It was very popular for a long time. It was one of the first apps of it's kind and got some loyal users. Then stagnated while tons of competitors blossomed.
> Then stagnated while tons of competitors blossomed.
Which competitors have blossomed and are also cross-platform? I can think of OneNote, but the 'clip from web' feature in Evernote is superior IMO. But I hate Evernote's "rich" (my foot) text editor for being so dumb and so basic, and the lack of organisation that tags and notebooks give, and am always keen to find a replacement.
Replacements always seem to have better features, but the cost of getting a note into them is higher.
For me, it's a case of the free alternatives catching up. Apple's Notes isn't as good as Evernote, but it's completely sufficient for many use cases. While Evernote is definitely better, it's not $7.99 per month better for most people.
If Evernote did not take funding, they likely would have had a path to profitability, even a meager one.
But, if Evernote did not take funding, it's likely another note-taking app would have, and Evernote would not have been able to compete with free VC money and RSU compensation.
Huge mismanagement. I used to be a loyal EN user. Even considered paying for the premium offering, but they just didn't price it properly for what was offered. They also went some weird directions that I didn't like, and removed features that I did like. Then they kept raising rates. They also never put in a dark mode or even themes and made constant changes to make it impossible for it to be done easily on the user side.
Edit: To be clear I'm paying for Standard Notes right now. So I'm not someone against paying for good things.
Anyone have any more infomation on what jobs exactly were cut? There's difference implications on whether it's a geneal whole company layoff versus laying off a single department versus discontinuing some expiremental side project and the staff involved therein.
My guess is that there were some engineering job cuts at least. I’ve had some views from Evernote engineers on my LI profile today. Could be coincidence though!
Using it for the things I use it for, I prefer the workflow to using Docs.
Evernote does OCR things, can take audio or camera notes, and has a tool to grab copies of webpages with various levels of cutting out non-content.
>Why do I need Evernote if I have Google Docs or Office 365?
It's a bit like asking why you'd need a PostIt note if you already have a piece of paper. They're tools that do pretty similar things that specialize in very overlapping but slightly different tasks.
my understanding is that office OneNote does a lot of similar things. I suspect that the answer here is that you don't need Evernote if you have Office 365
Although I use OneNote more, Evernote's bookmark/favorite feature is sadly lacking from OneNote. If onenote had a panel for favorite notes, that would be huge.
I have an Epson scanner and use their ScanSmart (I think this is what it is) to setup the flow that lets me push a button on the printer and the scanned PDF will show up in one of my notebooks. The OCR might actually be coming from the Epson software and not Evernote, maybe I'll look into it later.
The OCR results I have now is not terrible nor wonderful.
the executive departures two weeks ago characterized
Evernote as “in a death spiral,” saying that user growth
and active users have been flat for the last six years
and that the company’s enterprise product offering
hasn’t caught on.
If a company isn't growing, its dying. Six years without customer growth? Its amazing they managed to rise a down-round, let alone any round at all.
I can't argue the logic, but this makes me sad. Can't someone make a product that people will pay for that is sustainable over time (even if # new users == # lost users )? Why does everything have to be huge to exist?
Not everything does but they raised a lot of money on the presumption that they would become huge, and now that screws up the incentives for new hires etc.
Hey off topic, but if you use that markdown style for long quotes, it's simply awful looking on mobile. Gotta scroll waaaaay to the right, then alllll the way back.
I just do this:
>Hello I am a quote that is extremely long lined with no newlines. I will break based on the width of your device just like any other normal text inside an HTML element. Look how long I am wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.
Listen. This is an HN style sheet problem, not user choice problem. The fact is, using the preformatted macro is a better way to highlight verbatim passages of text.
>Your version just mixes in with everything else you typed, and hardly looks like a differentiable block of text at all, regardless of whether it wraps or not.
Hey look! A completely distinct
block of text. And wow! It's
monospaced too! This gives the
impression that it's reprinted
exactly as originally written!
And all I had to do, to make phone
people happy was manually wrap at
maybe, like 30 chars. Amazing!
This might be a little off-topic because I only vaguely remember using Evernote, and thus am not as familiar with its feature set; but does anyone here use Google Keep? I remember trying it during its soft launch, but didn’t revisit it (Google Drive and Pinboard are sufficient for me). But I can’t recall the last time I’ve ever heard someone mention that they use it.
Yep I use Google Keep all the time. I switched from Evernote to Keep maybe a year or so ago.
Keep has a very simple and convenient design. There's a note length limit that I find annoying sometimes, but encourages switching to a Google Doc instead if the note is getting too long. Also love the syncing between devices (web, multiple Android devices)
It's ok for grocery lists and other really simple stuff, but it's too basic and bare bones. No tables, no free layout, no attachments, basically nothing else than either checklists or simple text with some images. 95% of my use is making a grocery list on the computer and reading it on my watch.
I've tried Evernote a couple of times and don't even understand why people use it and why does it take more than a couple of devs to maintain, it seems sooo simple (yet hardly intuitive) and lacks any smart features I sought when looking for a personal information management tool.
