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Vesper 2.0 and Vesper Sync
- jwr 12y agoAre there any Vesper users that also used Simplenote? I'd be curious to know if there is anything significantly better about Vesper, compared to Simplenote. I realize Vesper lets you add photos (cool) — are there other differences?
- jgruber 12y agoImage 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.
- ianbannerman 12y agoI've used both. Simplenote has clients for major platforms and the web, unlike Vesper's iPhone only setup. This is the main reason I currently use Simplenote - I need a desktop client (web, OS X, or Windows). But when Vesper's Mac version launches I'd like to switch. Simplenote offers more functionality than Vesper at the cost of complexity. Parts of Simplenote feel arbitrary or difficult to build a mental model for. Vesper is beautifully apparent in how it works & what you can do. I never feel lost or wrestling for control in Vesper.
- leejoramo 12y agoI primarily use Simplenote on my iPhone because it syncs with altNV on my Mac. altNV is my primary note taking tool. I have tried various combinations of replacements for both of these apps, but keep coming back to this combination. I really love the Vesper interface. I find it much easier to use on the iPhone than any other note taking app. I also find the implementation of the tagging feature to be very easy to use to organize notes and to create work flows. If I only needed notes on my iPhone, I would choose Vesper I could see myself moving to Vesper if the OS X version lives up to the same UI standards as iOS, embraces the keyboard, and has a good export/import story.
- jwr 12y agoThanks for all the answers. As a heavy Simplenote/NVAlt user, this tells me I should wait until Vesper has apps on all platforms I use (iPhone, iPad, Mac) and reevaluate then. For the moment, I'll stay with simplenote, but keep watching.
- LukeB_UK 12y agoI have no idea what Vesper is and after looking at the website, I still have no idea.
- jgruber 12y agoVesper is a simple, elegant notes app for the iPhone.
- ihuman 12y ago"Vesper is a simple and elegant tool for collecting notes, ideas, things to do — anything you want to remember. Organize your notes whatever way comes naturally to you, without complications. Vesper's focus is on how it feels to use." https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/vesper-simple-elegant-notes/id655895325 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/vesper-simple-elegant-notes/...
- comex 12y agoIs there a way to export notes from the sync server to an open format? I don't currently use Vesper, but lack of such functionality would be a dealbreaker for me.
- malvim 12y agoGenuinely interested in why you guys decided to roll your own cloud sync service instead of using something like dropbox or the like. I recently started using YNAB (youneedabudget.com) for OSX and iPhone, and one of the things I liked the most is how they used dropbox to sync flawlessly between devices. It's probably hard enough doing sync right even with the help of dropbox API, but it just seems to me that rolling your own makes it two problems instead of one. Care to share your reasoning? Thanks!
- jafitc 12y agoYou are as weak as the weakest link in your system. The more you rely on 3rd party services the more likely you're going to be burned by them. If you have sync under your control, you can guarantee a certain level of user experience. Is it more work? Definitely. Is it worth it? It depends on what your priorities are.
- gress 12y agoYou have this the wrong way around. If you roll your own sync service, then you become the weak link in the user's system. Given how much effort it takes to get this stuff right and to maintain the service, it is irresponsible to do it yourself unless there are features you cannot otherwise deliver. It's far better from the user's perspective for developers to use Dropbox or even iCloud, because the chances of them abandoning or losing user data, or simply failing as a business, are much slimmer than those of an app developer selected at random.
- jafitc 12y agoIf you've never heard of the horror stories, I invite you to read up on that. It's not about the company going out of business, it's about having issues with a "black box" that you can't possibly debug or fix. The things you don't have control over will end up breaking your promise to the user. http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/26/4148628/why-doesnt-icloud-just-work http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/26/4148628/why-doesnt-icloud-... http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/03/frustrated-with-icloud-apples-developer-community-speaks-up-en-masse/ http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/03/frustrated-with-icloud-...
- tptacek 12y agoI admire the clarity of Gruber's writing, and I'm very happy that Vesper is honest about their capabilities w/r/t/ decrypting notes stored on their server, but "salted and hashed" was an unforced error. My guess, knowing how smart the people behind the code for this app are, is that they're not actually using "salted hashes" to store passwords, but an actual password hash (like bcrypt). Either way: the announcement would be better if it said which one they used. "Salted hashes" have been obsoleted, and are quickly attackable. It is possible to build an app like Vesper and not have it be straightforward to be compelled by the authorities to build surveillance into it; with native clients as the only clients, some straightforward cryptography would get them there. I'd hope they'd at some point be interested in talking to cryptographers about how to do that right. But like I said, in the absence of sound cryptography, candor is a great substitute. There's no OS X app for this yet, is there? I'd use it for personal stuff if there was.
- jgruber 12y agoWe 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_Mobile_Services_Day_12_.aspx http://www.thejoyofcode.com/Exploring_custom_identity_in_Mob...
- tptacek 12y agoThat's great; it's the answer I quietly predicted I'd get. If you're communicating to laypeople, you can say something like "we use a modern secure password hash".
- zaroth 12y agoNote, if your crypto.pbkdf2() is using SHA1 underneath, then 1,000 interations of SHA1 is very little computation for a GPU, which can do billions of SHA1 per second. Also, asking for 32 bytes from PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA1 has some bad side-effects, particularly if you are splitting up the result. (1Password got bitten by this, and wrote up the issue here: http://blog.agilebits.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/playing-defense.pdf http://blog.agilebits.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/playing...)
- ghshephard 12y agoIt's not quite a Canary, but the privacy policy has the line, "it's theoretically possible for Q Branch to read the decrypted note text or view image data, we don't have a mechanism in place to do that." Presumably, that line will disappear if they create such a mechanism. I'm super, super excited about the Vesper update, and can't wait for the OS X app to role out. I use vesper as my sole note taking app on my iPhone - it really is elegant, easy to use, and requires very little cognitive overhead to hop into. On my Laptop, it's all evernote, but, as much as I use it (2-3 hours a day, all meetings) - I've never really loved it. It's got a lot of crud, and upselling stuff that overwhelms me when I'm trying to just enter a new set of meeting notes. Love the way the Vesper team does stuff slowly, deliberately, and beautifully. If only all software was crafted with that much deliberation. Artisanal Software.
- kackontent 12y ago> We’ve tried to make it as easy and simple as possible to use. Here’s how it works. First, you create a Vesper Sync account using an email address and a password. Then, your Vesper data — the text of your notes, your image attachments, your tags, everything — syncs to our cloud service. Sign in using the same account on another device, and your Vesper data will appear on that device. > That’s it. I don't get why it's mentioned as something special - isn't it how it usually works? Dropbox, OneNote, OneDrive, Google Drive, anything? You create account, sign in, bam you have your data synced.
- atmosx 12y ago> Though it’s theoretically possible for Q Branch to read the decrypted note text or view image data, we don’t have a mechanism in place to do that, and we won’t create a mechanism unless legally ordered. So you can't protect data from US organizations. That's the reason I ditched dropbox, I don't see any reason adopting another solution which is less supported by third parties and has the same flaws. Any non-US citizen using US-based companies for online data storage should think twice before adopting any solution which is not in the EU or even better on his own country.
- supercoder 12y agoInteresting timing with WWDC coming up. Possible that Apple have been listening and present something new to make all these custom jobs redundant. I'm hoping they do, as a developer who also has rolled a few custom sync solutions to avoid iCloud , we'd all be better off if the OS handled the dirty work properly