Setting Myself Free of the Bear (and Others)
If you work with plain text, as I prefer to, then you probably try out different text editors from time to time (or, you know, constantly). I recently tried out a nice one called Bear. It’s an attractive environment to write in, syncs well between Mac, iPhone, and iPad, has good previewing and exporting features, as well as a host of different themes to suit your preferences. All in all, it’s got a lot going for it. I used it exclusively for a while, and paid the first month of its subscription.
But I’m dropping it.
The reason why is simple: although it’s all about plain text notes, it doesn’t store your notes as plain text files. Instead, it keeps them all in some kind of database and syncs that via iCloud.
Using iCloud for syncing isn’t a problem, but locking my notes away in a form that’s not accessible to any other text editor definitely is.
Its export features are good, so it’s not that your notes are locked away irretrievably. But while you’re using Bear, you can only edit your notes — or view them, for that matter — in Bear. And that’s just not how I want to work.
It’s kind of antithetical to whole plain-text ethos, to my mind. You should be able to switch text editors without having to even think about it. Just open the file in the new editor and get on with it.
Next I tried the unimaginatively-named Notebooks. A similar setup with the syncing, but you can point it at a directory of files on the filesystem. It has its own strangenesses, though, in that it wants to keep tight control of the directory structure, and when you look at the directory in Finder or another text editor, you find it has been polluted with plist files, one for each plain-text file.
So I dumped that one, too.
And right now I’m trying Ulysses, which is very much of the moment, because it has just switched to subscription-based pricing, and caused much furore in doing so. I happen to also be trying out the SetApp service, which is interesting in itself, and which includes Ulysses as one of the apps it makes available.
It’s fine, but is also prone to dropping the odd plist file in my folder, I see.
In the end I’ll probably stick with nvAlt for short-form notes on the Mac, using a folder synced via Dropbox, and Editorial on iOS. Not forgetting Drafts on iOS, of course, but you only type things there to export them somewhere else, really. And then BBEdit or Sublime Text for longer pieces.
Those last two might become the subject of another piece, about how I don’t get what’s so great about BBEdit. But that’s for another time.
Nuts to Dough
Just thought I should mention, en passant, that when I referred to misspelled donuts the other day, I was talking about the ones that can’t spell “crispy” or “cream”,1 not the spelling of “donut” itself. I was brought up with it as “doughnut,” but I guess I’ve come round to the other, presumably American, spelling.
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And that don’t taste at all like proper do[ugh]nuts. ↩︎
My site was down for a couple of days. You probably didn’t notice. These things happen when you’re on holiday, it seems. The nice people at Linode were very helpful, though, and it’s all back up now.
The Rolling Donut, Dublin. Highly recommended. Good to remember how good donuts can be if you don’t get misspelled American ones.
Ice-cold Guinness. I’m reminded of the late Bob Shaw…
Test posting to my site from Quill. I’ve no idea whether this will work.
Further to this morning’s post, it looks like I’ll be in the City for a while, and only going to the client’s site later, or occasionally. Which is good news for my commute.
On my way to first day at the new job. This is at the consultancy’s offices in the City, though, for induction, not at the client’s site.
I’m pretty sure that all of these are meant to be autumnal. Yet here it’s early August — high summer — and there they are, growing madly.
New Job
As you may know, I’ve been between contracts lately. Had quite a lot of interest from my CV, but not been so lucky with the tests and interviews.
Yesterday at about 10am a recruiter called me. Today at just after 5pm I was offered the job. A new contract, six months initially, with the likelihood of extending. Sometimes things go fast.
First time anyone has asked me for a more detailed CV. But hey, I can write about myself till the cows come home.
Weird. I go to Ted Leo’s Soundcloud page. A track by someone called Lil Purpp starts playing. Nothing to do with Leo or the page I’m on, as far as I can see.
Some Open-Source Software for Your Delectation
I have made a thing, and pushed it out into the world. Well, really, this is me pushing it out into the world, because nobody will have noticed it before now, and with this, there’s a chance they might.
A couple of months ago Manton Reece and Brent Simmons announced the existence of JSON Feed, a new syndication format to sit alongside RSS and Atom; but using JavaScript Object Notation or JSON, instead of XML.
They invited people to write parsers and formatters and so on for it, and I quickly realised that no-one had yet written one in Java. As far as I can tell that is still the case. Or at least, if they have, they haven’t made it public yet.
No-one, that is, but me, as I have written just such a thing: a JSON Feed parsing library, written in Java. I’m calling it Pertwee. That’s the product page at my company site (more on which later). It’s open-source, and can be found at Github
As software projects go, it’s not that exciting. But it is the first open-source project that I’ve released. I hope someone might find some use for it.
Monster sky out my window. And time I tried some photos with this new phone.
Wait, Now ATP has gone back to the old outro theme. Was last week’s just a one-off? I’m so confused.
[@colinwalker](https://micro.blog/colinwalker) Did you know that your blog’s search page for the term is the second hit on DuckDuckGo for #indieweb? Quite impressive.
The Microformats 2 WordPress plugin was causing spurious HTML tags to be visible around my name next to these posts. I’ve disabled it for now. But looking at the page to get that link, I’m realising that maybe I don’t actually need it:
For all themes that do not declare support for Microformats 2, this plugin attempts to add Microformats to areas that are accessible through filters and actions.
I think the theme I’m using, Minnow, probably supports microformats already. Though I confess to having only slight understanding of what microformats are for. I added that plugin while moving the site the other day, along with all the #Indieweb plugins.