This somewhat cryptic announcement of Folding Text 3 for Mac, with (maybe) a Windows version in some undefined future.

http://support.hogbaysoftware.com/t/foldingtext-3/3638

I used Folding Text 1 and 2 intensively for a while, years ago, but when it began down the path of abandonware (the developer seems to have a history of leaving work unfinished) I forgot about it. The post linked above doesn't explain much about what Folding Text 3 might be, or when, but it will come with a "perpetual payment model" even though on first release Folding Text 3 will not have all the features that Folding Text 2 has.

So, it will cost us more over its lifetime, and give us maybe less than the current version, maybe more. Maybe who knows? I find it hard to get enthusiastic about vapor.

I hear you. On the one hand, so many cool ideas. Taskpaper was brilliant. Folding Text was powerful and simple at the same time. Oakoutliner was really promising.

But the products do seem to evaporate (tho endure in other ways). I admire the innovation, I really do. And I understand that it's not easy to come up with a product that pays you.

So in the end I'm not sure what to do. Pledge some money to a good thinker? Buy sketches of software that never quite live up to their promise?

Someone in that thread said it for me: not interested after reading "FoldingText 3 is also written in electron"

I've never come across a an elegant Mac app using that Framework, let alone one that responded quickly and smoothly. I nearly coughed up a lung last month when TheSweetSetup said Atom.io was the best Mac text editor - it's a powerful electron app, but dog-slow with large files.

An underwhelmed user wrote on the Hogbay forum:

"FoldingText is moving into an area where there are already established competitors like Ulysses, Bear, and The Archive, that, and I sincerely don’t mean to be discouraging, are firing on all cylinders. As far as I knew, no one was doing what current/previous FoldingText was doing - giving me this lightweight toolbox to work with plain text files."

It's baffling. Why take a more-or-less unique product and change it to compete with established products against which it will be difficult to gain traction? Not a good business plan, or at least not a business plan that the developer has bothered to share.

In the Windows world there isn't a Ulysses or a Bear, and so maybe Folding Text could gain traction in that market, even with a subscription model, but the developer teases a Windows version for some nebulous point in the future that likely never will arrive.

A developer needs a good product *and* a good business plan.

And yet, and yet... As a licence-holder of Jesse's Mori (which worked very well in my experience) ten or eleven years ago, one of my first Mac applications, I hope very much that Folding Text 3 works for us, and for him.

I don't understand why anyone would make a macOS note taking app/outliner in 2018 that didn't have an iOS version.

Our own Stephen Zeoli wrote on this forum in 2014:

"[Hogbay owner] Jesse Grosjean is an innovative developer, but he doesn’t seem to have the ability to make a plan and stick with it. ... Maybe the downturn will force him to be a better business man."

Or not.

Hugh wrote:

And yet, and yet... As a licence-holder of Jesse's Mori (which worked
very well in my experience) ten or eleven years ago, one of my first Mac
applications, I hope very much that Folding Text 3 works for us, and for
him.

But it's not really Jesse anymore. He's completely offloaded the app to Mutahhir, as he explained 5 months ago in this HackerNews thread ("Mutahhir has since taken the project over while I continue to work on TaskPaper and WriteRoom."):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15928992