I have a scanner that with the push of a button scans records and sends them to Evernote, I then shred the paper. Receipts, invoices, various mailed things all go into Evernote.
I also use Evernote web clip to save a copy of a web article (or often a recipe) which I would like to either finish later, have for reference, or share with someone.
I also save notes about computer things. Research for all my options to do X, or commandline snippets to make Y happen.
Then I can scroll back in history and it helps recall to see the things I have been doing.
Side note: I use DEVONthink for all of those. It's not cheap, but neither is Evernote Premium. Also, DEVONthink's AI for classifying new data items, summarizing them, and searching in them is outstanding. Subscribe to a few choice RSS feeds and you have a personal database full of new, discoverable research.
I wrote a blog post describing how I use Evernote for GTD as well as general record keeping. Its flexibility is both a strength and a weakness: it lets you tailor a setup that works well for you, but it also makes it very difficult to see how to get the most out of it at first glance.
Evernote can export notes into ENEX XML document itself.
I've used https://github.com/laurent22/joplin to import this ENEX file and access most of the features (formatting, images) but not other (i.e. password protected values)
In case it's useful and you're on a Mac, FYI you can use Bear (bear.app) to import EverNote's XML export file; and you can then use Bear to export the whole thing as a bunch of markdown files.
Evernote to me just seemed like a worst case scenario of technology jumping the shark. Note-taking should be a simple matter, and there are good apps out there that make it nearly as easy as a pencil and paper. But Evernote is not one of them. I gave it a try and I felt like I was jumping through hoops and learning curves for basic things, which just seemed silly for note-taking and related tasks.
I would love an opensource replacement for Evernote. But it must allow me to clip images into it. Life is not always just text, and most of the programs that people claim they use to replace Evernote are text only.
Evernote also allows me to embed PDFs (or any file really), which is nice, but as a minimum spec, I insist on the ability to drop in images.
You can in Onenote, with the bonus of not giving Google even more of your data. The online client seems to work really well, although I prefer the native one.
I used to use Evernote and had too many failed updates and corrupted databases leaving me out of wifi in the big world without my notes. Sure they'd resync once I went back online, but I keep essential things in there.
It has an incredibly impressive feature set for an open source application, but it seems to me too much effort has gone into bells and whistles at the expense of the basic functionality.
The thing that killed it for me is that unlike every other text editor in the world, you can't apply formatting to text until after you've typed it.
Hi, creator of Turtl here. I'm hearing good things about Joplin/Omni, so I'm going to spend some quality time with those apps to try to learn from the things that they are doing well.
Also, we have a new version coming out very soon, v0.7.0, that will have significant UI/performance/stability improvements. I think it's worth checking out (although obviously I'm biased).
You really have to do something about your website. You get nearly no info nor simple stuff like screenshots. Is there a way to help you out in that regard?
Turtl requires a server to sync, right? I don't remember that turning me off initially, but after using Joplin - I really wish more apps would make use of regular plain-text file syncing.
Have you thought about having Turtl sync to a local directory, or using something like nextcloud/dropbox? I don't know much about the backend of Turtl, so I'm not sure how reliant it really is on the server process..
I'll look for the 0.7.0 release and check it out, thanks!
Yes, I've thought about that. And it's an attractive idea, however one thing that sets Turtl apart from other note apps is that it's both encrypted and enables sharing. Other apps do one or the other, not both, and in order to truly support both you can't use something like Dropbox or Nextcloud unless you want to be handing people keys out-of-band and doing a lot of manual work.
Turtl's main goal is to make security easy. If you have to setup Dropbox or Nextcloud to get syncing working, then it didn't attain that goal, I believe.
Also, by providing a service on top of the server, I can eventually make some money from this thing I've spent years building =]. I hope you like v0.7.0 when it launches!
I definitely forgot about the sharing aspect of Turtl, thanks for that reminder! I also understand your point of being able to provide a service, and I hope that it is successful for you when premium launches! If you haven't already, you should also consider looking into setting up Patreon as an option for donating towards the development of Turtl.
I re-downloaded 0.6.x for now to give it another try. One of the things I remember not being completely happy with was the web clipper. Has that changed at all with 0.7.0, or do you plan on improving it in the near-future?
There are a few other issues/questions I have, but I'll troll through the issue tracker first before bothering you too much :P
(Joplin's dev here) Can confirm that Joplin can embed images - you can copy and paste an image directly by pressing Ctrl+V in a note, or attach them. It's also possible to attach any other file, PDF, etc. and open it in an external viewer on mobile or desktop.
Evernote import is also supported and as far as I can tell works well for many users. If you find any glitch or issue though, feedback is welcome.
The app is still under development with, at the moment, a focus on bug fixing and improving the desktop and mobile usability.
Evernote had such a feature- Skitch was their program which integrated screenshots and allowed for marking them up, indexing the text inside the image, and filing them alongside or within my other notes. But they killed it and I'm not sure why. It still works but is buggy and unsupported now.
