New App: Bike by Hog Bay

He sold it in November last year to Double Dog

I feel you. I didn’t know of Mori, but all the others I’ve used and loved and grieved. LOL

TBH, I think I feel a kinship with developers like these. If I were a developer, my products would probably follow a similar path. I’m just glad he’s still making stuff.

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I watched the video, seems to me like a mind map does a lot of the same things as this app. How is this better/different than a mind map?

Speaking of mind maps and outliners, iThoughts recently shared it’s going to release an outliner mode.

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MindNode has an outliner mode too. Which is why I think Bike isn’t really adding anything new, plus it doesn’t have the visual mode of a mind map.

I prefer to use mind map software like Tinderbox, or draw maps in GoodNotes or on a Whiteboard. I don’t really like how most mind mapping software auto-places/sorts visuals for me.

The ability to space out the document like I can in a text editor while retaining the structure from an outliner is a nice feature. I always feel claustrophobic in outliners.

Here’s an example of some meeting notes I took today and how a traditional outliner would treat them (on left) and how Bike lets me space it out w/o messing up the structure (on right).

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Oh I see, that is nicer.

Spacing is set in Bike preferences. Simple and nicely done:

@beck I know how to adjust spacing between rows. But if I’m seeing your example correctly it seems that you have some uneven spacing: i.e. the spacing between sessions (e.g.) are greater than the spacing for subtopics within a session. I like that format a lot. Are my eyes deceiving me? Or how did you get that uneven, and very pleasant, spacing?

So this is an expensive app with fewer features than the competition…?

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Yes, that’s what I was trying to point out.

Hit enter at the beginning of a line to get more spaces that aren’t bulleted.

@beck Ah, got it! Many thanks. It’s nice that when you double-enter the indicator triangle no longer shows up in the emtpy row. The preferences for line height plus row spacing, combined with your double-enter hack, all make the process more beautiful (at least to my eyes)

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I agree!

It’s not a hack, though, it’s a feature. One, I believe, that sets Bike apart from other outliners.

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I’ve not had coffee yet. Feature vs. hack vocabulary not yet activated in brain cells. :slight_smile:

… and, yes, a very nice feature

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I bought the Bike app but don’t see myself using it until at least v2. It is nicely done but still missing a killer feature. And it doesn’t replace my use of TaskPaper, at least not yet.

In regards to no longer storing files in plain text, I realize that compared to HTML, plain text and even Markdown is very limiting. HTML (and CSS) can display almost anything. (Light Bulb goes on!) That’s probably why The Bike app prefers to store its documents in HTML. And why Bike has chosen to leave TaskPaper behind with its plain text format. I’m looking forward to what might come from that freedom and flexibility.

What really kept me away from it is $29.99/year (assuming you want to maintain the latest updates). That’s a lot of money when I can get Cloud Outliner or Task Paper as part of Setapp.

@tonycr I believe Jesse wrote that ongoing yearly updates would be 30 to 50% lower than the original price. I know I read that “somewhere”. I find this kind of pricing reasonable. Some other apps I use also employ the same approach (e.g. Curio). And I know that I don’t update every year … for one product I update once every 3 or 4 years. Typically I don’t need every update feature … but simply wait until there is enough change that updating makes a lot of sense to me.

It looks like it has potential, and (as @karlnyhus says) using HTML as the default file format makes some sense, although whether the lack of interoperability over OPML is worth it remains to be seen. I often take meeting notes on my iPad.

It’s quite a high price tag considering it doesn’t have rich text - the ability to have at least a little bold and highlighting here and there is useful. You also seem stuck with a single font. I appreciate it’s on the roadmap. That said, the ease with which multiple rows can be selected/manipulated is really great… it really does fulfil the promise to be as easy as a text editor and that might be enough to justify the cost. It is a pleasure to use, which I can’t say of most outliners.

One to watch along with the open source Zavala which is impressive (and free!), but also has its flaws and is much less fluid than Bike. I’m glad to see the Outliner space getting some new energy.

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And you can’t get an extra CR between those lines in the left app?
Sorry, but an empty line, once in a while, is nothing selling software to me.

Thanks, Matthew.

I guess that makes sense. There probably wouldn’t be sufficient change for me to upgrade every year, but that option is there for the power users. I agree with the 3-4 year upgrade cycle. Probably enough.

I’ll have to take another look with that in mind and see if it becomes more attractive.

Tony