I mentioned OmniOutliner 6 in a recent Sunday Serial. It’s a great Mac app, incredibly powerful if you need it, and a simple outliner if that’s all you need, too. I harbor a great affection for OmniOutliner; it came bundled with my some of my earliest Macs from the heady early days of OS X, and in those days, there was a dearth of software. OmniOutliner was a NeXT app that moved over to the Mac, and will always have a place in my heart–and my SSD.

But this post isn’t about OmniOutliner. It’s about Bike.

Bike launched nearly twenty years after I found OmniOutliner, from the great developerJesse Grosjean, who operates Hog Bay Software. Hog Bay has always made fascinating writing apps: WriteRoom, one of the earliest Markdown writing apps available for both the Mac and iPad, FoldingText, TaskPaper, and most recently, Bike.

Digression Alert: TaskPaper

I have always loved Hog Bay’s TaskPaper, even though I don’t use it. I have a license, because I want this app to thrive. It’s a simple, text-based task manager, and there’s nothing about it I don’t like. My professional life and its attendant needs don’t scale to its parsimony, but that’s not TaskPaper’s fault. It is, in spirit and function, essential–not in the sense that it’s a must-have, but that it’s born of a pure, distilled focus. It could not possibly attract any kind of casual fan base; the person who downloads, uses, and purchases TaskPaper is a rare bird.

What’s beautiful about TaskPaper is what’s beautiful about html: you type plain text, but the interaction you have with what you typed is decidedly–magically– rendered. In the same way that modern Markdown writing applications render your Markdown syntax on the fly, TaskPaper recognizes particular formatting characters, and render the results in a functional way that harness the power of the Mac’s GUI.

Mac Nerds Only

Hog Bay’s wares are pretty much Mac only. You can open most of their file formats on your iPad or iPhone, but it’s not a simple multi-platform affair a la Notes, OmniFocus, or OmniOutliner.

Again, this isn’t so much Hog Bay’s hangup as mine. As I need the complexity of OmniFocus, I want to hop between Mac, iPad, and iPhone.

I do, however, like to imagine myself as the inevitable old duffer I’ll become, with simpler needs than I have now, using TaskPaper for imposing a modicum of order to what will surely be an inordinate amount of farting around.

Bike

Back to Bike! I found myself this week needing to write a summary for our legal counsel, and in a fit of indecision, prevaricated on which text app to write up my thoughts. BBEdit? Notes? Drafts?

And the thought seized me: Hey! Bike!

You can easily cobble together a simple outline in Bike. It tis built for outlining. But it’s a great rich text editor, too, so you can use it that way. It’s less intimidating than an IDE or text editor like BBEdit, but it’s dead simple to use. It’s markdown friendly, but boasts its own file format, which you can render simply by changing the file suffix.

At the office, I tried to format some text, and Bike prompted me to upgrade my license, which had lapsed. I didn’t need to–but I wanted to. I want Bike around. I want it around for a long, long time. Just like TaskPaper.

It’s on sale for Black Friday. Check out Bike!