The problem is if you raise 300M for a note taking app you need to come up with some plausible way for your company to be worth 3B. There is such thing as raising too much.
I think they also shot themselves in the foot many years ago when they had a lot of heat... they were too expensive. If they were cheaper and converted more passionate users into paying customers back then, those people wouldn't have looked for alternatives, of which there are many.
Evernote did one thing extremely well. I remember being in the Valley a few years back and saw this huge Evernote building from the freeway. I was stunned, this entire building for my simple note taking app! What happened in a quest for growth is they bloated the product. It was no longer a simple elegant note taking app anymore.
Evernote from the outside appears rudderless. The founders gone and it's clear that the MBA's running the place not only don't have a passion for the product - I'm willing to bet they don't regularly use it.
I'm still convinced with the right leader it can be salvaged because so far there hasn't been a compelling product to seize its market.
I think it could even tolerate more than $1/year. I shell out money for anything I find useful, and I like evernote, but $4/month is insane for what it is -- considering all of the alternatives. I'd easily pay $1/month though, maybe $2/month if it really became important to me.
I stopped using them after they made it clear they had no interest in supporting a linux client. Not sure if they have changed their attitude since then, but that ship has sailed as far as I am concerned.
I wanted to love Evernote, even swore by it for a time, but after a few months of extensive use, it becomes apparent that they don't care about customers outside of their business plans. Feature requests as old as 5 years get ignored while they keep pushing out features that would make Evernote more like a powerpoint alternative than a note-taking app.
Personally I want to think this is happening because better alternatives have been popping up. There's bear and omnifocus and, recently, notion.so that does a lot more than Evernote for a relatively cheaper price.
Also all of them have dark modes while Evernote doesn't.
Evernote, like so many apps before it, has fallen head-first into the go-big-or-go-home trap.
These companies start a desperate, doomed-to-fail chase of a gigantic market, at the expense of their small-but-profitable niche. It's understandable from their board members' perspective, because a nice 5% ROI is not what they're after. They need that moonshot, even if chasing it likely results in losing everything.
See also: Every company that decides that their platform now needs a social media element.
Between Apple Notes, Bear, and OmniFocus I have no reason to use Evernote. They all do what they focus on well, cost less over time, and are proper native apps to boot.
For OmniFocus in particular I also have the assurance that its maker isn’t just going to up and vanish any time soon. They’ve been around since the NeXTSTEP days and are quite healthy.
I'm looking at the Omni products and they seem all great. But I might be transitioning from iPhone to Android in the next 24 months and am afraid of losing a lot of investment.
I switched from onenote to evernote a very long time ago to get away from microsoft office. After evernote went to shit, though, I didn't have any real alternatives so I went back to onenote. I wonder if the newest free version runs in wine.
> I wonder if the newest free version runs in wine.
Microsoft already discontinued OneNote (the Office version). The last version will be 2016. They're offering OneNote as a modern app now that requires a Microsoft account and syncs to the cloud - and of course it doesn't have equivalent functionality.
Here is a suggested plan for Evernote to succeed. Look at what types of note people are making - do a session with different types of note/subject/user.
For every single thing, make a piece of functionality specific to that note type, subject or person. Do this hundreds/thousands of times and review what helps you grow.
- Note Type: Generic Note, Todo List, Wedding, Mood Board, etc.
- Subject: Scientific/Maths notes, Programmer notes (i.e. python/jupyter notebooks, observablehq.com), Notes for specific industries, designers, school teachers, etc.
I can't really give good examples of these until I see the usage but you get the idea.
It really feels to me Evernote is for one a or two very specific types of people/use cases/subjects (the founders probably) rather than making something their users really want.
This is almost exactly why a few weeks ago when I finally decided to look for a way to start mangling my mess of random things I jot down while working, or browsing the web, etc... Gave Evernote a look, because I had heard it was "the best note taking app", and was almost immediately unimpressed. Browsing through the site, and playing with the free version, I hardly found any of the features offered by the paid versions better than what I already had with my unorganized "note taking" process (essentially tons of notes in OS X's Notes app, various text files here and there, and plenty of forgotten to-do lists & kanban boards).
I was actually pretty blown away people are paying for the features Evernote offers, the only advantage from my disorganized workflow (aside from it being a little more organized) is looked prettier (albeit no dark mode kinda killed that too).
I just wanted something that was a bit more tailored to how my normal workflow, something a little closer to just using my text editor like when I'm programming. Something that supported Markdown, syntax highlighting, organizing into folders, tagging, and preferably with a dark theme (I won't stop using something if there isn't one, I'll just try to find an alternative with one if possible). Had Evernote offered these features, or a package with these features, that are a little more tailored to how I work, I probably would've bit the bullet and got a subscription.
