Informant for iOS 5.41 is scheduled for release late December 2018 (currently submitted to Apple)
• Changed to a new weather provider, DarkSky. The previous weather provider (WeatherUnderground) shut down the API/feed that Informant was using. You must install this update for weather to work beyond December 31, 2018.
• You can now specify if you want to include completed tasks in the search options
• Added the option to duplicate a note when force-touching it (on force touch supporting devices)
• Fixed issue where sometimes the Quick Entry row might not appear when searching
• Alarm Picker now respects bottom safe margin on iPhone X-style phones
• Fixed issue where you’d get unexpected results if you made an exception on the root event of a recurring series and changed the “All Day” flag
• Fixed regression where multi-day all day events wouldn’t properly draw the gradient from the past section to the current section of the event bubble
• Fixed issue tying to the Home Time Zone (in TravelAssist) on iPad
• Fixed issue where View Settings were not immediately taking effect on iPhone X style phones
• Fixed some minor view improvements for iPhone X style phones in landscape
• Fixed issue with zero duration events starting on the first day of the week at midnight that did not appear on the calendar view
• Fixed ability to set iOS Calendars to Use, in some cases this was not working
• Added complication for Series 4 Large Info Graph Center
• Fixed issue where search might not find an exception that occurs after the end date of a recurring series
• Optimized internally for iOS 12
NOTE: This will be the last release that supports iOS 10.x. Future versions of Informant will require iOS 11.0 or better. Currently iPhone 5S and greater can upgrade to iOS 11.
I just bought a new iPhone and installed informant 4. Informant 4 is still running perfect on my old iPhone and iPad with iOS 12, but I can not restore my purchases on the new iPhone. The only Info from support is to subscribe to informant 5 because support for informant 4 is canceled. Informant 4 is still the better App and it looks like Keith is now trying to own money by cheating his customers. I thought to subscribe again for informant 5, wenn it is as good as informant 4, but now I will never pay a cent to this company.
Norbert
Norbert,
I am happy to hear that you are so pleased with Informant 4. However, it is disappointing to hear you quickly assume negative intentions from us. We DO still support Informant 4. If you want to contact our support team, we will gladly help you. We actually provide pretty amazing support for a purchase that you may have made many years ago. The actual facts are that Informant 5 has far fewer bugs and broken features than Informant 4 does, and for that reason we do recommend purchasing Informant 5. We do hope that you understand that it takes developers and technical support people to keep an app like Informant functioning. These things do not happen without paying customers supporting us. We thank you for your support in the past, and we do hope you will take the leap of faith to move to Informant 5.
-Keith
I am surprised that it took you so long to figure out the modus operandi!
With this company it is not a “leap of faith”, it is a leap to one’s death!!!
m_g58,
Are you attempting to be funny or just rude?
Hi Keith,
thank you for responding. I already contacted the support team and got the answer, that they can not help me. So I am waiting for better infos.
I already purchased informant 5. I am a toodledo user and I want to sync toodledo with informant, but it is not worth for just this one feature to pay 20 Euro a year. Informant 4 does all I need including toodledo sync.
First I want to activate my purchases in informant 4 and then I hope you change the price plan – maybe single features for less money.
Norbert
Hi nkraus.
Am in the same position as you. Just upgraded my phone to find PI 4 only runs in limited mode on new one. Worked fine on ios12 on old phone. I contacted support and got the same response as you.
For syncing I only use Toodledo as all my other data is stored in Outlook so accessed with PI accessing built in calendar. Wouldn’t mind paying for Informant 5 outright but it simply isn’t worth paying $20 a year just for toodledo sync. I can understand paying a subscription if I wanted to used Informant server to store all my data but i prefer to let Microsoft or Google do this.
A real shame as have been using PI for over 15 years but the new pricing model just doesn’t work for me. Will be looking to see what other options are out there.
Regards Andy
Please open a case to support. We can unlock Informant 4 for users who continue to wish to use it. Making assumptions without checking the facts leads to incorrect and misleading posts such as this. Also keep in mind that an annual subscription to Informant 5 is .50 cents per week US. For your two quarters per week you get the latest iOS application, unlimited use of Informant Sync, the Android application, free unlimited application support, assurance that your Informant will be ready for new OS releases, new devices, sync service changes, and that you won’t find yourself lamenting the retirement of your application as you will always have the latest version your device CAN support. (eg. 5.41 is the latest release that devices which cannot update past iOS 10 will be able to run)
Fact: Informant 4 is a retired iOS application. It no longer has a weather feed, the ability to sync to Google, the ability to use Smart Titles and will continue to lose functionality as it ages.
