I seldom “rant” and my comments probably hardly qualify as a “rant” but I just wasted an hour and half scheduled for writing on fixing my Bookends library. For some inexplicable reason, my Mac and iPadOS Bookends library stopped syncing. It has been syncing perfectly as of a couple of weeks ago. I opened Scrivener to start writing, needed to add a citation that I knew was in Bookends but was nowhere to be found on Bookends on the Mac, only on Bookends on the iPad. I went through several problem solving exercises, searched the web, etc. Nothing was resolving the issue.
Solution? Export the current Bookends library. Delete Bookends on all devices. Reinstall Bookends on all devices. Import saved Bookends library. Activate iCloud sync in all versions of Bookends. Application now syncing.
Echo this daily. I was doing some copying and pasting from iPhone to iPad for a few things. In the beginning it was working great, then later on…it just stopped working. No matter how much I copied, it would not paste anywhere. Double checked settings, WiFi, you name it. Restarted.
I just started throwing everything into a Drafts note, and just waited for sync to show up.
I equate Tech to a sports car you run until it quits vs a horse drawn wagon.
The car can go a lot faster and a lot further but eventually you have to stop to fix it or get fuel.
The horse plods along and you can keep moving. You feed it, you let it rest but you keep making forward progress.
You get a lot further with the sports car ultimately. The built in frustration is never knowing when you will be forced to stop and fix it.
same here. Today’s problem is MacOS updated itself to 11.4 on a usb drive installation connected to my Mac mini and now it won’t boot to the usb drive; it’s not even showing up when you hold Option when restarting, just shows the old (slow) fusion drive with the old 11.3 install on. Going to lose a few hours here now……
I was watching a video from Level1Techs and the guys makes a great statement that when you really look at computers Hardware or Software it’s a wonder the stuff works at all. It takes so much human effort to keep the pieces working to a satisfactory level.
This is why I’m making a concerted effort to minimize the investment in new apps until they’ve been battle tested. I know I can trust BBEdit, Drafts, DTP and a variety of other apps who’s code has been massaged for years.
Sync is a huge issue. Every WWDC I pay keen attention to improvement in CloudKit. Data stability is paramount
I hope you are not missing out on something useful for you as a result.
Getting new software is something of a hobby for me. (Yeah. CRIMP.) Speaking just for myself, I honestly cannot recall the last time I bought or trialed any software from the App Store, or software from other sources that was recommended by a reputable blogger or forum like this one, that was lousy with bugs. Sure, some things don’t thrill me because the design or feature set isn’t useful. But I think that the excellent skills in the developer community, the build technology they use, the platforms we have today, coupled with the review mechanisms and word-of-mouth communities that we have in place now have made horrific software pretty much avoidable or maybe non-existent.
Yep, happens all the time. Cloud syncing and multi device syncing made things worse. I wish we can live in a one (or max two) device life and have everything in one place. Same as one note taking app instead of everywhere.
I am glad I am not alone! Have been having a problem with iCloud library photos and screenshots not feeding down to iPhone. Will probably have to spend time removing all the existing GBs of photos and reloading them to kickstart syncing.
man, don’t get me started on iCloud photo sync… not only is it slow, it sucked a lot of CPU time (photoanalysisd daemon) and caused the fan in my MacBook Pro to turn on continuously.
For future reference, try holding option while clicking on the cloud button and then selecting force resync. This little hidden trick has always fixed such issues for me.
That’s not a bad idea. In general, I will not depend on a program that is maintained by a single developer. If I’m going to invest a significant amount of time getting an app to do something important I don’t want the program to disappear overnight. So I prefer products from an established company or popular open source project.
I share this perspective as well but what is the threshold: two developers? Three or more? For example, I’m investing a lot of notes in Craft. I know there are several developers but I don’t know how many. Likewise, others are investing a lot of notes and time in Obsidian but as I understand it, there are two developers. Carrot Weather (hardly an essential app) has one developer.
Where does one set the threshold of what I’ll call “risk” in investing heavily in an app?
Part of my answer is that I’m not too concerned so long as I have the ability to easily get my data out of it. One reason I’m comfortable using Craft (and others with Obsidian) is that in the latter case everything is on your computer in plain text (though all of the links will break if the program stops functioning) and with Craft I can export in multiple formats including markdown.
