What Fine Apps Are You Drifting Away From?

Curious, did you drop Agenda as you were thinking of thirty days ago? I started looking at it today and thought I’d give it a try for planning/tracking a new WPress site. Thought it would encompass past, present, future in a interesting fashion.

I’m at the i wonder what happens if stage. … oh, it does markdown links and bolding. Still have not gotten to why bother… yet.

I did. Now that it has attachments and in-line images I’m trying again. But I’m not at the point of conviction that this is a must-use app.

I like the general design idea behind Agenda, but I’ve had enough of notes apps where I can’t choose my own font/size and text/background colors. (Another example of this is the otherwise very nice NoteJoy app.) I either use apps that give me the choice, or I use services in which I can change those styles via CSS in my browser.

Overcast has been my podcast player of choice for years and it keeps getting better.

I’m too much of a Scrivenerista to move away from it, but I also would whish they’d find a decent background syncing solution. I don’t care if icloud or dropbox, but I want to be able to just start writing and not wait two minutes until it has synced …

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I drifted away from Scrivener when they had troubles getting an iPad version to market.

I appreciate that Scrivener’s features could have a strong hold on an user. Eventually, I found a replacement that met my needs.

Same here. This is how syncníng was done 10 years ago.

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I too find it annoying, but I accept that this is the only way right now to ensure flawless syncing. The (possible) complexity of a Scrivener project cannot be synced securely with the usual background syncing techniques. Probably they could find a more convenient solution that would work for most people most of the time. But this would include the risk of data loss and to me it makes them trustworthy to see their priority is on this side.

It seems like apps designed in a pre-sync era often have a hard time making the jump to the modern world where it’s expected that they’ll work seamlessly on every device. Some never make the jump. Others, like Scrivener (and DEVONthink) manage to graft on syncing capabilities, but it doesn’t really feel as integrated or seamless as an app designed for sync from the ground up.

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I’ve reduced my clutter in real life thanks to the minimalism trend. I’ve been thinking about how to do this on my devices. There are still some apps that I don’t want to get rid of “just in case.” I guess it doesn’t hurt since it’s digital space, it hurts when I subscribe or update without considering how much I use the app. There are also other apps I might consider switching away from for comparable apps. For example, I really enjoy Screenflow, but my university gives us Camtasia for free.

I stopped using PDF Pen Pro, PDF Expert, Pixelmator, affinity photo, affinity designer, and Good Notes. Mostly because I’m trying an Adobe creative cloud subscription. I replaced good notes with Apple Notes. I also stopped using Mars Edit since I moved to SquareSpace. I guess I also moved from WordPress to Square space. I had my website on a low-cost server, Dreamhost, but it was sooo slow and then there were extra fees for backing up my website (would rather not figure out how to do this on my own). The last straw for WordPress was when I got an email that a virus had been detected and that for a subscription fee they could remove it and start monitoring my website for viruses.

My school gives me a free office subscription with 1TB of space. I moved some test files over and immediately I received errors. Onedrive doesn’t like dashes or symbols in file names I guess

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I stopped using Simplenote when they dropped native TextExpander support on iOS. Used to use it on iOS and sync with nvAlt on the Mac. Still miss it - the clean interface really worked well for me. But lack of TE is a dealbreaker for me.

Now I take notes in Drafts and then import to 1Writer, which syncs with nvAlt on my Mac.

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Now we have Drafts for Mac – really helpful for me. I had a similar setup with nvAlt before.

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I was a loyal Aperture user from the very start but after it was abandoned I have settled in with Lightroom 6 for DAM and initial processing (last stand alone non subscription version). I round trip through Luminar for additional tweaking but only as a plugin.

My take on it is that the more powerful and complex an app is in the underlying structure the harder it is to get sync working at all much less on multiple services. I’d rather deal with the issues of waiting for a rock solid sync solution with a powerful app than limp along with a less capable one.

Personally, I also use the Scrivener sync time on open to gather my thoughts and prepare to write. It’s like a mini meditation that rarely takes more than 1 minute.

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I respectfully disagree with DEVONThink about their sync being grafted on. Granted I am a fairly new user. About 2 full years. I think their sync solution is beyond what most software offers. Actually I don’t know of any software that offers all of what DEVONThink does.

For ex:

  • Full encrypted at the storage level. My data is mine!
  • iCloud, Dropbox, Webdav, Bonjour
  • If you spend any time offline, you can still sync using Bonjour between all your devices with a cable connection or a direct wireless connection. No need for the internet. When back online, it just syncs with the online storage options.
  • Redundant sync stores. I can sync the same database to several sync stores. I can even mix and match.
  • Selective Sync. I can choose which DB is sync’d to each device.

For me personally, I store over 8 gig of files (mostly PDFs, markdown docs, movies), over 6,000 files, and the sync is near instant over iCloud. I use Bonjour when I go offline.

I hope someday they offer sftp. That would round out the capabilities and make it very easy to set up a large cheap private sync store on a service such as DigitalOcean.

— Stephen

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Over the past few weeks I’ve deleted some fine apps that I’ve not used in months:

  • Textexpander (also due to keyboard access in iOS and subscription pricing) swithed to KM for more complicated snippets on the mac, and standard text replacement on mac and iOS for everything else.
  • Spark, I went back to stock mail.app
  • Ulysses, my writing is a mixture of stock notes app and Drafts
  • Fantastical, went back to stock calendar app (mostly for travel time) with Drafts as input source and custom action to format correctly to compensate for natural language parsing.
  • got rid of Office365 subscription, the native iWorks suite is more than enough for my needs

so all in all trying to simplify the app landscape :slight_smile:

Since the Drafts beta I have simplified my note taking apps to just Drafts and Ulysses for writing. I used to have a convoluted system of notes with Bear, Apple Notes, and nvALT.

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To do list trackers in general. I used Things for quite a while but feel like I’m at a point where I can remember 95% of the things I need to do.

BBEdit->PHPStorm: I made that same change a couple years ago and really kicked myself for not doing it much sooner!

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I went the other way. (The difference is that I keep generalized lists elsewhere but mainly use my task manager for things to which I can assign dates/times.) Whenever I have the smallest thought about making a call or planning something or buying an item I just throw it into my task manager’s inbox with a quick-add, and then deal with that list - with many items I’d otherwise have forgotten - when I had time later in the day to review them. What had me stymied for too long was trying task managers that didn’t allow for quick-adds and inbox-bucket.

Wow, that’s an expensive app.