Vesper notes users offered Ulysses migration path

Posted by MadaboutDana
Aug 26, 2016 at 08:38 AM

Yes, I think that sums it up pretty well!

shatteredmindofbob wrote:
I’m really not sure there’s any larger lesson to take away from Vesper.
>When it launched, it was expensive, limited in features (there was no
>syncing capability and no one stated that one was planned) and was sold
>basically on being pretty and having Gruber’s name attached to it.
>Basically, it only appealed to Apple partisans.

I’m very wary of proprietary sync. Having said that, OmniGroup products and Simplenote all sync very well using proprietary systems – Simplenote in particular. Otherwise, Dropbox is by far the most reliable (Notebooks and Scrivener both use Dropbox very efficiently), but certain apps seem to make very good use of the modernised iCloud (especially Ulysses and Letterspace, although both of them are effectively text-only, so in principle there isn’t a lot of data involved). Another fairly good iCloud app is Cloud Outliner Pro 2, which I use increasingly as a fast task management app, but Ulysses and Letterspace appear to use some kind of “prodding” mechanism - ha, technical term! - to sync stuff more or less immediately.

Vesper seemed to me a rather over-priced solution to a problem for which, even when Vesper was created, a whole bunch of solutions already existed - many of them aesthetically more pleasing. Many of them have, in turn, vanished or never been updated, despite their relatively attractive look’n'feel. I’m not sure I agree with Hugh - or rather, David Sparks - that the whole model needs to change; I do think Apple needs to make it possible for app developers to charge for updates, if they don’t want to use the subscription model. I’m alarmed to see that efforts to develop an iOS version of the exceptional Quiver programming notebook (macOS) have faltered recently; I suspect the author simply hasn’t made enough on a very highly regarded app to bother spending the necessary time to produce a new version. I’m hoping that’s not the case. Charging for updates would create a much more sustainable app ecosystem.

>to a proprietary sync system is the beginning of the end. This is one of
>the reasons I didn’t upgrade Day One.