Aquaminds Notetaker

Posted by Hugh
Sep 14, 2019 at 04:09 PM

satis wrote:

>
>NickG wrote:
>> One signiifcant advantage of Curio, Tinderbox, OmniOutliner and others
>>i s active support, from both the developer and the user community.
> >At this point in time I think developers who don’t develop apps that can
>be easily accessed on mobile are going to find their numbers of
>customers continue to shrink. In 2019 I simply would never consider an
>app like Curio or Tinderbox, no matter how good. I’d take a less
>full-featured app whose data I can access and edit from a tablet or
>phone any day.
> >Of the apps mentioned above only OmniOutliner is cross-platform, but my
>experience is that development is sporadic and idiosyncratic, the app
>has glaring UI issues, and the user community is declining (and
>responses online ranges from great to nonexistent). With the Mac version
>now raised to $99 and the iOS app now $50 (if you want sync and other
>features I consider must-have), it seems clear that they’re putting the
>app into maintenance-mode, and aren’t interested in new customers. If
>you look at the forums and their participation in them, the vast
>majority of discussions are about OmniFocus, the company’s bread and
>butter, with most of the remaining discussions being about OmniGraffle.
>The inability to easily create and edit and share themes is distinctly
>unfriendly, they know it, don’t want to spend the resources to change
>it, and no new new features are promised for the future.
> >Because of this I’d rather use multiple apps with online components than
>tie myself a a single-platform app.

Personally I’m not so sure that Omni are putting the app into maintenance-mode. It’s true that there are gaps in both their development-timeline and their feature-list for OmniOutliner that I’d like them to remedy as soon as possible. And I’m sure that OmniFocus gets major attention because it must be the major earner in their offer. But from the outside it appears they have what could be called a “carousel” model for developing most of their software, putting major effort into each of their apps in turn (apart from OmniFocus) every few years or so.

As a user, I prefer that to the “shooting star” model, where an application is developed like crazy for a couple of years, and then disappears in a puff of smoke. We’ve seen that too frequently.