Kindness...

To be honest, I’m not a programmer. I don’t know how to write code but enjoy tinkering and learning. I bought Nova when Panic introduced it, as I was already familiar with Coda and Coda 2. I used it to edit my blog and try out a few open-source projects shared by others on GitHub. That’s about it.

Panic introduced Coda, and later came the annual software upgrade/maintenance subscription. From my perspective as someone in marketing, I saw it as no different from those annoying subscription services out there. I understand that everyone needs revenue to survive. After all, people work to make money. I still paid for the subscription to use Nova.

From 2022 until now, for over a year, Nova has received small patch updates and minor tweaks. Paying $49 a year just for bug fixes didn’t sit well with me.

Then, strangely enough, when my subscription expired, Nova released a new update. It fixed more bugs, optimized things more, etc. I decided not to renew my subscription and switched to Zed. I don’t know how to write code, and before LLMs, I had to Google and read everything to modify my website the way I wanted. The whole process took a few days. Now, it’s much quicker—just a few minutes. Zed has features that Nova doesn’t, and vice versa… So now I find myself with one foot in each boat, which is uncomfortable, but still better than before.

On a beautiful day, Nova announced the 12.2 update, and to my surprise, it allowed me to update, even though my account had expired and I hadn’t renewed my subscription.

That day, I still made myself a cup of coffee, as usual, but the coffee tasted better.

Sometimes, being kind to existing customers is more important than chasing after new ones.

I think for myself