Fact: You can use Informant 4 with iOS 12, if it is a new install from a restore you will need to contact support for unlock assistance.
Fact: Continuing to use Informant 4 is your choice. It is in a “use at your own risk” proposition as we have no way to know when it will stop running.
Informant 2.64 was retired many years ago and was still in use until iOS 11 ended 32bit application support. Many Informant 2.64 users had to upgrade the day they installed iOS 11. Some lost their data others lost some data, some that were very lucky and practiced good backup and syncing habits upgraded to Informant 5 and didn’t lose any data. We can’t predict what will happen the day that Informant 4 stops running or when that might be. Until that time however when you reinstall a backup of your device that includes Informant 4 just open a support case and request an unlock. An agent will be glad to assist you.
To avoid all of this heartache we have already provided the solution which is to upgrade to Informant 5 and continue on.
Wesley. Thanks for your response.
FACT: I contacted your support team before posting my original message. They messaged me to say they could not unlock PI 4 on iOS 12.
My mistake. In the original email from the support team they did provide an unlock code, I missed this. I have tried this code and Informant is now working.
It is worth noticing that FIVE MONTHS have elapsed since the last release of Informant for iOS, and it provides little more than bug fixes. The July update was noticeable for the new time picker, which we had been waiting for one year and a half. The “new major release” announced EIGHT MONTHS AGO with a new View Selector / Main Navigator looks now dead in the water. Only God knows when we will see it. It is evident that the development of Informant has been completely abandoned since the switch to the subscription system: once you have enough idiots (including me) paying a yearly fee for your software, why even bother to consider working on it? I am not a native speaker, so I can’t find the words to describe how disgusted I am towards the “new” ownership, their contempt towards customers and their mothodic destruction of an excellent app.
Hey Gennaro,
Thanks for sharing your unfiltered opinions. Not entirely accurate, but at least you participate. Thank you for that, and thank you for being a customer, even if you don’t love everything we do (or don’t do).
Obviously we have not abandoned development on this app or you would not be reading release notes about what fixes have been completed. As for the “pace of change”, we have elected to focus more on resolving bugs and issues that are reported and to move more cautiously on interface changes that may be disruptive to users who are “used to” the current interface. Also, our weather feed provider announced end-of-life on the API we were using as of 12/31/2018. That caused us to have to research numerous options & select a new weather provider. That was a significant undertaking & was not part of our roadmap 6 months ago. As Apple keeps releasing new phones, the new phones (X, XR, Xs) will use the “new” navigation menu. We are letting the dust settle for the time being on the “L-shaped” menu that the iPhones 5-6-7-8 will be using. If you are on an iPhone 5s or older, Apple will not be supporting updates to iOS 12 by next year. We will re-asses our efforts on the “L” menu in next few months for iPhones 5-8.
Wishing you all the best in 2019!
Keith,
it is really a shame you were not so thoughtful about disruption of user experience when you dramatically changed the interface from PI4 to I5 and made nobody happy.
A dozen of minor bug fixes in 5 months of work hardly look like “focus”, but I guess all is relative. I suppose I will be dead by the time you do any meaningful update. As for your weather provider (a service I haven’t requested, I don’t want and I don’t use but that I’m forcibly paying for anyway), you worked so amazingly well and swiftly that you didn’t manage to get the updated version of Informant featuring the new weather provider trhough the app store before the end of life of the previous. Well done you! Focus means focus I guess.
Now you are writing for the first time ever that the new navigation menu will be available only to top end and newest iPhones (X, XR and Xs) “as Apple releases them” and “letting the dust settle” for everybody else. I am using an iPhone SE and an iPhone 6s. Am I not fancy or rich enough to deserve the new navigation menu? Were 8 months not enough to let the dust settle? Are we supposed to die under a pile of dust before you consider it settled?
Once again YOU ARE DOING NOTHING AT ALL (other than a dozen of bug fixes) for your paying customers. Customers who pay a yearly fee. And now you are writing that you are still planning to do nothing at all for the foreseeable future, while you still kepp collecting your sybscription money as efficiently as you can. You should be ashamed of yourself, you are a disgrace and a doom for this once fantatic software.
My name is Wesley, I am the product manager for Pocket Informant. I will reply to your note as there are many incorrectly assumed items stated. Before I begin to reply, I will only be dealing in factual information about the Informant application. I as a representative of Informant I have no motivation to upset customers or drive users away but I do have an obligation to be totally truthful even if customers like yourself do not like the facts, they are the facts and don’t change.
