A few weeks ago we hoped that Beta 14 might be the last update before the final release. It was not, unfortunately. – We encountered a few obstacles on the way to the App Store that we need to solve or work around, and it is hard to say how much time this is going to take. So we decided not to leave you with Beta 14 telling you about its expiration every time you open it (although you could click away the message and keep on working for about three more months), but instead provide you with another update. We have not changed too much, but we added a few things that were suggested and requested, hoping to make Notebooks a little more comfortable.
Thank you for your patience!
New in Beta 15
Additions
- Support for TaskPaper’s @done notation
(lines starting with “-” are considered todos, adding @done at the end of the line marks the todo as completed).
Improvements
- Reliably open internal links in Markdown documents.
- Paste images from clipboard directly into Markdown documents.
Fixes
- Compatibility improvements for combined Markdown documents.
- Detect and correctly handle oder Mac text formats.
Notebooks for Mac/Win 1.0 Beta 15
PROBLEM PRINTING FORMATTED DOCUMENTS. When I go to File->Print for a plain text document I get, as expected, a print dialogue that allows me to select a printer, save to PDF, and so on. BUT, when I turn that plain text file into a FORMATTED document and then select the File-Print option, I do NOT get a dialogue. Nothing happens. Which means that I cannot print Formatted docs or save them as PDF.
Hi Bill,
thank you for the report. You are of course right, the “Print…” command from the File menu seems non functional. We will look into it.
Fortunately, the keyboard shortcut cmd-P works as expected and shows the print dialogue, which then allows you to save as PDF.
Best,
Alfons
Hi Alfons. Do you intend for the Mac and Windows versions to adopt the same appearance as your new iOS7 look? I’m trying to get used to this new look and then its jarring to revert to the old when I open the Mac app. Just curious.
Hi Robert, yes, we will adopt the same look wherever it makes sense. The icons will change, the UI will undergo a little change as well (flat design vs. Mac native design) etc. But we will reserve these changes for the final 1.0 😉
re: “Support for TaskPaper’s @done notation (lines starting with “-” are considered todos, adding @done at the end of the line marks the todo as completed).”
Is there more info on how this should work? I’ve tried starting lines with “-” and also using the @done at the end of the line, and I’m not seeing anything different on Mac or iOS.
Hi Greg,
this currently is available in Notebooks for Mac / Win only, it was a last minute addition following a user request. The iOS versions will support it after the next update.
To trigger this new notation, you need to activate “Highlight Markdown Syntax” in Notebooks’ preferences > Write&Edit first. Then, whenever you start a line with a dash “-” and end it with @done, the line appears struck though.
I hope this helps.
-Alfons
That did indeed-thanks! Looking forward to the iOS app getting this also.
Version 15 does not work on my Mac 10.6.8. How to download version 14?
Hi Pascal,
we have two versions of Notebooks for Mac, one is made specifically for Mac OS X 10.6. Did you download that?
Best,
Alfons
I get a strange “shimmering” when I try to access “Recent Documents”. This has happened with all recent versions. I’m not sure how to explain it other than the pop-up box of recent notes vibrates and appears to open & close rapidly as I move my cursor towards the list.
Is this normal behaviour? It’s very distracting.
Also, I find the app crashes often when pasting content with images into a formatted document.
Finally. would it be possible to add a short-cut key to convert a text note to a formatted document?
Thanks for a great app. I finding myself using it more and more everyday.
Fred
Hi Fred,
that “shimmering” or flickering is not normal behavior. Do you see that when clicking the “clock” icon in the bottom toolbar only, or do you also get that when you select Recent Documents from the File Menu? – Which Windows version are you using (we are primarily testing on Win 8).
Regarding the crash when pasting contents, do you have any details for us? Does it make a difference where you take the contents from?
A short cut for converting notes to formatted documents is a very good idea, I put it on our list.
Best,
Alfons
Hi Alfons,
I created a short screen-capture video of the “shimmering” and will send it to the email address on your Contact page. It only occurs when I choose Recent Documents from the File Menu. Sometimes it will still allow me to access the notes – other times it prevents access as seen in the video.
To be honest, I didn’t even know the clock icon was for Recent Documents. Great feature. That works fine.
The crash when pasting contents using happens when pasting longer docs with images. Is there a size limit?
Fred
Sorry, I forgot to mention I’m using Windows 7 Professional.
I have only NB for Mac, But I cannot see that this works. Of course I can add the dash (-) on the beginning of a line to certain notes/documents. But nothing happens.
BTW, the – dash at beginning of a line in mmd results in preview look as
– this task and
– that task (i. e. listing)
Could you explain somewhat more?
Alfons wrote:
“this currently is available in Notebooks for Mac / Win only, it was a last minute addition following a user request. The iOS versions will support it after the next update.
To trigger this new notation, you need to activate “Highlight Markdown Syntax” in Notebooks’ preferences > Write&Edit first. Then, whenever you start a line with a dash “-” and end it with @done, the line appears struck though.”
Hi again Joachim,
this “notation” is applied to plain text but has no effect during Markdown conversion. It is meant as a convenience method when casually collecting tasks in a single document, and it works like this:
– this is my first tasks for today
– and this is another one; I don’t care to create an extra task list for that
– and yes, here is one more thing to do
After completing each todo you might delete its line from the document, but then you don’t have a “history” of what you did today. So instead, you mark a task as completed by adding “@done” at the end of the line, which tells Notebooks to show the line as struck through. So at the one of the day the document should look like this:
–
this is my first tasks for today@done–
and this is another one; I don’t care to create an extra task list for that@done–
and yes, here is one more thing to do@done“we have two versions of Notebooks for Mac, one is made specifically for Mac OS X 10.6. Did you download that?”
