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Development Team Led by John Gruber Releases New Note-Taking App Vesper
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Unless Gruber pays this site, it is amazing how much coverage he gets here. Big deal - another note taking app (with limited functionality). Replace Gruber's name with Joe Smith and nobody cares. Frankly I am surprised this didn't make the front page of this site.
Gruber can do what he wants. He has his platform and his followers. I don't consider him a journalist either. I consider him an Apple mouthpiece. If he want to sell crap apps to his loyal followers, more power to him. I just don't understand why anyone falls for it or why anyone cares.
Gruber can do what he wants. He has his platform and his followers. I don't consider him a journalist either. I consider him an Apple mouthpiece. If he want to sell crap apps to his loyal followers, more power to him. I just don't understand why anyone falls for it or why anyone cares.
I get your point better now, but I still think you are too harsh. If Musk were to write a regular column for a magazine, I would still read it because it would be entertaining to read his perspective. He is famous enough that his conflict of interest is very visible.
For other run of the mill journalists who might be working for NYT the standard changes, unfortunately. I cannot possibly keep track of the possible conflicts of interests of hundred or thousands who write for NYT, so I'd like them to have none and NYT to pay them enough to buy that loyalty. Either that or disclose each and every possible conflict at the top of each article. Daring Fireball or marco.org or Asymco are sites with only one writer and I go there to get the opinions of designers or indie developers or whomever, aware that they primarily earn their money through means other than blogging. This might make their opinions biased, but it also makes them have a unique perspective.
The difference would be if Musk was writing a column that reviewed potentially competitive products. If he was writing a column about his business, that's fair enough (although he'd have to make it very explicit). No news organisation would allow him to write a more general column on motoring or the environment, where he was potentially covering competitive products. It would have no credibility.
Does Gruber not make his primary income from blogging? His RSS feed sponsorship rates alone are $8,500 per month ($442,000 per year). That's on top of advertising income (a single, exclusive ad on a site with 4-5 million pageviews/month according to him), membership income ($19/year, no word on how many members), and T-shirt sales. There are certainly no sour grapes there; I don't think the amount you earn has any bearing on the standard of professionalism you are expected to adhere to. That said, he earns more than any journalist working for the NYT, so I don't understand why you'd hold him to a lower standard because of it. If I were a paying member, I'd also be demanding a refund. Paying readers presume independence.
Gruber doesn't work for any organisation so he doesn't have a boss to keep him in check or a formal ethics policy that he has to subscribe to; I'm not saying he's broken any laws by doing this. I'm saying that there are standards of professionalism which are expected in this industry and which have also been breached.
I know professional journalists who have forgone very lucrative deals (consulting contracts and the like) to protect their independence. It's disrespectful to the profession for somebody like Gruber to be earning millions of dollars from this App, especially because it's his name that's clearly driving the promotion, while he pertains to be a journalist and tries to call others out for failing to adhere to professionalism standards. Read interviews with him and he clearly likes to think of himself as a journalist; I don't think it's right that you get to romantically act like one but then shirk one of the biggest responsibilities that comes with the territory.
That's all I'm going to say on the subject. I'm not going to be reading DF any more. I know the loss of me as an individual isn't going to have any financial consequence to him, but I think the loss of trust in general is going to hurt. This is a big opening for somebody else to step in.
That is the exactly the point though. Gruber is a personality that has a large following (4-5 million page views/month). Having used Vesper for better part of yesterday, the app isn't perfect (missing sync and export, strange font choice, cannot rename tags), but it is very deliberately designed.
I suspect if the app was priced more according to current feature set, it probably won't have as many critics. But as 1.0 product, it is very polished. But knowing Gruber and Brent Simmons (I am not familiar with Dave Wiskus), I am quite certain the app will evolve.
I received a Tweet reply from Gruber regarding the features we all want, they will come in time and when they are ready to release them they will, in case nobody noticed they released the App just ahead of WWDC, it takes advantage of that conference, waiting until all the other features were ready would surely have delayed it's release.
And whats wrong with him making an App in conjunction with two others, he gave us all markdown for free.