So lets begin- G. “you were not so thoughtful about disruption of user experience when you dramatically changed the interface from PI4 to I5 and made nobody happy”.
Kind of a bold and “putting all users into your view” statement. First Informant 5 is now 3 over years old, Informant 4 was last updated in 2016 and cannot be used as the measuring stick for Informant 5 anymore. It’s ancient history by any technology measure. The then new Informant 5 UI was a big change, however as the support manger I saw thousands of cases where users who gave Informant 5, with its new look, a fair chance embrace it. When Informant 5 launched all devices had a home button. It was in the second year of Informant 5 that the iPhone X came about and radically changed things. Now we are into the second generation of the iPhone X and none of the new iPhone models have a home button, none of the new iPads have a home button. The future of iOS development is for devices without a home button. We do have a UI update planned for the iOS Informant that takes this into account but that also is cognizant of our customers that will still be using devices with a home button. We have some things to workout so it will be a bit before we even have a beta with this UI update but we are not abandoning anyone. However technology does advance and we cannot endlessly provide legacy support for old devices. Informant is and has always been a cutting edge application and it cannot continue in that vein with extended legacy support. On the developer side, a policy that has served us well put in place by Alex and Chris is to support the current iOS release and one back. So the next release of Informant for iOS will not run on iOS 10. This keeps the Informant application current and on a currently Apple supported family of devices.
G. “A dozen of minor bug fixes in 5 months of work hardly look like “focus”, but I guess all is relative. I suppose I will be dead by the time you do any meaningful update. ”
If you were the user who reported “a minor issue” then you would be glad to see that we are addressing these usability issues and will be for the foreseeable future. In your previous statement you stated that Informant made changes without caring about the customer (I4 to I5) so now we are taking a stance of addressing items that have been reported/requested as usability features and you are upset that we aren’t seeming to reinvent the wheel. It seems that in your eyes no matter how we proceed it is wrong. As the product manager I am focusing on usability issues, a Chevrolet is a good car, a BMW is an excellent car. The difference between the two is the details. I believe that we can take our current Informant a very good Chevrolet and make it a BMW by just addressing the details. None on their own are going to change the world but together they will make Informant a BWM in its space.
G. “you worked so amazingly well and swiftly that you didn’t manage to get the updated version of Informant featuring the new weather provider trhough the app store before the end of life of the previous. Well done you! Focus means focus I guess.”
Again a broad statement made without knowing or asking for the facts. The macOS Informant was released with the new weather feed a week before the feed terminated. Informant for iOS was submitted at the same time. You may have noticed a lot of apps were doing updates near the end of the year. They were doing this because of changes to the submission requirements that were not made public until very late in the 5.41 development cycle. We had to make some last minute changes to accommodate these. They were not applicable to the macOS release which is why it went out on time and 5.41 was delayed. As a result of the delays though 5.41 works as it should and we are not discussing the application not running/working properly today. The delay was a bit out of our control. I personally with engineering put in some late nights and weekends doing all we could to avoid a delay, in the end it happened as things sometimes do but it was not a lack of focus or any other type of negligence on our part.
G. “Were 8 months not enough to let the dust settle? Are we supposed to die under a pile of dust before you consider it settled?”
Asking us and getting the facts before making another bold assumption would avoid the propagation of a popular misunderstanding. In 2018 our release schedule was not what we wanted it to be. There were many reasons for this none larger than the fact that longtime developer Chris transitioned out and we had to find, interview, vet, and allow a new lead developer to come online. These changes also led to me adding the role of Product Manager to my long time role of Global Support Manager. This is a lot of transition for any package. Now we have a very synergistic team in place. I have the unique capability of hearing from customers everyday as the support manager and I can steer the application in the direction that the customer feedback is leading us as the product manager. This will not make everyone happy, but in the global view of the application it is what is best for Informant, for our customers and for our company. 2019 is already off to a great start, we have 5.41 for iOS released, 5.42 will be in beta within the next 24-48 hours, followed by a new mac beta. Yes there will be no world shaking new things but a lot of oft requested usability fixes. 5.43 is on the drawing board and we are moving forward. Before Chris left one initiative he wanted to do was stop the massive 30 item updates and do more updates with 5-10 items. We are bringing that forward, again to make the application better for everyone.
