Is Mariner Software (marinersoft.com), makers of Paperless dead?

[ryanhunt]

I posted this question in another thread, but posting here because I believe Mariner Software's apps go beyond just Paperless, one of my favourite Mac apps which has great integration with my Fujutisu ScanSnap scanner. Their other apps include MacGourmet Deluxe, Persona, Contour

It seems the company has stopped trading/gone belly up/closed down etc. The website is offline, their emails are bouncing and I've seen no updates (or social posts) for a very long time. I can't find any official news online - but they're still offering their apps for sale on the App Store.

marinersoft.com: Down/Offline
https://marinersoftware.deskpro.com/ : Online
Emails: Bouncing/not working
Twitter/X: Last post was from July 17, 2020 (last replied on Oct 12, 2020)
App Store: Still selling apps.

Does anyone have any info/background on this company, or do I need to find alternative (supported) software now?

Thanks!

 

[johnb1968]

I was wondering the same thing. It seems they've abandoned all their software, left their customers hanging and closed down. They're not responding to emails and the website is dead. I was looking for an update to Paperless when I found out a few weeks ago.

Anyway, I ended up converting to Receipts, which works similarly but the transition was painful to say the least. At least Receipts is under active development.

It was particularly disappointing because there was no warning. Nor did they give us any way to export a Paperless DB to another app. I guess they don't care.

 

[johnb1968]

Also... They're still accepting money in the App store. I posted a warning review that the company has gone bankrupt, but I wish Apple would take it down or let people know.

 

[floral]

Do you mean "Paperless" like the iPad screen protector?

 

[johnb1968]

Do you mean "Paperless" like the iPad screen protector?

No. Paperless is a receipt scanning/organizing app.

 

[4743913]

 

[4743913]

Today I remembered I had 4 marinersoft licenses... that was some of my first mac software

If anyone used MacJournal, it seems that dev split off..

Dan Schimpf Software

 

[johnb1968]

Today I remembered I had 4 marinersoft licenses... that was some of my first mac software

Oh yeah... I remember them from years ago. I'd been using Paperless for 10 years. Importing all my receipts from the last three years into the new application was slow, tedious and painful. Thanks for nothing, Mariner.

 

[bobgray]

Finally, I find some news about Mariner Software. Would have been nice to have some warning. Even the worst companies (Neat, for example) gave customers time to find alternatives. I'm referring specifically to receipt management software. Paperless works(ed) really well on my Mac platform. Any suggestions for an app owned by a reliable and stable company?

 

[4743913]

Finally, I find some news about Mariner Software. Would have been nice to have some warning. Even the worst companies (Neat, for example) gave customers time to find alternatives. I'm referring specifically to receipt management software. Paperless works(ed) really well on my Mac platform. Any suggestions for an app owned by a reliable and stable company?

DevonTHINK is my paperless solution. DevonTechnologies is the best.

DEVONtechnologies | Home

DEVONtechnologies develops DEVONthink, DEVONagent, and other Mac and iOS apps for document and information management and web research.

devontechnologies.com

 

[bobgray]

DevonTHINK is my paperless solution. DevonTechnologies is the best.

DEVONtechnologies | Home

DEVONtechnologies develops DEVONthink, DEVONagent, and other Mac and iOS apps for document and information management and web research.

devontechnologies.com

Thanks! I'll take a look.

 

[HDFan]

I posted a warning review that the company has gone bankrupt,

Can you provide a reference? Not that I like them. They took over a great product - MacGourmet - made changes that corrupted my database and then stopped supporting it without fixing the problem.

 

[JustARumor]

I haven't used Paperless in a while, but I went to grab something from it today only to learn that it's seemingly abandoned, which led me here.

It looks like their support site is still up at https://marinersoftware.deskpro.com/, but I don't see anything more recent on there than 2019 (I didn't look at everything, though).

As for getting to your data, if you dig into the library file, you'll find all the receipts intact as PDF files. The database itself is the DocumentWallet.documentwalletsql file, and it's actually an SQLite database, SQLite being a widely used public format. I was able to rename it with an .sqlite extension and then open it with PhpStorm's SQLite database tool. I didn't take the time to figure out how the database is structured, but key bits like collections and receipts were easy to identify, and the tables reference the thumbnail images and PDF receipt files via relative pathnames.

So, all the data are there and should be accessible for the foreseeable future using widely available tools, though non-technical folks would probably need a few minutes of help from a developer friend to get at the metadata (getting to the receipts themselves is trivial since they're just PDF files). Moreover, I think it'd be straightforward to write a utility to export the data into something more useful for perusal purposes. I was very tempted to do that just now but I really don't have time at the moment. Maybe in a couple of months, as I'll want easy access to my old data at some point.

For now, if you're not a developer but need to get at your receipts, navigate to the something.paperless library file in Finder (stored in the Documents folder in your home folder by default), right-click on it, and choose Show Package Contents from the context menu. It'll open like a folder. Then, dig into the Documents folder inside, and you'll find all your receipts as PDF files organized into subfolders by date (folders for year, with subfolders for month, with subfolders for day). If you remove the .paperless extension from the folder name, Finder will make it a standard folder, which means Spotlight should index it and make at least the text-based receipts searchable. I'm not sure, but in Sonoma, Spotlight might even do its own OCR to make the image-based receipts searchable. (Allow a bit of time for all this indexing to happen after you remove the name extension.)

NB: All of this refers to libraries in Paperless v3 format. I didn't look at anything in v2 or older, as all my libraries have been updated to v3.