Fortunately, thanks to some kind commenter here actually, a few weeks ago I found Boostnote[1]. And it was exactly what I was looking for, and didn't find in Evernote. First class markdown support, dark theme(s), syntax highlighting, the ability to setup cloud storage for syncing across devices, and it's even free and open source! But, that's not even the best feature (for me at least), Boostnote supports VIM keybindings! And honestly, that's one of the biggest reasons I never got around to getting one of these notetaking apps, because of the lack of VIM keys it's so jarring to break from my normal workflow where my editor is either vim or is using the keybindings, I used the vim Chrome/FF extensions, but until now I couldn't try to take notes without slamming esc a bunch and sighing because I just typed "kjkkkkhlkjlkjh" for the millionth time.
If you're a developer looking for an Evernote alternative, definitely give Boostnote a look. It fit right into my workflow instantly, no bugs, no ads, no bullshit, and it's got all the features you would get with Evernote, but with a touch of specialization for developers. If it weren't FOSS, I hands down would've almost immediately bought it/subscribed, because it literally had everything that I wanted out of Evernote. And, now I get that devs aren't the general public, and the basic note taking functionality
will likely be just fine for most. But, at first glance, I don't see a single thing it does in the free tier, or the first paid tier, that you couldn't accomplish with OSX's Notes & Preview app, so I don't see how offering just the most basic note taking feature set is a sustainable business model when so many free (and often even builtin) apps do exactly the same thing. It certainly wouldn't hurt for them to start offering something unique, more specialized, like one of your examples Bullet Journaling. I'm only semi-familiar with it, and have been meaning to look into more, however one of the reasons I haven't was I wasn't able to find the "Evernote of Bullet Journals" online. And for people like School Teachers, if they built out some functionality specific for them, like a first-class lesson planner, alongside their normal notes, and an idea board, etc... I'm sure teachers would flock to it (if it didn't suck that is), I know my mother would love a nice looking, easy to use app, that she can take notes, work out lessons plans throughout the day, and ...
> Fortunately, thanks to some kind commenter here actually, a few weeks ago I found Boostnote
And you've been that kind commenter today for me. Boostnote is the first suggestion here that actually seems feasible for me, properly cross-platform, the UI seems very well done, lots of customizations, and (if I understand correctly) plain Markdown storage, not yet another obscure unnecessary format that's unreadable without the app. I've been using Simplenote after Evernote started being too bulky and unreliable, but Simplenote is not quite polished and doesn't seem to be getting any love. I'll give this a try, it'll be really good if this pans out. Thanks!
For the reference of anyone reading this: unfortunately, it looks like Boostnote's mobile applications are currently "on hold", because they're known to be buggy and unreliable, and the old maintainer has left the project. That is a pretty major issue for me, though (hopefully) only temporary.
(Another issue is that it's not really "highly customizable" once you get into it - even though "customizable" is a proud part of their tagline - but at least that doesn't seem to be intentional, just some messy disconnected design of the Preferences page, according to an Issue comment on github.)
My GF worked there and this was precisely her job. She loved the product, but just had to leave the company; they didn't seem to get what it would take to make the company successful.
I'm not sure that company could be successful -- they raised so much money there's no way the investors could be made whole just on that product. I believe (from public info) their revenue is in the single digits per quarter.
It doesn't help that their CEO is an ex googler. I don't mean this as any insult to Google nor to him specifically, but working at G doesn't prepare you for a more resource-constrained environment where the product's traction and success is of existential import. I've seen this problem play out over and over.
I have wanted this for years. Think structured notes. If I'm jotting down a review of a restaurant in Evernote, let me give it a star rating and locate it on a map. Let me give places I visit the same. Let me choose what widgets show in a 'Note type' -- and when I search let me search for these fields.
E.g. "All items in EverNote within 30 miles of X and with a rating >= 4 stars"
I am describing a flexible database with a cracking UI. And nobody has done it AFAIK (except one startup a couple of years ago that took funding then burned)
Tangential: For bonus points, add other modes to the note taker. A WorkFlowy-esque outliner, one of those where you add cards to the right of each item to drill into detail. There's lots of different types of notes people want at different times.
Yes me too - the context awareness is key but it's unbelievably obvious and you could literally add an unlimited amount of awesome and useful functionality.
HealthClinicUSA - Your Health Clinic Online
Daily tips on #health, #beauty, #nutrition, fitness, diet and more. Helping you on your way to becoming fit & healthy.
https://healthclinicusa.com
Dropbox is extremely reliable, and has not given customers a real reason to switch imho. Evernote is famously unreliable with a "quirky" interface that often behaves strangely.
The pain of Evernote was enough to make me switch. Dropbox has not yet pained me enough to switch away from being a paying customer despite the fact that I have a 1GB OneDrive plan with Office.
I tried to switch away from paid 1TB Dropbox to the bundled ("free") 1TB OneDrive that's bundled with the Office subscription I need to have from time to time.
Filesystem integration with the Mac was disastrous. Three problems: 1- some characters are not permitted in filenames; you find this out when synch fails and have to guess where the problem is; 2 - some files simply silently don't synch; and 3 - a couple of times a day it would decide it had lost synch and then would have to re-index the repo, which not only took up cycles (I could survive that) but meant there was no synching while that was happening.
