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Quiver: Programmer's Notebook for OS X

happenapps.com

171–180 of 264 posts

Re: Quiver: Programmer's Notebook for OS X

#171
post #24

That looks very good, I just wish I could buy it outside of the mac app store. I really dislike buying for the app store and much prefer buying directly from the company...

Can you explain why? Curious as this differs from most people I've seen.

I like the ability to install apps from the Homebrew Cask Tap [1] to automate my laptop setup where possible. Apps that are only available in the App Store aren't usually installable this way.

[1] https://github.com/caskroom/homebrew-cask

Re: Quiver: Programmer's Notebook for OS X

#172
post #122

A few questions 1) Any plans to support Windows or Linux 2) Do you handle High-DPI screens, (vector graphics for icons?, obey screen scaling)

The author made a ShowHN post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8683597) about this previously, where they commented (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8684082) that he had no plans for a Windows or Linux port - but they wouldn't mind if someone else used the same design and format to do so.

There seems to be a lot of similar interest, so maybe someone with the right skills could start a community developed open source linux and/or windows port.

Re: Quiver: Programmer's Notebook for OS X

#173
post #10

Been using this for a few weeks, and it is great! I'm sure that, compared to Evernote, it misses features that are important to some, but it adds a few of its own and is so much faster to use it's in another league entirely. Looking forward to the upcoming iOS version. The one feature I miss the most, besides that, is something like Evernote's menu bar app, for quick entry/scratchpad.

If there is an iOS version I'll jump from NVAlt/SimpleNote to this plus dropbox and write a migrator

I would love to migrate away from NVAlt, really hoping that Quiver is the answer. NVAlt is great, but the combo of no tags + no iOS version has been a thorn in my side for years.

Re: Quiver: Programmer's Notebook for OS X

#174
That's nice but costs $$.

I have a markdown file in a private git repo for each month, I append a new header with the date at the start of each day and use it as a notepad, dumping whatever comes to mind. Most importantly I don't go back and revise what I've written.

Re: Quiver: Programmer's Notebook for OS X

#175

This is something I have been looking for with this type of interface. Markdown support seems the easiest, but why not use something more robust like AsciiDoc http://asciidoc.org/ ?

It's great to see somebody caring about AsciiDoc as well, which is always getting neglected! Even GitHub supports it!

Re: Quiver: Programmer's Notebook for OS X

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a small flaw... compared to not being on Windows. I like the concept, but it's a non-starter while it's not available on... I don't know... the largest platform.

I like the concept, but it's a non-starter while it's not available on... I don't know... the largest platform It is slightly unfair to complain about what platforms a developer chooses to publish his/her work on. Perhaps they have been a long term Apple user? Perhaps they don't know anything about Windows development. Windows may be the largest, but there are so many good apps and developers making a living off the…

> This doesn't make using their apps a "non-starter".

I don't think the parent meant a "non-starter" in general. This app seems really awesome, but I primarily develop on Windows, so it's a non-starter for me, which is really too bad. I was really excited looking through the page until I noticed it was only on OS X.

That and I'd prefer my electronic notebook to be available on my phone as well, so that's another reason I wouldn't use it. But if this ever comes out for Windows/Android, I'd definitely be excited to try it out.

Re: Quiver: Programmer's Notebook for OS X

#177
post #156

The more I read about different applications, the more I think you can't understand them unless you look at the underlying data format. Here's Quiver's: https://github.com/HappenApps/Quiver/wiki/Quiver-Data-Format It's . . . really good. Like, _really_ good. I particularly like that they keep the metadata and the content of the note separate. This is the same thing Camlistore does, and it's nice for version control b…

This seems remarkably similar to the Jupyter (IPython) notebook format [0]. The only big difference I can see is the separate metadata file, which I'm not so sure is a plus (since it adds the complexity of needing each notebook to be a folder). [0] https://ipython.org/ipython-doc/3/notebook/nbformat.html

It's a tricky situation. I'm not sure which is best. The advantage of using a directory for your format is that it's easy to use preexisting tools on the contents of a note.

Say your note looks like the Quiver example:

  B59AC519-2A2C-4EC8-B701-E69F54F40A85.qvnote/
  ├── content.json
  ├── meta.json
  └── resources
      └── BCA3F8A8-C8CC-4FE5-AABB-C4262134B9E7.tiff
You can examine and modify the .tiff file using normal command line tools. This is nice!

Whether this adds to the complication of the project depends on your perspective. From the user's perspective this is simpler, they can now use normal tools to work on resources without having to manually extract and then reinsert the resource.

But from an overall perspective (which is probably more important), I think you're right that this is more complicated. Directories are higher level than JSON files -- we don't always have tools that can work with them. A JSON file has a both a single Unicode and byte representation, not so for directories. Losing this to make things easier on the user is no small deal.

Perhaps the right answer _is_ to put the whole note in a single JSON file. From there it can be transformed into directory with FUSE for modification by standard tools (or for export purposes if the user wants to move away from our note type). I'm still not sure about this though.

Re: Quiver: Programmer's Notebook for OS X

#178

That's nice but costs $$. I have a markdown file in a private git repo for each month, I append a new header with the date at the start of each day and use it as a notepad, dumping whatever comes to mind. Most importantly I don't go back and revise what I've written.

As a software engineer, I'm always baffled by this reaction... It's $10, less than what I just paid for lunch. Have we completely lost the value of good software?

Re: Quiver: Programmer's Notebook for OS X

#179
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think MPW (the original Mac IDE from Apple) in 1985 can claim prior art on the notebook UI

Perhaps, but this patent ( https://www.google.com/patents/US8407580 ) and a history of litigation (e.g. ( http://bactra.org/reviews/wolfram/ ) may be enough of a barrier to prevent its adoption.

That patent is about a user interface for hiding/showing the code that creates particular rendered outputs, not for the general idea of a “notebook” UI.

I suspect there’s prior art (Hypercard? every spreadsheet ever? this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_graphical_user_interfa... ?), and the patent seems pretty obvious, but in any event, I don’t think other “code notebook” implementations are currently infringing this patent, and it seems relatively straightforward to work around.

Re: Quiver: Programmer's Notebook for OS X

#180
post #164
post #123

Quiver: A Programmer's Notebook for OSX There, I fixed the title.

Good idea—we've changed the title to that (before seeing your comment, in fact). Some of the complaints in this thread about the program only existing for Mac, though, are childish. It's fine to ask for another version, but to carp about it petulantly is embarrassing.

Howso?
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