About the survival of our Data ( when Apps die )

Posted by Skywatcher
Jun 13, 2025 at 07:59 AM

macosxguru wrote:
I tried to address your questions in:
> >Abandoned Software and Lock-in
>https://bicycleforyourmind.com/abandoned_software_and_lock_in
>#macOS #software
>

Interesting article, thank you.

But I have a few reservations about it :

I think it comes down to how people tend to think and work with data. You say “I love outlines. I live in outlines.” and “For me, with my focus on writing, the solution is “focus on the format.” Text formats are my focus.” , and that’s a blessing , because you’re less hampered by the issue of visual thinking. But I ( and certainly a lot of other people ) tend to think spatially, even in my head. I literally see thoughts floating in my head, and i try to reorganize them spatially.

This is why software like Curio or Tinderbox is so invaluable to me. Curio is like this giant whiteboard that can accept almot any type of media you throw at it, and allows you to reorganize all of it spatially , and even connect them ( in a more limited way than Tinderbox for example ).

It also depends on the type of work you do. I happen to have projects that deal with a lot of multimedia material: images, videos, graphs/diagrams, PDFs, as well as simple text. This is obviously not easy to save into a standard format like plain text or Markdown. And the main value of Curio isn’t just that it can absorb multimedia stuff, but the fact that it can -organize- and -map- them spatially in a way that creates more sense and meaning from groups various of multimedia data, and makes new insights possible.

Tinderbox is the same way, athough just limited to text. The value isn’t in the day the data is stored, but in the way it’s organized and mapped and linked to each other. It’s the -linking-, the mapping and organizing that creates more sense in places where it didn’t exist previously, new insights and therefore new data. Tinderbox is basically mainly a linking machine ( and also a semi-programmable search and retrieve machine), it’s almost its main purpose of existence.

Spatial software ( MindMaps, Curio, Tinderbox, OneNote, Obisdian -when using visual graphs mode-, etc) serves a type of work that is simply either impossible or very hard to do with software that presents data sequentially like outliners or databases. Because the value isn’t in how the data is stored, but how it is linked AND presented all at one visually.

Using universal formats , as you concluded in your article, may solve the portability of stored data, in the sense of transfering one storage to another storage. But how do we transport the main value of the work done with these type of spatial apps : The deep linking and complex organizing ( the kind that goes beyond the simple grouping in folders ans subforlders) of data, sometimes of multimedia type ?

I don’t know what is the solution, and maybe one should simply accept that there isn’t one . Maybe a small consolation would be what Stephen Zeoli wrote earlier, about restarting the work all over again : “So maybe there is some solace in the fact that you’ve already gotten good value from the now-abandoned application. And if you need to rebuild the map in a new app, it is a new opportunity to re-examine your efforts and perhaps develop new insights.”