Whereas I just have almost everything in my DB directory tree and even do all my development there (builds and all).
At my last company we had Box which is almost identical with Dropbox but with a much more complex interface to satisfy corporate I/T. Total overkill for a startup!
Dropbox was an early solution, and put the effort in to make it nearly effortless to get set up.
They've also built a lot of good will from me over the years with promotional offerings. I don't actually pay for a subscription, but I've got about 13gb of quota.
The big difference between the two is that: Dropbox is the simplest version of any cloud storage concept that nearly every level of computer user can understand. Evernote is not simple.
With their market share, Evernote has so much potential to make helpful and innovative products, yet they screw it up so badly. They rarely add features, and when they do, they're never the ones the users want. I'm determined in my lifetime to create an alternative that actually reflects the needs of people who are idea creators.
I've been a loyal evernote user for 5+ years now and IMO, its unequivocally, the best note taking app out there(including Keep, OneNote, Apple notes, Wunderlist etc). Looking at the comments, I am surprised that evernote isn't as popular among HN'ers as I thought it would be.
Having said that, I can see skepticism surrounding the app based on erratic updates they've been shipping for a while now.
The app has been ruined by :
- Wildly Inconsistent UI (Windows app > MacOS)
- Switch to table layout (monster margins look ugly and quite frankly, unbearable)
- Uncertain updates (more often than not it'll break an existing feature)
Few months ago, I mistakenly updated the Mac app and it was such a painful experience, I had to dig into archives and reinstall 2016 version to restore some sanity. As someone who is heavily dependent on the app, these changes have been frustrating. I'll be jumping ship the moment a viable alternative appears.
I've used onenote for a while and tried to move over to evernote - it's horrible on windows.
Simple things just as being able to highlight multiple words to change fonts or even have auto capitalization not have a toggle.
The only thing I did like was the ability to repeat the last command you took but that shouldn't have to exist for stuff like changing fonts of certain words one at a time.
If you use a Surface, or other modern, non-caveman computer with excellent pen support, then there is nothing better than OneNote for note-taking. Interestingly, MS has been slowly deprecating the legacy desktop version of OneNote in Office and replacing it with the free Windows 10 app, which is now far more capable than the old version was.
Of course, there still things that should be added - especially in the drawing, touch/pen UI (bring back radial menus!), and data management/tagging searching departments, but if you haven't tried it lately, OneNote has gotten staggeringly better over the past couple of years, and IMO, easily outstrips its current competition...
Oh, and FWIW, MS has put a LOT of effort into improving the OneNote apps for iOS and Android, too - they are approaching full first-class citizen status, which makes them really handy. (Funny, I used to bash MS, but they're really doing a great job with OneNote, VSCode, and WSL, all of which I use and rely on regularly. Now if they (or anyone else for that matter) could only build modern email/calendar/contacts app that works as well as what we had in the 90's (Palm, cough, Palm...)
Interestingly, I just checked their update history for iOS, and it seems the last real update was almost a year ago, and it was mostly bug fixes or other non-descriptive updates since then.
I think my comment was around the wrong way, I meant that evernote was horrible on windows - so much so that I just switched back to onenote out of frustration.
I do miss the desktop version of onenote as that had a lot more features that I was hoping to find on the windows 10 app version.
I have just under 15K notes and have been a Premium customer since 2008, however, these days I find myself barely touching Evernote at all, and have switched to primarily using Notion.so, with Pocket and Zotero for snapshotting/handling research, and a bit of Dropbox Paper (I had a soft spot for Hackpad).
From my perspective, Evernote has gotten consistently worse over the past few years (some of this is due to the core product not scaling as people put more notes in - the search craps out and the organization sucks):
* No way to easily exclude say web clippings from search; in general the search results are inadequate (and doesn't factor in recency or frequency appropriately) of cache things intelligently - this effectively makes Evernote a PITA for anything but write-only usage
* Rather than helping people categorize things, they've made it progressively harder by making Notebook organization clunkier. I never got into using tags because it didn't make very good suggestions, and there's no hierarchy. With dysfunctional search, in the end it's all just a "pile."
* The original appeal of Evernote was seamless syncing across all platforms, but I'm almost entirely on Linux these days and there's no official client or good alternative, and the web interface is awful. That pretty much killed my usage for good, but every time I launch the iOS app, it seems to launch slower. There's way too much friction for creating notes.
I'll probably be exporting and cleaning house sometime soon. While the web clipper is great, I can probably find a better alternative (or just switch to Zotero for everything, as it does fine page snapshotting and the collections/subcollections largely work like you'd want). The OCR is probably the nicest thing I'd miss, but besides occasionally scanning some receipts or other papers, I'm not sure there's anything else I use it for. Also, their security/privacy updates from last year also made me hold my nose.
There are some neat open source projects that have started up recently, but I'm also starting to think about my notes and research in a more long term view (keeping and syncing, but also publishing).
