Used evernote a ton for a long time, but their last major overhaul 18 months or so ago left me behind. They switched their UI, process flow and more. It took it from a tool I found indispensable to one that tried to force me to their will.
Eventually, I grew tired of trying to fit into their new methods and moved on.
It doesn't surprise me they haven't been able to grow their paid base.
Open source companies could run on a blockchain and one could have a smart contract to release the source code or access to one's proprietary data upon company going out of business..
This wouldn't work. Flux compensator blocksize capacity can't support the throughput of a mangle tangle even with Merkle pruning. That's assuming that the Bermuda triangle would even come close to providing enough energy for your servers.
You know how there is a trend of open businesses? Basically people who open source their metrics?
I think that things have the potential to go even further. A business could open a bank account and have its transactions viewable at any time or its balance queried.
The business could encrypt customer data and then release the customers' keys to the customer if the business's cash balance drops below a key threshold.
Do you even know what going out of business means?
Hint: It's not cut and dry. The Amiga company is still in business. Radio Shack still exists. MySpace isn't dead. GeoCities got killed, it didn't go out of business.
Smart contracts won't help you here. Blockchains won't help you here. This is a complex legal problem and you're suggesting it's easy, that the Magic of Blockchains will solve it.
One could precisely define solvency conditions. "If cash minus liabilities exceeds $1million, perform_unwind_operation()" _Obviously_ these conditions could entail more complex business logic
Obviously this idea is getting HNmocked and I'm not going to be able to talk my way out of it, and yes I realize that ideas of property ownership and managing contract disputes are one of the cornerstone of the justice system and society itself.
In that way I am somewhat of a crypto radicalist and I'm talking my book as I do have a long crypto position.
I've been an Evernote user for a long time, but it's been ages since I've felt that they're actually user-focused by way of improving holes like poor functional parity across their apps(1). As a outsider, a huge amount of energy felt squandered on a shotgun-strategy of special-purpose apps while a stream of core app rebuilds launched, none of which significantly moved the functional needle.
I've been exploring alternatives, but so far nothing has stuck. Last time I looked at OneNote it seemed promising, but the lack of tags (seriously?) was a showstopper. DevonThink Pro was interesting, but the Mac experience and UI is archaic to the point of being unusable IMO. Esp. the way that DT bakes a really terrible styling onto imported Evernote notes.
I'd love to hear migration success stories from those of you who've moved on.
(1) One example: Want to create or modify a table on the iPad app? Nope. Baffling.
I'm still writing some notes in Evernote on my mobile, but on desktop I've just switched to markdown notes in a Dropbox folder. I have a vim plugin now that generates a html preview as I type.
I think markdown is the most future proof technology for the moment because you can just use pandoc to convert it or most note systems will accept markdown as an input format.
I'm not sure how tags would work in markdown, I guess you can create links manually but that's not really what you want.
I suppose the set of features I need covered include:
- Web clipping. Evernotes browser plugins are pretty darn good here.
- Notes with attachments (images, PDFs, etc.). Some of these are mixed-media notes, where text, images, and/or file attachments are mixed to create a comprehensive document about some topic. Others are "pure" attachments, e.g. "store this PDF where I can retrieve it by search".
- Note taking. This, in isolation, is the easiest.
- Note syncing, mobile and desktop. This gets a bit harder.
- Search. Let's be clear, this was the first and biggest killer feature of Evernote. Notebook and tag organization are important, but rather than just providing direct hierarchical/taxonomic organization, they're largely there to support search with user-defined search facets.
I'd also love good Markdown support – that's one of my most-wanted features from Evernote in the first place.
So, you feel search in Evernote is good? Personally I've found it severely lacking. I can't tell you how many times I've searched for something that I know is there (and that I do find after manually looking for it), but search comes up empty.
That's interesting, and absolutely not my experience. Search has been robust, finds what I need, and absolutely worth having. Might be worth a support request -- maybe there's some undetected lossage in your account's search indices and they need a rebuild. (Or maybe you can kick that off self-service?)
Have you tried diigo.com and it's apps? I highly reccomend it to everyone looking for Evernote alternative, especially for web clipping and organizing.
Personally I use Ulysses which has been great on desktop & mobile (supports code blocks, markup & more). However I'm not sure how I feel after they switched over to the whole subscription-model thing...anyone else have any success with similar alternatives?
I used Ulysses but I ended up moving to Bear[1]. It's still. a subscription fee, but much cheaper ($1.49/mo). It's lightweight and perfect for what I use it for - taking notes.
If I was going to suggest something for longer-form writings (e.g., journaling, blog posts) and you find that inadequate, I've heard good things about iA Writer[2].