And whats wrong with him making an App in conjunction with two others, he gave us all markdown for free.
Whatever.
This is America, which is for now, a liberal democracy (note to the unintelligent: don't read that as being Democrat). The idea people successful in any industry shouldn't trade on that in other forms is asinine. If Gruber isn't out there claiming the value of the app is based on his merit as a blogger, then why is he being vilified for it?
I like reading Daring Fireball. I think Gruber writes well. I own two DF t-shirts.
My response to Vesper is simple: who cares?
Why does the world need another note-taking app, and for $4.99 at that?
100% uninteresting.
This is America, which is for now, a liberal democracy (note to the unintelligent: don't read that as being Democrat). The idea people successful in any industry shouldn't trade on that in other forms is asinine. If Gruber isn't out there claiming the value of the app is based on his merit as a blogger, then why is he being vilified for it?
I like reading Daring Fireball. I think Gruber writes well. I own two DF t-shirts.
My response to Vesper is simple: who cares?
Why does the world need another note-taking app, and for $4.99 at that?
100% uninteresting.
Vesper: The Top Note-Taking App of 2009
Seriously? No universal support, no sync of any kind, and no way to export your data from the app aside from emailing it to yourself?!?
This would be a great app in 2009, but it's 2013 and I won't pay 99 cents let alone $5 for a redundant lazy effort like this, particularly with all the self-serving conflicts of interest inherent in the whole venture. If the iOS Notes app supported images like the Mac version does, why the hell would I ever need a device-dependent app like this? Maybe it'll be one of the new features in iOS 7...
__________
With all that said, I think the worst part is that he chose to use a photo of his own child in the app description pictures. Give me a break, man...
Seriously? No universal support, no sync of any kind, and no way to export your data from the app aside from emailing it to yourself?!?
This would be a great app in 2009, but it's 2013 and I won't pay 99 cents let alone $5 for a redundant lazy effort like this, particularly with all the self-serving conflicts of interest inherent in the whole venture. If the iOS Notes app supported images like the Mac version does, why the hell would I ever need a device-dependent app like this? Maybe it'll be one of the new features in iOS 7...
__________
With all that said, I think the worst part is that he chose to use a photo of his own child in the app description pictures. Give me a break, man...
Somebody who is not familiar with a topic does not become automatically more credible, just because he is examining from the outside. Unfortunately, if you are familiar with a topic biases and conflicts become inevitable. Better to disclose them and let in many such writers than limit it to those whose knowledge, sources and biases are unknown...
I would still want to know about Musk's take on BMW-e or Mercedes B-class electric vehicles. As people know who he is and what his financial stakes are, it would not be a conflict of interest. Even if you take his words with a grain of salt, he would still have a lot of credibility. I'd rather hear from him than somebody who has never started a company or never had to trade off car features against time, space & cost or never tried to take a car design into manufacturing or never had to deal with battery issues.
Could he lie to hide something? Sure. On the other hand, an outsider without any bias and therefore not intimately familiar with a topic can easily be manipulated by the insiders into printing misleading or incorrect information. For example, take Isaacson and his Jobs biography. He wrote fairly incorrect claims about the relationship between OSX and Jobs' old company NEXT. Well, either the source he trusted did not give him the full picture or he misunderstood. The articles do not have to be about technology, either. You can follow qz.com, with high quality articles about mostly economic and social topics. The same set of journalists sometimes end up misleading their readers, such as when I saw two stories regarding legal issues surrounding visas for foreign technical employees. What they wrote might have been technically correct at a superficial level, but completely incorrect in practical terms. Most likely, they are being manipulated by those they trusted as sources.
Awful amount of words in this thread for someone who doesn't care, don't you think?
Not at all. I am trying to figure out the appeal. I went to his site because of the posts in this thread about $5 being cheap for an app and now I am convinced he is certainly not a journalist. Every recent post was basically just a quote from someone else with one line of commentary or description. And anything he does actually write is just the Apple company line. So no real conflict of interest to me. If he can make money off his fans, it is no different than a band selling their fans a t-shirt. I just don't get why he has any fans. It is possible to not care about the app, but be interested by the situation and discussion.
flat design falls flat
Totally agree. With flat design as embraced by this app, you have to run a background process in your brain, to scan the screen and spot items that may potentially be interactive. Often you are wrong. Some things you thought might be interactive turn out to be not, and other things that are in fact interactive you miss. The only way to be sure is to try to interact with it and see what happens. Major fail. It should be blatantly obvious what is amenable to interaction and what is not.
