Well, never mind the article I was just sitting down to write about Vesper because Marco nailed it — his article parallels my thoughts almost exactly.
The handful of reviews and comments I’ve read today seem extremely polarized. For the most part people seem to love the app or hate it. I’ve always thought that when you’ve got a polarizing design it usually means you’ve got a winner.
Hating on Vesper because it shipped with “not enough features” is a bit like hating on a sedan because it’s not an SUV. It’d be one thing if Vesper had hard-to-hit tap targets, crashed on launch, lost data, and had typos in the credits. But it doesn’t.
Though Vesper is shy on power-user features — no Dropbox sync, no iPad version, no TextExpander support, no import, no export — what it’s not shy on is thoughtfulness and extreme attention to detail.
Vesper’s current lack of sync, export, etc. isn’t an oversight; it’s an intentional omission at this time. What Vesper does do, it does extremely well. It’s a skillfully crafted app, and that’s exactly what I’d expect from the team behind it.
Whether or not Vesper becomes my new go-to note-taking app or not is irrelevant. An app doesn’t have to become my most-used app before I can appreciate its design considerations and its delightful details.