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Notes -
That is a great app. I just bought it, and I'll use it a lot, but I still want to complain about this class of thing in general. That is, monetizing publicly available info for mobile formats. If I didn't have a stash of Googlebux about to expire, I'd have passed on principle.
On a PC, if you wanted to look up how to tie an Alpine Butterfly, you'd quickly search it on Google or Perplexity. If some site was selling a tutorial for $5 you'd automatically move on to the next available free one, because we don't live in an age where the Mountaineering Guild gatekeeps access to the secret knowledge of rope folding, and it's near trivial to put up a site with the instructions for free. It bothers me a bit that developers get away with selling the same thing as a mobile app simply because of the added annoyance of trying to do it with a small screen + thumbs.
Yes, the presentation here is excellent. The UI is near-perfect, but also, I bet I could have Claude vibe-code me one with little effort.
I think this is more about the incredibly nice interactive UI than gatekeeping the actual knowledge of how to tie a knot.
I have no problem searching whatever arbitrary thing I want on my phone, or indeed typing paragraphs of text: if all this app did was present pretty text instructions I'd have no interest, it's easy to get those text instructions to my phone any time I want for free. But I want to learn knot-tying and don't really understand it, and this seems like a significant improvement for learning.
If you think that sort of thing is easy to code through AI, you're welcome to throw an open-source and free version of it up somewhere, you'd be helping out rope enthusiasts everywhere and making a convincing case that the developers aren't doing anything important. I suspect the easy-to-code version of that app loses a lot in usability though.
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