Totally agree. With flat design as embraced by this app, you have to run a background process in your brain, to scan the screen and spot items that may potentially be interactive. Often you are wrong. Some things you thought might be interactive turn out to be not, and other things that are in fact interactive you miss. The only way to be sure is to try to interact with it and see what happens. Major fail. It should be blatantly obvious what is amenable to interaction and what is not.
There are multiple desktop clients for Simplenote. They list ten for the Mac and four for Windows on their own website: http://simplenote.com/downloads/
I don't understand where that 'no desktop sync' notion comes from.
ive followed him for a few years and have never once felt he was objective. i feel his posts are sometimes on the same embarrassing levels as some of the "fanboys" on here when it comes to google. he often ignores whole topics where apple dosent come of well and gives similar stories regarding apple and google quite different treatment.
hes a smart guy with good connections which i find wasted when he is nothing but a apple mouthpiece
i think the criticism of the his recent post about app prices and the way this app is being reviewed/reported on is fair.
I agree that Gruber is not completely objective. He is more objective than many other Apple pundits though.
He is an excellent writer but is far from humble and occasionally does things that are rather self-serving, like his app price post, that rightly put a lot of people off.
Gruber is an interesting guy. He seems to live in a fantasy world where he is a combination of James Bond and Dean Martin. His last live podcast was in a bar and sounded like he was hanging out with the Rat Pack
And the name of his new app? Named after an obscure cocktail. Gruber is just too cool I listen to multiple podcasts too. I find Jim Dalrymple to be the most overtly pro-Apple biased pundit around. But they are both entertaining. I just take Dalrymple's comments with a larger grain of salt.
I agree that Gruber is not completely objective. He is more objective than many other Apple pundits though.
He is an excellent writer but is far from humble and occasionally does things that are rather self-serving, like his app price post, that rightly put a lot of people off.
Gruber is an interesting guy. He seems to live in a fantasy world where he is a combination of James Bond and Dean Martin. His last live podcast was in a bar and sounded like he was hanging out with the Rat Pack
I listen to multiple podcasts too. I find Jim Dalrymple to be the most overtly pro-Apple biased pundit around. But they are both entertaining. I just take Dalrymple's comments with a larger grain of salt.
dont even get me started on dalrymple and his 1 word answers/reporting.
these are writers/reporters/bloggers who through some contacts get some info, try things before its available etc. however they are not steve jobs or someone of that stature which i feel they think are closer to than the average tech buying joe schmo.
as i said in my post i read grubers blog and check it often and find him informative and when he does what he does best there is a lot of info ive gotten from his work so i wish he and his kind would do more of that otherwise they are just as sad as the entourage #87 for the flavor of the month.
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I keep an eye on his blog too and I feel the same way as you. He seems to enter into fanboy mode most of the time he covers anything related to Google, which is a shame because he is clearly a very smart guy. Hopefully he doesn't continues this trend or else I'll just stop following like I did with AppleInsider.
Vesper will sell reasonably well, mostly due to the fame of Gruber and the other developers. I would not be at all surprised to see in a few weeks Gruber writing on DF about how '$5 apps can be successful' and using Vesper as evident of this.
Vesper's success as an app will have far more to do with Gruber's personal brand than the quality and features of the app.
Gruber was a mac developer at BareBones software, then started a blog that had (and has) lot of success and it became his primary job. Now he is releasing an app for iOS.
This dynamic is called "Talent plus Capitalism Effect" and had nothing to do with journalism ethics or conflict of interests. Are you able to create a blog that has the same following? Do it. You will get the rewards. Are you not? Don't be jealous, it's a really pathetic show.
There should be an easter egg for this app. Every time you write the word "Pavlovian" or "canonical" something happens, those are probably the two words gruber uses most often.