I had a look at the thread linked by about subscription totals. It may be harder to wrap one’s head around a subscription in those cases. It’s like the app is an expensive power tool that you’re renting when you need to do a job (or, say, for your years of working professionally on X), but what you make with the tool is independent of the rental.Īnd then there are apps where everything about them is ephemeral (I assume that that’s what carrot weather is like). I don’t dislike that model and I don’t see a problem with “renting” the app when I need it in that case. There are also apps where your data is accessible across multiple apps, so the subscription may come and go but your data is your data. There are apps where the updates only unlock new features (like Bookends). The issue is the proliferation of subscriptions, which is in effect “renting” the application. I could add a host of other apps where I’ve made a similar assessment–Ulysses, TextExpander, perhaps 1Password (still reviewing), MindNode, and more.Īs to Bookends, now that I realize there is a non-subscription version available directly from the developer I’ll probably go that route. I just need to add and see events on my calendar. It is a beautiful app, the natural language parsing is, well, fantastic, and the feature set robust. The stock weather app provides that so I don’t pay a subscription for my weather app. What I NEED is accurate weather data and forecast. It is a great app., I like it but I don’t NEED the customizations. An example is an app like Carrot Weather. When deciding whether or not to pay a subscription I start by asking “do I NEED the features this app offers?” If I don’t NEED those features, though I may prefer them, I usually opt for the “good enough” non-subscription app. Each individual has to decide what represents good and wise stewardship of his or her finances, including a reasonable budget for app subscriptions and/or purchases. I doubt anyone begrudges developers a proper return for their labor. My sense is that, at least in this forum, there’s not an objection to subscriptions in the abstract … As a practical matter … there are limits to the number of subscriptions a person can reasonably maintain. The subscription I’ve been paying for ($9.99/year, if memory serves) is for syncing between macOS and iOS. If I need to extract annotations from a PDF, PDFExpert lets me export those to Markdown fairly and the Mac app for Bookends is a paid update about every two years if you want new features what you already have keeps working. (Their prices aren’t unreasonable, but I already have +/- 25 GB in Dropbox thanks to referrals from the early days, and I’ve got 2 TB in iCloud. Using linked files + PDFExpert means I don’t get Zotero’s new annotation features, but the upside is that I get reliable sync without having to buy additional storage from Zotero. (Thankfully this means I don’t need to use Zotfile for directly managing PDFs on the iPad, which was the part I always found fiddly and annoying.) I can still add notes to a source in Zotero, and those notes will sync just fine. That puts the PDFs in a place that I can access from PDFExpert, no matter what device I’m on. Because the iOS version doesn’t play well with synced files, I still need to use Zotfile to automatically save PDFs to a folder in my iCloud Drive (Google Drive or Dropbox would work just as well).
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