G. “Am I not fancy or rich enough to deserve the new navigation menu? ”
Any device that can support iOS 11 and higher will be getting a revised user interface in Informant. Not sure where you got the idea that the new UI is only for the rich.
G. “Once again YOU ARE DOING NOTHING AT ALL (other than a dozen of bug fixes) for your paying customers. Customers who pay a yearly fee. And now you are writing that you are still planning to do nothing at all for the foreseeable future, while you still kepp collecting your sybscription money as efficiently as you can. You should be ashamed of yourself, you are a disgrace and a doom for this once fantatic software.”
More opinions stated incorrectly as facts. Your statement of doing nothing at all is insulting to the men and women who work on this application daily. You have in your post scolded us for changes we have made then scolded us for not doing enough, this illustrates that again no matter what we do someone is going to be upset. The usability concerns that we have will make the application better they are just not “sexy” “boisterous” changes. In the future however when in your normal usage you don’t have an issue because these usability items are addressed it will indicate that we have been successful. As for the subscription, simply put, without it there is no Informant. Having a support team, having a dev team, being in business all have costs, real monetary costs. Each time a sync service such as Google changes their sync API’s there is substantial costs to keep Informant syncing as it has to be engineered for these changes. Recently the weather provider had to be changed, it was a costly change on the engineering side. New devices and new OS’s are coming later this year and it is expected that Informant will be ready for them. Those all have costs. The revenue stream that keeps these updates coming, that allows me to spend an hour responding to you personally, that keeps the support cases answered is the subscription. Again this has been in place now for over 3 years and I am surprised that its still a thing to be discussed. So to say nothing is being done is a very incorrect statement. In truth a lot is being done. The gist of your note is that you didn’t like the big sweeping changes of Informant 5 from Informant 4 but now regular updates with usability fixes aren’t enough either. I’m afraid that if we made some big change that you would again be scolding us here in the forum and that you will scold us again when Informant 5.42 is released with usability fixes. The future is bright for Fanatic Software and 2019 is shaping up to be a great year for Informant.
Wesley, I know you (so to speak) very well from support. It’s good to get a reply from someone involved in the development of Informant more directly than Keith, so thank you for your long reply, the most relevant part of it being that Chris is gone away, which is very sad new indeed and, in spite of your optimism, casts dark shadows on the future of Informant (for iOS at least). I am afraid you are getting confused when you write that I5 is just over 3 years old now, I would rather say 2. It is actually good you wrote today because it makes exactly 2 years since Alex wrote things like “our people are staying”, “I’ve got a lot more support”, “I’m super excited for our future together”, “with great appreciation for the last 17 years and excitement for the next 17”. It looke like everything was going to stay the same and instead In less than two years the two main developers have left and almost nothing stayed the same. It doesn’t sound good.
For the rest, I am afraid you are misunderstanding me: If I were one of the users experiencing the bugs now solved I would be furious for the fact that I had to wait FIVE MONTHS for a release with fixes for those bugs. And more for other fixes. Bug fixes are always welcome, this “minor” releases should be much more frequent. Just as they were in the past. On the other hand the long expected revision of the UI was announced EIGHT MONTHS ago and has not happened yet. You took one year and a half to upgrade the dreadful time picker of I5 into something good. How much longer will we have to wait for a better UI? Except those who never used PI4 we all know that it was better before. It looked like you were taking steps in the right direction. How much longer will it take?
You’ve been working with Informant for a very long time, so you know much better than me that both bug fixes and new features and interface adjustments were much much more frequent before the advent of Keith and Complete XRM. Why is that happening? If it is because of the problems you described in your reply, I hope now development will proceed in a more expedite way. If 5.42 arrives in a few weeks rather than in a further FIVE MONTHS we can do nothing but rejoice, even if it includes nothing sexy. If not, something is wrong. PI4 was a mature product, I5 is not, it needs adjustments which are just not happening. Didn’t you have a few web pages with feature requests / improvements? I guess they are dead. How many of them have been implemented? In the past we could discuss, these days I don’t waste my time, I know whatever I mention (like the and/or filters I’ve always wanted) will never happen.
Finally, even if I don’t have data I am ready to bet that there are many more iPhones with buttons than without out there, and it seems a tad early to already talk about obsolescence. I would expect these devices to be supported at least as long as new versions of iOS wil.
cheers
I’ve read several times on this blog, that the cost is necessary to have a great product that works like it should. You’ve been collecting that higher price for years now. When I5 was first launched I remember reading many times “I4 wasn’t great overnight. Give it time and you’ll love I5 just as much as you do I4.” Can I ask, how much more time (or money) is needed before some of the ideas we voted on be included in one of these updates?