 

[johnb1968]

Finally, I find some news about Mariner Software. Would have been nice to have some warning. Even the worst companies (Neat, for example) gave customers time to find alternatives. I'm referring specifically to receipt management software. Paperless works(ed) really well on my Mac platform. Any suggestions for an app owned by a reliable and stable company?

I converted everything to RECEIPTS app in the App Store. It's under active development and is definitely more stable than Paperless ever was. The conversion was a pain as I dragged all the PDFs stored in Paperless into Receipts and had to reenter all the information. I wish I had seen the solution mentioned above before I tried that, but now that it's done, hopefully I won't have to do this again. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/receipts/id1079833326?mt=12

 

[natallica]

I just found this thread after looking to see if there was an update for Paperless that wouldn't hang on exit. It's a real shame it seems their apps are dead because the app did exactly what I needed. Do DevonThink and/or the above-mentioned Receipts have smart collections that sort receipts in batches based on year and category?

 

[johnb1968]

I just found this thread after looking to see if there was an update for Paperless that wouldn't hang on exit. It's a real shame it seems their apps are dead because the app did exactly what I needed. Do DevonThink and/or the above-mentioned Receipts have smart collections that sort receipts in batches based on year and category?

I can't speak for DevonThink, but Receipts does exactly that. It's not perfect but it's definitely more stable.

 

[Bob-K]

For what it's worth, Paperless can export CSVs and receipts. I did the following in version 3.0.8:

CSV export: Select what you want included (I clicked on the "Everything" icon, then did "select all" (command-A)) and "File > Export to CSV..."

Receipt export: Select the entries for which you want receipts saved, then "File > Save Individual Receipts" and select a destination folder. The PDF name format is VENDOR - DATE.pdf. I wish the date were first, but it's better than nothing.

I did a quick search, and didn't see anything about the Receipts app importing CSV (though it does export).

 

[H_D]

Big fan of receipts, very active and nice developer, I hope this exists for a long time.

 

[sommls]

To me as well, receipts appears to provide most of the functions of Mariner's now unsupported Paperless, but with much greater stability. DevonThink looks quite powerful, but the learning curve would also likely be steep for casual users.

While transferring Paperless data to receipts via a simple script seems likely to work well, the two programs are already sufficiently compatible that a simple drag/drop from entries in Paperless into receipts works to relocate the old source pdfs with no further intervention.

It looks further as if the receipts OCR is sufficiently robust to transfer dates of the original transactions and amounts without further user input for practically every file.

This transfer for me was not completely trivial in terms of time. However, since my paperless database over several years had accumulated a fair amount of "spaghetti" metadata and inconsistent naming, having to reenter some of it manually was akin to overdue spring housekeeping.

It's too bad that Mariner's business model was ultimately so neglectful of end users: even the smallest effort towards continued development for decent niche software like MacGourmet and Paperless would have been helpful.

 

[Mockletoy]

They had left all their apps to stagnate for years before they finally just kind of faded away. I remember seeing some of their stuff offered in a bundle somewhere a few years back and even then the apps were all basically abandonware they were pawning off on unsuspecting buyers. It seemed super shady to me at the time that they kept selling software they clearly had no intention of supporting or developing any further.

I don’t know if anyone remembers the short-lived and ill-fated iOS port of MacJournal, but wow was it bad. They “updated” it for a while, but not really, before finally giving up and removing it from the App Store entirely. That’s why I was so happy to see that the original MacJournal developer had reclaimed it and started work on it again, but that also seems to be more or less abandoned.

Man, that takes me back. I loved MacJournal in the late 2000s. It was such a great sort of everything app for notes, journaling, blog posts, you name it. But then Mariner let it die of neglect. Oh well, so it goes.

 

[Euroamerican]

^-- you mean this guy: https://danschimpf.com/

?

Sorry to hear that. i remember a neighbor who was writing a play who like some Mariner app, perhaps this one.

 

[carlmims]

So, What is the best replacement for Paperless I have been using for years and have about a 4 gig library. Need easy conversion and would be great if you could view from iPhone / iPad as well as your Mac. I keep the lib in the cloud. On ver 3

 

[SlickSlack]

I am using Devonthink as my replacement for Paperless. Plus I also use it for a ton of stuff that Paperless was never going to do. (Work related document tracking, A personal journal, a creative writing project).
On top of all that people have written above, you can also export the PDFs from Paperless and all the data you've entered will be in the Keywords section of the Get Info window in Preview. So the metadata is in there in each document. I can't remember if it's added on export or if it's in the files stored within the database. Depending on where you're taking your PDFs you can script a method to extract those keywords and write them to fields in the destination. That's pretty much what I did, but with a ton of help from the DevonThink forum and people with much more scripting experience than myself.

Another person on the DevonThink forum just did their own version of this using Python and AppleScript. You can read all about it and see their code here:
moving from mariner paperless to devonthink

 

[MacHeritage]

That’s why I was so happy to see that the original MacJournal developer had reclaimed it and started work on it again, but that also seems to be more or less abandoned.

Man, that takes me back. I loved MacJournal in the late 2000s. It was such a great sort of everything app for notes, journaling, blog posts, you name it. But then Mariner let it die of neglect. Oh well, so it goes.

For up-to-date info here is the address: https://danschimpf.blogspot.com

Still fully being worked on and a release as of July of this year. Doesn't look like MacJournal is abandoned to me.

 

[MacHeritage]

I had no idea they had gone out of business until now. What a shock. The web site wasn't coming up and I didn't know why.

I have many Mariner Software titles. I mainly use Paperless 2 on an older Mac and StoryMills was another and was hoping to upgrade to Paperless v3 (scanner issues with macOS was the reason, not Paperless itself). Looks like I will have to rethink everything and move to DEVONthink for that stuff instead.