Had never seen this before. But I only see a subscription option?
Yep! You’re right. I bought it as a one-time purchase a few years ago.
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The answer to that question about Disney is almost definitely “yes”. If they become aware of it, I just about guarantee you’ll get a very cranky cease & desist letter, possibly demanding that you pay monetary damages to avoid going to court.
One of the broad guidelines for intellectual property protections is something that boils down to “if you don’t defend it, you can lose it”.
Random related-ish story.
A friend of mine had some old metal pans that they used in the old Harley Davidson factory. When the factory was shut down, one of the workers got to take them home. My friend wrote to Harley Davidson and asked if they were authentic, and the guy in the “archives” department said they were. He even sent over a couple nice pictures of the guys at Harley using those pans during manufacturing.
So my friend listed one on eBay. The ad title mentioned that they were from the old Harley Davidson plant. A couple days later, the ad disappears without warning. Harley’s legal team demanded that eBay pull the ad, even though there was no question about what these things were, and the term was perfectly valid.
Intellectual property is a crazy world. 
That’s the core of the issue though. Apple doesn’t have to think they have standing. They just have it, period. And if a dev doesn’t agree, they leave the store (which means leaving the platform entirely) or spend the time and money to sue one of the world’s largest companies while their business is effectively shut down and hope that they can win.
Sure, but all of that was true of iDOS as well. It’s an app that’s been in the app store since 2014, and all of a sudden Apple demanded that they remove a rather important feature (that had been present for almost a year) or be banned. A feature, according to the developer, that he’d specifically called their attention to in a dozen separate updates and that had been considered perfectly fine up until that time.
Apple was making money off that one too. The app was popular in a niche community. And now it’s gone. Not because any rules changed, but because Apple decided to change their interpretation of the rules without notice.
I’m not even really an App Store critic, FWIW. But I definitely see how a lot of potentially innovative ideas aren’t even profitable to try in the environment that Apple has created. And that goes double or triple for anything that involves giving customers “upgrade” options that Apple rather clearly doesn’t want them to have. Apple’s solution is subscriptions, or new paid-in-full versions.
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Have too many to list 
Strange thing of seeing members posting their docks while using Alfred. Can’t remember last time I look at my dock after installing Alfred.
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Even though I posted a screenshot of my dock, I never use it either as I also rely on Alfred. I keep it hidden. I only use it when I want to drag a file to an application.
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Look folks, the Dock is the Mac’s anchor, it should always be visible, and at the bottom, as Steve intended.
This is the hill I will die on.
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You are even more cynical than I am and I certainly do not mean that in a bad sort of way!
Maybe I best explain what an altered book is which I’m not sure was the best example. It is a manufactured book, often old, that is altered by artists, often around a theme or as a journal, and I’ve never seen any that were sold more than one at a time. I know Disney covets their reputation closely but I doubt that they would bother.
I know that gets into intellectual property rights and all. In the case of altered books, I’d surmise they are definitely getting into an area of violating those rights unless they are using them for educational purposes. I forget what that’s called. I have never studied that area of law.
Being showed the door like that… sure, I can see where there may be anti-trust issues on Apple’s part. ;o)
I just do not see anything wrong with the way Agenda is managing their app- on the contrary. I suppose I’d need to see Apple’s guidelines. It seems to me that they have devised a model that works. There are a lot of people that loathe the subscriptions. And I certainly do not begrudge developers their money.
Perhaps your explanation is indicative of why I don’t see others following suit.
Rules are far too often arbitrarily made up by some knucklehead.
I just see a terrific app with a lot of work going into it. These developers, imho, are going the extra mile.
Don’t get me wrong - I applaud Agenda’s business model. It’s one of those things that broadly falls into the category of “doing right by their customers”.
That’s my suspicion. The fact that it seems to be in the “grey area” and almost certainly adds a bunch of extra development complexity are two good reasons to not do it.
