First off, I appreciate the work on the New Clear. I was excited to see activity on the development on an application that I have been using for about 13 years now.
Unfortunately, the new version has significant changes that render the application unusable for me.
The lack of sync is number 1. No sync = Useless
The UI hiding the iOS / iPadOS status bar. Who thought that was a good idea? I live my days mostly on the Clear app. I need to see the status bar when I am in it.
Not being able to see at a glance the number of active items in a list.
Clear on iPad not having the list of lists visible at all times.
Slow responsiveness of the UI on older devices. There is a very noticeable delay while typing in New Clear on older devices. On top of that, the horrid animations make it feel clunky compared to the clean and simple animations of Old Clear.
I would gladly pay hundreds of dollars to get the Old Clear back. It worked. And it worked reliably for me. In the mean time, I will be exploring other options.
For those on the lookout for apps to switch to from New (Broken) Clear, I have been testing Remember The Milk for the past half a day. I prefer the UI of Old Clear but Remember The Milk might end up being my replacement
We can’t bring it back, and if no sync makes it useless, I guess we will simply have to build back up to it before we can hopefully win you back someday. But also the other feedback is useful, I appreciate you sharing it.
I will say “I live my days mostly on the Clear app” is the most stirring argument I’ve ever heard for the status bar, and I hear you, I mean I have days where I have like an hour or two spent inside the app too.
After launch dust settles we’ll probably start thinking about some initial opt-in settings and that will be high up on the list. There are still some straightforward performance optimizations we hope to do in relatively early updates too, have to admit we were not testing as much on older devices. (What model/generation are you on?)
2.0.1 will include some major initial improvements in scrolling and in-list performance for lists with thousand+ items on latest devices, which probably means it should be noticeably snappier in any longer lists on your device. And will go from there. I believe any performance regressions tend to center around very long lists and new Clear should be very snappy otherwise, but yeah I have no idea how this runs on say a 6 year old phone.
I’m actually not 100% opposed to the thought of Clear Classic on TestFlight someday, as long as it was 100% clear, this is only available with minimal support until the day it refuses to build on new Xcode etc. and that build will expire after 90 days.
But this would still require work, at this point it may even require some other migration process bolted into it which could be non trivial. So I feel like I can’t properly weigh this out until after launch dust settles and would have to run it by engineering when we have more bandwidth.
Please do not hold your breath but also, I’m not entirely unsympathetic here. I mean purely for sentimental reasons I don’t love the idea of it disappearing forever either. But we are in super triage mode right now on this new foundation, very indie resources here!