I still use and love my iPhone 6 and while I’m sure there are many, many users who have newer phones than me, how many do you think always have the newest? Think about how many of your new features and updates don’t apply to me and others, and yet we’re paying the same as everyone else. I still NEVER use the weather, or google sync, or Evernote, or a need to sync between devices, etc, but I’m still paying because there’s one feature I value. If you’re going to have a one-size-fits-all approach to your pricing, you need to provide features and updates that apply to as many customers as possible. Since I can’t use a lot of the features, and the updates don’t seem to apply to me, I5 is basically the same as it was the day it launched. Is that what a subscription buys me after 2 years?
As a P.S., I can understand your desire to defend your company, but I had no intention to post on this blog until I read your responses to customers. No matter how wrong a customer may be, it’s not a good look to tell them they’re wrong. It makes other customers feel defensive and now there’s another negative comment on your blog.
@mehill and Gennaro and others who have similar feelings-
Its important to establish that the truth is the truth no matter how much we or a customer do not like it. We can tell customers exactly what they want to hear but most of the time that will be inaccurate. Imagine the discussion we would be having here if that were the case.
I have been doing support in this industry for 25 years and I can say this with some authority, it is possible for a customer to be wrong. Paying for a product does not free any customer from the truth and from the realities that we all have to live within.
For the most part customers that leave negative feedback are mad. Mad that we had to tell them no, mad that we occasionally can’t resolve an issue, or mad that we are not telling them what they want to hear.
If you look at our negative feedback as I do every day you will see that most of it is very emotional, if you know us or Informant you will see that a lot of it is factually incorrect and that a high percentage of users who leave negative feedback have not contacted support and the biggest thing in most negative feedback is that it does not refer to anything wrong or disliked with the application itself. Few of our negative feedbacks are specific about the application many complain that the application costs 50 cents per week (iOS annual subscription), in your case the negative feedback is because we did too much changing to the application or not enough. When the release that includes the new interface comes about I guarantee we will get tons of negative feedback the first week. It will be hateful. Then it will taper off, we’ll get lots of suggestions on why its a bad design and what we should change and how could we etc. Then it will taper off. Out of all of that we may get a handful of things that are constructive and that can be feasibly brought into the application. Its the same cycle I’ve seen for the last 15 years and will see with each update that does more than the small fixes.
Chris and Alex are two of my best friends we worked together for a very long time and they did a great job with Informant but they both moved on and that’s ok. Informant lives on and will continue. Chris and Alex were growing weary of the perpetual negativity in these types of forums. Many long time customers view the times past with rose colored glasses and discount anything we do today as “that’s not how Chris and Alex would do it”. Correct, the things we are doing today are not necessarily how Chris and Alex would have done it but that doesn’t mean what were are doing is less or not as good its simply different. The rose colored glasses view for the Chris and Alex years are frustrating for me as one who lived through them, we had a lot of good times and I cherish them. Its quickly been forgotten however, how nasty users were when Informant 2 was born. I was replying to the cases back then and they were brutal, hate filled and exceptionally negative many predicting the death of Informant. The common themes then were “the changes to Informant were too many” and “the updates are not coming fast enough”. One user wrote “why did you have to screw up Informant 1.6? It worked well and was simple”. Fact was that the 1.x framework mainly the db engine was hard to work with and slated to be deprecated by Apple. Change had to be but we took a public flogging for doing so even though it meant the app would live on.
When Informant 3 was released a whole new cauldron of negativity was unleashed with many of those predicting that Informant 3 would be the demise of our company. Some cases that I remember seeing a lot of were “I hate the look” and “Where are the updates?” Fact, Informant 3 was a stepping stone version to Informant 4, it didn’t have a long life. Many users now view Informant 4 as the best of Informant for iOS but they pretty much hated it at its start.
In the early days of Informant 4 the customer hatred was so strong it was hard to come to work each day and face the support cases, the cases that were not hateful were predicting our end. Common at the time was “This interface sucks!! Informant 2 was so much better again you guys are messing up what works” followed by “Where are the updates?!” The fact was that Informant 4 was the culmination of our efforts going back to the 2.x release but like all things technology related it got old. Its framework was aging and needed substantial updating.
