Roam Patrol!

Posted by nathanb
Oct 20, 2020 at 02:36 PM

bartb wrote:
After 30 + years in Information Technology I have gracefully surrendered
>to the thought that I will never fully grasp all the thinking that goes
>into software product development & marketing. I know there are always
>competing priorities within companies and that markets can be fickle.
>I’m just determined to stay agile and flexible and avoid the heartbreak
>of following in love with certain software.
>

Same. I don’t necessarily blame Microsoft and Evernote’s direction as they are kind of at the mercy of catering to their huge install base. And if making their product do the basics more gracefully helps the ‘average user’ then their decisions probably have a more positive impact on the world than what I’d rather see them do.

I just grew up with software being used by nerds, not normies. In that time every ‘update’ came with more functionality. Now most updates are about user interface or performance improvements. It used to be that if you liked a program but wish it could do just a little more, all you’d have to do is wait for feature updates. This is still true for niche software, but I’ve now accepted that we can’t ever expect more capability out of popular software, only ‘usability’ improvements. ‘Usability’ almost always means less options for me.

I still catch myself in that mindset, reactively scanning OneNote changelogs for improvements I’ve waited a decade for. It’s just not going to happen and that’s ok. I just need to use tools that fit me instead of settling for tools that are designed to be most accessible to the widest possible audience.

As far as updates go, that’s what makes niche software fun. Roam is adding really cool power features like monthly now and that’s refreshing. Since it’s such a wonky product, I can be fairly confident that it’ll never be so popular to be forced into shifting all development resources into catering to the typical office user.