Welcome!
This is the community forum for my apps Pythonista and Editorial.
For individual support questions, you can also send an email. If you have a very short question or just want to say hello — I'm @olemoritz on Twitter.
First Look at Editorial 1.1
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Via the Internet and all info being there, we know better TaskPaper integration is a real possibility, on the iPhone as well, and for that matter that an iPhone app exists (wether it will be released anytime soon or ever, I guess we can't officially know yet, but from things certain people have said, I think it's in progress - don't take my word for it). It's close I think, but unfortunately I'm not a tester :( so I'm speculating on observations. Granted, another official update on the site would be nice, but it seems like a complex app in comparison to many others, with a lot going into it. I know it's at least going to happen eventually, and I take the long time to mean it's going to be awesome and the relative lack of regular updates to mean he's too busy making it so. Maybe I'm just optimistic though.
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If you look at Ole's twitter, you get the occasional nugget, like this screenshot of the iPhone app. From all indications, this sounds like a very significant feature update that also adds a new app (iPhone). Understandable that it takes a while to dev and polish.
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jonmoore, I'm with you 100%— we need communication, on a regular and consistent basis, if we're going to have a level of comfort that the product is moving forward and is actually on the horizon.
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That was my whole point. I'm fed up spending time and effort with products (such as i.e. the aforementioned TaskPaper) only to find out they become unsupported on my platform of choice (IOS) and end up in the far flung reaches of the App store with the tumbleweed. I've bought and supported all of Jesse Grosjean's programs and continue to beta test the latest version of FoldingText but when you build personal workflows around specific software and find that the developers are unable to support their creations it's a major hastle.
It's not a problem if a development strategy changes as appears to be the case here with Editorial (with what appears to be an integration of Jesse's TaskPaper syntax within Editorial and I'm sure many other changes) but leaving customers in the dark with no explanation is not good quality customer relations. To announce a product upgrade in October and then only seed snippets of update info to a Twitter feed for the next six months is not what I think of as good practise. I work in the software development business too so I understand the complications that can happen but they should never get in the way of clear & open communications with the customer base.
Apologies if any of this sounds harsh, especially considering the innovative products Ole has brought to market over the last few years but running a successful company needs exemplary communication skills as well as superhuman programing chops.
jm
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@pruppert I've been excited since I first saw the screenshot. It's shaping up nicely it looks.
As for updates, like they said, you follow the twitter account and you get updates on occasion. Traditionally there's a twitter account specifically for the app or the dev company where updates can be found, but that's not the case here. I'm anticipating it and I'm generally impatient, and I also understand the desire for more info concerning the progress, when you invest your time in it. But considering how a lot (I mean A LOT, but not a majority) of devs respond to requests for progress updates, he handles it quite well.. I see him answer people, even if he doesn't seem to get on there often. I've seen many devs who get offended or downright irate about a simple "are you able to give an eta?" And that may be because they're asked a lot, but I think it's a bit ridiculous. At least Ole is polite as can be about it all.
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@Ole Thanks for the iPhone support. Looks awesome in screenshot we are waiting for that take your own time to complete the project perfectly done.
https://omz-forums.appspot.com/editorial/post/5907833547653120#post-5861947190804480
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From LeftsideWobble:
@olemoritz @LeninRzSz and talking of the 1.1 update that was announced 6 months ago... Any new status update?From @olemoritz:
@LeftsideWobble @LeninRzSz I know, I'm sorry. Hope to have some news soon. :/
3:54pm - 10 Apr 14 -
@due3die I second that. Would I love to have it now? Absolutely! But I'm fine with waiting if that means it is the best it can be. Take your time and do it right, which I've no doubts you will.
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I may be mistaken, but I thought the notion of waterfall development had gone the way of the Dodo and we were living in the sparkling new world of agile?
Take the time to do things right, sure, but when there is more than a year without a bug fix, I have to wonder if there isn't something seriously wrong. Heck, even Pythonista had an IOS 7 refresh...
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On "the 1.1 update that was announced 6 months ago" I would say it WASN'T announced but rather a "keep the faith" teaser. But people take such things as an announcement.
I would say, with no grumpiness whatsoever, it'd be better to have a series of small(er) updates rather than the one very big one we're now all eagerly anticipating.