If you live in the Apple ecosystem, I highly recommend mweb[1]. It ticks all the boxes I've been looking for:
- intuitive UI: lets me see 1) raw markdown syntax or 2) formatted preview... no weird in-betweens
- sync to/from mobile, with preview & edit support
- markdown support with nice preview and support for code (similar to github style)
- search
- support for folders (and potentially tags, if I ever find a good use case for them)
- pdf export
- no subscription model
Alternatives I've tried which haven't done as well for one reason or another:
- Bear: confusing preview/editing mode
- Evernote: no markdown
- Ulysses: subscription model shift
- Standard Notes: confusing/buggy UI
- Quiver: poor mobile support
I would be happy if Evernote was "done". I pay for a subscription, I am not interested in paying for new features, I would simply be happy if it went into eternal feature freeze and only did security and compatibility updates.
Of course this kind of thing won't happen but maybe it says something about the optimization pitfalls of our economy.
This would never happen for numerous reasons, but imagine if you could fork a company somehow. Take the existing state, but just take it in an entirely different direction.
For companies that don't produce physical goods, this would actually be somewhat doable..
I once worked at a company that had a successful product ($40M in sales, $15M in arr via support plans). They did a rewrite, that of course went a year long and was poorly handled by sales and marketing ie it was talked about freely with customers and prospects; contributed to sales drying up while they all waited for the new hotness.
I knew the rewrite was going take a lot longer than they were saying, both due to common sense and because there were conflicting goals from ceo and cto.
I went to the ceo and made a case for a back up plan, myself and a few others could continue on the old busted version; bug fixes and minimal enhancements only, insurance if you will. I really thought about buying it but had no way to finance anything like that. CEO didn’t bite and was in process of selling the company to a PE firm.
I left when the new version finally shipped with half the features and twice the bugs. The PE installed CEO wrecked the sales org and sales never recovered.
As a side note, a foreign firm had pirated a much older version 10 years prior, rebranded and was #3 with it in that market.
Really? I wonder how it will compete with Redbox? We rarely watch movies (we don't even have a Netflix subscription), but when we do it is a spur of the moment thing so we just run around the corner to redbox and grab something. Waiting for a movie in the mail? That's so 2010 ;-)
But before you get too smug, the idea of going to Redbox to get a physical disc is not exactly cutting edge compared to just clicking on a button and renting a movie on demand from your cable provider/Apple/Amazon/Google/Vudu.
Sorry if I came off as smug. Wasn't my intent. We typically spend about $1-2 a month on Redbox. Any streaming movie rental would be at least four times that amount.
Yeah, that is a good example of a company making a badly timed business decision and ultimately recovering completely unscathed (although it seemed like they were in hot water at the time).
> but maybe it says something about the optimization pitfalls of our economy
Of the tech economy, perhaps. Or perhaps that's what you meant by "our", this being a tech site.
A huge amount of the workforce is engaged in work that doesn't change much at all. Construction workers, skilled labor like service plumbing or mechanical maintenance, engineering, retail work, etc. It's fairly optimized and if it changes, it changes in reaction to something or because new technology opened new opportunities. Really, it seems like mobile and web applications are the most stuck into this loop of having to add something new. An emacs users who used it 25 years ago could still use it today.
I'm the same. Happy with current functionality and the current price.
It doesn't need to be the only product or have the most users it only needs to be functional and make enough money for it to be worthwhile except with vc funding it has to constantly chase growth and returns.
Mostly agreed. But the reality is that EN isn't a "lifestyle" company, but instead took a ton of VC investment. AFAICT, this generally means a future of terrible mismanagement by a board looking for an exit on a company that didn't turn out to be their darling unicorn.
I doubt core engineers were working on Skitch either (for one, it was an acquisition), but GGP still points out that Evernote lacked (still lacks?) focus. Selling branded stuff (they also did business card holders and bags) is another piece of that.
I'm a happy DevonThink user (but not a super fanboy, so I won't lose sleep if you don't like it as much as I do). What did you think was archaic about its UI? It has several different layouts to choose from. Do you think they're all bad? I won't disagree, but maybe because I've been using it for so long I don't really notice it. Also, what does it do to the Evernote imports? I've never used that so I haven't seen that before.
That said, it's really good at filing and searching. I'd highly recommend trying it long enough to look past the UI to its capabilities. I'd hate to be without it now.
I have been using evernote since it practically launched. I only use Evernote these days because there is no competitor I like a lot. Not because it's good.
The app crashes, it takes forever to open, and the company has not improved anything in a long time.
