I’m sorry for the absence. I don’t think I dealt with the feedback for FT3 internally very well. To be honest, I almost gave up on it - the jury’s out whether that’s a decision I’ll regret in time .
However, I’m not giving up, at least not yet.
This is still a work in progress, but I’ve been fleshing out two avenues in parallel.
A simpler, document based, native FoldingText app
What this means is that this app will not be as fully featured as FT2, but will work reliably (as reliable as new software can be to be perfectly honest). No plugins at the time of release, but I’ll work together with those who are really interested in specific plugins to get them into the app
A dropbox backed service that will work online
This is to provide people access to their FoldingText documents from anywhere they can run a modern web browser.
This is a lot of work, and I’ll take my time evaluating and building the both of these. I will, however, move to a more regular cadence of updates and releases, and slowly move away from this forum for the new products (To be decided). As always, feedback and constructive criticism is welcome.
Forgive my ignorance, but what’s a “Document Based Native” app versus what FT2 is? What advantages does this add? I thought biggest thing for next version of FT was support for a directory of files?
If FT is moving to be web-based or only support docs on Dropbox? I cannot use Dropbox for most of my documents.
What’s wrong with the current approach in FT2? Is it unfeasible to fix the bugs that are bothering some users (personally it’s very stable after I removed some plugins causing issues)?
I would be happy to upgrade to version 3 even if it only included some minor improvements and general bug fixes.
Or alternatively, may I suggest that you release FT it as open source?
Seems like it’s already a pretty good foundation to build on. Especially since it would be fairly trivial to port to Linux and other platforms. Could be a good way to get the bugs bothering people fixed and the project continues with less need for resources to keep it up to date.
You could maybe try to reach out to see if there’s sufficient interest to maintain it as open source as a cross-platform project?
As a long time FT user, I’m relieved the app isn’t going to become something else. I’m very happy with FT as it stands. There are a few bugs that need fixing and I’d like a couple of tweaks made, but that’s it. I appreciate you need to be remunerated for your time, and that the FT2 code-base has become too complicated to maintain effectively. If you were to release FT3 as a re-written, updated, stable version of FT2 with no additional features (and perhaps even a few removed), I’d happily pay to support it — even a relatively large amount (however, I would like to avoid a subscription model). I’d even be happy to pay in advance to show my support (by crowd-funding perhaps?).
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