A pair of essays has been rattling in my head for a while.

First is Kyle Chayka from October, in “TextEdit and the relief of simple software”:

Over the past few years, I’ve found myself relying on TextEdit more as every other app has grown more complicated, adding cloud uploads, collaborative editing, and now generative A.I. TextEdit is not connected to the internet, like Google Docs. It is not part of a larger suite of workplace software, like Microsoft Word. You can write in TextEdit, and you can format your writing with a bare minimum of fonts and styling. […]

I trust in TextEdit. It doesn’t redesign its interface without warning, the way Spotify does; it doesn’t hawk new features, and it doesn’t demand I update the app every other week, as Google Chrome does.

John Gruber at Daring Fireball responded to it in January:

But I get the feeling that Chayka would be better served switching from TextEdit to Apple Notes for most of these things he’s creating. Saving a whole pile of notes to yourself as text files on your desktop, with no organization into sub-folders, isn’t wrong. The whole point of “just put it on the desktop” is to absolve yourself of thinking about where to file something properly. That’s friction, and if you face a bit of friction every time you want to jot something down, it increases the likelihood that you won’t jot it down because you didn’t want to deal with the friction.

Part of me agrees with this vehemently – for casual text wrangling, Notes is by far the best iteration of what both the old Stickies app and TextEdit attempted.

But Notes are still evolving. The UI keeps changing. I’ve had a note shared by a friend hanging alongside my own notes for years, without me asking for it. I remember the moment when tags were introduced, and suddenly copy/​paste from Slack started populating things in the sidebar. Then there was this scary asterisked dialog that slid so well into planned obsolescence worries that it felt like a self-own:

And the attendant warning, ostensibly well-intentioned, adorned my notes for months, just because I had an older Mac Mini I barely touch doing menial things in a dusty closet:

On top of that, the last version of Apple Notes on my macOS occasionally breaks copy/​paste (!), which led to some writing loss on my part. (If you cut from one note intending to paste in another, and realize nothing was saved in the clipboard, you lost the text forever.)

These are not show stoppers. But they too are friction that has to be juxtaposed with what Gruber lists in his essay. They’re also friction of the unexpected, new, stochastic flavour. TextEdit’s challenges, on the other hand, are known knowns. In this context, TextEdit is in that rare – and maybe increasingly treasured – place where it no longer gets updates, but it doesn’t feel abandoned, or falling apart, or at the risk of outright cancellation. (I think on the inside of tech companies this is called being “maintenanced” – not actually staffed to be improved, but still eligible for breaking bug fixes and security updates.)

A user named Millie captured this feeling recently on Mastodon:

We need to normalize declaring software as finished. Not everything needs continuous updates to function. In fact, a minority of software needs this. Most software works as it is written. The code does not run out of date. I want more projects that are actually just finished, without the need to be continuously mutated and complexified ad infinitum.

And I saw another person, JP, sharing a similar sentiment:

Personally I would be very happy to live in a postcapitalist world where it was 100% FINE that desktop operating systems had “stopped evolving” because they were good enough to meet basically everyones’ needs, and there was no stock price to crash from an old monopoly having clawed its way to the top with nowhere else to go. “Let [certain] software be finished” has always felt to me like oblique pining for humanity to outgrow our current political-economic system.

Even on my crowdsourced list of well-made apps and sites, someone mentioned Bear – interestingly enough another note-taking app – this way:

The fact that in the 10+ years I’ve been using it, there’s only been a single major overhaul update is a feature, not a bug to me.

I have seen this sentiment grow in recent years, as AI is seemingly shoved into every crevice of everything whether or not it even had crevices to begin with. Liquid Glass on the Mac side and incessant ads plus bugs on the Windows side add to the malaise.

But I’ve also been in technology so long that even outside of tensions of capitalism, it’s hard for me to imagine software not changing. Code does run out of date even if you try very hard. So I don’t know yet how to square all this.

Bear is not finished/“maintenanced,” but it seems to not be changing the same way some other software is changing, either. I’m excited reading its blog – even if there are features or updates that do not pertain to me, they don’t bother me, and make me excited for others benefitting. Its innovation feels considered, not reckless.

In a week I’m praising products I didn’t expect to praise, I feel similarly about Lightroom Classic. When Adobe in 2017 forked Lightroom Classic out of the newly-refreshed Lightroom, a lot of us got worried about the “Classic” tag having “dead man’s walking” connotations. But nine years later, and Lightroom Classic is still being lightly updated with fixes, camera presets, and – occasionally – feature changes that largely feel welcome. Lightroom Classic appears, to once again use industry jargon, “stable.”

Maybe the answers are somewhere in this post: celebrate and fund “maintenanced” apps, fork apps into “stable” and “modern” paths, or encourage and practice slow, considered growth. I bet there are other approaches and altogether new ideas to try, too. (There used to be a tradition, when software was physical, to list all the new stuff at the back of the box. What if we started writing out the things we didn’t add?) But I like at least talking about it to begin with. There are apps in my life I want to feel like TextEdit, there are apps that I want to feel like Notes, and there are ones I’m happy to put on the cutting edge/​beta/canary path, where bugs are a promise, and motor memory a distant dream.

I yearn for a software ecosystem that allows all of these types of apps to blossom.