Now they even changed the logo making it harder for my mind to locate the app.
Why on earth would they want to? OneNote runs on everything, ties in well with Office, and covers the big ticket features that Evernote does. I'm a vimwiki user for the most of what Evernote/OneNote cover, but what I can't believe is that Evernote users haven't saved Microsoft the trouble, and just switched to OneNote. I mean, if you're going to go walled-garden, Microsoft has some nice landscapers.
I would pay to be able to make onenote only use the local filesystem and not be allowed to connect to the internet at all except when I manually decide to. Their syncing is garbage! Lord forbid you find yourself on a plane. Suddenly all your notes, inaccessible, even if you synced them an hour prior.
Maybe it is because we are still using onenote 2010 but we have one note books on our network drive and just sync to that. Works great for a team of 6.
Evernote on windows is horrible. My two biggest annoyances were:
- No auto capitalization,
- no highlighting multiple words (wanting to change the font of specific words in different lines)
I moved over from onenote and decided to move back, maybe it's just more comfortable for me. They were both free versions anyway.
The same reason every mid-sized company gets bought: to obtain the users. Evernote was there first, and has an established market through nothing more than inertia. Their product is terrible. Someone will buy them, absorb the userbase, and get rid of the existing product.
Have you used OneNote? It is definitely a comparable product vs. Evernote and is integrated with Office365 which makes it part of all existing enterprise subscription packages.
THey also have a free version which is pretty good.
Well, that's one of the reasons I just settled on vimwiki despite having used OneNote since it was an internal build when I worked at Microsoft. I'm tired of chasing it around. Included with Office. Not included with your version. Runs on Mac, but only online and no local storage. Doesn't have that important feature the Windows version does. Had shared notebooks for ten years, permissions system still sucks goat balls.
And now they're going to axe the "good" version. Lemmee just alt-tab back over to vim here and make a note of that...
Would you then bring some light on how the such thing happens actually. That was really breakthrough product - the ultimate one, combined with Microsoft technologies like Tablet PC, and handwriting recognition - and now, after the 15 years since Microsoft invented all that, they are chasing after Apple with their iPad Pro?
edit - after twenty years!
> In 1999, original equipment manufacturers released the first tablet PCs designed to the Microsoft Tablet PC specification
I use Evernote because of its excellent image markup. You can mix images and text in notes and really document an image-based or figure-based data flow. Not sure if there's any alternative that does this as well.
As someone who dropped Evernote several years ago in favor of OneNote, did they ever improve the merging behavior? I gave up on Evernote due to daily merge conflicts that I got tired of manually resolving.
> “In the past three months (June, July, August), Evernote has been downloaded 2.5 million times worldwide,” a spokesperson for analytics firm Apptopia said. “After store fees, the app has brought in revenues of $2.9 million through in-app purchases.”
That seems like... not a lot... for a company that has raised $300 million in funding.
Yeah I remember commenting here a few years ago with surprise that they were a "unicorn" with ~$30M ARR, and nobody seemed to find that valuation unrealistic...
$1 per download isn't enough to pay the bills. That's not much more than a 99¢ game. It means people don't actually value the product enough to pay for it.
I spent my last two years of residency taking my notes in Evernote, but they really fall short in the transition between hand-written notes and that shift to research where you need to make high-quality handwritten notes over a PDF, like Notability, and then move those PDFs to the bibliography phase of databasing. Now that I'm out of training and doing my own work, that like of integration with my future self really killed EverNote for me. Now I need to figure out how to ensure all my notes are saved somewhere.
These knowledge management systems really need to think about a human through their education-training-research-job lifecycle. I think DogPile + Notability + Evernote would be a great integration.
You gotta roll your own out of app organization/tagging scheme, which isn't a big deal in keyboard mode, but when my machine is in stylus mode, totally sucks. (I used folders to organize Xournal files. Hard to navigate via stylus. Compare to say onenote with good stylus/touch us)
Also, the UI is just funky. Switching colors of the pen requires carefully tapping an extraordinarily tiny colored box. No way to paste images, you gotta clipart them in (so no roll-your-own stylus screenselect +paste functionality like onenote + windows 10). Scrolling only works sometimes, and leaves little penmark dots usually as it takes a second to understand that that wasn't my stylus.
It only recognizes one of the buttons on my thinkpad stylus.
If you're in putting text and want one word to be a different color, that single word needs to be an entirely different textbox, which is nearly impossible to do so close to other text. Also, no bold, italic, underline.
Gotta roll your own sync, which doesn't bother me because onenote sync is so terrible it actually makes the software worse.