Hi Alfons,
I downloaded the right version 15 for my Mac (10.6.8), and it does not work! Only the “Books” appear, not the “notes”…
I made several attempts, nothing works, sometime notebooks freeze.
Now I use a old version 12, how to get back to version 14, which was no problem?
Pascal
Hi Pascal,
does that meant that you only see the column with books and the document right beside? If so, type cmd-3 (or select “Show All” from the View menu) and Notebooks presents the list books, the list of documents and the currently selected document.
I hope that does the trick.
Best,
Alfons
Have been using Notebooks for some time .. immensely useful cross-device ‘data tree’ system and am loving the way it is developing. I would really like to be able to open a window (that I can keep open) and collate information from a number of other documents in Notebooks — I currently use another app for this (e.g. the native notes app on Mac) .. am I missing something? Is there a way to do this?
Hello John,
Great to hear you like Notebooks 🙂
I agree, opening a document in an extra window would be a very useful addition, and to be honest, I also wish Notebooks would allow me to do that. However, it still is an item on our todo list…
As a workaround, and instead of using a separate app, you could create a duplicate of the Notebooks app and launch that as an independent instance. Not overly elegant, but it works 🙂
Best,
Alfons
I suspect I know the answer, but is Notebooks for PC able to run on Win RT?
Hi Lacey,
you are right, NBMac won’t run on Win RT. There is no simple way of porting “standard” Windows apps to RT, due to RT’s restrictions…
First time here but like the program. I’m a little concerned that there is nothing here since January, though. Are you guys still working on it?
I’m surprised there is not an easy way to change font size. I have a simple text note but the text is small. When I select all of it, or any portion for that matter, and select Format>Document Font, nothing changes to the tex in the note no matter what I choose. Interestingly, when I select the text and try the Format>Document font again, it shows the font and size I previously chose, but that’s not the way the text appears. The text doesn’t change no matter what I do using Format>Document Font.
It’s also interesting that if you right click, you get the “Show Fonts” choice but if you select text and try to use that option, as soon as you select a font and size, the highlighted text instantly becomes non-highlighted and nothing changes.
Thanks.
Hi Lary,
the silence here usually means that we are busy working on Notebooks, and that is the case right now. – We are trying to fix the final 2 obstacles that keep us from publishing Notebooks for Mac/PC 1.0, and of course we are working on the iOS version of Notebooks as well. So there is no need to worry 😉
Regarding the document font, there may be a few aspects to be aware of (and I think you are referring to formatted documents here).
– You can only change the font of the whole document, but cannot change the font of a selection. This limitation is “by design”, as this produces cleaner documents that are much easier to maintain.
– “Format > Document Font…” and richt-click > Font > Show Fonts do the same thing, they change the font to be applied to the current document; the first option, however, applies the font when you click OK in the dialog, the second option applies the new font the moment you select it.
– If the new font is not applied to the document, please try “Format > Apply Current Style”; does that change the font?
– If still not, could it be that you selected a document style (style sheet) which enforces its own document font?
Best regards,
Alfons
Alfons,
Thanks for your response but I now have a much BIGGER problem.
We’ve spent a lot of time over 3 days building a client notebook. We were working on a text document and selected preferences to see what was there. We changed the font style, said ok … and INSTANTLY, saw a hierarchy in that notebook that mirrored with what is in the Finder and everything else disappeared? Yes, I know that makes no sense at all.
We quickly closed the notebook thinking something went temporarily screwy and thought we would re-open the Notebook app. When we did, it was BLANK???? We’ve closed the app and re-opened it several times, and there is absolutely nothing there.
Is it easy to reconstruct? This is really painful – and we are Mac power users on this platform since the beginning, so I don’t think we’ve misused it or done anything out of the ordinary.
Thanks for your help.
Hi Lary,
I hope we can quickly fix this. – When you say Notebooks was “blank”, does that mean that nothing was displayed, or were you presented with an empty hierarchy? – Have you tried to toggle Notebooks’ views by typing cmd-3 (which should display tree view, list view and document)?
If it seems like Notebooks is empty, let’s look for your documents:
– Notebooks stores all its documents in folders on your hard drive. When Notebooks displays what you see in Finder this might indicate that Notebooks “lost” the setting for its start folder (I cannot explain why that would happen, though). – So leaving Notebooks closed, please use Finder and navigate to the folder/hierarchy you were using in Notebooks. By default, this would be ~/Dropbox/Notebooks, but if you used a different folder, open that.
– If you are unable to identify that folder, use Spotlight to search for a document you were working on.
– If that does not help, either, please take a look at the Trash to find out if the that is where the documents have been moved to.
If any of the steps above helped you locate your documents, launch Notebooks again, open its preferences and check the “Notebooks Folder” setting; the folder you set here is the one that Notebooks uses as its root. Does that correspond to the location of your files?
If that still does not restore Notebooks, would you please send us a screenshot to info(at)notebooksapp.com?
Best regards,
Alfons
Alfons,
Thanks for your response. Hitting did restore the hierarchy but for some reason, when I checked in Preferences, my entire hard drive was the designated Notebooks Folder, which must be why my entire finder showed up in the hierarchy. I changed it to the correct folder and now Notebooks looks like it should and everything seems to be there.
Very strange behavior and I have no idea how the Notebooks Folder got changed, but I sure am glad it was easily remedied.
Thanks for your help. I’m glad I’m back to where I need to be.
Regards, Lary
I am glad to hear this issue is fixed 🙂
-Alfons