Letters from Armorica will return next week, after this brief rant.

For many years I have written Letters from Armorica using an app called Ulysses. It lets me compose in Markdown, and then does an excellent job of pushing the text to this blog. I get a backup on my own computer, the blog post is formatted correctly, and all is good.

And then today I wrote today’s letter, had it almost finished, and then it disappeared. Vanished. Gone. Like it had never existed.

There are two buttons next to each other in Ulysses; one initiates a search of your posts, and the other creates a new blank post. I often hit the second when I want the first, and then have to delete a blank post I did not want. I did that this morning; the empty posts vanished, and my current post vanished too. It was gone from the app and gone from my disk. It should at least have been copied to Ulysses’ trash folder, or to the system trash folder, but it was not. (Note, I’m a software engineer. If the file was anywhere to be found on my disk, I’d have found it.)

The relevant disk folder is in my Dropbox folder, so the post should have gone to Dropbox. So far as I can tell, it did not. The trash folder on Dropbox had the empty post, but not the one I’d actually written.

Needless to say, this is discouraging.

A few years ago, Ulysses switched from a one-time fee to a subscription model. I found it useful, so I paid for the subscription. No more. If I can’t trust it I’m not going to use it. I’ve cancelled my Ulysses subscription. It will be a little more tedious to post the new letter each week, but better that than using an app I cannot trust.

Goodbye, Ulysses. You can find your own way home.

____

Photo by Gervyn Louis on Unsplash