• General
  • Has Stability / Reliability Improved?

Long time users may notice I haven’t been on the forum for awhile. Nearly a year ago, I got into work, went to open Legend and start my work day and the app crashed. No amount of reload / restart would fix it. Possibly a re-install might have… but at that point I was fed up. It wasn’t the first time something like that had happened. I can’t have software that I RELY on for tracking tasks / projects / reminders simply going KABLOOIE at random times.

Challenge is - there really is nothing else like Legend. After a year of other tools… I’m still running into the same frustrations and limitations around organizing that brought me to Legend in the first place.

I’m considering moving back in - BUT - same as before. Organizing in Legend may suit me better; but if it’s going to crash when I need it… it doesn’t matter how well organized it is. I’d rather have a software that I’m “hacking” to make work; but that WORKS; than something I can’t trust.

For those of you who have been around awhile - how is the stability recently? How is the sync? Can I trust Legend to be my “everything” manager tool? Or should I stick with more reliable solutions?

    I’m using Legend on a daily basis. It works for me, but Legend is not bugfree. New bugs en re-occuring bugs, like yesterday I noticed changed behaviour regarding drag-drop a local image to an outline. This frustrated me a lot months ago, but nowadays I tend to live with them. And change my workflow to workarond these bugs. Not ideal, but still better than not using Legend at all. I wished Jay would focus on bugfixing, and not building new features to fix the bugs and introduce even more bugs. I would still recommend using Legend, but you should be open to accept the bugs and workaround them.

    • Jay replied to this.
      5 days later

      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.

      • Jay replied to this.

        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.

          a month later

          Thank you to everyone who replied here. I’d like to try moving back into Legend… I do miss the features.

          However, even just trying to “move back in” I’m already finding bugs again. sigh. I’ll make a list of them in a separate thread. I’ll probably move back anyway - Legend is unique in feature set, and it works well for me.

          It’s crazy, we make the same observation. Legend is great, but still too many bugs, which sometimes make it so painful to use.
          I have plenty of examples to give.
          The forum which is completely polluted with spam (it’s systematic and messages sometimes remain for several days like today), is not at all a guarantee of seriousness.

          And regarding the bugs, I understand that it is sometimes difficult to resolve them. But if I take the example of this thread that I posted at the end of August (https://forum.legendapp.com/d/1185-mailbird-problem), there was no bug on mailbird, an update in August created a new bug which is still not resolved 4 months later . It seems so incomprehensible to me.
          In fact, I have the daily fear of having a bug that completely blocks me from using Legend, or of having a completely new bug that will take several months to fix.

          I have a very paradoxical feeling.
          I don’t want to criticize Legend because it’s such a wonderful tool.
          And I want to criticize because it annoys me so much.

          The spam in the forum is crazy! I can’t find any tools in Flarum that can stop it. The only thing that would really work is to require approvals on signup, but then that would add a huge blocker to new users joining and posting. I’ve been trying to clean it out daily but lost track over the holidays, and they seem to have stepped it up from one a day to many a day… I re-enabled a spam plugin so maybe that will help…

          I’ve been slow during the holidays but I’ll try to fix these bugs soon! I had thought one of the recent updates would have fixed the Mailbird bug, but I guess it didn’t. I talked to the Mailbird team and got a way to test it so I can more easily find/fix that bug.

          On the bright side it seems like sync is very stable now 🙂. So now I will be able to focus on these experience bugs.

          8 days later

          @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.

              7 days later

              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 🙂

              9 days later

              Jerud Heh way to go Jerud! 😛. No worries, thanks for splitting it out.

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