Folding Text 2.1 out -- now abandoned by Hog Bay

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Oct 19, 2015 at 03:41 PM

It is no doubt true that Folding Text didn’t sell well enough to keep Jesse’s attention on it, but his next project could very well be even more difficult to make work financially, as many early-adopters may not be so quick to buy into it with his demonstrated track record of jumping ship on his software.

TaskPaper isn’t nearly as “geeky” as FT and seems to have a larger following. Instead of continuing to improve TaskPaper, he made the choice to stop working on it and focus on FT, thus, in the end, leaving two user bases high and dry. He also dropped the TaskPaper iOS app. (In fairness, he did make it open source and two developers are now working on forked versions: TaskOnPaper and Taskomator—the latter just had a new version come out.)

While TaskPaper remains a live app (you can still buy it on the App Store)—it just hasn’t been updated in well over three years and Jesse stated that he was stopping to work on it because it is flawed and he wanted to give FT all the power that TP had and more. Now they both seem abandoned.

I’m not complaining about this—it is what it is. Lots of big companies hang users out to dry too (e. g. NetManage with EccoPro). I’m just suggesting that it is not a good way to make a software business viable.

Steve Z.

Andy Brice wrote:

>
>Prion wrote:
>>https://hacked.com/interview-writeroom/
> >I think the key text is:
> >”[Folding Text] also quite geeky and not easy to sell. Much easier to
>sell simpler more focused apps like WriteRoom and TaskPaper.”
> >So it seems he wasn’t making enough sales to justify further
>development.
> >It’s impossible to predict how many sales a new product will make before
>you release it.