Fortune 5 company here–we have tens of thousands of technical users on Macs. Like many others, iCloud and Dropbox are blocked. Not a day goes by when I don’t see at least one person complaining on our internal Mac slack channel about a lack of available good note taking apps due to the syncing restrictions.
I think its a bit of an exaggeration to claim that there are too many services to support and that people will always ask for more, so you are hesitant to open the flood gates. IMO iCloud, Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Amazon, and WebDAV would likely satisfy everyone’s needs. Just WebDAV alone would go a long way, since its something of a catchall solution.
As one person above noted, this thread has been ongoing for almost four years. You have repeatedly mentioned it would take a maximum of one month of development to add an additional sync option. Idk, it seems like in four years you could have done the one quarter (or one month, in the case of WebDAV) of development and be done with it? You mention that this only affects a small subset of users and there are more pressing roadmap items, but I do wonder about all the potential (corporate) users who cannot use Agenda due to a lack of sync/backup option. I’d imagine this is quite a lot of people.
I’m confused. iCloud and Dropbox are blocked at your company you say but you are advocating for iCloud and DropBox, saying they would satify everyone’s needs??
Update: Your note prompted me to go back and look at the original post. 1) They added Dropbox to the already existing iCloud, and 2) Apple offers end to end- encryption for iCloud according to this iCloud Security Overview.
I’m not sure why you’re confused. Yes, iCloud and Dropbox are blocked by my company. I am advocating for a solution that supports all of the following: iCloud, Dropbox, OneDrive, Google, Amazon, WebDAV. I believe that would satisfy everyone. The first two are done. Sounds like one quarter of development would deliver the others. For me (and others) this is by far the most important request since without a working sync/backup solution, agenda cannot be used. Doesn’t matter what other features are added in that case.
As I have pointed out a few times in the thread, everyone wants something else. That’s the problem. You think your list covers everyone, but I know people at Apple, and they want Box to be supported. So it goes on and on…
We are investigating some options which may open up more backends, as well as what would be involved to do our own. But it’s not a short term project, and putting everything on hold for a 3-6 months also doesn’t seem very palatable.
Appreciate the feedback in any case.
So more is better. your company would allow which ones?
Amazon and WebDAV
I could imagine WebDAV might be a nice thing to support for people with strict security policies. That backend is certainly on our radar.
I was just looking at Ulysses and their External Folders sync option looks perfect. They market it towards Dropbox and Git, but it looks like it would work for almost any third-party sync service.
Thanks. Ulysses is a completely different app, with different data structure. They just use markdown files, I believe. It’s a markdown editor. It’s also proprietary, so the code is not available.
We could add something like that, but it wouldn’t satisfy many people, because it would be Mac only. Most people want sync to iOS devices as well.
Thanks for the feedback!
Hello everyone,
Congratulations on your work and your app, it’s really great. I used it for a long time (as a subscriber), but nowadays, my concerns about privacy have become increasingly important. Specifically, after a recent incident with my iCloud account, which was “locked” by Apple for a period of time to secure it. This made me realize the need to keep my data at home, for example through a NAS. I now only use applications that are compatible with WebDAV/CardDAV/CalDAV, which are standards, and indeed I couldn’t find a solution for this with your app, so I no longer use it. Therefore, I’m giving a thumbs up for this type of feature!
Thanks for the feedback! We’ll take it along. It would indeed be good to add WebDAV.
Interesting. I didn’t know anyone used WebDAV or its relatives anymore.
I know you’re skittish about iCloud because of your recent experience, but I did want to note from a privacy & security standpoint, if you enable end to end encryption on iCloud and then turn on the encrypted iCloud option in Agenda, your data is protected by encryption keys which are only present on your devices, and cannot be accessed by anyone else, including Apple.
If you’re managing your data at home, don’t forget to make backups and store them offsite.