Xournal is an incredible software but it's just soooo cloooose. I keep meaning to hunt around to see if it's open source and see if I can start contributing to get it how I want it.
One huge problem is that there’s a lot of competition that provides most of the same core features for free—like Apple Notes, for example. It’s also easy to repurpose apps like MS Word and Google Docs to achieve the same functionality. Obviously they’re very different apps designed for a different purpose, but many of my friends don’t seem to mind. They just want a reasonably functional way to take notes for free.
I swapped from Evernote to OneNote for all my note taking needs years ago. I can dump all of my random notes and thoughts into one notebook then structure them better than I ever could with just tags. Not sure if that's changed on Evernote, but lacking the option for both structured and unstructured notes is what drove me away from it initially.
Not my use case I guess. I use it for my own notes and lists and sketches rather than a repository of stuff from other sources.
Evernote was fine at the start but it seemed like they could never figure out what they wanted the UI to be, so they stretched it in too many different directions.
Nice little program, but Evernote's main contribution was buying it and killing the iOS/Android/Windows versions. I liked it better as an independent app that cost a couple bucks instead of a freebie that died for not fitting the "core Evernote experience."
I used to be a regular user. I never paid because they never gave me a reason to, not because I didn't value it. I'm not going to go out of my way to figure out how to give them money when I'm already getting everything I need for free.
The closest they've come was when they started limiting app access to the account to two devices. I almost pulled the trigger. If they lower it to one device, I will strongly consider paying.
There is one big thorn in my side though. It is their synchronization. Way too often I end up with two conflicting notes. They get sent to different places and they are not linked together. Before starting to pay, I will give on the of the Evernote alternatives a try, solely because their synch sucks. I understand that synch is a difficult feature, but at least try to make the post-conflict user experience more pleasant. Cross-link the conflicting notes at least.
Another problem for me is their text handling of lists. Eery so often, after I paste something in, bullet points appear or disappear. Things get merged in and are impossible to de-indent. It feels lie Microsoft Word from 1998.
I would expect everyone who was in market for Evernote to already have Evernote installed. They've been a big name for close to a decade now. I got their Android app in... 2013, if memory serves.
I mean, is this the point where Evernote realizes products eventually reach market saturation, and you need to start playing some bullshit business games like planned obsolescence or recurrent payments to keep up the growth curve (or, alternatively, realize you've done a good job, and move on to do something else)?
Dropbox Paper is a good Evernote replacement- cutover one year ago, very satisfied. Great note taking tool, markdown engine has very efficient keyboard shortcuts to generate inline blocks and other useful formatting (incl code blocks), easy to drop photos or files inline, good search, good sharing, reliable sync, and a “Save to Dropbox” icon on IOS (send to from Safari) to use as a replacement for Evernote webclipping ( clip as pdf, then insert pdf into Dropbox paper doc).
How have you gotten around not having a desktop client? I've thought about moving to Paper, but the lack of desktop client bugs me a bit for easy shortcut stuff.
I finally subscribed to Evernote a month ago but hadn't considered Dropbox Paper as an alternative. Very interesting idea. What do you do for web clipping on your desktop?
note station is actually decent enough. there's a web clipper, desktop app, mobile apps, and its pretty much a complete clone of evernote. they even managed to add text highlights before evernote did.
the only thing stopping me from importing everything into it is that there is only 1 export option. they need to add a html option and maybe plaintext
I prefer notion because it enables powerful structures around individual notes. From when I used evernote, it was limited to folders of lists of notes sorted by some not very useful criteria (towards the end I was naming my evernote notes with certain prefixes to try to instill more structure), or sets of notes grouped by tag.
In contrast, notion allows notes to coexist with other notes within a single "meta" note, ad nauseum. You can organize them in rows and columns and insert arbitrary text or whatever other content to label notes, for instance. One particularly powerful structure is using notes in a kanban or trello like setup, while enjoying the full evernote-like features provided within any individual note.
I’m on the fence after using it for about 4 months. Initially I was drawn to Notion due to the features, templates etc. - it made me feel like I was running a legit business, with sections for company vision, expense reports, meeting minutes etc!
The multifunctional nature reminded me a lot of Lotus Notes, empowering users to build new functionality and database (not a bad thing, though leads to silos and lock in).
Two main things ended up frustrating me about Notion that I went back to Bear and other tools:
- For pure text editing some of the shortcuts drove me insane. The syntax was kind of like markdown but not quite, and the shortcuts for moving between levels of indentation were different from pretty much every other app I had used. The rich content was cool, but ran into so many issues with embeds only working on certain platforms, and rendering blank or crashing the app on others.
