It was amusing that Sunrise was bought by Microsoft, but still could not connect to either of the Exchange servers I threw at it. Support basically just shrugged at me via email, rough translation being 'it works on my machine.'
Sort of unrelated, but Outlook for Android also still cannot handle recurring all-day events. They will appear in the calendar on incorrect days. Also tested this across multiple servers.
I use Nine for email, which blows Outlook for Android out of the water. Business Calendar 3 is the only Outlook (Desktop) equivalent calendar I've found for Android.
I agree but the current model is broken. I buy FantastiCal, don't like it, I've just thrown money down the toilet. Yeah yeah you can go through iTunes and get it back but that feels like a dick move, and how many actually know the procedure anyway? It's not exactly advertised.
I throw a quid down the toilet? That's fine, I don't mind. I throw a fiver or a tenner? Woah dude, that's like, a Starbucks latte! Totally different (or not, but hey, that's what it feels like).
I wish Apple would start allowing time-limited trialware. The IAP machinery is already there, they just have to allow apps that stop working after 30 days if there is no payment. After 30 days, I have a pretty good idea whether an app is worth £1, £10, £50 or 0.
> I throw a quid down the toilet? That's fine, I don't mind. I throw a fiver or a tenner? Woah dude, that's like, a Starbucks latte! Totally different (or not, but hey, that's what it feels like).
Well spotted. Note how that strip is from 2011, it was a bit of an old joke at the time already, and nothing has changed. Or rather: app-developers now route around this perception with IAP-whaling, which makes everyone sad and doesn't really map to "real" apps anyway. A trialware model would be better for everyone.
People hate the idea of spending money and then having a bad experience. You can be reasonably sure that with a cup of coffee that it won't be completely terrible, if you have a bad experience you can ask them to brew you a new one. With apps it is a lot more hoops to jump for a less certain outcome.
you have to consider apps are still plugging holes of basic functionality everyone expect from a computer but isn't available on mobile.
I still can't fine tune my screen brightness nor set up a firewall. oh but next version of the OS will have support for saving a copy of my credit card for wireless payments
Given that so many startups only exist for the purpose of being bought, the logical conclusion here, is that perhaps you shouldn't rely on things made by startups.
At least, until they reach a level of self-operation that makes it clear that if they are bought, they'll be kept.
I still use Sparrow for email on Mac. Would use it on iOS too, but it's quite buggy in iOS9. Spark is _almost_ as good as Sparrow on iOS, but it's free which makes me wonder whether they're doing some kind of data mining for revenue and how long they will be around.
And because it's open-source, it won't just get shut down. Worst-case it gets abandoned or forked or suffers feature bloat (but since it's already a mail client...) or goes the way of Thunderbird.
Slightly shameless self promotion: If you're looking for an Android solution, we're working on TimeFerret, a calendar app that helps you reduce fragmented meeting schedules and track productivity. It's not released yet though. The iOS version will be out first, followed by Android.
The overarching lesson I'm slowly learning is to not get too comfy with any saas products. Who knows how long they'll stick around, regardless of if they're great / popular / profitable.
I still prefer to use desktop-based products that I own as much as possible for this reason. Rather than think of it as being behind this swing of the pendulum, I prefer to think of it as being ahead of the next one.
This is why I am very skeptical of (non-open-source) software made by startups. Often they are not in it to build a sustainable long-term business, but just for an exit, and that almost inevitably means the death of the software. It's as though the software is really just a sort of "corporate resumé" made to support their goal of getting bought out, not really something to be used.
Unfortunately, I realize this attitude might make it harder to actually make a sustainable business around solving a non-trivial problem, but as a user I've been burned too many times by companies suddenly getting acquired and then ceasing to exist.
This has nothing to do with opensource. Many opensource startups have just died and not taken things forward.
If anything, look into the mission of the company and how they make money. i.e. look into their business. If it's all doled out for free, it's a good idea to give them a miss.
It's sad when we pay $5 for a coffee made in 5 minutes that we'll drink in 3... but not $5 for an app that took 5 months that we'd use daily for a year.
Most coffee cups already do have ads on them. They have you paying $5 for coffee, AND running around with free ads for them in your hands. And you don't even notice you're a walking billboard for them! Not to mention all that juicy data you're giving them with every CC purchase, or loyalty card swipe...
Not to mention that $5 might be the most expensive app someone buys, and then they expect updates for the foreseeable future despite on-going development costing loads more time. There have been developers who released a separate, paid sequel and were left with angry customers who expected updates to their original app.
My experience has been that since underlying platform software changes so quickly locally run purchases are often more work to maintain than SAAS offerings.
I honestly don't think that Free software can keep up in the short term without a regular dues-paying membership organization behind it. Instead of concentrating on trying to expand interest in software rights, I think the only way forward is to consolidate the already converted. Also, it gives non-developers and non-technical people the ability to feel fully involved.
I wish the Chicago FSF had two or three offices in town, a local administration, weekly meetings, classes daily, and that I could send them $25 a month to remain in good standing.