It's a matter of "news management" and I hope Ole's learnt something from this.
But this all smells of a "sole developer" situation where the product plan is vulnerable to lots more things than if a big corporate were attempting to push it out. But then I can't imagine Editorial (or Pythonista) ever getting past the Product Planning stage. (At least not in MY big corporation.) :-)
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Even though I've never promised an actual release date, and the above was indeed more of a "teaser", I guess it's obvious that I wanted to have the update out a lot sooner myself. I'm really sorry if the delay got some of you worried about the app being abandoned, but I can assure you that this is absolutely not the case.
In hindsight, I probably should have released a smaller update a while ago, and I'll try to learn from this. Being a solo developer, I can change plans pretty quickly when I get excited about a new idea, and while I'm very grateful for that freedom, I'm also well aware that it can make the whole process somewhat unpredictable, and perhaps less trustworthy.
Especially when working on new features (vs. incremental improvements/fixes), it's often very hard to predict how long it will take, and more importantly, if it'll work out at all.
For example, when I worked on Editorial 1.0, I spent about two months on experimenting with an entirely different method for creating workflows. In the end, while the system was more flexible in a lot of ways, it turned out that it was also more difficult to wrap your head around, and that the UI wouldn't work at all on the iPhone... It looked pretty cool on screenshots though, so if I had worked on this "in the open", I'm pretty sure that a lot of people might have been disappointed when I decided not to pursue this idea.
After I released Editorial 1.0, my first priority was getting Pythonista ready for iOS 7. Even though Editorial got a lot more attention then, the update for Pythonista was more important because the then-current version had pretty severe compatibility issues on iOS 7 that didn't exist in Editorial because I could already test it on the betas.
Shortly before releasing Pythonista 1.4, I started working on a pretty big new module. I didn't plan to include it in that update because I wanted to get it out as soon as possible, but I was (and still am) pretty excited about it. While I initially only thought about it in the context of Pythonista, I started seeing a lot of potential for this in Editorial as well, and I quickly made a lot of progress initially, so I figured that it wouldn't push back the release by more than a few weeks.
As it turned out though, there were a lot of little details/bugs that took quite a bit longer to figure out. Both Editorial and Pythonista are "platforms" in a way, so I have to get some things (mostly) right the first time, because people then start building on them, and I can't make radical changes that would break existing workflows or scripts.
Anyway, the thing I'm actually talking about is a Python module called
ui
that'll basically allow you to create custom user interfaces. It's not just a module, there's also an integrated visual editor for setting things up without code, and in Editorial there's also a way to build UIs around workflows, without having to write Python at all (though you can also mix and match). Before you get the wrong idea: This is in no way a complete wrapper around UIKit or some kind of Cocoa bridge, so you won't be able to do a all the things you could do in a native app, but it provides a (hopefully) easy-to-use and pythonic way to create UIs that look and feel "at home" on iOS, and it's possible do some relatively advanced stuff with custom drawing and touch handling.For Editorial, I tend to think of this as a "plugin" interface that allows the creation of workflows that are nearly indistinguishable from native features. Obviously, this won't be for everyone, and there will definitely be a learning curve, but given what I've seen this community come up with, I'm pretty confident that it will enable some people to really push the limits of iOS text automation (and others to reap the rewards via shared workflows).
I didn't want to announce this sooner because I faced quite a few challenges getting memory management and a couple of other technical details right, and frankly, I wasn't sure if I could pull it off – but at this point, I'm pretty sure this can work well, and it's been in beta testing for a while now.
I've hinted at a couple of other improvements, both here and on Twitter, notably TaskPaper support and an iPhone version.
While these are also relatively big features, I already started working on them before 1.0 was released. I mostly pulled TaskPaper support out of the initial release because it seemed a little bit like a rip-off and I didn't want to dilute the Markdown focus of the app, but given that the official TaskPaper app for iOS is no longer available, and a lot of plain text folks are looking for alternatives, I think that it makes sense to include it now. I've tweaked the implementation a little bit since I worked on the original version, but overall, it wasn't a huge change, and I mostly "resurrected" code I had already written. It's similar with the iPhone version – this was quite a bit more work, but I definitely wasn't starting from scratch, and 1.0 had a lot of the pieces already in place. My current plan is to release it as a universal app (free update) and raise the price (for new users) to $6.99, but I'm still thinking about it, and I might make the iPhone version a separate app instead (this is basically just a business decision, it doesn't affect the actual development very much).
