Unlisted MindNode Classic
Markus Müller-Simhofer (via John Gordon):
Despite our best efforts, we encountered difficulties bringing our planned changes to MindNode. Providing seamless sync, live collaboration, and other new features was impossible when storing documents as files on disk. We revised our plans and started to develop a new app, “MindNode Next,” that now manages its documents directly in the app and synchronizes them using CloudKit.
[…]
With the release of MindNode Next, we will soon rename the current version of MindNode to “MindNode Classic.” This name change aims to better distinguish between the two versions of MindNode. We understand that MindNode Classic holds significant importance for many of our users, and we are committed to continue supporting it. Our team will continue to work on shipping enhancements and bug fixes for MindNode Classic.
[…]
Due to a request by Apple, we had to hide MindNode Classic on the App Store.
This is not great for our users who want to reinstall the app (they need to use the direct link or the purchased app dialog) and I’m sure we will get several bad reviews on the new app for this. However this is better than removing it from sale since we can continue to release updates for the app.
This is what we’ve done with our older apps also. Definitely better than removing them from sale! Especially for business and educational customers who otherwise had no way to install their bulk purchases.
Previously:
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I have no interest in seeing yet another app take away the ability to mange my files in the finder. I like to be able to keep all documents related to a project together regardless of the file type, I don’t want to have to dig into multiple apps to find the files for each project.
Thankfully they are keeping the old app around, lets hope it is built on UIKit/AppKit so it can go into a low effort maintenance mode.
I feel sure Apple breaks document sync on purpose. There's no *good* reason it can't work correctly; it's just stupid artificial restrictions imposed by Apple on syncing. Apps shouldn't have to implement this stuff case-by-case; document-based syncing is the most natural approach. But no!
Love collaboration and seamless sync are notorious problems to solve with plain text files. Logseq ran into the same problems and started building the DB. Note that this has less to do with Apple their iCloud ‘solution’, although it isn’t helping. It’s just that plain text files are to work with when it’s not just read and writing data from one origin.
For local-first live collaboration, AutoMerge seems to have come a long way (and isn’t just for webapps anymore): https://automerge.org/
Clearly, it's a very difficult problem when you don't have synchronisation primitives and locking. But, that just means Apple should bring those features to document storage, instead of roping people into an unhelpful (and unhealthy!) dependency on APIs that each app must use independently to implement their own little silos.