How did you find the learning curve with notion? I found it on here a few days ago and thought it looked amazing, gave it a few days trial but now I feel like I am just wasting time with it trying to do the things that I want.
Simple things like not being able to put different colors on text in the same block or even just putting a simple table (no not a database) into a block have put me off it. Also it is difficulty (re: impossible) to copy and paste notes over from another application without it getting all messed up.
There are definitely some rough edges - like you mentioned, copy and paste is awful (tbf this is very hard to implement, it's all edge cases), there's no web clipper yet, and for me, personally, I get annoyed by the '/' shortcut (also the search has gotten slower and slower (not sure if this is due to growing corpus or other issues) and there are some other niggles (not doing a great job auto-expanding where you're nested when you jump to a page for example), however they are consistently improving the product in lots of very noticeable ways: https://www.notion.so/What-s-New-157765353f2c4705bd45474e5ba...
And it does really the few things that I most care about:
* Seamlessly syncs/accessible on all my devices (I wish it did better offline access though)
* Has a rich, modern WYSIWYG editor (w/ markdown shortcuts, supports attachments and different types of embeds, comments/etc)
* Has a tree hierarchy on the left - I would prefer faceted nested collections (you can't put a note in two folders), but it's much more effective than single-pane organization like GDocs or Dropbox Paper
I've used a few the tables a bit and it's pretty rudimentary - if you don't need the organization, from what you've outlined, honestly it sounds like GDocs still might be what you need (I've always had a lot of GSheets I link out to from my notes - sucks it's not all in one place, but for notetaking, I think the more important thing is that I have a way to organize/find pointers to things, which GDocs completely fails at).
Evernote is good for pasting in arbitrary formatting, but horrible for editing formatting, and thus simple notes just get lost in a see of Dreamweaver-esque WYSIWYG nightmare formatting.
Evernote was great for a while. Then they decided to go nuclear with monetizing it while simultaneously ruining the software with the worst design changes and features imaginable.
I have Evernote but never found it easy enough to use to depend on it. And it just seems scarily buggy. I'm a paid user too!
I just tried to use it for a new project and when creating a shared note it kept telling me my email address wasn't validated. Well there's no way to validate one unless you go to the web site, delete your address and add it again! It also offered to set up 2FA...only I'd used 2FA to log in! So I got a new set of replacement keys. This was frightening enough that I exported all my data.
But what tool shares phone/laptop and permits formatted text, attachments, and offline use? Apple notes almost gets there, but doesn't.
Evernote is an example of a great product that is incompatible with the VC model of funding (also see Twitter). Once you take VC it's not acceptable to be a niche product that does one thing really well, you have to worship at the altar of cancerous growth. The VCs would rather the product be ruined than miss an opportunity for 100-1000x, and if you don't agree they will install adult supervision to do their bidding.
Evernote killed itself by losing its vision in search of ever greater monetization, how the current product compares to other products on the landscape is irrelevant.
The free version of OneNote is lighter. The version that comes with Office is full-featured. (Don't know exactly what's different, I've only used the office version.)
The full version is also free. It comes included with the Office365 installer, but can be downloaded on its own:
https://www.onenote.com/download
OneNote syncs to OneDrive - so if you have O365 your storage space is quite large, whereas free users only have 5GB (though compared to Evernote's 25MB this is still plenty)
Unless they've changed it quite recently, the version that comes with Office365 and the one from https://www.onenote.com/download are different programs.
I did an office 365 install a week ago and recall a second Onenote popping up. Is it just no longer being developed, or did I get one of the last installs? I was unaware of the change!
Attachments, yes. Web clipper, no I don't think so. But I doubt most people who used to use Evernote and now use Apple notes ever used the web clipper (including me).
I don't know what Evernote supports, but OneNote lacks some simple features. Can Evernote import slides from a PowerPoint larger than 50 MB? Because OneNote lost that. Does Evernote actually support saving to a file? Because OneNote doesn't support that trivial feature either.
Evernote is better for filing documents / archiving things - whether those are PDFs, web pages, business cards, physical mail, etc. OneNote is better for free-form notetaking and editing. Each page feels like an open canvas.
In particular: I can't drop a file directly onto the OneNote icon to archive a file - I have to make a "page" and drop it into the page's canvas. OneNote doesn't provide tagging. It enforces a certain organization that only makes sense for notes (notebooks > sections > pages). Attachments always feel like a second-class citizen inside of a page (which isn't to say OneNote's attachment handling is wrong, it's just designed for storing handouts in class alongside your handwriting, as opposed to archiving every piece of paper on your desk).
In my use case, I use Evernote (with a ScanSnap scanner) to archive every piece of physical mail I receive. It's great that I can just throw in a pile of mail, push one button, let the scanner bundle it into PDFs/JPEGs/contact cards as appropriate, apply metatadata, and OCR/index it. I tried to move this workflow to OneNote, and couldn't get anything as smooth.
I use both. I use OneNote for notes in class, and Evernote for long-term archival/recall of everything else.