- It was surprisingly easy for team members to screw things up. I’m talking about cluttering tables with blank records, moving documents around and causing them to disappear into the ether for other users. There just didn’t seem to be very good controls or audit trails.
On paper, their feature set looks great, with various synchronisation options (Dropbox, WebDAV, OneDrive) and apps on Windows, Linux, macOS, Android and iOS.
>> open source note taking and to-do application, which can handle a large number of notes organised into notebooks. The notes are searchable, can be copied, tagged and modified either from the applications directly or from your own text editor. The notes are in Markdown format.
Was going to sit down and Google something with this exact set of features. Thanks for saving me the time!
I am so on the fence about Evernote. I have used their product for years, but found that they didn't lean into the whole "organizing a zillion things" well enough. I really wanted a replacement for my Franklin Planner that went out in the early 2000's with a fizzle.
Chris if you're reading this email me (contact in the profile) would be happy to share my thoughts on next steps.
I dont know, why there is soo much hate for evernote in here. I understand , the valuation seems crazy. I have been using evernote for years and it suits my needs. I write journals daily and tag them with keywords. That way, i can read my past journal and laugh at myself.
I used them for years as a paying customer, and though the apps were also a bit slow and buggy I thought they were worthwhile.
I only cancelled when they changed their terms to allow engineers to read your notes to improve their ad targeting. Though they eventually walked that back it soured me enough, now I get by with google docs instead.
>"Susan Stick, another recent hire (June 2018) who is the company’s general counsel — a role that appeared to be vacant for two years before she joined — is expanding her role to include people operations as well."
So they have a lawyer being asked to take on what are essentially HR duties? If that's not the sign of a sinking ship I don't know what is. I wouldn't expect that individual to be there for much longer either.
Also "People Operations" is a load of shit, another Silicon Valley invention that seemingly all startups now feel compelled to have. I've had a few People Operations departments in jobs past and their duties largely consisted of brining the credit card to company "drink ups" and ordering dart boards and ping pong equipment for the office. The bar for this role is even lower than that of regular HR.
I wish them well. I was a paying customer for many years but a few years ago I backed up all of my notes and cancelled. I noticed that I spent much more time creating and curating notes than ever using them. Now I use org-mode and occasionally Apple Notes and Keep.
I re-evaluated the utility of long term curation of notes and working material.
Same here. I stopped paying since the only premium feature I used was the PDF indexing.
Personally, I’ve seen more people using Bear recently than Evernote... which is starting to feel a bit ancient. Its biggest strength is that it has Windows and Android clients, where as Bear doesn’t.
If Evernote hasn't found a set of features people would be willing to pay for in their ten years of existing, I doubt another round of funding is really the solution. I'd much rather see them reduce their staff to an amount they can afford given their MRR, and focus on fleshing out the features that people are actually willing to pay for.
JIRA out of the box is fairly sane. The problem is it’s so easy to customise and project managers go crazy with statuses and custom fields and mandatory transitions.
I was a paying customer for a couple of years. Their failure to make cutting and pasting bullet lists, intuitive, despite many people complaining for years was enough to make me leave.
I just snapped one day and walked away, never looked back.
I really did like their OCR features. I guess I like lists more.
OCR is their most important feature, and that is mainly what I pay for. The clip extensions for browsers and Skitch are nice too, but not as essential.
I fondly remember Evernote talking about being a company that lives around for a hundred years. It had really great leadership, smart staff, a desire to be as independent as possible, keep data as belonging to the user as much as possible, and away from subpoena, and then a vision to help people become more productive.
Sometime later the vision floundered and staff became bored. Lots of people left for something more exciting. And the product went through its dark period.
Now the flaws are too many to mention and too well known too repeat but my question remains the same: what is there to do as a company that it makes sense to last a hundred years independently?
No. More than that. How can a company become so important just by collecting thoughts and memories?
FB survived because they had complete open access to how users were using the product. And they pivoted from their earlier promises.
I mostly use Evernote to save/tag interesting articles for later reference (it sure beats trying to re-find stuff via google). Any good cross-platform replacements for this use case? Especially ones that run as a desktop app and/or are self hosted? I want a solution I can stick with.
I think I misunderstood what the parent meant by "article". I use Zotero for academic journal articles and books. I think you can import website links too, though.
I always thought Evernote was just a more updated version of Treepad.
Treepad was a way of making all these labeled leafs of notes and organize it hierarchically. But it ended up being really annoying to manage. It was easy to add notes but easier to never look at them again, rendering them useless. Search or typical tag-based approaches wouldn't solve these problems. I always thought it would require something innovative, perhaps a more atomic line-based input that self organizes as a large list.
