Today, Smile announced TextExpander Adjustments, describing the changes in a blog post after last week’s announcement was met with a wide variety of emotions.

In this post they pretty much nailed it when it comes to listening to what people had to say:

1. “$50/year is too much!” Now it’s $20 for existing customers, forever. Lots of people said they would pay $1-$2 month. This works out to $1.67. Assuming people do sign up, which I suspect many will, it will demonstrate that people are not against sustainable pricing as much as they were against an annual fee that was much greater than what they were previously paying.
2. TextExpander 5 will continue to be developed. This was true even before today, but it’s important to understand. This gives people a way to sync their snippets via Dropbox, iCloud, or BitTorrent Sync. The difference is that before today it seemed like there was an eventual end-date to TextExpander’s life, and now there seems like a future which will be more accessible to more people.
3. TextExpander Touch for iOS will be put back in the store. You can say that this never should have been removed, but dealing with App Store issues of confusion is an ongoing problem that developers deal with every day.

Best of all, today’s announcement leaves me feeling much more that there are available options rather than “This is the future, either get on-board or get left behind.”

I heard several people say that “syncing is a solved problem” in reference to Dropbox and iCloud. I disagree. While there would be reasons to be concerned about being forced to use Smile’s sync service without clarity about security (both when data is in transit and “at rest”), I reject outright the idea that the developers at Smile are either so dumb or so greedy that they thought “You know, we have a perfectly good system, but let’s make our own sync.” I am not a developer, but I know enough developers to know that (almost) no one wants to make their own sync. They make their own sync because they have seen problems and shortcomings in existing systems. Anyone who reads Brent Simmons’ Vesper Sync Diary and can still think that sync is a “solved issue” (even with the iCloud improvements that came later) probably doesn’t understand all the edge cases. Developers of 1Password, Day One, Yojimbo, and others have all decided to make their own sync solutions. So, maybe stop saying that sync is a “solved” problem just because it works for you.

Does that make Smile’s decision to roll their own sync solution the right decision? Not necessarily. For what I need, BitTorrent Sync works perfectly, but I don’t need all the things they want to do. (The internet would be a better place if we could all remember that “X works for me” does not mean “X works for everyone and no one needs anything better than X.”)

Will I sign up? Probably not, at least not right away. I still don’t see anything that I need from their new system, so I will continue to use what works for me. But if that changes in a year or two, I would have no trouble accepting $20/year to support the on-going development of an app that makes my life better and easier, made by a company that does a lot to support the Mac and iOS communities.