Omnifocus, Fantastical behind curve despite subscription charges

I’m happy to wait because I know that the result will be high quality. I don’t view it as a race.

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Fantastical’s widgets are coming tomorrow.

[rant]

I don’t think that 6 days “late” is a big deal.

The whole iOS release cycle frustrates me. Threads like this frustrate me. I’m frankly concerned for the developers. It feels like such a toxic relationship with Apple’s release cycle and devs, and with user’s expectations surrounding these releases as well.

The fact that all my apps worked throughout the beta cycle is more than I can ask for. Getting widgets on day one shouldn’t be an expectation, even if you’re paying a yearly subscription. The sub is simply for supporting “regular” development not immediate access to every feature that’s ever released.

[/end rant]

Bottom line: we have amazing apps that do phenomenal things and are way better than they’ve ever been. In fact this was the most seamless iOS release (minus the sucker punch of the release day) I’ve seen in a while. I think we should be thankful for the new OS features and be happy with the quality apps we have access to on a regular basis. :man_shrugging:t2:

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They are indeed coming today (or maybe tomorrow for EU customers like me):

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Well comes at no surprise to me as many software devs do not have a viable business model and Omnigroup laid off a number of people in March. These lay offs impact morale and many switch to preservation mode from innovative mode.

Omni Layoffs

I think most of us understand it’s frustrating for developers. We get it, it’s stressful, but I don’t think we need to make excuses for these companies when they promised to be more innovative and asked us to trust them with our money so they could deliver stuff at a quicker pace because that’s what we’re paying them for.

My cup of coffee sacrifice expects this!

I don’t know what the differences are, and I don’t the specific challenges for each app, but apps like Todoist, that develop for every platform, had widgets within hours.

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add Day One to this list. Despite charging a subscription, they have now REMOVED TextExpander support on iOS as of last week (Version 5.3). How a text centric app doesn’t support TE is not even fathomable to be.

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Well, I’m happy I dumped them for Diarly.
However, the Airmail guys told me TE is based on a soon to be deprecated text control, which is why they still don’t support it. I was doubtful, but now I wonder if that’s the reason.

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I spoke with Smile Software about what the Airmail devs told you, and they said that was false. There have been no deprecations that affect TextExpander. TE still works fine with Omnifocus, Drafts, and Fantastical. If devs are removing it, it’s because of laziness, not a breakdown in the SDK of TextExpander.

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It’s just discussion. Don’t let it wind you up.

I was surmising as much (Ulysses, OmniFocus and Drafts all seem to use vastly different controls). Thanks for clearing that up!
I might come back to the Airmail devs with this, though :grin:

I never said I was wound up. I simply said this thread frustrated me, and it does. :man_shrugging:t2: It’s just not a fruitful discussion. It’s whining and moaning about something that you ultimately have no insight into. How these products are created and maintained is outside of your purview. This thread seems to imply that subscriptions give you some power over the lives of these developers, and their work ethic is failing to meet those expectations. “X software was able to get widgets working on day 1, why can’t Y?” As another said, the large amount of time investment for Apollo’s dev to get widgets out the door on day one is a choice that dev made. I don’t think these other devs should be looked down on if they’re taking a “little” more time. And really it is a “little” more time. Even if widgets don’t ship in OF until Oct. It’s really an insignificant amount of time for a larger new feature like this.

Anyway… I’ve said my piece. :wave:t2: :blush:

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A part of me thinks you’re being mildly sarcastic :wink:, but Todoist shouldn’t be held up as some gold standard. Maybe for widgets, but what about “Boards”? They have taken literally “years” to develop their new Boards feature. They still don’t have an actual native Mac app, and their keyboard support is atrocious. Sure they were out Day 1 with widgets, but my goodness there are so many other features that are languishing behind that this one exception shouldn’t let them off the hook either. :joy:

My point in saying this isn’t to gripe. People love Todoist. It’s a great platform, but you can nitpick about any number of things for any piece of software. :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

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Aaaand the Fantastical widgets are here, 12 of 'em:

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For sure. They have been behind on a lot of those things, and they rightfully get crucified for that by its users.

But time and time again these large companies switch to subscriptions (rather poorly in the case of Fantastical) with promises of speed. When we see one of the hallmark features of the newest OS being rolled out by major competitors (see Calendars 5) it’s frustrating.

I’m not always against subscriptions, in fact I have subscribed to Evernote for a long time, and defend them and provide feedback when appropriate, and we all know Evernote has it’s own woes. I personally believe Flexibits squandered a lot of good will with their transition and this just opens the wound a little bit more.

And as for expectations, companies ask us to “sacrifice” cups of coffee or lunches out, or whatever the hippest millennial thing we squander money on to support them, so asking for sacrifice back isn’t that crazy is it?

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Honestly, whether an app supports a new OS feature on the day of release or a week later isn’t the kind of speed I care about when evaluating whether a subscription is worthwhile. I care about how fast they’re developing and releasing new features that I care about. The speed that matters to me is releasing the big new feature I want this year rather than taking until next year, not whether I wait a few piddling days for widgets.

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So, for example, the widgets for Fantastical (that were just released) are by far the worst I have seen versus their competitors. So, they charge more, go slower and release worse end product. None of this matters too much in the big picture, but it is certainly fair to discuss. This, amongst several other issues with Fantastical are likely to lead to me not renewing my subscription when it expires.

Aaaaand Todoist Boards are here. Is it Christmas already?

https://twitter.com/todoist/status/1308768398952857600

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I was wondering whether widgets would be available for non-Premium users.

They seem to handle that nicely:

Its widgets are available even to free users, though calendar sets and automatic conference call detection in widgets are subscriber-exclusive.

Source: MacStories

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Genuine question: why do you consider their widgets unsatisfactory? Are the widgets lacking some features you need?

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At first glance I like Fantastical’s large event list widget quite a bit. Just put it on my iPad homescreen.

This is also the first time I’ve run into the new iOS 14 date/time picker. I’m loving it.

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