Work on Informant 5 began shortly after the original 4.x Informant was released. We knew the new app would have to be subscription based for our company to survive and that we would take the opportunity to forge a new Informant. This design was heavily influenced by Alex’s dream of what Informant could be with the newest iOS design elements. At the same time Alex was looking to personally do something different for a living and the merger was beginning to take shape. Alex didn’t want to simply walk away from Informant and kill it. So he made sure that Informant would live on and breathed new life into it with the merger. Informant 5 became the centerpiece of the merger.
Keith and our new ownership company have been blamed too much and too long for too many things around Informant. Without the merger Informant 5 was going to be subscription based no matter what. Keith nor our new owners designed Informant 5, the merger saved the app from financial failure.
The one time purchase model of Informant 4 was not generating the revenue needed to keep the lights on, we cut costs, reduced staff, removed most perks, had a pay freeze, a pay reduction, and had nothing else to cut. This was not a result of anything that management had done wrong, it was because of the shift in the app store economy from pretty much new iPhone/iPad owners buying apps like crazy to existing iPad/iPhone owners who were not buying new apps as much. When new app sales dropped as the devices became the standard it impacted a lot of companies, many good design houses and development companies went under. Alex managed to keep us afloat but it wasn’t easy. Apples own solution to help the developers whom they also rely on for income was to quit selling apps and make them free and either do in app purchases (which are great for games because you keep buying “power ups”) or to sell subscriptions to the applications. We had to wait for the iOS to support it fully but the subscription model fit what Informant needed. We would keep doing what we’d done in the past with updates and new features but the subscription would provide the necessary revenue to keep the company in business and would ensure that our customers never had a discontinued model of the application.
Just like Informant 2, 3, and 4 Informant 5 launched as an imperfect application. The easy scapegoat was to blame Keith, the new owners and the merger. In reality Informant 5 had fewer growing pains than Informant 4 and 3 combined, it had more negative feedback because of the change to being subscription based but very few complaints about the functionality. Yes the user interface took its licks because it was different but that is normal and will happen again. The biggest mistake made was that Informant 4 was left in the app store for too long after Informant 5 was released. In hindsight that hurt us then and still does today. There were other mistakes as this was a big transition for everyone and transitions can sometimes hit a bump or two.
Alex provided for Informant to live on without him. I will always be grateful for that personally. As will I be to Keith and our new owners for giving us the stability to continue and have the fantastic product offerings we have today.
In 2018 Chris decided to move on and we had one more transition to overcome. There was no way to push releases out the door when internally Chris was working hard to bring our new lead developer up to speed and educating him on one of the most complex iOS applications in existence. Now that is behind us and we already have one update out and we will be following what Chris was going to implement anyway and that was smaller more frequent usability updates. So when you are lamenting the moving on of Chris and Alex I think its important to remember the whole picture.
Transition also brings good things, Informant 5.41 and the macOS 1.1.4 releases were internally tested under our new more rigorous testing program (this was developed while we were in the dev transition), we are standardizing a lot of behind the scenes actions around the application that will lead to better initial release quality. These were areas found that we could improve upon as part of this transition. Its important to remember these things as well. We divided up some of the roles and moved our team around to make the application better. In the year to come you will see these things come about in many ways in the application. We’ve not forgotten about new features but only those that bring value to our core functions will be considered. The features we have will be improved with new techniques and better methods but only when we have the engineering bandwidth to do them right.
This is why not trusting us and constantly railing on us is incredibly frustrating. To say we’ve done nothing is very inaccurate and infuriating. To rail on us for not giving you value in your subscription is hurtful to everyone who spends their life working on this application and to Alex who set up a future for Informant even with himself not being at the helm so that you can have an application to rail on. Its disrespectful to our new owners who took a risk on us and gave Informant a new lease on life. We had some obstacles to overcome and we have, there will be others in the future as is the nature of this business but rest assured while you may not agree with all we are doing, Informant is in good hands and is poised to continue to be great.
Informant’s death spiral began when Alex sold his company. Now with Chris leaving, the flush lever has been pushed down.
Wesley,
thank you for your history of feedback to Informant releases. Very interesting. Myself, I’ve been using PI on my Asus A636, when I chose between PI and Agenda Fusion, so since 2006. I can’t remember which PI version I first installed on iPhone, but on my record I can see that I bought my first iPhone in July 2009 and Pocket Informant for iPhone was possibly the first iOS app I have ever purchased, still in July 2009. The fact that I’m still using it means that in spite of everything I can’t find a satisfactory alternative. As for subscription costs, I don’t like them but I’ve been already subscribing to Informant Sync for several years, so it did little change to me.