(Personally, I think that DevonThink is a closer replacement to Evernote than OneNote is.)
I spent years with the same workflow, and Evernote groaned to a halt with over 5000 PDFs in it for me. (i7, 16gb ram).
I now store all my scans in Google Drive and use the OCR that comes with the ScanSnap. It works just as well, the search is Google fast and I can share them easily.
My boss today wondered why he made a particular decision for a commit he made 3 years ago. He pulled up Evernote, searched for the bug number, and had his notes from when he was working on it. Mystery solved.
With OneNote, he’d have to have some sort of filing system to organize that. With Evernote, he knew it was there and he could search for it if he needed it. That’s not to say you can’t search in OneNote, just that the archiving model of Evernote works far better for his workflow.
What do you mean? I have seen medium-sized wikis written using OneNote, and I've seen it used as a collaboration environment for specifications / mockups / design in groups of dozens of people as well.
The one feature I never found a decent replacement for was Evernote's web clipper. It worked really well, and I actually used it quite a bit since it was so low effort compared to saving a page or copy/pasting something that I might want to refer to later.
Mac Office is always missing things, it might as well be a different product. The free OneNote though should be the same and there is even a web-based version.
> Mac Office is always missing things, it might as well be a different product.
Is it? I've been using Excel cross-platform for a while and I haven't found a missing feature yet. (Although some keyboard shortcuts are annoyingly altered.) I don't use the rest of the Office suite as much, but OneNote is the only outlier I've seen personally.
I don't think anyone thinks Twitter is doing well in its own right. It's shedding users, it's possibly harming democracy, their moderation is being questioned daily in the national US press and many users don't know how to use Twitter.
I encourage you to have a look at Guillaume Chaslot's https://algotransparency.org - it identifies what videos YouTube's algorithm most often recommends, based on a given search. Serious question (I'm not trying to be facetious): looking at those recommendations, what do you think?
That is not proof. It's cherry picked topics for uncontrolled Youtube recommendations to a bot account they created. I think nothing about that is scientific and it screams tech illiteracy.
Google ads were also used substantially during 2016 [0]. Google’s ability to target messages to demographics that they only know because of their data trawling is effective for selling garage door repair and election influencing.
This "harming democracy" and "being questioned daily in the national US press", is all about the existing arbiters of information (also called the mainstream media) trying to protect their control over information dissemination.
It's definitely niche in the world of VC. Take Twitter. The hope was that they would be the new Facebook, which basically everyone uses. While Twitter may have a lot of users, they aren't growing, and it's pretty clear there are basically two groups: Twitter users and non-Twitter users, and non-Twitter users don't see much reason to use it.
But in the hopes of getting everyone to love Twitter, a lot of people think they lost focus on their existing users, which didn't make their existing users happy but never ended up enticing significant numbers of non-Twitter users either (FWIW I am in the "non-Twitter user camp", so not complaining they broke my experience)
I don't think it is a problem with the VC model at all. Evernote has taken more than $300MM in funding. Nobody put a gun to their head and made them take that money. The people who run Evernote decided to go in and tell investors that they had a plan to turn Evernote into a multi billion dollar company, and that plan said they needed a huge pile of money, and the investors made the mistake of writing a check.
Evernote could have skipped those VC meetings, skipped renting the huge, insanely expensive office just off Rt. 1 by SF, skipped putting huge, expensive light up Evernote signs on that office, and skipped hiring hundreds of engineers in the most expensive place in the world to hire engineers. They could have rented a small office in a commercial park in San Jose and only hired 10 people and now they would be quite profitable. They could have done this by only taking a few million dollars in funding, and now they wouldn't need an insane valuation to exit.
101, not rt 1. They’ve had a massive sign on a building on 101 that always struck me as a zeitgeist for SV — a note taking app with its logo on a building...
This feels like the same thing as the other poster said. The problem is not so much that the VC model exists, so much as the leaders of Evernote decided to pursue it (and perhaps to some degree the culture in silicon valley which pushes founders towards this model).
I agree, it's the widespread VC culture of big growth & big exits that gets people talking about Evernote as dead or dying, when in reality if it was a small company focused on it's core product and building steadily then it'd be considered a success.
For a company success should be making a profit, treating your employees well and making something worthwhile.
I've basically been coding mad and heads down for 2 months building it. I think we will have a release candidate in another week or so...
My hope / goal is to make a BETTER Evernote that's open source and lasts 20-30 years.
We have some AMAZING Open Source apps like VLC that just seem to last the test of time.
I think we deserve better!
One of the other things I wanted was something that was inherently hackable with a plugin API. The data is stored on disk and persisted via JSON so it's easy for write 3rd party apps that use the data.
It also works with git, dropbox, etc if you want cloud sync. I'm probably going to build in native cloud sync though and probably use Amazon Appsync since it supports offline sync easily.
Looks awesome! I rarely use PDFs and even more rarely create or edit them, but I hope you do well.
I’ve long thought that dealing effectively with PDF or other complex, crufty formats is a good candidate for a “shlep blindness”[1] style startup, and I hope it works out for you.