In the long term Free software can't help but win, unless Stallman gets hit by a bus. Stallman will eventually be hit by a bus.
edit: and by all that I mean that Free Software needs to build a proper business.
In the ancient times GNU and the free BSD programs provided a vastly better user experience than the native tools in just about every commercial Unix system.
Also the window managers were at least slightly less awkward to use and at least tweekable.
I think there are a lot of specialised software development tools and products that are free or open source that are generally better than their commercial alternatives.
Although it's complicated as a lot of large players are putting a lot of money into free or open alternatives while still convincing their customers to pay a lot of money for their enterprise alternatives. (I wonder how they do it. I am actually reluctant to use a free database server although it's not uncommon for the commercial database we use to have rather horrid bugs that won't even be fixed since its virtually impossible to reproduce the problem in another system, and we can't debug properly without the source.)
It's only mass market applications and games that gives you enough money to totally outcompete free, maybe a small reason is that typically only a small fraction of the audience can code. I guess the same is true to some extent also for specialised tools in other domains, like financial or medical software, were the users typically can't code and there might be legislation and regulations too.
Its a valid question, clearly they weren't making enough money to survive as a proper business. Would you have paid more for their service? And if so enough more that the reduction in users covered the cost of operations?
One of the things that that comes up a lot with new ventures is that they don't know the answer to those questions when they start, but they do when they either die or succeed. In this case it seems that its financially feasible as a "feature" of Outlook rather than a standalone business.
Looking at the landscape of startup "businesses" recently it is becoming more clear that the viability of the product is irrelevant, since the goal is to get noticed as good programmers/designers who made a "real" thing and get hired.
You have to be careful slipping into cynicism, I try to guard against it myself. Shipping something is a better indicator of execution than a degree and it does get people noticed, but it would be an overreach I think to suggest that the majority of businesses start out looking to be bought and acqui-hired. Sometimes the idea is bigger than that, and sometimes it isn't.
I'm intimately familiar with the space, especially when it comes to Silicon Valley startups, and it's no cynicism, but reality that most of them do, in fact, start out looking to be bought. In fact, that's the #1 goal of VCs, angel investors & almost all founders.
You're responding to someone also intimately familiar with the space. Honestly, arguing whether something is a majority view vs a big minority isn't that interesting.
"Our product is our stock" - quote from HBO's "Silicon Valley"
Basically, this. Start-ups and their investors are looking to cash out. Imagine if Apple or Microsoft had been bought out by IBM in their early years, instead of them both disrupting the space drastically.
For the record, from a Microsoft stand-point, I think this makes perfect sense. They were acquiring talent and a user base it's foolish to have two competing products in your portfolio. From a user standpoint, it probably sucks (I've never used Sunrise, and actually already use Outlook's calendar.)
I'm definitely an oddball, but I would rather want to be part of a business to serve people and solve problems. I don't want to be rich, just make enough be comfortable enough to work on the problems that I want to solve.
Maybe getting bought out on my first successful product affords me the freedom to do so.
Well, this is disappointing. I was late to the Sunrise party, so I've barely been able to use it. I'm not thrilled about heavily integrating Outlook into my future work, so I guess it's off to find another solution.
It's a bit unexpected, but I've found Outlook to be the best iOS email client these days. It's bloated and has quite a few rendering bugs, but for the basic email-as-task-list workflow pioneered by Mailbox et al I haven't come across any current players that are better.
Kind of sad that the explosion of clever email and calendar apps a few years ago has collapsed into a handful that aren't as good as we used to have.
Their web application rewrite that they did last year though is hot disgusting garbage. I don't know how they managed to make something so slow and sluggish as the "new" Outlook. Downright embarrassing.
I wish there was something like it just for Calendaring though. Especially on the desktop. For email I'm already using Polymail full time and it's a hassle to have two email clients just for calendar.
Not the OP, but on my Android device I have an easier time of calendaring since basically any app I choose will show all of the calendars I want (personal, my work calendar, my manager's calendar, my team's calendar) in the same space. For desktop, I did have Sunrise's desktop app until I noticed I wasn't getting a proper sync of some (apparently random) appointments from desktop to cloud/mobile, and even more so because I accepted an appointment via Sunrise and it changed my email alias in the response from my actual address to Sunrise's generic "invitation@email.sunrise.am" so that people then started emailing me at the generic email rather than my actual address.
Most of my calendars are Google Apps. Outlook was my backup for the work calendar using the Google Apps Outlook Sync app (although I've noticed a few sync failures there, too), and just adding additional calendars to Outlook without having all of my email there too looks like it requires some kind of arcane magick. Thunderbird+Lightning got rotated out of the mix quickly due to a lot of issues syncing and getting multiple calendars into it.
Probably because everyone we're communicating with is mixing between Google Apps/webview calendar and Outlook or Office 365, I also find that I regularly can't see an appointment that is emailed to me in my email client as it shows up as an .ics file attachment instead.
So featurewise:
- Most important for me: Easy addition of multiple calendars, where I can just select which calendar a new appt should be added, as easily as I can in my Android clients- I hate using web clients for calendaring, and they never really show multiple calendars well. NOTE: I mean that the calendar has a direct sync to each of the calendars online, not having one main account to which I have to share all of my other calendars. I want one place where I can go to view and create appointments and then have them also show up in their respective accounts.