What you write is hardly surprising. People don’t like change and react badly to it (and the “hate mobs” are a sad feature of our times). I might have been one who didn’t like new versions of PI at first, although possibly not always. Still, most people eventually get accustomed to the new version and tend to like it the most. So what happened to I5 for people like me (and, I’m sure, most PI4 users) still not liking it two years on? To me, it looks pretty simple: in the past, each new version was followed by a stream of adjustments to fix bugs and correct/perfect new features and changes in UI. For I5 little or nothing happened, the most meaningful “correction” being the new time picker which arrived about 15 months after the initial release of I5.
Now, given that you are a fan of the truth, let’s see just a few.
(1) TRUTH: bug fixes and new/updated features were much more frequent up to PI4 than they have been with I5. You’ve been there all along, you could even provide some numbers relating to frequency of releases per month.
(2) TRUTH (Wesley): We’ve not been releasing much mostly because in 2018 we were transitioning from established web developer to a new one. NOT TRUTH (Keith): we’ve been focusing on resolving bugs. Question (again): can 14 “minor” bug fixes can be the result of FIVE months of focused work? I wouldn’t think so. The slow progression is more due to what Wesley writes.
(3) TRUTH (Wesley): we need subsription system otherwise we would not be economically viable. NOT TRUTH (Keith): (as far as I can remember) subscription allows us to give you very frequent bug fixes and new features, and a 5-star app!
(4) TRUTH: Keith represents new ownership. NOT TRUTH (Alex): Keith is the new marketing guy
(5) TRUTH (Wesley): Alex sold the company etc. so that it wouldn”t die with him going. What Alex wrote: company sold to be more viable and to open to new possibilities, I’m excited to work for its future, the team won’t change.
(6) NOT TRUTH (Sienna Scheid): new major release with update UI (which seemed to have received overwhelmingly positive feedback) will come soon. TRUTH (Keith): 9 months on, you are preferring to “let the dust settle” and who knows when this new UI will arrive.
I stop here. What me and most customers know is what you communicate on this blog, on Facebook and Twitter. You might have taken 5 months to release 14 bug fixes and nothing else. What all customers see is the frequency of your releases. I don’t regularly have private chats with Welsey or Keith, like most customers I suppose. If you take 5 months to release 14 bug fixes it might be due to your offices having flooded, to lead developer transition, or to your poor focus. What I knew when I replied to Keith is what Keith wrote. So here are my suggestions:
(1) In the good tradition of WebIS and Fanatic, use this blog (and/or social media) to let people know what’s going on, rather than just for release notes. One of the best features of the company used to be direct, positive and fruitful relationship with developers. This has entirely disappeared.
(2) If you want your customers to stick to the truth on this blog and elsewhere, please don’t keep the truth hidden from them. It doesn’t help.
(3) If you get criticism, especially from people who have supported you for more than ten years, take it onboard rather trying to berate the person who criticises you. It might help to try to understand what’s behind the criticism you get, rather than dismissing it as the usual furious reaction at the new release. As I wrote, you might have all the good reasons in the world for having slowed things down, but what customer see is the final result: 15 months to correct the flawed time picker, 5 months for 14 bug fixes.
That said, you have my sympathy for having to deal with angry feedback on a daily basis.
cheers
Gennaro
Wesley,
I’m just referring to the terrible subscription, although it’s not all flaws.
Whether a “software subscription” is a fraud against the customer depends on the fineness of the opportunities to be booked. “All or nothing” IS such a scam. For example, I don’t need sync, I have an Exchange account. But I would like the weather. For a maximum of 5 Euro per year, maybe I would subscribe to it. For 20 Euro – no chance.
I never said that a customer can’t be wrong, I said that you shouldn’t tell them they’re wrong, but you decided to double down I guess. Apparently you feel that the truth is more important than the customers experience.
I for one, have contacted support many times, but it takes time to fix issues, and while I was always happy to help make this app better in the past because I loved it, I no longer feel that way and will only devote so much time to help you fix your product. Another reason why you need your customers more than they need you. And, personally, I’ve never complained about any of the previous versions despite being a customer for about 8 years now, but it’s nice to know you dismiss my comments as “railing” or “emotional” and lump me in with all other customers who complain. Says a lot about how you see us. Dare I say it’s hurtful to everyone who spends their time and money supporting this application?
