Jonathan Poritsky’s Elegy for Vesper

Jonathan Poritsky:

But Vesper was innovative in two key ways: tags and photos. No note taking app before or since has treated photos as well. And I can find no replacement for the way it handled tags. […]

The brilliance of Vesper’s photo handling was that it didn’t treat photos as inline elements. They were almost like metadata, an aspect of your note. The photo itself could be the whole note.

When Apple added photos to Notes last year, many said it was the death knell for Vesper. But Notes treats photos differently. They are inline, part of the note. They are not the note itself. For me that’s not as attractive. It adds complexity where I’d rather have none.

He’s got a wonderful story at the end, about a particular note he wrote in Vesper. I don’t want to spoil it.

★ Thursday, 25 August 2016