Sunrise is shutting down
blog.sunrise.am
blog.sunrise.am
> Today, we’re excited to announce that Sunrise is joining Microsoft. For Sunrise, this is just the beginning.
> Sunrise will remain free and available for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Android and Desktop – we’re not going anywhere.
Sort of unrelated, but Outlook for Android also still cannot handle recurring all-day events. They will appear in the calendar on incorrect days. Also tested this across multiple servers.
I use Nine for email, which blows Outlook for Android out of the water. Business Calendar 3 is the only Outlook (Desktop) equivalent calendar I've found for Android.
> It’s almost time to say goodbye
> as all good stories go, there’s a sad bit to it: we’re not able to support and update Sunrise anymore. No new features. No bug fixes.
If they don't shut down, I still learned something new! But usually they do.
In this case, I landed on Fantastical [1] — it's a little pricy but completely worth it. (Mac/iOS only.)
We should appreciate when its pricey. That's motivation for the product to continue to exist. Otherwise, "OurIncredibleJourney".
I throw a quid down the toilet? That's fine, I don't mind. I throw a fiver or a tenner? Woah dude, that's like, a Starbucks latte! Totally different (or not, but hey, that's what it feels like).
I wish Apple would start allowing time-limited trialware. The IAP machinery is already there, they just have to allow apps that stop working after 30 days if there is no payment. After 30 days, I have a pretty good idea whether an app is worth £1, £10, £50 or 0.
I agree.
I still can't fine tune my screen brightness nor set up a firewall. oh but next version of the OS will have support for saving a copy of my credit card for wireless payments
I still use Sparrow for email on Mac. Would use it on iOS too, but it's quite buggy in iOS9. Spark is _almost_ as good as Sparrow on iOS, but it's free which makes me wonder whether they're doing some kind of data mining for revenue and how long they will be around.
P.S. +1 for fantastical, it's great!
> This application is temporarily over its serving quota. Please try again later.
EDIT: Changed it to say the website is up, where it said the website will be up shortly.
you can also pull up fantastical and scroll through your events but I find most of the time I'm reviewing events from my phone.
here are some more tweaks: https://www.alfredapp.com/blog/productivity/dont-miss-a-date...
At least, until they reach a level of self-operation that makes it clear that if they are bought, they'll be kept.
It's 50€ in a world where premium calendar apps are 3-4€. It better be good to justify an order of magnitude price difference.
I've just gotten used to the UI.
Can anyone commit to building a proper business? Is Sustainability no longer a virtue of creating a service/application?
One of the things that that comes up a lot with new ventures is that they don't know the answer to those questions when they start, but they do when they either die or succeed. In this case it seems that its financially feasible as a "feature" of Outlook rather than a standalone business.
Is that the case? They were bought by Microsoft, but does that mean they weren't making enough money before?
They got bought out. That presumably made them money.
How is that not a proper business?
I'm definitely an oddball, but I would rather want to be part of a business to serve people and solve problems. I don't want to be rich, just make enough be comfortable enough to work on the problems that I want to solve.
Maybe getting bought out on my first successful product affords me the freedom to do so.
How about we users commit to building the tools we need, and forget about relying on businesses to do it for us?
That's what free software is all about — head on over to the Free Software Foundation and pitch in today!
I wish the Chicago FSF had two or three offices in town, a local administration, weekly meetings, classes daily, and that I could send them $25 a month to remain in good standing.
In the long term Free software can't help but win, unless Stallman gets hit by a bus. Stallman will eventually be hit by a bus.
edit: and by all that I mean that Free Software needs to build a proper business.
Also the window managers were at least slightly less awkward to use and at least tweekable.
I think there are a lot of specialised software development tools and products that are free or open source that are generally better than their commercial alternatives.
Although it's complicated as a lot of large players are putting a lot of money into free or open alternatives while still convincing their customers to pay a lot of money for their enterprise alternatives. (I wonder how they do it. I am actually reluctant to use a free database server although it's not uncommon for the commercial database we use to have rather horrid bugs that won't even be fixed since its virtually impossible to reproduce the problem in another system, and we can't debug properly without the source.)
It's only mass market applications and games that gives you enough money to totally outcompete free, maybe a small reason is that typically only a small fraction of the audience can code. I guess the same is true to some extent also for specialised tools in other domains, like financial or medical software, were the users typically can't code and there might be legislation and regulations too.
It's sad when we pay $5 for a coffee made in 5 minutes that we'll drink in 3... but not $5 for an app that took 5 months that we'd use daily for a year.
Unfortunately, I realize this attitude might make it harder to actually make a sustainable business around solving a non-trivial problem, but as a user I've been burned too many times by companies suddenly getting acquired and then ceasing to exist.
If anything, look into the mission of the company and how they make money. i.e. look into their business. If it's all doled out for free, it's a good idea to give them a miss.
Well you're probably correct, but then when an OSS startup dies you have to code keep, use, and develop.
Basically, this. Start-ups and their investors are looking to cash out. Imagine if Apple or Microsoft had been bought out by IBM in their early years, instead of them both disrupting the space drastically.
For the record, from a Microsoft stand-point, I think this makes perfect sense. They were acquiring talent and a user base it's foolish to have two competing products in your portfolio. From a user standpoint, it probably sucks (I've never used Sunrise, and actually already use Outlook's calendar.)
