Or, "why I won't be buying it again".

Some of you might have heard of Chocolat. Some of you might not have, so here's a quick summary. It describes itself as a "Native text editor for Mac".

I found Chocolat earlier this year, and kind of liked it. It had pretty good JavaScript support, and as I write a reasonable amount of JavaScript on random projects usually involving QML, I found it worthwhile enough to buy it for the few bucks it cost. I was quite happy with it. The user interface was also neat. I bought it in May, and was pretty happy.

But soon after, OS X Yosemite bursts onto the scene.OS X Yosemite was announced and released to developers on June 2, 2014. The public beta was released on June 24, which I upgraded to on day one. I work on a lot of software, so it's kind of natural that I'm on the close-to-bleeding-edge, so I can make sure that things work.

Chocolat, unfortunately, didn't work on Yosemite. It crashed. As I don't use it all that much, I didn't mind, figuring that this would get sorted out sooner or later. Aside from that, my Yosemite story has been pretty painless and enjoyable.

This week, I finally decided to give Chocolat another try, figured out that version 3 supposedly doesn't crash on Yosemite, and got redirected to http://chocolatapp.com/3/. Right up there, in green font is this:

Why, I hear you ask, is the pricing different? Good question.

It costs money because, well, it's a major upgrade. Not too much visible on the user end, but apparently there was a lot of technical debt that needed to be paid down. I can respect that.

On the other hand, it's free for Mavericks users because 2.x crashes on Yosemite, and if it wasn't free for users before they upgrade, there would probably be a lot more pissed off people.

But where does that leave people like me: people who had the (misfortune?) of trying to live on the bleeding edge of software? Well, I'm stuck with that crashing 2.x, because I didn't upgrade when I still had Mavericks available to me. Now, I get to pay another $15 for software I already bought this year, and was able to actually use for two months.

Meanwhile, everyone who stuck with Mavericks gets it for free, because otherwise, there would be no "smooth upgrade path" (read: a lot more pissed off people). I'm sorry, but where the hell is my "smooth upgrade path"?

What am I going to do about this? Well, I'm definitely not going to buy Chocolat for the second time in a year. Apparently, it's pissed enough other people off that they had to write a "FAQ" page about it. But an FAQ page doesn't give me the working software that I paid for already.

Sad, really.

As an aside, I was originally not going to write about this, and just let it slide (it's not like it's expensive software). But then I actually talked to the author about it, and the answer  I got could be tl;dr'd down to "well, but don't you think I should get paid for the work I did on v3?" to which my answer is "sure, but I already paid you two months before I stopped being able to use it". And that got me annoyed enough to write this post.

I'll be clear here: I have nothing wrong with the authors of software getting paid so they can keep writing software.

What I do have problems with is buying a product and not being able to use it two months later. And still not being able to use it once the admittedly beta operating system I was on at the time is out in public release. Especially when everyone else is able to upgrade without a second thought.

And that's why I'll be avoiding Chocolat in the future.