I'm not sure Evernote ever really came up with a more innovative solution than an upgraded treepad + cloud + search + tags ?
I’ve been a long time user of Evernote and have a love/hate relationship with the product. It really doesn’t know how to handle merge conflicts. I’ve been too lazy to switch but I’m starting to feel enough pain that I may make the leap.
Edit:typos
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 298 ms ] threadEventually, I grew tired of trying to fit into their new methods and moved on.
It doesn't surprise me they haven't been able to grow their paid base.
git is literally a "blockchain", and has been since before "blockchain all the things" was cool.
I honestly have no idea what you are talking about in the rest of your comment.
I think that things have the potential to go even further. A business could open a bank account and have its transactions viewable at any time or its balance queried.
The business could encrypt customer data and then release the customers' keys to the customer if the business's cash balance drops below a key threshold.
Hint: It's not cut and dry. The Amiga company is still in business. Radio Shack still exists. MySpace isn't dead. GeoCities got killed, it didn't go out of business.
Smart contracts won't help you here. Blockchains won't help you here. This is a complex legal problem and you're suggesting it's easy, that the Magic of Blockchains will solve it.
Whatever man.
Obviously this idea is getting HNmocked and I'm not going to be able to talk my way out of it, and yes I realize that ideas of property ownership and managing contract disputes are one of the cornerstone of the justice system and society itself.
In that way I am somewhat of a crypto radicalist and I'm talking my book as I do have a long crypto position.
Plus this also presumes that people report faithfully, accurately, and that zero mistakes are made.
The biggest problem with immutable ledgers and smart contracts is simple: Shit happens.
I've been exploring alternatives, but so far nothing has stuck. Last time I looked at OneNote it seemed promising, but the lack of tags (seriously?) was a showstopper. DevonThink Pro was interesting, but the Mac experience and UI is archaic to the point of being unusable IMO. Esp. the way that DT bakes a really terrible styling onto imported Evernote notes.
I'd love to hear migration success stories from those of you who've moved on.
(1) One example: Want to create or modify a table on the iPad app? Nope. Baffling.
I think markdown is the most future proof technology for the moment because you can just use pandoc to convert it or most note systems will accept markdown as an input format.
I'm not sure how tags would work in markdown, I guess you can create links manually but that's not really what you want.
- Web clipping. Evernotes browser plugins are pretty darn good here.
- Notes with attachments (images, PDFs, etc.). Some of these are mixed-media notes, where text, images, and/or file attachments are mixed to create a comprehensive document about some topic. Others are "pure" attachments, e.g. "store this PDF where I can retrieve it by search".
- Note taking. This, in isolation, is the easiest.
- Note syncing, mobile and desktop. This gets a bit harder.
- Search. Let's be clear, this was the first and biggest killer feature of Evernote. Notebook and tag organization are important, but rather than just providing direct hierarchical/taxonomic organization, they're largely there to support search with user-defined search facets.
I'd also love good Markdown support – that's one of my most-wanted features from Evernote in the first place.
The dropbox text editor works 'ok'. It's not great, but it's clean enough that I can edit my markdown notes and they'll be synced with dropbox.
Requires a rust compile of the code in the plugin, but once that's working it works well.
Have you tried diigo.com and it's apps? I highly reccomend it to everyone looking for Evernote alternative, especially for web clipping and organizing.
If I was going to suggest something for longer-form writings (e.g., journaling, blog posts) and you find that inadequate, I've heard good things about iA Writer[2].
1. http://www.bear-writer.com
2. https://ia.net/writer
Of course this kind of thing won't happen but maybe it says something about the optimization pitfalls of our economy.
For companies that don't produce physical goods, this would actually be somewhat doable..
I knew the rewrite was going take a lot longer than they were saying, both due to common sense and because there were conflicting goals from ceo and cto.
I went to the ceo and made a case for a back up plan, myself and a few others could continue on the old busted version; bug fixes and minimal enhancements only, insurance if you will. I really thought about buying it but had no way to finance anything like that. CEO didn’t bite and was in process of selling the company to a PE firm.
I left when the new version finally shipped with half the features and twice the bugs. The PE installed CEO wrecked the sales org and sales never recovered.
As a side note, a foreign firm had pirated a much older version 10 years prior, rebranded and was #3 with it in that market.
They compete by having a larger library.
But before you get too smug, the idea of going to Redbox to get a physical disc is not exactly cutting edge compared to just clicking on a button and renting a movie on demand from your cable provider/Apple/Amazon/Google/Vudu.