It would be super-awesome if Apple would just get it through their heads that subscriptions make many users cranky and devs would like other options. But right now they seem to be pushing devs in the subscription direction.
Hopefully that changes in coming years.
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II can relate to this so much 
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Maybe the use of subscriptions will peak and then the bottom will fall out of the market. I don’t see them lasting forever. They are too anti-consumer and some of them are utterly outrageous!
Yes, I am sure there are plenty of developers that would appreciate other options.
Andy, is Alfred free? I recently got a laptop and there it was! Now I know I bought it (or had it) several years ago.
I’ve been using Launchbar which I use to REALLY “go to town” on.
Alfred is free to use for basic features like opening apps, searching files, custom searches on websites, open browser bookmarks.
I bought it for $50 like 2-3 years ago and its paid back 100x of that. Its a must have for me. TBH, I bought Keyboard Maestro after listening to MPU and its nice and stuff, but I just use Alfred to do everything. The community is great and really active.
You know how @MacSparky says, “Drafts is ‘Where Text Starts’’ on team MacSparky”. Alfred is that to me. Every automation, workflow starts there. Its has replaced TextExpander, Keyboard Maestro and bunch of other things for me.
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I love how Alfred also show your usage in a graph, so you can really quantify that 100x 
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a big +1 for chronosync- still going on my license from 2005, and an app I use several times a week still.
my only older license that’s still active might be FruityLoops which I bought on Windows 98 & which they actually let me transfer to the mac.
BetterTouchTool has been one of my best finds recently! Such a brilliant indispensable MacOS app. The UI leaves much to be desired but I suspect that will improve with time as the focus seems to be functionality. I keep discovering new uses for it all the time!
Interesting. I use to love doing macros (a while back). So Alfred does macros too? I already find it endearing due to the price (so far). I’ll probably add it to my list. Thanks!
Can you use Alfred Remote with just the basic Alfred? (Just looking it up).
I wonder why is BetterTouchTool such an underrated tool? Marketing maybe? This tool does wonderful things I never imagined I needed. The developer is a super nice person and the community is amazingly helpful.
Lesser-known things you can do with BetterTouchTool:
- Create Context Menu with custom actions
- Execute shell/appl/JS scripts
- Create custom menu bar items/subitems
- Standard shortcuts across multiple apps. Like opt+D is duplicate for me. in finder, it duplicates files, in browsers, it duplicates tabs, etc.
I feel like there have been so many new features added that people don’t know about them, since they’re not hyped that much. $20 for a lifetime license, this is such a steal.
@MacSparky @ismh Maybe a section in one of the episodes about the new stuff in BetterTouchTool would be awesome.
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Endel’s lifetime pricing is kind of all over the place. They bumped it up to $249 on iOS this year but if you buy lifetime through their MacOS app it’s still $89 and it looks like it carries lifetime over to the iOS and iPadOS apps as well as far as I can tell. After a ton of searching on their price change and/or any discounts off of that steep $249 price, I read about the price difference on this blog and purchased lifetime myself earlier this week on MacOS.
Under my user account on iOS and iPadOS, it says “subscription through Mac App Store” on it but otherwise works normally without any limitations. That’s a huge price difference for the same thing unless they decide to limit the MacOS app to only Macs in the future. They haven’t said anything like that, I just wanted to acknowledge the possibility since there are these two weird tiers of lifetime.
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@keatonkeaton wait what? Why would someone pay $249 for 2 devices when they can get it for $89? 
. I guess you paid the 89 and that unlocked all devices lifetime?
Yep! Right now it works on all of my devices, MacOS and iOS/iPadOS/WatchOS for the $89 price through the MacOS in-app purchase. Overall I’m really happy with it so far though I know I would not have purchased lifetime at the $249 price point, at least at this time. I try to support developers as much as I can, especially ones who offer one-time purchases over subscriptions but for me personally, $249 is a lot to throw down on a single app and it’s pretty rare for me to do so unless it is more of a necessity for my work.
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