Product discontinued?

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Dynalist is an EXCELLENT outliner, and it’s sad to see it is not being updated. Thus, it’s important to know where the company stands.

I know there haven’t been updates for years and the company is focusing on Obsidian.

However, there is no clear indication that they are committed to Dynalist being a functioning product on not in the future, especially with futureOS and browser updates.

The website contains broken links and I heard the app may not be able to scale with lots of data. Also, I hear customer support is not there.

If someone from the company can confirm one way or the other whether this is a dead end product or one that will be kept updated. Either way, please indicate as such on the website.

Thanks so much!

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I have just visited this forum to ask something similar.

I have by and large switched from Dynalist to Obsidian, although in some respects and for some specific purposes, Dynalist is better than Obsidian.

I cancelled my Dynalist subscription after 5 years, then after a few months of the non-usable (for me, anyway) “lite” version, renewed my subscription for a month.

I’m currently a paying Dynalist subscriber, officially entitled to “Priority Support” via email, I have now sent the same query to Dynalist customer support twice, it was acknowledged via an automated message, but that’s it. No further reply from a human being. It’s been a couple of weeks now.

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Thanks for sharing your experience Alex. Obsidian doesn’t meet my needs myself (lack of web version is one big issue). But I’m glad to hear it can supercede Dynalist.

Too bad about the lack of customer support even as a paid member.

Dynalist seems almost like the perfect tool for so many of my needs. I wish I came across it years ago. But a huge cloud of uncertainty hangs over it. It’s like the company lost the keys to the app and website, and they’re just leaving the app on its own with zero involvement.

The two closest alternatives I found are WorkFlowy and Tana. WorkFlowy is good and very well maintained, but oddly missing some basic QOL features. I am using it for some other things however.

Tana is also good and also very well maintained, but far more complicated than I need. But I will be exploring more.

I just wished Dynalist was decisive and say one way or the other what they intend to do with this tool:

Is this abandonware or not?

With all due respect, I don’t think I’ve ever seen the creator of a significant software product (Obsidian, Dynalist) be so flippant.

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Is this abandonware or not?

Well, I was hoping it was at least “maintainware” rather than outright abandonware… Let’s hope for the best (under the circumstances).

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It seems abandonware at this point (though payments still being accepted, lol) :)… Their link to Discord server was dead as well.

But we can hope. Till then, I’ll be keeping my eye on stable alternatives, though still finding Dynalist such a good tool.

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Great news! I’ve just received an email reply from Dynalist support, which fully resolved my issue, and they even gave me 1 month of free Pro subscription as an apology for the delay.

It appears that my original emails landed in their spam folder, rather than their reply in ours, which is why there was no reaction.

Truth be told, in 2024, emails have become such an extremely unreliable mode of communication, I much prefer software providers who offer web-based tickets to provide tech support to their customers. This might be a good way to proceed in future for Dynalist and Obsidian customer support, I think.

(I somehow think someone must have noticed these recent posts of mine here in the forum, and only thanks to that, they were able to locate my emails in their spam folder retroactively. Without this web-based forum, they might still not have noticed my emails…)

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Very nice to hear that there is some life w/ Dynalist side of things, and great to hear of your issue resolved. I didn’t send them an email yet myself, but good to know the channel exists. I will try this now.

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No. We’re all using it right now. Such a sensationalist headline phrasing… This misconception has been discussed a lot in No monthly blog update since November. Are the team ok? - #7 by Erica ,
Are you staying with Dynalist? - #11 by Alex_Avenarius , etc

Just a couple weeks ago they jumped on a bug as soon as people mentioned it in discord and fixed it “Ok I made a fix on the server side - can you guys give it one more try?”

They’ve also mentioned that Dynalist is dear to their heart as their first real business. I doubt they’d abandon it. But I have daily automatic dropbox backups either way.

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Agreed.

That doesn’t matter to me if it’s so great right now. If something better comes along in the future, I’ll use that. Markdown is extremely easy to move between apps.

They did clearly commit to that. I’ll link below.

Where? Did you report it to Send Feedback - Dynalist ?

