Fix it yourself

I use Simplenote iOS every day, and recently they added a task list feature to the app, meaning you can just tap to mark an item as done. The only problem was, there was a bug where sometimes that tap would make the list scroll to the very bottom, which was really annoying for me, and I noticed I was starting to avoid using the feature because of this problem.

Eventually I thought to report the problem, and only then did I find that the app is open source, which meant the time I would have taken to only report the problem, was instead spent actually fixing the problem.

So version 4.9 is now available, and it includes the fix, and I’m very pleased about that.

This is the kind of situation where open source really shines, because the problem probably doesn’t bother many people, and so was low priority for the main team, but it really bothered me. And it’s reminded me that before I got so focussed on iOS, it was more common for me to be using open source software, and therefore be able to do this kind of work. But iOS put a bit of a dent in that workflow - most iOS apps are not open source, to the extent I didn’t even consider that a possibility even when using an app every day that actually is open source.

I’m really happy with the outcome in this situation, and this is a big reason I like to build my main workflows on software that has source available like this. Data portability is more important overall, but open source is a great bonus.