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

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.

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... ;-)

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.

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.

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.

Call me pessimistic but I had always thought Vesper to be canary in the coalmine - but for a very different reason. I bought it already suspecting that I would end up using something else for all the reasons known back then. I think the developers (knowingly or unknowingly) wanted to find out how much the VIP roster would effectively get them.
And now they found out that sticking important names onto an average product may have helped them some but has lifted them to an entirely different level either, there are suddenly these conspiracy theories put forward stating that because Vesper goes down, it must mean that an entire universe must be going down as well.

I am not buying this, there was just too little development going on and people lost interest, simple as that.

For me, sync is the single most important feature of any note taking program. I need any note taking software to sync fast and I need it to sync across all my devices. SimpleNote sync is pretty good, as is Dropbox. Up until now iCloud was not even usable. Now it works, but I still find it slow. According to the developers of Bear (which I am liking a lot, although it is still in Beta), Apple's own Notes app uses CloudKit, not iCloud, and that is what they are doing as well. Right now I'm using Ulysses with iCloud sync and finding it a bit slow...

Count me among those underwhelmed by Vesper, and the intial hoopla over the app. A $20 Mac app would be just as questionable at the time the iOS app was released.

There have been so many good note taking apps released on Mac and iOS over the years- especially Mac.