I’m lazier than I am cheap.
But honestly, most of my movies fall off the back of a truck onto my Plex server.
And I was just giving you hard time about being smug.....
I find it fascinating that this is core idea that made Netflix so successful, they just rely on much lazier customers than you!
Of the tech economy, perhaps. Or perhaps that's what you meant by "our", this being a tech site.
A huge amount of the workforce is engaged in work that doesn't change much at all. Construction workers, skilled labor like service plumbing or mechanical maintenance, engineering, retail work, etc. It's fairly optimized and if it changes, it changes in reaction to something or because new technology opened new opportunities. Really, it seems like mobile and web applications are the most stuck into this loop of having to add something new. An emacs users who used it 25 years ago could still use it today.
It doesn't need to be the only product or have the most users it only needs to be functional and make enough money for it to be worthwhile except with vc funding it has to constantly chase growth and returns.
It does make you start to question why you are paying for a service whilst locking yourself in when the rug can be pulled at any minute.
Never mind random apps, what about socks? [1]
1: https://mashable.com/2013/09/26/evernote-market/
That said, it's really good at filing and searching. I'd highly recommend trying it long enough to look past the UI to its capabilities. I'd hate to be without it now.
The app crashes, it takes forever to open, and the company has not improved anything in a long time.
Now they even changed the logo making it harder for my mind to locate the app.
Total disaster at Evernote.
I can't believe Microsoft hasn't bought it yet.
Why on earth would they want to? OneNote runs on everything, ties in well with Office, and covers the big ticket features that Evernote does. I'm a vimwiki user for the most of what Evernote/OneNote cover, but what I can't believe is that Evernote users haven't saved Microsoft the trouble, and just switched to OneNote. I mean, if you're going to go walled-garden, Microsoft has some nice landscapers.
https://onenote.uservoice.com/forums/327186-onenote-for-wind...
I moved over from onenote and decided to move back, maybe it's just more comfortable for me. They were both free versions anyway.
THey also have a free version which is pretty good.
I still miss sunrise.
Not for long.
https://onenote.uservoice.com/forums/327186-onenote-for-wind...
And now they're going to axe the "good" version. Lemmee just alt-tab back over to vim here and make a note of that...
edit - after twenty years!
> In 1999, original equipment manufacturers released the first tablet PCs designed to the Microsoft Tablet PC specification
I worked at the same company, didn't work on OneNote. Doesn't matter, I'm a tech guy and these decisions have nothing to do with the technology.
I use Evernote because of its excellent image markup. You can mix images and text in notes and really document an image-based or figure-based data flow. Not sure if there's any alternative that does this as well.
That seems like... not a lot... for a company that has raised $300 million in funding.
These knowledge management systems really need to think about a human through their education-training-research-job lifecycle. I think DogPile + Notability + Evernote would be a great integration.
You gotta roll your own out of app organization/tagging scheme, which isn't a big deal in keyboard mode, but when my machine is in stylus mode, totally sucks. (I used folders to organize Xournal files. Hard to navigate via stylus. Compare to say onenote with good stylus/touch us)
Also, the UI is just funky. Switching colors of the pen requires carefully tapping an extraordinarily tiny colored box. No way to paste images, you gotta clipart them in (so no roll-your-own stylus screenselect +paste functionality like onenote + windows 10). Scrolling only works sometimes, and leaves little penmark dots usually as it takes a second to understand that that wasn't my stylus.
It only recognizes one of the buttons on my thinkpad stylus.
If you're in putting text and want one word to be a different color, that single word needs to be an entirely different textbox, which is nearly impossible to do so close to other text. Also, no bold, italic, underline.
Gotta roll your own sync, which doesn't bother me because onenote sync is so terrible it actually makes the software worse.
Xournal is an incredible software but it's just soooo cloooose. I keep meaning to hunt around to see if it's open source and see if I can start contributing to get it how I want it.
>The font and point size can be modified using the "Text Font" command in the Tools menu (or the toolbar button).
Yup, just like I said.
>Alternatively, images can be pasted directly from the clipboard (without having to select the image tool).
Nope, non functional on Ubuntu 18.04, have tried countless times.
Evernote was fine at the start but it seemed like they could never figure out what they wanted the UI to be, so they stretched it in too many different directions.
The closest they've come was when they started limiting app access to the account to two devices. I almost pulled the trigger. If they lower it to one device, I will strongly consider paying.
There is one big thorn in my side though. It is their synchronization. Way too often I end up with two conflicting notes. They get sent to different places and they are not linked together. Before starting to pay, I will give on the of the Evernote alternatives a try, solely because their synch sucks. I understand that synch is a difficult feature, but at least try to make the post-conflict user experience more pleasant. Cross-link the conflicting notes at least.
