I agree with this perspective.
I also volunteer to support this initiative because, like so many others on this forum, I think FoldingText is, in a word, AWESOME.
Can I suggest that the price on the website be raised to its original price, can I suggest that we all demonstrate our collective powers by recommending the product to our friends and colleagues and lets see if we can demonstrate our commitment to the product the same way that @mutahhir and @jessegrosjean have with their development time. Perhaps some might be able to get a post on LifeHacker? Perhaps reach out to HARO? @foldingsheets - I agree with your sentiments on the home page - I’m guessing you have some specific thoughts - perhaps you can create one?
Anyone teach marketing? Might there be an opportunity for a real time landing page test of different copy - as an assignment? Perhaps we can encourage them to share with their classmates based on the fact that x% of the grade will be based on the actual revenue that comes in on their pages?
Lets work together to save FoldingText by supporting @mutahhir
I’m coming to this game a little late – I just discovered folding text, ordered it, and installed it. IMHO, I think this is just the niftiest little product I’ve seen in a long time. It’s simple but got plenty of “swiss army blades” to do just about whatever I need from it. It’s quick, it’s fast, it’s text-based, and it just flat works! I have become very fond of this app in the last couple of days. It reminds me a bit of the old Ecco program in some ways, and that was a jewel.
Pulling it from the market would deprive a lot of folks of what is truly a little gem of a product. As @mcmckinn said, put the price back to where it should be - it’s worth it. I was charged $0.00 the other day, but I’ll gladly upgrade to a more proper price point.
My question is: why had I not heard about it until now?
Reading this post, I think the only real options are:
open source if you can find a willing maintainer
sell it to somebody who thinks they can make it work
let it sit at this version and only do emergency/compatibility updates
So I guess it depends how much time/money you want in/out of this thing.
I don’t see the value in starting another, competing, app from scratch. That would be more fun for the developer, sure, but the long term outcome would not be any different to where FT is right now.
First off, thanks for developing this great app. I have had my eye on it for years but never bought it because I didn’t need the folding functionality. I recently started a complex project where I knew I needed something with this kind of folding of focus from macro- to micro. Lucky for me, it was right after you made it free! Thanks again.
So this is one vote for “YES please let it live on somehow!”
I wonder if you’ve explored the idea of licensing the productivity features to a more (ahem) “economically established” markdown editor like Ulysses, Bear, SimpleNote, or Marked? My read on the markdown editor market is that there is a HUGE variety of editors, free and paid, each with 85% of the “full” feature set and each with one or two key differentiating features. Very few are dominating the market and making sustainable money. Other great low-cost markdown editors like Mou, MacDown, and Typora don’t show much evidence of active development.
The cheap bastard frugal pragmatist in me would rather support this project with one-off donations rather than to sign on for yet another yearly contract for a cloud alternative like Dynalist or Workflowy.
I think it’s smart to develop FoldingText-for-Atom, as I assume that supporting this new breed of cross-platform open source text editors (alongside VS Code and Brackets) should open you up to a larger user/donor base?
I like the idea of open sourcing it, just because one’s text editor is so personal that probably everyone has slightly different ideas about how it should work, so the customizability those open editors allow is a nice addition.
I hope these suggestions help, and I dearly hope that FoldingText lives on. I’m just discovering how great it is (and evangelizing it to my coworkers and blog readers). Hoping that the rest of the world catches up!
I just wanted to make sure to let you know that I am another user who has recently found Folding Text and started using it heavily. Huge fan! It has become my standard markdown editor and plain text editor that really is such a killer app because it can scale up so well and can really be great thinking tool. I’m hoping for some way to support Folding Text. If not to support future development, just to make sure it doesn’t go away or break with a future macOS update. Maybe a donation link or something? Thanks for an amazing app!
Just another, very belated post to say that FoldingText is a wonderful tool that does exactly what I need. If there’s a way to keep it working as it is, that’d be grand, and I’d certainly be prepared to pay for it. If it could be made to work on iOS, I don’t think I’d write in anything else. I’ll also be recommending it to students, though whether they’ll take it up is another matter.
I’m new as well.
I would like to see this as an open source project.
very promising.
I would also like to see it ported to an iPhone/iPad app with syncing vis iCloud.
I just wanted to note that as of December 2019, FoldingText remains my preferred app for long-form plain text writing and editing. Some apps now come close, but the simplicity of FT’s IU and its extensibility continues to set it apart. I know that the markdown editor space has been or has gotten crowded, but FT still remains distinct as a product.
Have you considered just making it a yearly software license, rather than a one time purchase? While in general I hate having to pay for a new license every year, I think there is a way to do so without alienating users. Sketch has a great model for this, I think. It’s a yearly license to continue getting updates, and if you decide not to get a new license your version no longer receives updates, however it continues to function provided that no OS update breaks the software.
Going this route seems like it would provide you with financial incentive to continue updating FoldingText, and would also allow loyal users to continue to support a product that we obviously love.
FoldingText is too unique to let it die, and it scratches an itch no other markdown/todo list/etc. app does.
Hi, I’m brand new to this product, but TaskPaper was love at first sight!
Thank you for the brilliant ideas that went into both of these apps!!
I really like what you’ve put into this app, and would gladly pay for it. I really don’t like the subscription payment model, but I’d prefer that over allowing this app to die.
After getting addicted to Taskpaper, I looked for something that would allow me to do that kind of todo planning in iOS, and found Editorial. Then I started exploring what else I could do with Editorial, and fell in love with your foldable text approach to writing.
I finally arrived here after looking for something that could do what Editorial could do, but on my Mac. I already have Scrivener, and several WISIWYG options, but none of them allow me to fold things in and out so easily, so that I can go back and forth from seeing the whole forest to perfecting the next tree, so to speak.
The things I see lacking in FoldingText are the things that I’ve been getting used to in Editorial:
I’d like to edit, but with a font that’s not quite so ugly to look at all day! I don’t need a lot of font options, but only 1 font, and making it a mono-spaced font, was not a pleasant surprise!
Allow me to quickly generate a preview of what my MD document will look like, plus generate output files like PDF, or HTML.
In regard to making this more sustainable from a developer’s standpoint, what if you integrated FoldingText into the same app as TaskPaper, and allowed the combined app to do both? It would obviously take some effort at first, but in the long run you’d only have one app to maintain.
Best wishes, and thanks again for some truly awesome software!
Last minute update: I see that it is possible to change the font, but not in a way that will be easy for many people. What I had in mind is a font menu, or a few options in a preferences menu.
I just tried and it does open and work for me. It might be that the first time you open it you’ll need to right-click on app icon, and choose “Open” from popup menu, and then OK in the following warning dialogue. After that double-click should work.
crash message
“Application Specific Information:
*** Terminating app due to uncaught exception ‘NSInvalidArgumentException’, reason: ‘*** -[NSURL URLByAppendingPathComponent:]: component, components, or pathExtension cannot be nil.’
terminating with uncaught exception of type NSException
abort() called”
