Dear Thortspace, I am a student,
and I have some questions about Thortspace
(1) “At the moment we have installed Thortspace locally on some devices and, since the savings are local in the free version and not synchronized, we were guessing about what will happen to our savings when we will switch to the premium version (both in case it is the trial or the full Premium).”
Thanks very much for your enquiry about Thortspace.
It is great to hear about your studies!
First off, I would like to mention that as you say you are a student, there is a 70% discount available on Thortspace subscriptions, for any academic institution that is willing to link to our academic page:
See:
To a certain extent some of the answers to your questions may change as we proceed, but here’s some answers to your questions as things currently stand:
When you log in to a Thortspace account on a device where there are locally cached spheres which are not already incorporated into that account, those spheres will get synced into that account’s cloud spheres if:
either (a) the spheres are set to “Public”
or (b) the account is a Thortspace paid Subscriber account.
We find that many students are happy to have their Thortspace content be public, since it comprises of things like lecture notes, or essay plans, which do not need to be confidential. Public content on Thortspace is free to sync, publish and collaborate on, including in real-time. Free public content is a principle I am strongly committed to.
See:
(2) “Once we pass to premium, what happens to our data if for a period of time we stop to renew the subscription?”
For Private data belonging to an account on the cloud service, there is a “period of grace” after a subscription lapses during which spheres are retained on the cloud service. After this period of grace has expired, this private content gets deleted from the cloud service. These spheres will still be retained on the local devices where they have already been synced, and are not removed from these unless a user permanently deletes them. Once the account has stopped syncing these local spheres, their content may diverge, so they essentially become independent local-only spheres.
(3) “Also, there is some sort of downloadable “source code” (Like CSV or something else) that can allow the user in any eventuality to keep a backup of the data without lose them and if yes how the backup can be read?”
Thortspace sphere data is stored in “Protobuf” format, and is always cached locally on your device — See:
However it is encrypted so that only the account owner is able to view it. The folder structure is dependent on the operating system. We do not currently provide a means of decrypting these protocol buffer files other than via the app, but this is plausibly something that could be done.
The Thortspace App also provides a number of ways exporting the textual content of Thortspace spheres, eg. to HTML tables or via copy-and-paste.
There is a summary of more technical information about Thortspace (including cache folder locations) here:
(4) “We were also guessing if thorts shape could be different from circles (i.e. rectangular or squared) or could be resized, if there is a way to insert PDF files, and if it is possible to start a new line writing in a thort or in a group…”
The Thortspace software does not unfortunately enable shapes for Thorts other than spheres and circles. Spheres can be resized, but the Thort circles cannot. (Not as the software currently exists.)
Also text entry in Thorts is does not currently allow new line characters.
Thorts do support have URL “weblinks” assigned to them … currently one weblink per Thort.
So my recommendation about linking to PDF files would be to put them on a online resource, like Google docs, and then add an weblinks to these online documents to each Thort.
The links on the online resource could be either private or public (as appropriate), but will in either case work fine for the person who is the owner of the online resource.
None of this really needs to be set in stone necessarily. If you would like to see changes made in the Thortspace software, my request would be to join the Thortspace facebook community group, and advocate for your changes there. See:
Addendum: “So if the subscription expired, only the private data are deleted from cloud, but since they are saved locally it is always possible to resync them with a new subscription in the future, right?”
Yes that is correct with the following caveats:
As the implementation currently stands, when a subscription expires, after a “period of grace”, private data is deleted from the cloud, which leaves the private spheres of that user as independent unconnected local-only spheres on any devices where these spheres have previously been synced.
Whereas public spheres can stay on the cloud without any paid subscription, and can be published without a paid subscription. I am strongly committed to the principle of free public spheres.
Please note that I am less committed to having Thortspace always support free local-only spheres, which although it is currently the case with the Thortspace software is, in many ways, just a happenstance. I wouldn’t want you to be investing your time into using Thortspace on the basis that this will always be supported. Although, of course, so long as this benefit is available, by all means take advantage of it !
Also please note that these local-only spheres are still owned by the account that originally “claimed” them when it logged into the device.
If a different user logs into the same device, they will not see the local-only spheres of the previous user. But, yes, the account that owns the spheres could subscribe again to re-activate the cloud service for those private spheres.
Ie.
(1) when a user logs in (user A, let’s say) to the thortspace App which previously had had spheres created without any log in, even with a free account, any local-only spheres that weren’t previously owned by any account get moved inside that user’s account, even if they don’t sync.
(2) if a different user logs in (user B, let’s say), they will not be able to access the local-only spheres of user A.
(3) if user A becomes a subscriber for a while and then their subscription laps, private cloud spheres will go back to being local-only spheres belonging to their account. The same account would need to start subscribing again, for these spheres to become private cloud spheres.
Also please bear in mind:
Cloud data should probably be thought of as more secure than local-only data. If there is some kind of error or issue on the device where the local-only spheres are being kept, it may be possible to lose that local-only data. For example if you uninstall an App from a device, you typically delete any associated data. I believe the iOS and Android operating systems both do this without warning users about the data loss.