At this point, the things I've talked about are pretty far along, but some polish is still missing, and I need to work a bit more on the documentation. The same applies to Pythonista 1.5 – because of the platform characteristics I mentioned before, I think that it makes sense to release the updates for both apps (more or less) at the same time, so that the feature set/API of the custom iOS modules is in sync.
I hope this has clarified a few things, but feel free to ask any remaining questions you might have below, I don't have a lot of surprises left anyway. ;)
Finally, here are some more screenshots of the work in progress (click on the thumbnails for the full size):
This is very simple workflow-based UI, there's an embedded workflow that is run when the selected button is tapped:
...this is a more complex Python-based UI that implements a calculator popover. Since the code fits on one screen, you can also get a rough idea of how the
ui
module's API works:...and finally, a few screenshots of the iPhone version:
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Oh shit. This is fucking amazing! and you are a GENIUS!!
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i'd pay 12$ for this thing
seriously,u can add it as iap... -
Wow. This is very impressive. Can't wait to try it out.
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@omz Thanks! I could have a lot of fun with this on long plane journeys. (I've had quite a bit of fun with 1.0 on plane journeys already.) :-)
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Looking beautiful, man! You take as long as you need. I had faith in it all along, given your hints on Twitter and all, but I know a lot of people will really appreciate this status update. And this is beyond what I was imagining. I'm very excited to try the new features. Hopefully all continues to go well. Once I started using Editorial, I was surprised it was only $4.99. $6.99 is plenty fair, especially comparing to Pythonista,a price (I think it's $6.99 right?). I would be willing to pay for the iPhone app separately, of course I won't argue with a universal :)
So, as of now, if things go as planned, are you planning to release 1.1 and the iPhone version at the same time? Or is it too early to tell? Thanks, and however long it takes, we're all looking forward to it. Cheers!
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Thankyou!
Great update.
With Editorial I am this " " close to having the Schedule-Diary-System that I've been after since my first Sol-20 computer days in the prehistory of personal computing.The TaskPaper includes in Editorial will finally give me the S-D-S and the other things hinted, and shown, above in conjunction with the creative workflow authors in your "ecosystem" will give me the closest thing yet to my very own DynaBook!
After a 38 year wait since my first personal computer I can wait a day, or two ;) more for perfection.
Thanks again for a great product!
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So, as of now, if things go as planned, are you planning to release 1.1 and the iPhone version at the same time? Or is it too early to tell?
Yes, that's the plan.
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Ole, thanks for the update on the status of Editorial. I understand this isn't something you can comment on in the absolute but do you see this next iteration of Editorial being released in the 0-3 month period or the 3-6 month?
For my money the developments look exciting and overall it feels like more of a V2 release than a point upgrade. The business decisions are yours to make but it's my belief that if the application is fundamentally the same experience across both iPhone and iPad it should be an aptly priced universal App but if you've had to customise the user experience to each platform then it is fair to price them individually. Fantastical 2 is a great example here of a company that provides great value even though each IOS platform is an individual purchase. But there are a number of text editors on the market that provide iPad and IOS Apps that are fundamentally the same but still charge a seperate fee for each. These always feel like a company milking it's customer base.
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I understand this isn't something you can comment on in the absolute but do you see this next iteration of Editorial being released in the 0-3 month period or the 3-6 month?
Definitely 0-3 months.
it's my belief that if the application is fundamentally the same experience across both iPhone and iPad it should be an aptly priced universal App [...]
The overall UI isn't radically different on the iPhone, but there are a lot of little details I had to tweak to make it work on a smaller screen, especially in the workflow editor.
Though I tend to favor universal apps as well, you could also make the argument that users who only own one device would pay for something they don't need... Of course, there are examples of apps where porting it to a different screen size is trivial (e.g. most games), but that's really not the case here.
Still, I've made Pythonista universal (it was initially iPad-only as well), and it's quite likely that I'll go the same route here.