Here we go again, another blog redesign! Lately, I’ve been feeling a bit lazy, and while we work on Beaver Pocket, which feels like Half-Life 3, everyone’s waiting for it, but it’s perpetually stuck in the void of ‘not quite ready yet.’ Anyhow, I thought I’d write a couple of short blog posts, which this won’t be, to release in the coming weeks, every now and then, to keep you updated.

All for a Lazy Saturday

Beaver Notes 3.8.0 has finally been released, and Pocket, along with WebDAV, loves keeping me up at night, which also means doomscrolling on Reddit. This time, I stumbled upon Elementary OS’s blog and remembered we have one of our own, though it sure doesn’t feel like it. So, I took on the self-assigned task of redesigning our blog based on Elementary’s structure and our own design cues. Eight hours later, here we are, with a design that feels like Beaver and inspires me to write a sassy blog post just because. Oh, and I’ve added RSS and Search, you’re welcome!

Don’t try a half-baked pie, it’s not worth it.

A couple of weeks ago, we released what should have been the last release candidate for Beaver Pocket. However, it probably won’t be the last. We’ve received some feedback and are working on a couple of fixes, most of them platform-specific, like WebDAV support for Android, which is becoming my personal nightmare. I promise this will be our last release candidate, but if I’ve learned anything from two years of working on Beaver, it’s that it’s better to take your time and test stuff thoroughly rather than releasing something half-baked.

Drawing, Sharing, and Designing

Let’s get to the good stuff already! Here’s what we are working on for both Beaver Notes and Pocket: a drawing component so you can play tic-tac-toe while in class; sharing notes using a custom file format called .bea, which is a fancy word for JSON and the first three letters in Beaver; better PDF exports; improved Markdown export; focus mode, now called reader mode, which makes the note read-only, letting you study even if your cat is on the keyboard; and some UI improvements and butterfly catching. On Pocket specifically, the time the app takes to open has been reduced, it was 3-5 business days before, and the last touch-ups to cloud sync are being made, with WebDAV choosing to straight-up not work on Android but only on iOS. Everybody has their preferences, I guess. Not an Android user myself, but WebDAV picking iOS over Android? That’s a bit much.

Pack It Up and Ship It to Production!

This doesn’t impact the user’s life much, but it makes my life a bit easier, and that is easy releases. By updating our electron-builder config, now the app is packaged, notarized (for all the Mac users), and uploaded straight to GitHub as a draft release. This takes off a good 30 minutes from the packaging process on my end, which is great!

Thank You 💖

Thanks to all our users, contributors, and donors for making Beaver possible, and thanks for being part of this amazing community. Hope you enjoyed the article. If you’d like to help build and improve the project don’t hesitate to Get Involved

Credits

Original cover artwork (CC BY 4.0): credits to @keeyen