The year is still very young and our plans for 2022 are endless. We've come up with a very tight plan for ERA this year to give you more options, more flexibility, and a better environment to work more efficiently. The foundation of ERA is in place and now the task is to build a modern house on it. Today we want to present to you the individual features that we have planned for 2022. While adding new features we always consider how they will impact the performance of ERA and if they are needed by developers or not. Our own requirements are to maintain a fast, easy-to-use software that is not overloaded.
ERA on MacOS As already written in one of our last articles, we are currently working on porting ERA to MacOS with Intel and M1 chips. There will be a closed alpha phase starting in a few days. If you are interested, please feel free to check out THIS article.
Filtering and sorting ERA will finally receive a sorting function for drafts and workspaces. It will be possible to sort and display drafts and workspaces by date and name.
Backup manager Backups are important, in order to have access to your work in case your computer does not boot or your notes get accidentally deleted. The backup manager will be able to backup your personal notes.
MathJax As a note-taking tool for engineers, writing mathematical functions should not be a miss. With MathJax this will be possible.
Draft sharing A lot of times you want to give access to your notes to colleagues, friends or customers. The share function will allow you to share drafts with anyone who has ERA running on his/her machine.
Draft export Export drafts as HTML (styled & unstyled), Markdown file, or PDF, so you can send them to colleagues, friends, or customers who are not using ERA. If you are missing a file format from that list, feel free to contact us so we can see if we can implement it.
Redesign app ERA has received many compliments regarding its UI from users. Nevertheless, there is room for improvement in terms of UI and UX. As always, we want to maintain the DNA of ERA and make sure that usability and simplicity are the focus of any redesign.
Editor toolbar refactoring Our toolbar in the editor is not perfect. There are currently few options, and the arrangement is not yet optimal. We will completely overhaul the toolbar to offer a better user experience.
Split view in draft space Edit drafts and see directly next to the editor what the result looks like. This is what the split view will allow you to do.
Detach drafts In addition to the split view, we also want to offer the option of detaching drafts from the main window so that you can display several drafts on one screen in multiple, independent windows at the same time.
Link drafts Do you know the situation where several drafts belong together but it still feels “loose”? Linking will allow you to link drafts together, who belong together.
MermaidJS When creating documentation for software, as a developer we need to create UML diagrams in order to visualize certain technical parts. MermaidJs allows you to create UML diagrams using extended markdown syntax. ERA is going to integrate MermaidJS so you can directly write MermaidJS markdown using the editor and display the result in a draft.
Images integration Display images and screenshots inside a draft in ERA.
Tabs Another frequently requested feature is tabs. Often you do not want to see several drafts at once, but often have to switch back and forth between several drafts or even workspaces. For this, we will implement tabs so that you can pin your most important drafts and switch back and forth at any time without wasting time.
These are our plans for ERA in 2022. Do you have any suggestions for improvement or feature requests? Just hit us up on Twitter @erash or write us a mail at [email protected]. All comments, critics, and suggestions are always welcome.