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Nova by Panic

nova.app

461–470 of 549 posts

Re: Nova by Panic

#461
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sketch has the same subscription model.

But sadly Sketch is garbage now. I've gone from paying for v.x.0 - x.09 and its solid and stable. Now I pay $XX a year and it bricks with every update. It was a great program for awhile there. Its making me look at XD at this point... SMH

It’s honestly been made irrelevant overnight by Figma.

Once even one person on your team moves to Figma it becomes absurd to use something where you have to share fixed files around and are stuck with only using Macs for your design work.

I still use Sketch for things that only I work on outside of work because I’ve already paid for it but having living documents and being able to share with the rest of the company without them installing software is essential now. Not to mention being able to use my powerful PC workstation not just my Mac laptop is great too.

Re: Nova by Panic

#462
post #445
post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, the quote and what you put after came as a big surprise - I was ready to nod in agreement as you recognize this as a sad story about the platform. The last time I was working on a text editor (KDE's Kate) and found a bug in the text layout engine it was written against (Qt's), I wrote a patch, submitted it upstream and it made everyone else's apps better, too. I can't imagine the world of hurt, discomfort and…

I've been a professional macOS developer for almost 20 years now and I can't tell you the number of times that this has been an issue. With no access (or ability to patch) the platform source code you are left with a) hacky work-arounds, b) re-implement the component or c) change the app's design or feature to compensate. All of which are a pain / more work / risky etc, etc - just to work-around bugs in the platform.…

The same happens with html and browser bugs all the time.

Re: Nova by Panic

#464

They are cutting themselves from so many users... I don't think that macOS has anything special today.

I think they were making Mac software back in the days when anything Apple was a true niche. They should be fine.

Re: Nova by Panic

#465
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going for Swift means competing with XCode, which wouldn't make sense as Swift is generally used along with the entire iOS/macOS Dev tools (Simulators, UI Builders, Device Manager etc). Not a wise thing to do.

It's the same for VSCode and JS/TS support though. Fighting against a fully featured, free, open-source and well-established product just on the basis of speed is going to be an uphill battle.

React Native for Windows and macOS is developed by Microsoft, and they continuously show how Electron bloat means it uses 300x more resources than Win32, UWP, React Native applications.

My hope is that they create enough momentum to force the VSCode team to rewrite in React Native.

Re: Nova by Panic

#466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Platform specificity typically comes with native performance and, in the case of Panic, a UI that closely follows OSX conventions. For some (many?) these are meaningful value-adds.

But isn't it better to be native on multiple platforms? Like Chrome itself, or Photoshop, or Sublime Text, and many others?

You are never native on multiple platforms. You are always alien on all of them.

Unless you have separate code base for each.

Re: Nova by Panic

#467
post #22

I really like their pricing structure here. If you want updates forever, it's functionally a subscription (which makes sense - constant updates require constant dev work). The key difference is that if you stop paying, you keep everything you've paid for previously (the app and all past updates). That's a _great_ way to do a subscription.

I've been spending a lot of time lately thinking about what I'd want for a subscription service. I've paid for subscriptions that allow you to continue to use the old version indefinitely, as well as subscriptions that completely turning off access to software at the end of the subscription. I think the "use the old version indefinitely" is actually irresponsible as soon as the application opens a network port: it's…

I'm doing the same, with https://httptoolkit.tech/: the core features are free, but there's advanced extras that require an active subscription.

I'm this exact case you cover: it's a powerful developer tool that's very connected to the network & captures the traffic of many of your other apps & devices. It _must_ stay up to date, or users could be at serious risk. Holding back updates from users would be irresponsible. I've noted this in the past, but never really spelled this out fully, and it's important context, thanks!

For cases like ours, the upside of freemium over simple paid software though is that the end of the subscription doesn't completely shut down a user's life (unlike totally losing access to your IDE, or your cloud data), and you do need to ensure that. Instead the free user limits are put back into place, but those should generally make workflows inconvenient or less effective, and not catastrophically blocked.

In my case, for example, free users lose the ability to import/export collected traffic, but the exported HTTP traffic is in a standardized format anyway (HAR: http://www.softwareishard.com/blog/har-12-spec/). Some automated built-in tools go away too, but manual workarounds exist for free, for immediate & short use cases. Those fallbacks & that portability ensure nobody is ever totally locked up by the end of a subscription.

It's a very delicate balance (they need to be limited a bit, or nobody buys anything!) but it's been working well for me so far, and as a bootstrapped dev a free basic option is _incredibly_ useful as free marketing. Good luck with PhotoStructure - feel free to get in touch if you want to chat about any of this.

Re: Nova by Panic

#468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I can't imagine the world of hurt, discomfort and frustration of developing against a lib set I can't read source code of or improve. Thank you . It boggles the mind that anyone who can write code would ever use a closed source operating system.

> It boggles the mind that anyone who can write code would ever use a closed source operating system. Some of us want our work to actually reach people who don't write code or sysadmin their own computer, i.e. most people in the world. I, for one, think my effort is wasted if it doesn't benefit those people. So while working exclusively on a free-software platform is tempting from an ideological purity point of view…

Working on a free software platform is not mutually exclusive with reaching the majority of end-users. You can develop web apps for example or use cross platform toolkits for native apps. That's what I do and it works great.

Re: Nova by Panic

#469
post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been a professional macOS developer for almost 20 years now and I can't tell you the number of times that this has been an issue. With no access (or ability to patch) the platform source code you are left with a) hacky work-arounds, b) re-implement the component or c) change the app's design or feature to compensate. All of which are a pain / more work / risky etc, etc - just to work-around bugs in the platform.…

The same happens with html and browser bugs all the time.

If it's an open source browser (Firefox or Chromium-based) can't you submit a patch?

Re: Nova by Panic

#470

I've been using the beta version of Nova for a few weeks now and I've almost used my trial period for the 1.0. As a TypeScript developer, if someone made me choose between paying $99 for the actually-free VS Code, or buy Nova, I would by VS Code without hesitation. Before it began getting long in the tooth I was a big Coda fan. On the whole I like VS Code but I do suffer the occasional runaway process so I am open-mi…

I also had the beta for a few months and work exclusively on TS development for work.

Nova is a great editor but the hard thing is taking a step back and realizing that Microsoft has clearly designed VS Code to be the Typescript Dev tool in the same way that XCode is the Swift/SwiftUI development tool.

The leaps and bounds in features JUST for TS is incredibly hard to replicate mostly because it’s almost Microsoft’s exclusive goal with VSCode development.

I imagine if one doesn’t work in TS that Nova is far more competitive, it is not a bad IDE at all when judged on what IDEs prior to VSCode meant.

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