Lastly, in case you haven’t noticed a theme, I’m complaining about your treatment of customers more than your product. Can you imagine, you go do Disneyland, your kid meets Goofy and steps on his foot and Goofy yells at him. You complain to management, and their response is “well, it’s really hot outside and even hotter in that suit, and your kid stepped on his foot so what do you expect?!?” Do you ever want to give Disney another dime after that?
How can customers update an app that is submitted late to Apple. Hopefully there won’t be weather issue since WU still seems to have interface still working. You put a blog out that says must update to continue weather,however you can’t even get it through approval process before deadline. Good planning on your part. I wonder how long did WU give you before you finally started to work on the issue. Spending all your time working on the hot new X phones, forgetting anything or anyone else’s needs.
Craig,
I agree with you. It is unfortunate that the app did not make it through the approval process sooner. Here is what happened: We opened up a new submission in early December, Apple rejected our app for numerous different reasons. We spent over 3 weeks going back and forth with them. The issues they did not like had nothing to do with code quality or anything like that. 1st) they did not like the way we had led customers to the in app purchase. They requested that we re-iterate the subscription language: “Subscription automatically renews and your account will be charged unless auto-renew is turned off at least 24-hours before the end of the current period. Subscriptions are billed through iTunes every 30/90/365 days (as selected by you) until cancelled. Manage subscriptions including cancel or auto-renew on/off in iTunes Account Settings after purchase. No cancellation of the current subscription is allowed during active subscription period. ” They made us change this at the last minute in 4 different places.. Then, after all that… They came back & said that our “settings” screen looks too much like Apples Native Settings screen & users might confuse it with the Apple settings. We think this is ridiculous. We had to appeal the submission & go back and forth with them because changing the settings screen would take more time and added NO value to our existing customers. In fact, it would (and will) probably frustrate more people than anything. So finally Apple decided to allow us to release the version. Dealing with Apple is not an easy thing and it is not predictable.
So, they allowed us to release the app, but now we are supposed to “change” the settings screen on our next release. Apple doesn’t say what they want or don’t want, but just say “change it”.
These are unforeseen challenges that add delays to the release process. I hope this explanation helps you know what is going on.
I am a long time Pocket Informant user. Even recently when I was in a phone conversation with Aaron (CEO of Toodledo) I told him that I used PI to interface with Toodledo since it was much more flexible and powerful. I fully support the subscription model because as a software developer I understand what it takes to maintain mobile apps and I’m happy to support maintenance and upgrades.
I have been patiently waiting for Informant 5 to reach feature parity with Pocket Informant 4 so I can start using Informant 5 and avoid some of the unpatched bugs in PI 4. But until then I continue to use PI 4 begrudgingly these past years. I only hope that PI 4 continues to work and that I don’t need a new device otherwise I’m out of luck.
With each release I look to see if I5 has the right features but still not there yet.
Derekh4,
What features are you referring to? What specifically about Informant 4 do you still like better?
Also, which iPhone are you on?
Keith,
There are a couple of items which are proving to be a “step back” in Informant 5 based on the Informant 4 feature set.
1. With Informant when I create a task I have a default alarm set to a time, say 09:00, which is set for every task by default. I also have the “Timed Tasks set due time as alarm” (which is what I really want but i can’t set a default time for new tasks so it uses the “Date-only Tasks set alarm at time setting”. With Informant 4 when I do add a time to a previously untimed task the alarm time changes to be “On date” automatically. With Informant 5 the alarm stays at the default time 09:00 and I have to manually set the alarm time to “On date” using the spinners (time spinners are awful in iOS, since they don’t bottom out at 00 so this is a tedious and time consuming effort for each task I create).
2. A feature included in Informant 4 was the “Alarms” – “Repeat Every Minute” setting for Task View. Informant 5 doesn’t have this feature implemented. My sole reason for settling on Pocket Informant so many years ago as a task management tool was this repeating alarm feature which only a select few task apps have. I have been waiting for this feature to be implemented in Informant 5 to switch over from Informant 4. I did try some time ago to switch over to Informant 5 and get a subscription to Pushover, a push notification service which did add the repeating alarms feature at my request. If I take my tasks in Informant 5 and push them into Toodledo, then I setup Toodledo to send emails when alarms go off, those emails get redirected to my personal Pushover account which then send a push notification to my mobile device which has a recurring alarm. But that got to be a nuisance that I had to to into a separate app to silence the alarm and then switch context into Informant 5 to then complete the task. It was much easier to use PI 4 since it still works fine.
I periodically purchase a license of Informant 5 to try it out (about every 6 months) but then revert back to PI 4 to wait until Informant 5 has feature parity.