I don't want to compare anyone to Michelangelo, but the opening sentence of the aticle is more than flawed. My daughter got some painting classes in that age, and I saw work of some gifted kids. A bit better than "directionless doodles, chaotic comics, and a few unsteady-at-best school projects".
I'm probably missing some context, but on my Mac I'm using three fingers drag and I can lift fingers and (quickly) reposition them without breaking the drag.
What are "competitive options"? It's a genuine question. Before Synology, I had some DIY server in a Fractal Design case, and noise and, to be honest, bulk were a problem. Also, maintenance of the server wasn't funny.
I switched to Synology about six years ago (918+). The box is small, quiet, and easy to put in the rack together with the network gear. I started with 4TB drives, gradually switched to 8TB over time (drive by drive). I don't use much of their apps (mostly download station, backup, and their version of Docker to run Syncthing, plus Tailscale). But the box acts like an appliance - I basically don't need to maintain it at all; it just works.
I don't like all this stuff with vendor lock-in, so when the time comes for replacing the box, what are alternatives on par with the experience and quality I currently have with Synology?
The problem is that a lot of competitors don't necessarily have great software. For example QNAP on the hardware side is supposed to be good, you have more bang for the bucks in term of performance but they had several major CVEs that really call into question their security practices. I have a friend who is running Unraid on QNAP and is happy though.
Unraid is brilliant if you're interested in BYO hardware. It can be setup with mix and match drives, supports docker and virtual machines. Realistically it's a bit more work than Synology to get up and running, but once it is, the only thing you really need to do is update the software from time to time
I don't mind the idea of BYO hardware, especially if it's an old server with hotswap drive and hotswap power built in.
Increasingly, with the time I have towards the things that interest me, I just want storage and a bit of compute to be like a home appliance, reasonably set and forget it and leave my messing around on a USFF computer.
I think this is just the tradeoff you need to make. I’m not aware of a solution where you can mix-and-match drives but also get the write performance of a traditional RAID array.
that is true, but you can make one fast pool using zfs and one slower one using unraids disk array, if you want to, or just use the zfs part as a cache for performance
Kind of surprising, I went the other way. I started out with ReadyNAS 15 years ago and after that product faded due to lack of support I no longer wanted to be tied down to a manufacturer. I built a custom solution using a U-Nas chassis. Found FreeNAS back in the day and have stuck with it ever since. Maintenance is fairly minimal.
If you heavily rely on apps/services. I've just gone to self managed docker environments for things like that. A very simple script runs updates.
I over-purchased a NAS and ended up with QNAP, even thought Synology provided more power (lower electricity use) to performance ratio.
In hindsight buying a QNAP that was more than the Synology equivalent felt like a good idea but I didn't really get into it quickly enough.
I also got burned by Western Digital's scandal of selling WD Red drives that really weren't that got them caught in a class action lawsuit. Can't see myself buying them again.
Some Intel N100/N105 board from Aliexpress with Fedora or Debian on top should be fine & much more flexible if you decided you want more than just a file server.
I bought Kindle Paperwhite with ads. Get tired of ads. Tried to pay Amazon to remove ads, for some reason it didn't work (I'm not from USA).
Contacted customer support, explained what's the problem, the person on the other side said "wait a minute, sir" and removed ads from my Kindle without asking me to pay for it.
So if I have a company that sells, say, manure, I can search and hire a voice actress that sounds exactly like Scarlett to promote me in radio ads? And write a tweet that vaguely implies that it's really her?
$150 for an electron app. I was considering holding my nose about the Electron part as I've been desperately trying to find a todo app that meets my needs, but damned if I'm going to subscribe or pay $150 for one.
Just because they don't feel the price is right/competitive doesn't automatically write them off as not your target market/ICP - it could still be very valid feedback, especially when competitive options may be cheaper.
Personally I pay less than 1/2 the sub rate they're charging for TickTick Premium, and love it. That's not to say I wouldn't pay double for what it gains me (I definitely would), but given that TickTick is a viable option - I don't need to.
Hope you enjoy - I've been on it for a few years after bouncing around a variety of tools and I really have no major complaints. My main concern is risk of eventual bloat, but so far it hasn't been an issue. I feel like it does a good job of letting you pick and choose what you want to use, hiding the rest.
Side note: although TickTick supports notes, I don't use them. I dig UpNote, another not-super-well-known but simple, cross-platform, and inexpensive tool. It's basically the feature-set I wished Evernote stopped at (super subjective, maybe too simple for most here).
I am (personally) alright with this model. $150 is on par with OmniFocus Pro [0] which I've gotten easily more than $150 of value out of. (Including prior purchases of earlier versions, and similar price points.)
With todo apps, I don't really expect the same sort of constant on-slaught of features like I do from other things. I expect it to continue to work and get out of the way. I expect the price to reflect the fact there was a lot of upfront work to get it "done" to a level where I can just use it.
Right, but by choosing to go keyboard-focused it's competing in a space with very feature-rich Vim and Emacs plugins (and users who want to work out of those) that are free.
Even the Sublime users have lots of options already. Sublime is ALSO a very capable text editor and $100.
The OP is likely trying to deliver something like Superhuman ($30/month) - speed and keyboard focused-email - but for todos. I would imagine there is very little overlap between that market and people who use vim or emacs + plugins.
Fair, though I do think there's value you might be discounting here that ISN'T keyboard shortcuts. The market isn't all vim/emacs users, it's complex Omnifocus-style todo app users, who are frustrated with the lack of keyboard support in those apps. These users are more comfortable with this price point than you may expect (IMO) but will need feature parity for things like OmniFocus perspectives/floating timezones/easy outlining.
A CLI app is not something I would want to use for something I touch every 30minutes, every day, from many devices. But I do use vim for text editing.
OF keyboard support is fine - and I say it as an ex-emacs and current neovim user who works in terminal.
It does not look that stellar but is well thought out and I am faster with kb in OF than I was in org-mode.
