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Vesper notes users offered Ulysses migration path
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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.
Posted by Prion
Aug 26, 2016 at 12:04 PM
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.
Posted by Luhmann
Aug 26, 2016 at 01:40 PM
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…
Posted by steveylang
Aug 26, 2016 at 10:53 PM
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.