It takes balls
Marco Arment writes about Vesper, a new note-taking app by John Gruber, Dave Wiskus, and Brent Simmons. He asks:
How can these guys launch a relatively expensive text-note app that’s missing so many features of competing text-note apps?
Balls.
I agree about the pricing (iOS apps should be more expensive); I agree about believing you have something to offer in a crowded category; but then:
It takes balls to release a note-shoebox app in 2013 that has no sync, import, or export.
To my mind, that’s not something that takes balls—that just is balls. Information silos for this kind of information, in 2013? Really? I’ll bet people defending this wouldn’t have done so had the app been by Adobe or Microsoft, or even by people lacking the fame and reputations of Gruber, Wiskus, and Simmons. (And, yes, Vesper might well get that feature in the future, but, again, isn’t that a bit like the usual tech excuse of “well, it’s only version 1.0, and it’ll be great by 2.0″ that everyone claims to hate?)
My bet is they held off on implementing iCloud sync pending any announcements at WWDC next week. Sync is a big decision to make when the platform-provided option is due major improvements. If they’re using Core Data rather than a Document model, iCloud is more or less unusable in its current incarnation.
Would have sunk without a trace if anyone else had released it, obviously, but if you have the luxury of waiting, you might as well.
Given that many iPhone users still don’t back their phone up, using an app without sync or export means that once your phone dies, the data on it is gone as well. I doesn’t matter who made the app, that’s just hostile towards users.
Do you have any evidence for that? I don’t think it’s true. The app requires iOS 6.0 and the current iOS setup process defaults to backing up to iCloud.
In my experience, the vast majority of people accept the defaults, and anyone who doesn’t probably knows what they’re doing.
Hm. Does upgrading to iOS 6 switch cloud backup on? It used to be true that most people didn’t back up to iCloud, but it’s possible that this is not the case anymore.