Don't Be A Free User - Pinboard Blog
Maciej Ceglowski, calling the “start a free web service, refuse to implement a business model, and eventually get bought” shenanigans for what they are:
Whether or not this is done in good faith, in practice this kind of ‘exit event’ is a pump-and-dump scheme. The very popularity that attracts a buyer also makes the project financially unsustainable. The owners cash out, the acquirer gets some good engineers, and the users get screwed.
To avoid this problem, avoid mom-and-pop projects that don’t take your money! You might call this the anti-free-software movement.
That’s a great name for it. At this point, I am genuinely skeptical of free services or apps that can’t be bothered or flat-out refuse to implement some kind of a business model. I need tools and services I can depend on, not web services that get bought and shut down or pivot to chase the latest stupid trend, and definitely not free or open source apps that eventually get abandoned because they became too much work or the developers finally realized they need real jobs or had a kid.
This is one of the reasons why I wished Tumblr would start charging money for the service, even if only for some kind of premium variant. I love the service, but apart from a few themes I haven’t paid them directly. Tumblr going away—by shutting down or being bought—would mean a lot of work and headaches for me.
Many services could secure their existence and become even better by charging something. I gladly paid for Simplenote Premium for two years, because I wanted one of the premium features and wanted to support the developers.
I like free stuff as much as the next guy—hell, I’m a student for chrissakes—but I believe that where people see value, they’re going to pay.
Junecloud, a quick shout-out
I just got an email from Mike Piontek over at Junecloud, whom I’ve sent a question earlier today concerning difficulties I had setting up a few Automator actions he provides as a download (among those a service to easily create SymLinks!).
He provides these and other great little pieces software for free and was still willing to reply very fast with the solution. Great service.
If you’re getting a nagging feeling in the back of your head right now, it’s probably because you’ve come across this company before; they make the great Delivery Status Dashboard widget that most Mac users know and love.
For me the nagging feeling resulted in finally purchasing the iPhone equivalent of the widget, which offers a lot more functionality and is highly recommendable to anyone who wants to know exactly when those Christmas presents will arrive.
A short take on Second Gear’s Elements
Late yesterday evening I found out about Second Gear’s latest software release on The Loop. The application is called Elements and is a text editor with Dropbox synchronisation.
Having been quite happy with the system I use for note taking right now,
— Simplenote (iPhone) + Simplenote cloud sync + Notational Velocity (Mac) —
I still liked the prospect of having one less service in my workflow, without sacrificing efficiency.
After having used Elements throughout the day, I have to say that I really like the app: It strats-up quickly, the interface looks nice and nicely customisable to fit my needs.
This 1.0 release it’s still a bit flaky — I’ve encountered a bug that crashes the app when you scroll to the bottom of the list— and for me (YMMV) it’s missing a few key functions to make it as useful as Simplenote:
- On-device-renaming — it’s coming in version 1.1
- (Full text) Search on the iPhone/iPad
- The ability to sort the file list by creation date or name. Though to be fair, Simplenote doesn’t have this ability either.
Nevertheless, Elements has already replaced Simplenote on my iPhone 4.
If you want to, you can check out the quick guide I wrote, explaining how to synchronise notes between Notational Velocity and Elements.
