Has Stability / Reliability Improved?

Laura,
As someone who had been having massive problems over the last year with legend synching, I spent a lot of time providing Jay with feedback on the (seemed like) never ending stream of sycing bugs. He was very receptive. Like most coders, I think he just needed a steady stream of repeatable bug info in order to nail down the issues. I was not going to commit to Legend until I could work for a couple of weeks without any issues.

I’m happy to say that I was able to switch from Workflowy several weeks ago, and have not had a syncing issue since. Yes, there are still issues (especially in the iOS version), but I now feel comfortable that I am not losing any data. I have quite a few lists of data that I depend upon daily and they’ve been rock-solid since I switched.

I agree 100% with what you said about Relying on the software, and put off switching for the last year because of the sync issues. Even though I hated Workflowy’s lack of progress, I couldn’t fault it’s reliability at the time. I was also an avid Dynalist user prior to Workflowy for the same reason.

I can’t speak to date/calendar/reminders (which it sound like you use) because I haven’t dove into them, but I feel much better now about outline data syncing. I’ve been strictly about the documents’ outline data and lists. I don’t mess with mirrors, links or dates. For me, the primary reason to move from Workflowy was their stagnant progress (despite never-ending promises) and lack of Panes (after 6 years of promising they were right around the corner). As far as I’m concerned, the Legend’s Panes alone were worth the switch once sync was working.

I can’t say I’ve had any crashes of the native desktop apps as you mentioned. Feel free to email me directly if you like:
sam<period>marrocco<at>cuttersstudios<dot>com

LauraH Not sure of the timing relative to when you stepped away, but the syncing became problematic while Jay was redoing the sync engine (in fact, I lost a ton of item notes during this process, my first and only data loss with Moo.do/Legend). However that was in Beta and that’s the risk of using beta software. It has been pretty stable for a while.

I do second the suggestion that bug fixing become not just the priority but sole focus until the vast majority are resolved. That’s been my biggest issue with Legend since day 1 and the thing that makes me consider leaving regularly.

If you use the email functionality, be aware that is moving towards showing the Gmail or Outlook full app in a pane rather than the Email inbox pane that has been used for a while. This negatively affects my user experience though may work better for some.

I think big crashes and sync problems are now behind us.

Bug fixing will be the top priority for a while. Email not working correctly has been the top complaint for a long time, which is why I’m working on that. Those issues are mostly reported by new users by email as the reason they couldn’t get started with Legend, so they’re not as visible on the forum.

I’ll continue to focus on bug fixing, on mobile as well as web/desktop. I want to get it to a place where it feels extremely solid before going into any big new features.

andrew Tell me more about how it negatively affects your experience (in the email thread)? Is it just that it’s not fully featured yet? Or is the new method just not as good in some way? I’d ideally like to make it strictly better once it’s all finished.

Eik What was the drag-drop problem? Can you start a thread for that? I made some changes to drag/drop for the new email pane and to fix some Mailbird problems, but I think I didn’t test dragging local files.

Jay Tell me more about how it negatively affects your experience

Sorry I should have clarified. If you keep the existing email pane option, it’s not a problem, but if we must use the new Email pane, I am concerned that would lose the ability to have multiple narrow email panes each showing a different filtered view of my inbox (or inboxes), which is actually pretty cool. Again, if extensions could be supported, that would help. Gmail’s multiple inboxes is somewhat useful but half baked and long ignored.

@Jay I do my part with the spam when I visit but I’m not here regularly. It does seem worse.

To be totally blunt: If a user can’t get over a little extra friction when signing up for the forum, they’re not going to be Legend users for long, anyway. Between the learning curve and the bugs, this app basically demands that users are a bit more patient than usual. It’s absolutely worth it, of course. This thread itself is all the proof you need for that.

@LauraH, you already know my experience is basically identical to yours. There are a number of core things Legend does that absolutely nothing else can do – or can even be shoehorned into approximating.

Answering your question: it’s about the same as it was. During the recent rough patch I stopped using beta entirely because I just needed to get my work done and didn’t have the time to faff with all the setbacks. It sounds like that is over now…but I still haven’t switched back. Too much to get done. I haven’t actually lost any data yet, though. I’ve lost work that needed to be re-created but not (I don’t think) any content.

Only once in 6 years have I been entirely locked out of access to my Legend docs, and that happened this summer. Jay took care of me right away of course, but there’s no getting around that risk. I absolutely do not rely on Legend for time-sensitive info: I use Apple’s calendar / reminders apps to schedule things that actually can’t be missed. Of course I would LOVE to have everything in Legend so I don’t have to double-enter critical events (and risk mistakes in keeping the duplicate entries current). But I haven’t gotten a reliable notification from Legend since the day I started using it.

Luckily (for me), the nature of my work is less about deadlines and appointments. It’s more like task-sequencing. I basically work for myself so if I don’t get something done today…well I just keep working on it tomorrow until it does get done. Ultimately I can’t start the next thing until the current one is done – when it’s “due” is immaterial. So I have dates in my main project task list. Legend lets me understand the common traits of tasks in my project across multiple unrelated subject areas, then put them into a serial list that optimizes my time, protects against mistakes, and reduces wasted material. This is irreplaceable.

So for me, an unreliable Legend that needs occasional repair and rework is better than none at all. Even if I had to spend a couple hours a week on Legend cleanup, it would still save me so much time and risk in my current project that it’s the lesser of the two evils. Yeah, it gets really frustrating…but there is no alternative. Obviously it’d be great if it weren’t that way – and once this huge project is over I plan to do my part to help that happen – but for now I have just learned how to proceed cautiously. I compartmentalize my work where possible for easier damage control, avoid features that have proven to be landmines, and have gotten comfortable with restoring from backups.

Jerud I completely agree with you that the usefulness of Legend greatly outweighs the need to deal with its quirks, foibles and flaw. There’s nothing quite like it on the market today.

There is, however, a lot of activity in this space now with apps such as reflect, tana, mem and suchlike. In general they are more polished than Legend but don’t offer the same sort of functionality. While I completely defer to @Jay in these matters for bringing such a wonderful product to market, I do wonder if there’s a business case for ramping up Legend by bringing outside money and resources into the mix. I worry that Legend is disappearing into the background noise in a market dominated by better funded by less well featured competitors.

wecanseeformiles I worry this, too. Obviously my choice to use Legend is almost 100% predicated on the USP as above. If something comes along that offers the same power but with more stability and fewer quirks, life gets a lot harder for this app because it will have functionally-equivalent competition for the first time.

Jay deserves recognition (and profit) for creating something actually different from the hordes of just-an-outliners that solves real people’s needs. He could have just “dumbed down” Legend to compete directly with other outliners, but thankfully he’s kept the principles of this app. It’s obviously not making anybody rich, nor generating enough buzz to bring in capital, but he’s keeping the dream alive and for that I’m super grateful.

The Mailbird team hooked me up with a way to test it and I finally got that duplicated emails bug fixed.

I’ll be ramping up the big fixing over the next couple of weeks. My primary goal for a while will be to make everything really stable.

Hopefully once everything is really stable then we can put more effort into generating some buzz and growing into a big team so we can move faster

I split the moderation / bug reporting discussion to a new thread here:
https://forum.legendapp.com/d/1490-bug-and-feature-request-reporting-on-the-forum/6

I managed to mess it up a little though; I lost one of @LauraH’s initial posts and forgot to put in an introductory post in the thread before splitting the others into it… Sorry!