But, I’ve been playing with it and I like it!
What I can do, I think, is
Can live with that well. Thanks for introducing Bike to me!!
Mike
ha ha ha, found something interesting.
Maybe I should have suspected that - the minute you touch the preview in DT, it converts the .bike file into an .html file and you cannot open it in Bike anymore. So no messing around with the preview.
Oh! He’s the creator of TaskPaper! - good stuff.
Oh (#2) - I see you can fold/unfold in DT’s preview, sorry I missed that. Don’t know why I can’t - are you on Sequoia?
There’s an answer to Bike files transmuting to html, but I can’t verify it for you. I let my Bike license expire. It’s a great product. I have too many great apps, though, and for the moment Bike is not on my system.
No, wait, I’m fibbing to you. I do absolutely know what I did.
I kept note of the cure (where else?) in my DT database for application notes. This is exactly how I fixed the bike-to-html issue on my system.
First, get the current contents of the AdditionalPlainTextExtensions preference with:
defaults read com.devon-technologies.think3 AdditionalPlainTextExtensions
If you get this warning, that option isn’t currently set:
The domain/default pair of (com.devon-technologies.think3, AdditionalPlainTextExtensions) does not exist
If it returns a dot delimited list of words (or one word like “.text”), then those are your current additional plain text extensions.
If the preference didn’t exist to begin with, write it with:
defaults write com.devon-technologies.think3 AdditionalPlainTextExtensions -string .bike
Or, you may have already had plain text extensions of, say “.f16.c47.dc3”. That would mean files ending in .f16, .c47, or .dc3 would be considered plain text by Devonthink.
If so, add bike with the command:
defaults write com.devon-technologies.think3 AdditionalPlainTextExtensions -string .bike.f16.c47.dc3
Verify the setting with a defaults read command.
If you decide to remove the hidden preference, perhaps because it’s too embarrassing to write about planes in plain text .f16 files, this command will get rid of the preference:
defaults delete com.devon-technologies.think3 AdditionalPlainTextExtensions
Give it a try. Read the documentation, verify the current setting, and then add .bike. I believe it will fix the problem.
Amontillado, THANK YOU!!!
That 100% worked. And now I can see the code and preview in DT. I can edit the code and it updates the bike file (for very minor edits) or (preferably) work in the bike file itself. But I can see the preview in DT, and fold/unfold the sections.
One very minor thing: in the DT preview, the links don’t work. You don’t suppose there’s anything I can do about that?
Cheers,
Mike
You might need to specify the parent folder of your Bike files in Bike’s Settings > Sandbox.
meowky, thanks.
I sandboxed the folder containing (subfolders, subsubs and so on) the bike file, and links still don’t work (closed and reopened Bike of course). The links resolve within Bike itself, but not in the preview generated in DEVONthink. I can see the “x-devonthink-item” hrefs, but in the preview, even though they look blue, and the cursor changes on mouse over, nothing happens on click (the link or little arrow)
examples:
code:
<p><em><a href="x-devonthink-item://5FC10A2E-92FE-4EE0-8C33-845C05D8FA1B">4 Color Managing Displays</a></em></p>
preview:
Curiously (to my naive mind) the little boxed arrow does not appear here, but does in the DT preview.
A URL scheme is not a standard URL. There’s no guarantee an application honors them. Bear that in mind.
That being said, copying an item link and pasting it into a Bike document yielded an active URL…
But… a bike file is not a plain text document. That’s why you’re seeing the raw markup. And the preview is almost certainly not rendered HTML but the QuickLook preview for third-party formats (though @cgrunenberg would have to confirm or deny that authoritatively).
Jim, I followed Amontillado’s suggestion:
So, in DEVONthink the file has extension “.bike”, the “Test alternative” shows the code, and the “Best alternative” shows a preview, with inert links 
So what you are saying is that the QuickLook preview for this that DEVONthink is looking at is being rendered as formatted text, not html - correct?
Criss would have to answer with more thechnical authority than I but the Best Alternative uses QuickLook for third-party formats. This is no different than the Finder. Select a .bike file in the Finder, press Spacebar, and you’ll see the links aren’t active there either. In fact, it’s likely a PDF representation of the file.
The funny thing is dbl-clicking the Finder’s QL preview opens the .bike file in Bike.
Dbl-Clicking a preview of a regular text file doesn’t do this.
Of course in the Finder QL preview windows both have the “Open in…” top button.
I’ll try and summarize what I got so far.
Goals:
Where I started:
(but totally expected)So far, nothing, MindNode, iThoughtsX, Omni, Pages, anything else (several) that I tried, allows me to do the simple thing of building/ingesting an outline in DEVONthink that can do folding/unfolding AND preseerve links (adding text color a cherry in the pie, really).
Has been an interesting exercise though, and I got suggestions from some very very nice people here!
This forum remains the best, and DEVONthink is my toast and butter. (And it always fall on the right side)
I did omit, by the way, a pretty obvious alternative:
Creating the outline in Apple Notes, the new version. It does have the section fold/unfold (by selecting a row and making it a Heading or Subheading; honors the links to any items in DEVONthink, and allows text coloring (the new Apple Notes actually gained highlighting as well).
The outline itself is never in DEVONthink, but exporting as a pdf to DT will create a nicely formatted pdf - all sections fully expanded - that does preserve the links.
I almost wish I could have a live Apple Note inside DT ha ha
That’s not unexpected, I’d say.
Jim, not dbl-clicking the file, but dbl-clicking anywhere inside the QuickLook window for the bike file. It opens Bike. But doing the same inside the QL preview window for a text file doesn’t open the associated app (Text Edit). And it doesn’t either for a png or pdf QL preview window. This doesn’t cause the file to be opened in Preview or (my case) PDF Expert. Something is different with the QL preview windows for .bike
Almost like, the preview panel itself (of course, the code for it) has some kind of link to the original file. yet that doesn’t happen for any other file types.
Agreed
I can store Apple Pages and Apple Numbers files in Devonthink
but not Apple Notes
I need files that can be stored/organized in Devonthink
Because Notes are not files – they are just blobs of data (a protobuf) stored in a SQLite database. Really cringy stuff, imo.
Apple’s Core Data framework seems very attractive for some developers, even if they don’t really deal with relational data.
wow cool stuff to learn, thanks! “serializing structured data” - back in the days I worked at Informatica (ETL) I would hear that a lot!
And thanks for the super interesting link!
(and, ciofeca - funny)