- Supports open standards like CalDAV/CardDAV as well as syncs to Google or Office 365 (I can select a provider like Fastmail that uses CalDAV for my personal calendar, but I'm stuck with Google or O365 for work)
- Desktop client, multiple views (agenda, today, week, month)
- drag-and-drop of items into the calendar to create a new appointment
- "Send to calendar" from an email as an option
- Categorization/tagging on an appointment would be nice - Outlook allows this but Google doesn't seem to allow tagging appointments like you can email
A bit of a data dump, but a desktop client that handles multiple calendars well is surprisingly difficult to find in Windows. I happily pay for a number of otherwise free services (Pandora, Evernote, Pocket, Lastpass, etc.), but there really isn't even a pay option.
My understanding is that Outlook for iOS uses a cloud service that talks to the Exchange server and stores your credentials/data: https://blog.winkelmeyer.com/2015/01/warning-microsofts-outl.... So logging in involves giving Microsoft (and indirectly Amazon, since it runs on AWS), clear-text access to your information.
You should check out https://www.uniboxapp.com, I switched to it during the first beta testing, and haven't looked back. Originally it was a Mac OSX only client, but now on iPhone and iPad. Organizes email by the person you're communicating with, like text messaging. Obviously an email client only, and not a super duper corporate client.
Outlook on iOS is great. It used to be called Acompli until it was acquired by Microsoft. I had long hoped all of the Sunrise features would be incorporated into Outlook before Microsoft shut it down, but no such luck.
The best part about Sunrise was Meet, its quick little method of booking meetings with someone: https://sunrise.am/meet
You'd choose some available times, it gives you a link which you send to whoever you want to meet with, and the recipient books a time slot with a couple of clicks. It updates in real time so if you book something new, the slot disappears. It even has a little iOS keyboard to generate these links.
Does anyone know a similar replacement service? Nothing beats just pasting someone a link and letting them pick one of three times you chose.
None of the suggested alternatives so far are the same as Sunrise's meet feature-- including vyte, Microsoft Invite, Google's Appointment Slots, or calendly.
Meet allows you (the requester) to set the times available for meeting and send a signup page to a single respondent.
It's not about group meetings, or about "office hours" that anyone can sign up for.
The use case is surprisingly broad: a small window of availability for a single meeting.
> On August 31st, we’ll officially shut down the app and it will stop working all together.
So based on this, I assume that all access to your calendar server (iCloud, Exchange, Google Apps, etc) was managed through a centralised server(s) that Sunrise used... for something.
Maybe the next time someone claims to be a funky new take on <boring office task> just do a little checking. We've had desktop and mobile device clients for mail, calendaring, contacts etc for literally decades. Why now, when we have more computing power available to us than ever before, do we need another server (operated by a company that's more likely to disappear than not) between us and our mail/calendar/contacts?
This is getting ridiculous. We need like n founder manifesto canary before we start using the products of all these startups. The canary should contain:
1. Their business plan
2. Long term vision for the company
3. How they plan to sustain themselves in the short run (1-2 years with no/little revenue).
4. What they would do if they get acquisition offers.
etc.
The startup can remove the canary once they decide to change their direction.
I'd like to say THANK YOU to the Sunrise team for the incredible work you've put into the app! You've made my calendar experience very enjoyable and I know that you got a proper reward for that as part of the acquisition.
It's great that there are people like you, working on software these days.
"Everybody wins" would involve everyone walking away with equal or more than they had at the time of parting, which could be done by opening the source of the product instead of letting it die of bitrot.
They're not being dishonest in characterizing this as more than a simple acqui-hire; most of the functionality of Sunrise is faithfully replicated in Outlook for iOS now (which, if you're not aware, was actually itself born out of the acquisition of a multi-protocol email app called Accompli, and still includes support for a variety of non-Exchange mail services). Unfortunately, missing features include the long-press natural language "quick-add" input box, and setting multiple reminders on events.
Drat, the best calendar app I've used on Android (except for the 46 notifications it gave for Easter Monday, and 58 for the last English Bank Holiday).
I'm sure this has been asked and answered before, but why do companies acquire startups just to shut their product down within a year so often? Is this just an acquihire? Or do big tech companies just play whack-a-mole with startups, buying any out with interesting products just to make sure they don't one day turn into competition?
For the $100+ millions Microsoft payed,they got the team, the tech and the opportunity to move the sunrise users to use their products.
Sunrise best capabilities are likely being built into outlook, they have a team that they know can execute and a percentage of sunrise users will move to outlook.
I only installed sunrise last week (when I moved to Android) but I found it a bit odd that I was using a different calendar app. I came from Windows Phone where messaging and calendar was baked in really nicely. So far my Android experience isn't as good but maybe outlook with sunrise will complete this circle for me.
> Today, we’re excited to announce that Sunrise is joining Microsoft. For Sunrise, this is just the beginning.
> Sunrise will remain free and available for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Android and Desktop – we’re not going anywhere.