Bike: Improved macOS Text Checking

Bike Outliner now supports autocorrect, substitutions, user replacements, and improved spell checking! Bike’s text checking interface is custom built, adopting and then improving upon macOS standard behavior.

Download

Show and correct errors

Showing and correcting spelling errors is surprisingly problematic in most macOS apps. Bike makes this task straight forward.

Predictable and reversible autocorrect

Autocorrect is a challenging feature. While useful, it will always be wrong or unwanted some of the time. How to design a useful feature that will sometimes be wrong?

The standard macOS approach is to limit the unwanted cases at the cost of making the system more complex and unpredictable. In my mind this isn’t a good tradeoff. Autocorrect is still wrong sometimes, but now you also have a system that’s hard to predict and understand.

Bike’s approach is different. It expects autocorrection to be wrong sometimes and optimizes the system make corrections predictable, visible, and easy to undo.

Expanded keyboard friendly checking panel

Standard macOS apps have three text checking UI’s: checking window, substitutions window, and menu items. These are extra windows that you’ll have to manage, and they don’t work well with keyboard shortcuts.

Bike’s approach is different. There’s a single keyboard friendly checking UI with all settings. There are no extra windows to manage, the panel slides into the bottom of your outline window. Use the Escape key at anytime to close the panel and go back to outlining.