I've been using Soulver for ages, I have Soulver 2 from the Mac App Store. It's a terrific little scratch pad, I love the ability to naturally interleave notes/language with arithmetic. I was unaware that there was a Soulver 3, however, as apparently they are no longer using the MAS as a distribution channel. Just a little top level note for anybody else like me that came here off the vague title alone and wasn't aware of Soulver 3.
> Why would anyone buy [any app] outside the Mac App Store?
I almost never buy an app from the Mac App Store when it's also available directly. I'd rather that the developer gets to keep the extra 30%.
Free apps I typically get from the store when available for the convenience of the updating system (though sparkle has made non-app store app updating pretty painless).
I don't find v3 a compelling upgrade for me but will upgrade anyway once syncing to iOS works again (important feature for me) just to support the dev.
> I almost never buy an app from the Mac App Store when it's also available directly.
Unpopular opinion, but I always try to buy Apps from the Mac App Store. It is easy to purchase and with buyer protection. You can easily install the app on another Mac and it updates automatically and all my apps are in the same place with just one account. But most importantly, Mac App Store Apps must run in a sandbox which is much more secure, than just downloading an app from the internet which might run with root privileges on your Mac.
I did purchase Soulver 3 though because I wanted to support the developer as I have been using Soulver 2 almost daily for 10 years. But sure enough, the in-app purchase experience did not work and crashed when going to PayPal. Ended up purchasing through the web-site. The downside now, is that my Soulver 3 App has megabytes of Paddle API frameworks embedded in it that is not used, and Little Snitch reports that Soulver 3 tries to connect to paddle 2 times every freaking time I start the app. Very annoying and unnecessary.
Soulver 3 has actually been a bit of a disappointment. They rewrote the parser and math engine in Swift and a lot of functionality has been lost in the process. I'm sure this will be addressed in further releases, but for now, it has no iCloud sharing and you cannot share documents with the iOS app. Bit flicking operators does not work anymore, which was so useful for programming. It has gained support for date time calculation which is very nice, like 'today + 30 days', but Numi does this better and also has a 'now' variable for current time you can do calculations with. The new Soulver 3 UI could be better and I especially find it annoying that the window has a rather large fixed min-width and I also don't like the different color for the right column. Numi is a a copy of Soulver, but has bypassed the original. Unfortunately, I found Numi after I purchased Soulver 3, but I have ditched Soulver 3 for Numi. Numi has more functionality, looks much better and has fewer bugs. Edit: I don't like that Numi is not available on the App Store either. Numi is created by a developer from Belarus, which is a country only slightly better than DPRK and I would very much like to have Numi in a sandbox.
Ha-ha. ))) C' mon man! So superficial about Belarus. )) I just don't want to bother with MAS, so it's much easier to automate all stuff. Btw all recent updates are notarized.
> I just don't want to bother with MAS, so it's much easier to automate all stuff.
That might sound good to you, but not to your users. Please put it in a sandbox and on the MAS. There is no reason for a calculator to _not_ run in a sandbox. Discoverability and sales will probably improve as well on the App Store. I for one, would purchase in an instance, whereas now the only purchase option is a paddle (sic) preorder button.
It is the newer version, there definitely appear to be some nice new features[0] and a UI re-fresh (although as a Soulver 2 user, I think I'm pretty happy as is)
I'm pretty sure that's a price reduction. I think Soulver used to be either $19.99 or $24.99; Soulver 3 is a price increase (although not unreasonable).
However, it doesn't sync with Soulver for iOS yet. I suspect Soulver 3 will probably come to the Mac App Store once the iOS app is updated to use the new file format.
Are you sure? Looking at my Soulver macOS receipt I did purchase it for $10 in 2012. I can't tell if it was a sale price but would be coincidental to have the same price cut 7-years apart.