Thats a hardware limitation. The reason dynalist feels so snappy is that it loads the entire document into RAM for fast access. This requires you to have a powerful enough CPU to do javascript on it all. If your document is slowing down your computer, upgrade your computer. Other services may break documents into smaller pieces and stream them to you but that introduces latencies. I would prefer dynalist stays as it is, so I can do massive document search filterings on the fly. My documents have never gotten so big that it slows my computer, personally. If you’re a data hoarder I suggest splitting up your documents into managable sizes for your hardware.

I find the combo of discord and forum extremely responsive compared to other online services.

“dead end product” - but this is a tool not a netflix series. Is your toaster a dead end product? I use what works best for the job today, today, and use what works best for the job tomorrow, tomorrow. I don’t pick a second-best product because it promises lots of “feature updates” in the future. The future isn’t here. It’s not like I’m locked in - the markdown export takes 30 seconds. I will always use the best tool today, even if it was created 50 years ago.

Company Statements and such…

Profile - Shida - Dynalist Forum

We still maintain it and make sure it’s working, but we’re currently not actively working on new features for Dynalist

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Well, yeah… But there are some annoying bugs in Dynalist that it’s sad to realize will never be fixed. I can certainly live with them (what else have I been doing over the last 5 or 6 years, eh?), but I was always kinda hoping they’d be fixed in the future.

Well, such is life – you can’t have everything. We got Obsidian in addition to Dynalist, and I dare say it’s an even finer piece of software than Dynalist. There’s definitely a place and use for both of them in my life. Obsidian has taken over a large proportion of what I used to store in Dynalist, while Dynalist has kept the portions of my data that it maintains better than Obsidian (outlines proper) or that Obsidian cannot handle at all (such as collaboration with others).

P. S.: The most annoying Dynalist bug for me, in case you’re asking? None of the fonts available in Dynalist supports non-English diacritic letters properly. Because I frequently share my lists with others to collaborate with them, I’m always kinda embarrassed that some diacritic letters, while always legible, look really bad in Dynalist, due to being replaced, inline, using the default (ugly) operating system font. Sigh.

(I was also hoping we would one day get the ability to switch Dynalist themes via a keyboard shortcut. Because this is not possible, I’m stuck in the same Dynalist theme all the time, Sci-Fi, because it just takes too many clicks with the mouse to switch to a different theme that way. There should simply be a keyboard shortcut for “cycling through themes”, until you arrive at the one you want for the present moment. I guess that – and other such nice things – will never be possible in Dynalist now or later.)

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I think you can use any font if you add it via CSS instead.

iOS APP User Custom fonts - :star2:Features - Dynalist Forum

You can if you use a browser extension to apply the CSS, instead of the custom CSS box. “Stylish” for example. I use one called “Decreased Productivity” to toggle between two.

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Thank you for the hint, but that only seems to work locally (for me only). I’ve gotten used to the ugly display of some diacritic letters over the years, :joy: but as I mentioned, I frequently share my lists publicly, and I collaborate with others on my lists (even folks who have no Dynalist account), and to them, my CSS never applies. It’s on behalf of them, rather than myself, that I’m embarrassed that the lists don’t really look OK visually. (Of course, it also reflects badly on myself – my choice of software to use for collaboration, and it reflects badly on Dynalist as software.)

So, to fix this, Dynalist would really need to implement a fully Unicode-compatible font from server side.

I experimented with Google Fonts on my Obsidian Publish site, and fonts like Roboto, Roboto Serif, Merriweather, Merriweather Sans and others would likely be “safe bets” – all diacritic letters would likely display properly in them, so we would need Dynalist to make those fonts available for us to be chosen for our preferred theme(s).

I’m afraid this is over my head; I’m no programmer. :flushed:

I use the Vivaldi browser as my main browser on all platforms (Windows, Android, iOS), and I’m not sure the extension you mention would work with it.

