Please please consider leaving legacy Clear alone, and making this a new, separate app in the App store. If you don’t want to use Clear 2 for the new version name, call the new Clear “Clear” & call the old Clear Legacy, Clear Original, whatever.
I like many things about the new beta versions (and am enjoying the test flight journey), but the creators of the original version captured the concept with just the right mix of features & simplicity. I would hate to lose that.
This reminds me of another app I use quite a bit. I have used the Drafts app for many years, but they abandoned the simple “create a note” concept long ago. Luckily they realized this, and left Drafts & Drafts 4 alone, and make improvements to Drafts 5.
I’ll probably pay for the new Clear when the time comes, but would love to not have it wipe out or overwrite the Clear app I have used since the beginning. If I had to chose, I would be more likely to keep my old version until it stops working with ios
I really hope that it stays, because curently I had to go back second time during beta, cause of reminders are gone and it’s like number 1 feature for me.
Reminders will be back next build, probably tomorrow morning.
More for @LegacyUser It will be free and we will not charge you. But yeah it will be updating over old Clear.
And I don’t know how much this matters to you but you do still have basically the design side of the original team on this project between me and David, original sound designer Josh etc. If you think we’re messing it up, maybe you can call it more of a Star Wars prequels situation vs. Disney’s latest lol.
Please give us a chance here, I do feel we kind of need to go all in and can’t afford to split our focus and resources across two generations of the app, one of which is rapidly falling apart. (It takes a lucky day and some prayers getting the latest Xcode to even build the ‘old’ Clear today, and not sure if you read the latest email update but the business side is in dire need of a reboot.)
I appreciate the explanation. I was thinking more of old apps that still run but are not maintained in any way, i.e. Vesper & Drafts 3. Either way, I’m glad the Clear app (old & new) is still around, and will hopefully be with us for quite a while in its new form. I’ll just have to visit the OG Clear in my personal app museum on my old iphone 5s (perpetually in airplane mode to avoid updates).
Yeah, I don’t know the specific situation in those apps cases but it puts extra pressure on Clear knowing that there are tens of thousands of people out there still using it daily, pouring more into it, and it’s into this vessel where the infrastructure behind has aged past modern standards etc.
But yeah we are going to put a lot into attempting to do this justice. I know a remodeling (well really, a rebuild) has some anti-coziness built into it, but I am hopeful it will be a good remodel vs. a bad one. And I have sentimental value attached to the original design too… maybe I will actually end up doing the same on an iPad or something.
I’m totally okay with replacing the old one with new one, as long as reminders stay reliable everytime. One thing I would really appreciate is that we as a legacy users get the legacy look for free.
Yeah we are planning that, probably Classic Heatmap theme + Helvetica + OG icon. (Possibly original sounds too if we can squeeze that in/port to new sound theme format.)
I echo the “Legacy Look” request. As a daily From-Day-One user, the single thing I’m really struggling with is the lively transitions up and down between lists. I’ve really tried to embrace New Clear, but I suffer migraines and the text moving, stretching and bouncing on the transitions becomes nauseous for me. An option to make the transitions less exciting would go down well for some of us
Echoing the legacy look request here, as a bare minimum. New app looks exciting but there’s absolutely zero in it that most people who are still regularly using the old app need. Don’t forget this was basically abandonware at one point, and now you are forcing an overwrite.
On that note, one huge functionality you mentioned removing was the Mac app and iCloud syncing. Is that back on the roadmap given how much time you’ve now spent on superfluous features?
Sorry for the negativity, but it’s important to remember both Realmac and yourselves dropped the ball on this for nearly a decade, and are now removing something we love.
Syncing is in the roadmap, we want it for ourselves. There was almost a year of work on it a while ago, with the new Clear running on iPad, but it was not enough to get it robust to our standards. (Like edge cases where syncing would get confused/need to resolve a conflict with dupes.)
With the original Clear, I believe a key reason it imploded early on and wasn’t able to sustain as a business was because we dove into cross platform sync too early. It was a huge expense to take on Clear iPad, Clear Mac especially, and iCloud sync and basically burned the team out… and it was not some game changer for the ongoing business, or aligned to a tiny indie garage band of a team with some unique strengths but not a huge amount of resources. So while we want to get there this time around, we want to be more prepared this time and start with the 95% who just use it on their phone.
Anyways, I get that I can’t change this into a positive situation for you right now, and it feels fair to me that you’re disappointed. But the goal is here is to deliver for you eventually, in a way that will sustain through the future instead of being on this kind of uncertain abandonware place that will eventually not work.
What will be there for release in terms of ‘legacy look’ will be the Heatmap Classic color theme (with the black completed area and such), Helvetica font, and classic icon option for past customers. Will look into sound effects too.
Thanks for replying Phill, as always. Great to hear about the legacy theme, and a shame you can’t quite get over the line with syncing. Finger’s crossed for the future.
