Bring Back the Old Clear

New Clear
1

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.

  1. The lack of sync is number 1. No sync = Useless

  2. 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.

  3. Not being able to see at a glance the number of active items in a list.

  4. Clear on iPad not having the list of lists visible at all times.

  5. 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.

Let me know if you bring back Old Clear.

7 Likes
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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

3 Likes
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Number of active items in a list! So thatā€™s whatā€™s missing! I couldntā€™ put my finger on it. Would love to have that feature back.

@mickeychor what iPhone are you rocking btw? Am wondering if I should update to Clear 2.0 on my older iPhones.

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I have an iPhone 13 Pro and M1 iPad Pro. The responsiveness is good there.

Also use an iPhone XS, an iPhone XS Max, an older iPad Mini, and an older iPad Air. Poor responsiveness and laggy on those devices

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Totaly agree i feel the same way

2 Likes
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We canā€™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 ā€œI live my days mostly on the Clear appā€ is the most stirring argument Iā€™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 weā€™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.

2 Likes
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I literally had at least 1 device on Clear from the moment I wake up (still in bed), until I get back to bed.

The devices I used Clear on are listed on a response above.

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You canā€™t bring it back or have decided to not bring it back? Throw it on Test Flight and give us a code.

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Iā€™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 canā€™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, Iā€™m not entirely unsympathetic here. I mean purely for sentimental reasons I donā€™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!

2 Likes
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I just got a new iPad and was going through installing apps. Decided to look at Clear again. Still no sync. My opinion still stands that Impending should not be trusted when it comes to apps you NEED to work. They are comfortable breaking apps despite consequences on their customers. Shame.

1 Like
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It does not bring me comfort to let down customers, itā€™s pretty much my nightmare because my favorite thing is delighting people.

There was a kind of crazy amount of work put into reviving Clear and making it robust for another decade, and a lot more work left to do. It was that kind of a CPR-requiring situation.

But I will say it feels we are now past the intense ā€˜will this restore a heartbeatā€™ phase and this summer our roadmap will be much more deliberately targeting the bigger remaining issues or missing pieces, now that it feels we have some breathing room to dive in.

If you check back again later this year, Iā€™m hopeful weā€™ll have made some good progress on the syncing front.

5 Likes