In any case: it’s just another command, you know? I’m disappointed that Dynalist, which places such an emphasis on keyboard shortcuts and their customizability, failed to include the command of Cycle through themes among the commands to which we can assign a keyboard keyboard. To me, that’s a rather mystifying omission. :cry:

(I’m happy to report, though, that keyboard shortcuts management is even better in Obsidian than in Dynalist. In Obsidian, practically all commands are at your disposal so that you can assign keyboard shortcuts to them, or assign them a button on the mobile toolbar. You can clearly see how Erica, Shida et al. learned from what was insufficient about keyboard shortcuts management, great as it is, in Dynalist, and they made sure they would implement it in an even grander manner in Obsidian. And they’ve succeeded – with a couple of shocking exceptions of non-available basic commands that I don’t feel like talking about here because it would be off-topic.) :wink:

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I may be misstating the font issue above – I’m noticing Roboto (for example) already is available for myself within Dynalist: so, yeah, just like your CSS suggestion, I can get the display to be neat for myself – but as soon as I share a list publicly, Dynalist uses its own default font (regardless of which theme I select for public sharing), and that default font distorts the display of some diacritic letters.

My preferred Dynalist font is Consolas, in which everything is displayed properly. However, as soon as I share a list publicly, even when I share my preferred theme, Dynalist replaces my preferred Consolas font with the default Dynalist font, which appears to be Whitney. And Whitney does not display all diacritic letters properly, especially not in the italic variety.

So, I wish it were possible, when publicly sharing a list, to specify which font should be used to display the list. There is this command to specify the theme:

https://dynalist.io/d/somelink#theme=scifi

That works, and my collaborators see the list in the Sci-Fi theme. However, the Consolas font, which works so nicely (and flawlessly) with this theme, gets automatically replaced with Dynalist’s default font, which appears to be Whitney. And Whitney mangles some diacritic letters, especially in the italic variety.

By way of analogy, I tried constructing the following sharing link:

https://dynalist.io/d/somelink#theme=scifi#font=consolas

… but it doesn’t help. The Consolas font still gets replaced by the malfunctioning default Whitney font.

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Thanks for all the updates, and yeah it’s good to know how it works (with all of the info loaded into RAM (BigChungus)). And testimony that it is being updated on some level.

For me, migrating platforms in the past were always a massive headache, but it does seem DL makes it very straightforward, especially with the outline nature of the files. So I feel pretty safe.

Now it seems Discord link is live (when I last clicked, I think from the website, the link was dead, so that is good). So I might join Discord as well and will continue to work with DL.

That said, they should be more communicative they are in maintenance mode (via their roadmap, links on their website, disclaimer on this community board, etc). I shared this feedback with them via email. I recently had email correspondence with them (copy/pasted below), which makes it official their current stance:

On Wed, May 8, 2024 at 9:25 PM Dynalist Support support@dynalist.io wrote:

Dynalist is currently in maintenance mode as the team is focusing on its sister product, Obsidian. So while we’re not adding new features, we are still maintaining what we have and fixing critical bugs. For example, updating the application to work on Android 14, and soon, fixing Google’s oAuth login due to a change on Google’s end.

That said, it’s unreasonable to make guarantees about the future, so we won’t attempt to either. In case of any force majeure in the future that risk shutting Dynalist down, we’ll ask for support from the community first, and in the worst case, notify all users months in advance.

All of our data can be export to OPML, HTML, or plain text, and there’s no property format involved. They can be downloaded at any time, see Back up your data. With Dynalist Pro, you can even get automatical daily backups so you don’t need to think about it.

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I wished it was being updated. It’s an excellent product and I use it everyday. Switched from workflowy and I’m very happy with dyanlist.

However, worried that it’s in maintenance mode.

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I sure this will probably sound like a trolling anti-comment, but I’m actually happy that they’re not updating Dynalist any further. It works just fine for me. When other companies update their product with new features, it often breaks something and users start down-voting it wherever they can.

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Good point. Their Obsidian app was recently shown in Lex Fridman / Aravind Srinivas interview as actually an example of an app getting carried away with features.

I for one was intimidated by Obsidian to get too far with it myself (though it wouldn’t have met my needs anyway cuz it’s not web based).

I think there’s a way to add features without making it feel more complex or breaking things. That said, I’m with you that DList is great even as it is.

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I do hope they continue to keep an eye on it, and just do the very basics to demonstrate some level of upkeep (updating their website, timelines, newsletter, etc).

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