jgruber

Thanks man. That's exactly what I try to do.

Exactly.

I didn't say it was noble, only that it took courage. It takes courage to rob a bank.

I shouldn't have included the font licensing fee (and in fact have since edited the article to remove it). Our annual server fees are 15-20x the cost of the font license.

What I was thinking about was opening sourcing the app. If we do that, we'll have to replace Ideal Sans with another font. The obvious choice would be iOS's system font.

No promises, but we are looking into open-sourcing what we can.

Apple doesn't buy commodity components for things like iPad displays. They're all custom-designed, custom-built.

Which reviews of mine do you think this applies to?

OK, let me confirm: browsing the web on iPad Pro feels noticeably faster than browsing the web on a MacBook (the new 2015 Core-M).

My take here is not about magic ARM dust. I do remember the magic RISC dust days -- and I, as a lover of the elegant -- was on the losing side of that one. I think the basic threat to Intel and x86 is this:

- Intel operates as a high-margin business. Their CPUs aren't $10 components, and they don't really have any serious competition. The whole point of the word "Wintel" was that all the value in a PC was going to Microsoft (for the OS) and Intel (for the CPU). These mobile ARM chips aren't like that at all. They're just another component in the device, like the camera and the display.

- Scale. Ben Evans makes the case well here: http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/11/7/mobile-ecosyste... . He writes:

"And fourth, the broader scale advantage - the ARM/iOS/Android ecosystem is moving towards selling 10x more devices each year than the Wintel ecosystem. That's a similar disparity to that between PowerPC/Mac and Wintel 20 years ago."

I realize too that running a benchmark like GeekBench on iOS is not apples-to-apples running it on Mac OS X. But even if it's not the case that the iPad Pro is a faster computer than a MacBook, it's close. But I really do think it's faster -- it shows in browser-based benchmarks, which I think are a fair comparison even across iOS and OS X.

But in short: Intel doesn't want to (and possibly can't) compete on price, and they can't compete on scale. Neither of those things are magic.

Yes it has a speaker.

Better to say I expect to prefer the 4.7 over the 5.5-inch phone, personally. But I would never say I won't buy a product before I've actually seen it in person.

(I have seen other 5.5-inch phones, though, and none seem like something I'd want to carry in my pocket everywhere.)

Here's what I wrote two years ago, when the iPhone 5 shipped:

  > There is no argument that some people really do like these big
  > closer-to-5-than-4-inch Android and Windows phones. I was in a
  > Verizon retail store yesterday (long story; don’t ask) and
  > overheard a relatively small woman buying a Galaxy S III. A
  > companion asked if she wasn’t worried that it was too big, and she
  > said no, big was exactly what she wanted, because she doesn’t have
  > a tablet and wanted to do a lot of reading on whatever phone she
  > got. She even said she was thinking about the 5-inch Galaxy Note
  > (which Verizon doesn’t carry). It was like a conversation out of a
  > Samsung commercial. Such people surely think the iPhone 5’s
  > display remains too small. But, trust me, there are going to be
  > many long-time iPhone users complaining that it’s too big after
  > they upgrade.
  >
  > In an ideal world, perhaps Apple would offer two iPhone sizes --
  > like they do with products such as MacBook Pros, MacBook Airs, and
  > iMacs. A smaller one with the classic 3.5-inch display, and a
  > larger (say, 4.5-inch?) one for people who want that.

http://daringfireball.net/2012/09/iphone_5

That holds up pretty well, but I undershot the two sizes by an inch apiece.

Also, I haven't said whether I think a 5.5-inch iPhone is actually any good, because, duh, I haven't even seen one yet, let alone used one.

Not at all. I would only argue that iCloud is not a good fit for all apps, and Vesper is one of them.

As the other posters have remarked, Brent's sync diary provides some of the concrete technical reasons why we rolled our own.

Big picture, though, we consider sync so essential to Vesper's long-term success that we wanted to control it. Dropbox is fantastic. We all rely on it personally. But we don't want Vesper to rely on it. I'm sure everyone here on Hacker News has a Dropbox account, and I'll bet most Daring Fireball readers do too. But we want Vesper to appeal to everyone, including people who don't know what Dropbox is or don't want it. (Plus, Dropbox doesn't work exactly the way we want it to work; we have code running on our servers, not just data stored on them. Vesper Sync works exactly the way we want sync to work.)

iCloud is very tempting too, because it puts all the onus of identity, privacy, and security on Apple's shoulders. But with iCloud, you have to choose between document syncing and Core Data -- neither of which is a perfect fit for the way Vesper is designed.

Lastly, we want to keep the door open for a web app version of Vesper, and a non-Mac App Store version for OS X. iCloud, by design, only works for apps distributed through the App Store.

We wanted to offer one and only one good way to sync. That meant rolling our own.

We hash the password using pbkdf2. The actual code looks like this:

crypto.pbkdf2(text, salt, ITERATIONS, BYTES, function...

ITERATIONS is 1000, and BYTES is 32.

Our code is descended from the code on this page: http://www.thejoyofcode.com/Exploring_custom_identity_in_Mob...

There is not, but it is on our list. We will get to it eventually, but it didn't make the cut for 2.0.

Vesper is a simple, elegant notes app for the iPhone.

Image attachments are the biggest difference. Another is that Vesper allows you to reorder notes by drag and drop -- move unimportant notes down, move important ones up. But the biggest difference, we hope, is that Vesper is just plain nicer.

Droid Sans was, by Google's own admission, designed for low-resolution screens. It's like Chicago on the classic Mac OS. Looks good on low-res screens but looks cheap on high-res ones.

Exactly.

Funny, I can't seem to find the article where I said much of anything about Lala, post- or pre-acquisition by Apple, let alone the one where I claimed they were "revolutionary".

Please let me know the URL for that piece.

That's an astute point. Never thought of that, but it's probably true.