As’ or Export menu item to move between formats, which is something I’d like to add.īike also allows users to generate links to outlines using a URL scheme in the following format: One limitation of Bike that’s worth keeping in mind is that the file format can only be specified when you first save your outline. Bike outlines can also be saved as opml files, which is a common outliner format used by other apps such as OmniOutliner, or as plain text, which is your outline using tab and new line characters.
bike file, open it in Safari or an editor like BBEdit if you prefer, or manipulate it as HTML in a shortcut, for example. Outlines can be saved in three different formats. In edit mode, expanding and summarizing sections is accomplished with + 9 and + 0. allows, whereas, in edit mode, those keys simply move the cursor. Because so many keyboard shortcuts for navigating outline are also available in edit mode, I don’t find myself turning to outline mode often, but it allows you to use the left and right arrow keys to expand and collapse sections. When enabled, Outlining Mode highlights entire rows at once, allowing you to treat each as a single unit. The bike also has a separate Outline mode that is turned on and off using the Escape key on your Mac. and you can focus on one section of the outline at a time, hiding the others. When multiple rows are selected, sections can be collapsed and expanded individually and all together. Rows can be moved up and down through an outline’s hierarchy, individually or as a group. Multiple rows can be selected and a new original row can be added over them with a single keystroke. Keyboard navigation and editing are at the core of what makes Bike such a powerful outliner. The bike gets this right, allowing users to indent and outdent anywhere they want, using Tab and Shift+Tab to change their level, which is something not all outliners support. One of the most important features for an outlining app to get right is content indenting and outdenting. It works up to a point, but the structured nature of the framework demands an approach tailored to how ideas are organized. A lot of outlining apps are just glorified text editors. The outlook of the bike complements its feature set well too. There’s an elegance to the bike’s borders that emphasize that you focus on organizing your thoughts rather than decorating your outline, which I love.
There are no formatting options, fonts to choose from, text color, highlighting, or any other customization options offered by Outliner. That’s it – text and a tab-based outline structure. The app features unadorned text arranged in a foldable, hierarchical structure. The focus was on speed and simplicity.īike 1.0’s strength also lies in its simplicity. As originally conceived, Drafts was a faster way to input text on the iPhone than any other app was destined for.
0 kommentar(er)
