Quiver: Programmer's Notebook for OS X

ReSharper and Visual Studio should be OS X compatible, it's not like every developer is using Windows. Such a monoculture.

See? It goes both ways (which, from your edit, I know you understand, but it's work a specific example). This guy's labor of love is a well crafted, thoughtful application for programmers using OS X. There is zero controversy there. Same with any other OS X-only application that Windows or (Li|U)nix users want.

When we beg for cross-platform apps from developers who don't understand all those platforms, we end up with web-browser-as-platform Electron-based apps that bundle a browser to render their UI layer. Sometimes that's done well (Visual Studio Code is quite nice) - often it's just okay bordering on slow. In fact, it's so rare that high-speed apps are available in some native form for multiple people platforms, I consider it a special gift to use one (Sublime Text comes to mind).

Let's not stifle the creativity and drive that small or single-person developer shops have by suggesting - even passively - that we are entitled to three OS-specific builds of anything they write.

I didn't have to: I have emacs, and thousands of people made it for me.

I do, of course, customise it for myself.

Me too. The simplicity seems very refreshing. I've been keeping all of my main notes as separate Markdown documents for a long time. This will be a big help.

I've been looking for an Evernote replacement that was more ahem concise. I've been using Evernote to help plan experiments and track papers, but it can't seem to get out of it's way... particularly when trying to share a notebook with collaborators. Honestly, the biggest downside that I see with Quiver is that it is Mac only. This isn't an issue for me, but might be for some collaborators.

Then again, the alternative would be to use some other tool or shared Google Doc or something like that, so Quiver probably isn't too much of a hassle in that regard.

You should be able to script writing new data to a note for simulations / plots, given that the notes are JSON files. I love that the DB is an easy to read / edit / backup set of JSON files.

The tutorial notebook is full of individual notes with multiple 'cells'. When creating my own note, it's not immediately obvious how I achieve this. Hitting ENTER just creates a new paragraph/line within the same cell. I've discovered, through trial and error, that hitting SHIFT+ENTER creates a new cell, but this should maybe be more easily discoverable.

Some of the UI elements are a bit out-of-place. I'm not sure if it's just because they're not native controls; I'm still running on Mavericks and it's quite possible these are El Capitan-style controls. Still, it's a tiny bit disconcerting.

On a more positive note, I think this is a wonderful concept which can potentially inform future tools for 'code management' (for want of a better term). I think there are plenty of ways in which the integration of code and other content can improve our discipline, so any work in this area is very interesting.

> it also means the consumer is effectively just licensing software from Apple rather than owning it outright

Isn't almost all software licensed rather than ownership sold? This isn't unique to the App Store.