Another problem for me is their text handling of lists. Eery so often, after I paste something in, bullet points appear or disappear. Things get merged in and are impossible to de-indent. It feels lie Microsoft Word from 1998.
I mean, is this the point where Evernote realizes products eventually reach market saturation, and you need to start playing some bullshit business games like planned obsolescence or recurrent payments to keep up the growth curve (or, alternatively, realize you've done a good job, and move on to do something else)?
Synology also has a DSM app "Note Station".[3]
[1] - http://paperwork.rocks/ [2] - https://sandstorm.io/apps/index [3] - https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/feature/note_station
the only thing stopping me from importing everything into it is that there is only 1 export option. they need to add a html option and maybe plaintext
Just in case: I am one of three initial Evernote developers who implemented the idea of Stepan Pachikov : https://notes.sciter.com/2017/09/11/motivation-and-a-bit-of-...
In contrast, notion allows notes to coexist with other notes within a single "meta" note, ad nauseum. You can organize them in rows and columns and insert arbitrary text or whatever other content to label notes, for instance. One particularly powerful structure is using notes in a kanban or trello like setup, while enjoying the full evernote-like features provided within any individual note.
The multifunctional nature reminded me a lot of Lotus Notes, empowering users to build new functionality and database (not a bad thing, though leads to silos and lock in).
Two main things ended up frustrating me about Notion that I went back to Bear and other tools:
- For pure text editing some of the shortcuts drove me insane. The syntax was kind of like markdown but not quite, and the shortcuts for moving between levels of indentation were different from pretty much every other app I had used. The rich content was cool, but ran into so many issues with embeds only working on certain platforms, and rendering blank or crashing the app on others. - It was surprisingly easy for team members to screw things up. I’m talking about cluttering tables with blank records, moving documents around and causing them to disappear into the ether for other users. There just didn’t seem to be very good controls or audit trails.
On paper, their feature set looks great, with various synchronisation options (Dropbox, WebDAV, OneDrive) and apps on Windows, Linux, macOS, Android and iOS.
Was going to sit down and Google something with this exact set of features. Thanks for saving me the time!
Chris if you're reading this email me (contact in the profile) would be happy to share my thoughts on next steps.
I only cancelled when they changed their terms to allow engineers to read your notes to improve their ad targeting. Though they eventually walked that back it soured me enough, now I get by with google docs instead.
So they have a lawyer being asked to take on what are essentially HR duties? If that's not the sign of a sinking ship I don't know what is. I wouldn't expect that individual to be there for much longer either.
Also "People Operations" is a load of shit, another Silicon Valley invention that seemingly all startups now feel compelled to have. I've had a few People Operations departments in jobs past and their duties largely consisted of brining the credit card to company "drink ups" and ordering dart boards and ping pong equipment for the office. The bar for this role is even lower than that of regular HR.
HR is the most critical part of a corporation, but I've never worked anywhere that seemed to treat it seriously.
I re-evaluated the utility of long term curation of notes and working material.
Personally, I’ve seen more people using Bear recently than Evernote... which is starting to feel a bit ancient. Its biggest strength is that it has Windows and Android clients, where as Bear doesn’t.
Hence why you have equivalent or better software from other companies
Also, it also struck me as not very user friendly and a tad bureaucratic
- Slow GUI
- Horrible Java thing
- Complicated
- Weird patching process
- Doesn't integrate with what you want (or does but costs more)
- Bought and mandated by somebody that doesn't need to use it
(:
I just snapped one day and walked away, never looked back.
I really did like their OCR features. I guess I like lists more.
Sometime later the vision floundered and staff became bored. Lots of people left for something more exciting. And the product went through its dark period.
Now the flaws are too many to mention and too well known too repeat but my question remains the same: what is there to do as a company that it makes sense to last a hundred years independently?
No. More than that. How can a company become so important just by collecting thoughts and memories?
FB survived because they had complete open access to how users were using the product. And they pivoted from their earlier promises.
Evernote stayed loyal. They suffered.
Treepad was a way of making all these labeled leafs of notes and organize it hierarchically. But it ended up being really annoying to manage. It was easy to add notes but easier to never look at them again, rendering them useless. Search or typical tag-based approaches wouldn't solve these problems. I always thought it would require something innovative, perhaps a more atomic line-based input that self organizes as a large list.
I'm not sure Evernote ever really came up with a more innovative solution than an upgraded treepad + cloud + search + tags ?