What a beautiful app. Sorry to see it become abandonware soon. - Same happened to other apps like that. Years ago I used and loved Netmanage’s EccoPro as a personal information manager (PIM). It was an outliner, an address book, a database. Way ahead of its time. But it was abandoned.
I have used Nisus Writer Pro for several years, replacing MS Word for my personal text writing. And I loved it. Sorry to see that devs get older and cannot maintain it anymore.
Same is true for other apps that I heavily rely on. For instance DevonThink. I don’t know how solid the company is, what their future looks like.
> For instance DevonThink. I don’t know how solid the company is, what their future looks like.
Oh, they exist, but did a rug pull with a switch to half-assed subscription model last year, increasing the cost threefold over the same time period. But it is ok, we all know that making a proprietary software a cornerstone of your workflow is a long-term risk. I've dropped them and never looked back.
I was thinking the only option that makes economic sense for Nisus writer is a subscription.
If the market is saturated and they're not going to sell any new copies, then they're just going to go out of business.
If they have existing customers which want the software to continue to exist on an operating system designed to make existing software stop working every few years... then customers paying for the privilege of keeping the thing working on Mac OS seems like the only option.
(For reference, on Windows you can just run stuff from 1995 with basically no problems.)
I hate subscriptions as much as the next guy, but if something is mission critical and irreplaceable, the $15/month for "I need this to keep working" seems pretty reasonable. If there's a non-trivial number of people in a similar situation, maybe they could work something out.
What are you using now, if I may ask?
A bunch of tools - Carbon Copy Cloner for backup, Cryptomator for syncing my docs to iOS, Samurai Search for searching through docs on iOS, Find Any File for search on Mac, and refiling... whatever, I've used a loosely hierarchical structure before, so I refiled with Alfred for some time, then I wrote a small script for dired in emacs.
Way happier now - DT did what I expected, but it was ugly, slow and cumbersome. Now I have a loose collection of tools and if I do not like Find Any Files, I can switch to ripgrep or whatever. Don't like CarbonCopyCloner? Take any other backup/sync solution, no problems.
Same here. Using lots of different tools. Many cli based. Yazi as file manager (TUI app), Houdahspot for searching fulltext plus preview, Hazel, and many more. Recently started migrating my pdf documents from devonthink to Obsidian.
Different person, but here’s what I moved to: https://honeypot.net/2024/05/31/retiring-devonthink.html
TL;DR I migrated back to the filesystem, with several smaller, more focused tools to replace DT’d functions in better ways.
I’d still be on DT but their pricing model is insane today. A $200 license gets you two computers. Have a work laptop, personal laptop, and an iMac in your home office? Too bad! Pick the one you don’t want to access your data on, or buy another license! LOL, no. They say this is to have pricing that’s “fair to everyone”, but apparently by being universally crummy.
This was basically my conclusion when I was evaluating DEVONthink earlier this year.
And it’s a pity, because DT is very nice. It’s not that nice to justify its exorbitant price tag, but still.
I’m glad they pushed me to using a Unix-philosophy collection of more focused tools, though. Each of those is better at their own thing than DT is.