I’ve mentioned before that I go through three phases as I get used to a new program: Inquiry, Inquisition and Investment:

The Inquiry phase is the “does it do what I want it to do, without being irritating?” phase. Basically this is like a caveman poking a thing with a sharp stick, hiding behind a rock to see if it tries to bite him, then biting it to see if it’s worth eating.

If a program gets past that, then comes the Inquisition: “Oh yeah, well can you handle this? What about that? And how do you like the comfy chair?”

Anything that makes it past the Inquisition with any level of approval gets my Investment, the phase where I put the time into learning how to use the program to its fullest and really start using it.

I’ve put VoodooPad through the wringer before. Searching through my email reveals that I have a version 2 license¹. I liked the idea, the core of VoodooPad back then, but it never got past the Inquisition. I could see that it wanted to do things right, but we never clicked.

Still, when I got the email that VoodooPad had left its original home at Flying Meat I was kinda saddened. It may not have been my cup of tea, but it was still an amazing product and it’s cool in a way that is hard to put into words. Don’t get me wrong, I think Gus of Flying Meat made the right choice when he decided to sell VoodooPad. If he doesn’t feel he can maintain it any more nobody would know better than he would.

The new owners at Plausible Labs have promised to make it better and take great care of it, because they love VoodooPad and want to see it grow. That’s great news.

But can I trust it?

There’s two questions there: Can I trust Plausible Labs to keep making VoodooPad better, and can I trust VoodooPad to be good enough to deserve my investment?

For the record I’ve already purchased my license; so we’re not talking about financial investment. I’m talking about investing my time, which is far more valuable these days. (“oh, look at Mr. Moneybags!” Yeah, yeah, you know what I meant.)

So, second question first: Can I trust VoodooPad, the program, to be what I want it to be?

Trusting the Program

This is the bigger of the two questions. After all, if VoodooPad is good enough to use and invest in now it doesn’t need a lot of updates all the time. My beloved Scrivener gets (I would say) Just enough updates: Not every month, but every so often. And even if updates stopped tomorrow I would keep using it until it no longer worked on whatever Mac I was using in the far future.

So I’ve started the process. I would say I’m near the end of the Inquisition phase right now. And what I’ve found is hopeful. Coming to version 5 of VoodooPad from version 2 left me refreshingly free of preconceived notions about the program: I knew it was a “Personal Wiki” and that’s about it.

Markdown support has entered the mix since last I checked the app, and even better, it seems to fully understand MultiMarkdown², which is a huge win. Simple Markdown like headings, strong, italic, etc. are all handled correctly and shown while you’re editing the text.

The other sine qua non for a personal wiki that I had is inter-page links that just appear without any additional markup/markdown/whatever. When I type the name of another page I want it to be clickable. VoodooPad does that with aplomb.

So, as a personal wiki it’s doing what I want it to do. Check.

And there’s a lot more that I haven’t fully explored yet³, like in-app scripting in Python, JSTalk, Ruby, shell, etc. and other potentially useful things like tagging, collections, built-in todo list collection…it’s basically the kitchen sink.

But there’s one huge dark spot: the iOS version of the app. It’s definitely been lacking in love or attention for years now. It’s not iOS 7-compiled, and most of the UI looks more like iOS 4. It doesn’t seem to open my main document, and it has separate editing/reading modes, thus getting rid of the main good thing I see in the desktop version. But, again, Plausible promises that improvments are coming. Which leads us to the second point: Trusting the company.

Trusting Plausible Labs

This is where I have a bigger problem. It’s not that I think they’re incompetent, or lazy, or bad developers or anything. Just as I believe Gus knew when to get out of VoodooPad, I also believe that he didn’t hand it over to someone who would mess it up. But it’s not their baby.

I’m not saying I think they’ll let it languish, but they need to know that now is a very sensitive period for the product. They shouldn’t rush any bug fixes or new features just for the sake of putting out a new version, but semi-regular updates on the blog about how the work is coming, some notification that they are working on it would go a long way to build confidence.⁴

That said, I’m going to Invest-with-a-capital-I in VoodooPad. And I great hopes of seeing Plausible Labs do great things with it. I just hope we don’t have to wait too long.

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