Vesper — the thought-collection app by Brent Simmons, Dave Wiskus, and John Gruber — has been updated to support Apple's new adaptive interface frameworks. And yes, that means Vesper now lets you note and tag in landscape on you iPhone and on your iPad.
If all you've ever made are brief reminders or lists, the additional space might not mean much to you. It lets you use the landscape keyboard, which some prefer, but text benefits from the large screen mostly when you enter a lot of it. So, I expect those that use Vesper to collect not only thoughts but drafts will be happiest with the new, wider options.
Big screen notes and images are one only one aspect of the change, however. Being able to have all your notes follow you from iPhone to iPad — thanks to Vesper sync — is another. It makes a useful yet dedicated place to keep your thoughts into a universal place to store and access them.
Also new, standard Share sheet support, so you can send your Vesper notes to any app that supports Share extensions, and do anything to them that available as an action extension.
I've been using the new version of Vesper since it went into beta and the transition really has been pulled off with the usual Q Branch minimalism and elegance. Typing on my iPad is still a joy, and typing into Vesper that way is joyous.
That said, I'm not sure how much I'll use the new modes for text entry. The biggest plus for me is availability.
The newly universal version of Vesper is a free update for existing customers and is currently available on sale for $7.99 for new customers.
John Gruber, writing about the new pricing on Daring Fireball:
Put another way, we're going to charge something sane or die trying. We tried following the iOS App Store trend by pricing Vesper at just $2.99 for months. It didn't work. Prices like that are not sane, and not sustainable, at least for well-crafted productivity apps. So Q Branch is drawing a line in the sand, and we hope other iOS developers will follow.
You can also read about why they went iPad instead of the previously announced Mac app at the Vesper blog.
- $7.99 on sale - Download now
Disclosure: I co-host a podcast with Dave Wiskus so check other reviews and get a well-rounded sense of the app if you're at all unsure about it.
