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Subscription as investment
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Posted by nathanb
May 13, 2019 at 03:41 PM
This made me smile. I’ve tried to make myself like markdown a few times thinking that if so many others that I respect think it’s so great, then there must be something I’m missing. Though it’s very likely that I am the weak link in being unable to grok markdown, I’m glad I’m not the only one in this boat.
>Daly de Gagne wrote:
>Alexander, thank you. I took a look at Joplin, and one drawback for me
>is markdown. I fail to see its appeal or a reason forbit in a general
>purpose notes program. I tolerate it in Dynalist but much prefer the
>approach taken by EN and Nimbus. In Standard Notes you have to buy the
>extensions package to get away from compulsory markdown.
Posted by Simon
May 13, 2019 at 05:59 PM
I’m afraid I’m totally against subscriptions and only pay where I’m forced to. Since the advent of subscriptions, my monthly outgoing tripled, so I dumped many apps. My problem with many developers such as Ulysses, is that they burned their most loyal customers. They offered and upgrade for a week or so, so if you missed it your previous support meant nothing. I’ve also seen quite a number of apps that received crowd funding / kickstarter support sell out to large corporates upon becoming successful leaving it’s loyal customers in the dust.
This breeds no loyalty from a user perspective.
Posted by Daly de Gagne
May 13, 2019 at 09:49 PM
Nathan, thanks - I thought I was the only odd one out when it came to markdown. It used to be easy to work with text in an easy way. Markdown may serve a purpose for some but, frankly, I am peeved that the ease of of use which we enjoyed in premarkdown days has been removed. Why don’t developers give users a choice and not, as is 6case with Standard Note make it available at added cost?
nathanb wrote:
This made me smile. I’ve tried to make myself like markdown a few times
>thinking that if so many others that I respect think it’s so great, then
>there must be something I’m missing. Though it’s very likely that I am
>the weak link in being unable to grok markdown, I’m glad I’m not the
>only one in this boat.
>
>
>>Daly de Gagne wrote:
>>Alexander, thank you. I took a look at Joplin, and one drawback for me
>>is markdown. I fail to see its appeal or a reason forbit in a general
>>purpose notes program. I tolerate it in Dynalist but much prefer the
>>approach taken by EN and Nimbus. In Standard Notes you have to buy the
>>extensions package to get away from compulsory markdown.
>
Posted by MadaboutDana
May 14, 2019 at 02:06 PM
I do take Nathan/Daly’s point about markdown, but there are a fair number of good apps for macOS that support both markdown and rich text (e.g. Notebooks, FSNotes, Scrivener, just off the top of my head, and probably many others; those three apps are currently one-off payments rather than subscriptions, too).
For Windows, I dunno. But I’d have thought markdown was more of a rarity in the Windows world?
The reason us markdowners like markdown is that it leaves you with raw text files, so no proprietary tie-in (and I’d argue that even RTF is a kind of proprietary format, given the number of different versions that exist). This is a key advantage of markdown, which is one of the reasons I’ve found myself moving away from former favourites like Ulysses, Outlinely (both of which use proprietary XML to create their libraries), and back to simpler software like iaWriter, Notebooks, FSNotes, Joplin et al. (both of which create/navigate individual .txt/.md files which can also be manipulated with any number of other apps/programs, including search software like FoxTrot Pro – so no tie-in).
Why get so neurotic about tie-in? Well, a simple perusal of the many, many apps that have been discussed here is enough to show you why: so many of them have gone the way of the dodo. So many once glorious, much-lauded, beloved apps are no longer with us, but have made their way to that great archive in the sky. What’s more, so many of them are unusable, because their creators - for what are, I’m sure, perfectly good reasons - decided not to make them publicly available upon expiry. Or kindly did so, only for the app to lose its compatibility with the latest operating systems somewhere along the line.
Whereas UTF-8 (or, at a pinch, UTF-16) is unlikely to suffer this fate - or at least, not for a long time to come. Fussy as markdown is, that’s why many of us prefer it ;-)
Cheers!
Bill
Posted by tightbeam
May 14, 2019 at 04:06 PM
MadaboutDana wrote:
>For Windows, I dunno. But I’d have thought markdown was more of a rarity
>in the Windows world?
Despite the sometimes infuriating sense that this forum ought to be called MacOutlinerSoftware, there are indeed many Markdown editors for Windows users. Here are some:
https://www.slant.co/topics/1852/~best-markdown-editors-for-windows
I doubt I’ll get my wish, but each post about software, especially new software, should include whether the software is Mac, Windows, or whatever. That’ll save Windows folks from wasting their time by following links to software they can’t use.