Kind of sad that the explosion of clever email and calendar apps a few years ago has collapsed into a handful that aren't as good as we used to have.
What do you wish it did?
Most of my calendars are Google Apps. Outlook was my backup for the work calendar using the Google Apps Outlook Sync app (although I've noticed a few sync failures there, too), and just adding additional calendars to Outlook without having all of my email there too looks like it requires some kind of arcane magick. Thunderbird+Lightning got rotated out of the mix quickly due to a lot of issues syncing and getting multiple calendars into it.
Probably because everyone we're communicating with is mixing between Google Apps/webview calendar and Outlook or Office 365, I also find that I regularly can't see an appointment that is emailed to me in my email client as it shows up as an .ics file attachment instead.
So featurewise:
- Most important for me: Easy addition of multiple calendars, where I can just select which calendar a new appt should be added, as easily as I can in my Android clients- I hate using web clients for calendaring, and they never really show multiple calendars well. NOTE: I mean that the calendar has a direct sync to each of the calendars online, not having one main account to which I have to share all of my other calendars. I want one place where I can go to view and create appointments and then have them also show up in their respective accounts. - Supports open standards like CalDAV/CardDAV as well as syncs to Google or Office 365 (I can select a provider like Fastmail that uses CalDAV for my personal calendar, but I'm stuck with Google or O365 for work) - Desktop client, multiple views (agenda, today, week, month) - drag-and-drop of items into the calendar to create a new appointment - "Send to calendar" from an email as an option - Categorization/tagging on an appointment would be nice - Outlook allows this but Google doesn't seem to allow tagging appointments like you can email
A bit of a data dump, but a desktop client that handles multiple calendars well is surprisingly difficult to find in Windows. I happily pay for a number of otherwise free services (Pandora, Evernote, Pocket, Lastpass, etc.), but there really isn't even a pay option.
Aside from being a massive security risk.
I think the former situation creates a legitimate expectation of privacy. I think the latter situation does not. Which is why I use Apple Mail instead of Outlook for iOS.
And yet somehow there's always someone saying, "well, you let Gmail employees run programs that aggregate data over its contents, therefore it's not really violating your privacy when a government investigator looks at them without a warrant". Which is it?
Now, Google has a 4th amendment right with respect to "your" mail sitting on its servers, even though its employees have access to it. Because it's really "Google's mail," stored on Google's property, under Google's control.
Or is/was this FUD?
https://blog.winkelmeyer.com/2015/01/warning-microsofts-outl...
You'd choose some available times, it gives you a link which you send to whoever you want to meet with, and the recipient books a time slot with a couple of clicks. It updates in real time so if you book something new, the slot disappears. It even has a little iOS keyboard to generate these links.
Does anyone know a similar replacement service? Nothing beats just pasting someone a link and letting them pick one of three times you chose.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/invite-microsoft-garage-proj...
Meet allows you (the requester) to set the times available for meeting and send a signup page to a single respondent.
It's not about group meetings, or about "office hours" that anyone can sign up for. The use case is surprisingly broad: a small window of availability for a single meeting.
So based on this, I assume that all access to your calendar server (iCloud, Exchange, Google Apps, etc) was managed through a centralised server(s) that Sunrise used... for something.
Maybe the next time someone claims to be a funky new take on <boring office task> just do a little checking. We've had desktop and mobile device clients for mail, calendaring, contacts etc for literally decades. Why now, when we have more computing power available to us than ever before, do we need another server (operated by a company that's more likely to disappear than not) between us and our mail/calendar/contacts?
1. Their business plan
2. Long term vision for the company
3. How they plan to sustain themselves in the short run (1-2 years with no/little revenue).
4. What they would do if they get acquisition offers.
etc.
The startup can remove the canary once they decide to change their direction.
I get what you're saying here, but the Sunrise team owe their users nothing.
"We never intend to make this an actual product. This is only here to get us attention and hired. If you use this, be aware we'll kill it as soon as anyone hires us."
If you wanted to use an app with open source and a permanent future you should have installed an open source app. Installing a closed source app created by a business and depending on them open sourcing it when the business closes is folly.
Software like what?
Literally the first question i ask about most things i use is: What's your path to liquidity? If the answer to that is a shrug, then staying away is a good bet.
Ah OK, so you don't have any skin in the game, you're just here to argue on the internet. Makes sense.
> thanks for going the expected route. :)
Which is to say that you're aware of viewpoints alternative to your own, but you have no interest in hearing them out, you just want to shout until you win.
If that's what you need to get through your day, congratulations on your great victory.
Nope, i expected you to attempt victim blaming. But hey, jumping to more conclusions is not unexpected either.
Is it impossible to have apps that don't go either Microsoft or google? I don't want to be locked in an ecosystem.
I will miss it.
Any alternatives?
Sunrise best capabilities are likely being built into outlook, they have a team that they know can execute and a percentage of sunrise users will move to outlook.
I only installed sunrise last week (when I moved to Android) but I found it a bit odd that I was using a different calendar app. I came from Windows Phone where messaging and calendar was baked in really nicely. So far my Android experience isn't as good but maybe outlook with sunrise will complete this circle for me.