![]() Octospace is different: it's an app that has many distinct parts (search, navigation, two kinds of documents, sync, etc.) and can serve different roles for different people, so the variety of possible questions and feature requests would be huge. Being single-purpose products with almost all requested features already implemented, they "just work" for most users, and I only need to allocate the time for some small updates. Having very little customer support for Qbserve and ConjuGato is what allowed me to start a complex new project. But there was another realization creeping in… The mental load ![]() Probably, I could have hired someone later to help me build a backend for data synchronization, offering it as a separate subscription service. Sure, there may be some market for an app like that, but I believe that most pro users would prefer products like Obsidian that allow flexible configuration and extensions. So Octospace ended up in an uncanny valley: a simple, user-friendly UI mixed with unfriendly assumptions about how the app manages its data. Occasionally, I get support emails asking about an "account" for Qbserve, despite it being explicitly sold as an old-school app that stores all your data locally. In addition to purely technical difficulties, more and more users nowadays do not understand file systems and some even expect everything to be synchronized automatically. While folder synchronization could work on desktops via cloud services, it is still prohibitively hard to implement for iOS and iPadOS. The real stumbling block was the creeping realization that the world has changed too much to release an app that stores one's data locally in plain text files. ![]() ![]() The hard parts, like the custom text editing for Markdown, were more tedious than complex, and I'd surely have finished them if I continued the development. In fact, while it slowed me down initially, it was one of my favorite parts, and I think I nailed the cross-platform architecture, neatly separating user interface models from their visual representations for different operating systems. When I talked about making a cross-platform app with native UIs, many people were skeptical. While I could have just silently removed the app's mentions from the internet and replied privately to the possible inquiries of those who kept it in mind, I decided to take the risk of sounding somewhat crazy and share the whole story in hopes that it can be helpful to someone else. I had enough resources to work on a prototype for more than half a year, and I had plenty of motivation after seeing over 1,200 persons subscribing to the landing page that only had a short pitch and no screenshots.Īlas, after a few months, I had to stop working on the app after stumbling into some major issues, only part of them being technical - the others were psychological and existential. Sounds a bit complex, but it looked like all the desired features could be achievable for an indie developer. In your Octospace wiki, some pages could be regular text, some could be concept maps - it would totally depend on how you'd like to structure the information on different topics. Hence, the "space" part: the goal was to escape the constraints of one-dimensional documents and to create a paper-like environment. This was an app I had wanted for years: a personal wiki with a pleasant writing experience (Markdown like in Bear, draggable blocks like in Notion) that would have both text-based pages and concept maps (like in Scapple, where I do most of my planning).
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