Who is Birch for?

[jessegrosjean]

Continuing the discussion from Birch 0.1.0 “Dev” release:

@MarkLikesText

I realise this is early days then but what exactly is the target market you are after? It looks very much to me like a tool for developers, not an end user or a consumer user that wants an app to be simple and effective but has some key functionality not in a plain text editor.

Yes, right now it does look very much like a programmers tool, but I “think” much of this is due to the fact that it’s being deployed as an Atom package right now. Atom brings lots of features that some people have been wanting for a long time:

• File browser
• Tabs UI, split panes, etc
• Cross platform
• Plus better versions of features that I’ve already been building in such as making it easy to create extensions and share them.

With that said… I expect the default user experience will have all of these things in “off” mode by default. You’ll just see a Birch outline in a window without tabs or any other non birch specific UI.

I really am trying to make this a tool that my kids can use. Being kids I’m sure they could have learned anything, but I think explaining Birch is going to be a much smother process. This is your outline. This is how you expand/collapse items. This is how you move them around. Select text and do “Bold” to make it bold. Compared to teaching them Markdown and how Markdown maps to a hierarchy, I think this will be much easier and more logical.

@MarkLikesText

…displays some structure and has useful things like tags , projects , tasks , notes etc and also can be exported to other editors easily.

The simple outline structure shown in Birch does not have any of these, so who would want to use it or is it just a development shell that needs plugins to give it added functionality?

The current version of Birch is very much a development shell.

As time goes on I’ll be building extensions for things like tags, etc. I’ll likely be posting those here as separate packages, but whatever final app comes out of this will include a good basic set of packages. It’s not the expectation that “normal” users will go out and find and install packages. But that will be an option for power users who want more specific functionality.