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Vesper notes users offered Ulysses migration path
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Posted by MadaboutDana
Aug 25, 2016 at 03:52 PM
I don’t know how many people in this forum used Vesper, an iOS note-taking app with pleasant synchronisation features, but the app was recently discontinued and its sync server shut down.
Soulmen are offering a small utility for importing Vesper notes into Ulysses, as detailed here: http://ulyssesapp.com/blog/2016/08/vesper-import/
Personally, I always thought Vesper was a little lacking in the features department, given the plethora of very good note-taking apps that are cross-platform and have more powerful features (take Notebooks, for example). That’s particularly true now, following the advent of some serious notebook power to both Mac, iOS and, to a lesser extent, Windows (Scrivener, Ulysses, DEVONthink etc.). Plus, of course, the heavily upgraded and now very capable Apple Notes (shortly to become even more capable, with font sizing and note sharing).
The simpler end of the market was already taken care of by Simplenote, an exceptionally efficient little app.
It was a valiant effort, just - in my view - a misplaced business concept.
Cheers,
Bill
Posted by Paul Korm
Aug 25, 2016 at 04:33 PM
Bill, I think John Gruber (Vesper co-founder) might counter it was not a misplaced concept, but a misconceived strategy. See his post-mortem here:
http://daringfireball.net/2016/08/vesper_adieu
It’s an interesting post, perhaps, but does not answer the question “is there a profitable market for the likes of Vesper?”
@MadaboutDana wrote:
>It was a valiant effort, just - in my view - a misplaced business concept.
Posted by MadaboutDana
Aug 25, 2016 at 04:46 PM
Yes, I’ve read Gruber’s analysis, but I still think the original concept was flawed.
There are just too many good note-taking apps around - and if you add the number of good task managers, you’re left with a lot of competition.
There was nothing about Vesper that made it stand out. Apart from John Gruber, that is… ;-)
Posted by Hugh
Aug 25, 2016 at 07:55 PM
An interesting post on the same topic from David Sparks in his blog here: http://macsparky.com/blog/2016/8/vesper-as-the-canary-in-a-coal-mine. What it seems to suggest is that prices for applications like Vesper have now become so depressed that, without a change to a subscription model, an entire class of software will disappear. But what will happen if consumers refuse to run with subscriptions? Presumably, the choice that we have become accustomed to over the years since the Mac App Store opened will disappear too.
Posted by shatteredmindofbob
Aug 25, 2016 at 09:40 PM
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.
Since the launch, I’d hadn’t heard anything about the app until the shutdown announcement.
This does reinforce something I’ve thought for a while, though—moving to a proprietary sync system is the beginning of the end. This is one of the reasons I didn’t upgrade Day One.