I might pick a more liberal license in the future but for now we're not a library and I think GPL is good. I'm actually more concerned about app bundlers stealing it and putting it on the App store or something and not contributing any changes back.
The GPL doesn’t really stop bundlers from stealing it. It just requires them to provide the (potentially modified) source code to their customers upon request.
Code isn't protected from becoming proprietary SaaS with the GPL though, AGPLv3 is the only way to ensure those that take your code, modify it and offer it as SaaS publish the altered code.
Yeah, it's also really important to understand that they only have to give source code to their customers. They don't have to provide source code upstream. So it's completely legitimate to take a GPL piece of software, make modifications, sell it anywhere you want, put a conspicuous note that you will supply source code on demand to your customers, and then never, ever supply source code because none of the users are technical enough to want the source code.
This is part of software freedom. Your end users do not have to distribute binaries or code to anyone that they don't want to. It's just that if they distribute a binary or code to someone, they have to grant the same freedoms they received.
Sometimes it's a bit hard to grasp these nuances (especially the, "Hey they can sellmy software" bit). It's important to understand that before you choose a license.
I have been looking for something exactly like this. I've tried some other apps as a place to collate and organize PDFs but haven't found anything. This looks really promising.
Thanks.. please jump on the Discord or join the reddit group. We're making FAST progress so if it's not 100% there yet just give us a few more weeks. Or even better send a PR or submit a feature request.
The guys on the Discord list were really really wanting tags in the repo view so I just banged them out on Monday.
and if you have a blog or a twitter account please give us a shout out. Polar is a brand new baby , only 60 days old, so not many people know about it yet.
The quicker we grow the more contributors we get which means the quicker we grow :)
I think a note app should be designed around the idea that the first action you take by default is always taking a note, and that actions should be made available where appropriate as a reaction. Shockingly, not many apps do this that I am aware of. Taking notes in an expeditious manner isn't always a design priority, and I don't think that's a needed sacrifice to make in a note taking app. That's why I never used evernote, anyways.
I feel like Bear[0] comes pretty close. I’ve been using it for the last few months and it’s one of the few apps I’ve found that actually allows me to just go in and take a note/jot down a quick blurb as needed.
I tried to use Evernote and it just never stuck with me. It felt like it was too much overhead just for capturing quick ideas.
+1 for Bear. I used Evernote for years but it finally became too slow and bloated with several thousand notes and tons of features I never use. I need a lightweight note app, if it takes more than a second or two to fire up the app and jot down a note then that’s a fail.
Bear is working well for me. The only thing I don’t like is no audio notes and weird formatting which makes copy pasting bulleted notes into other editors somewhat painful. Still my default note app and likely to stay that way for the foreseeable future (or until I have thousands of notes again causing performance to degrade...)
I liked and used bear when it just came out, but it is moving at a glacial pace when it comes to adding certain important features, such as adding support for tables and equations.
Bear has a very good story when it comes to sync with the iPhone. But if you need cross-platform support, tables, equations, and such features org-mode, Typora, etc. are much better options.
We can, but they introduce tons of challenges in rendering and display, change the serialization format (whereas basic stuff can just be edited and viewed as plain text) etc.
Besides where does one stop in a note taking app? One could also ask for footnotes, bibliography management, graphs and plots, handwriting recognition, PDF management, and so on...
Notational Velocity (and clones) always seemed to do well with that. Very light, very plaintext, but great as a sort of reactionary "Open and start typing and ask questions later" platform.
I find myself using the plain old "Notes" on Mac for nearly all of my note taking. It's just so much simpler than dealing with sections and pages and organization.
Most of my notes are relatively ephemeral, perhaps lasting for a task or project. Rarely to I need to reference things that aren't in relatively recent history. When I do, I'll just scroll back or do a universal search.
I've fought with/used a whole shitton of note tools, including Evernote and OneNote, and what I've finally settled back on is plaintext synced via Dropbox.
I don't even use Notational Velo anymore, since OrgMode converted me to an emacs zealot. Turns out, there's a workalike mode called deft that gets me all the same awesome search behavior.
On iOS, I use a mix of Drafts and Editorial (well, and BeOrg, for the orgmode files).
By going this way, I'm no longer dependent on someone else's product map for my notes. Sure, I guess Dropbox could become problematic or something, but there are other options there -- in this context, it's just plumbing.
Looks interesting! My use case revolves a lot around PDF and trying to remember the best bits, I'll be trying this out.
For the general public to catch on to whatever the next Evernote is, I think it will have to have; inviting visual elements like Notion, collapsible text like workflowy, better reminder/project management. So many of the top feature requests of Evernote that have been neglected, some since nearly the beginning.
Probably a good thing for the company, honestly I didn't even think Evernote required 54 people total, that seams incredibly bloated for such an increasingly irrelevant software.
Gonna mention Quiver (The Programmer's Notebook) as it hasn't been mentioned yet. I've been on Evernote for about 10 years and have a few thousand notes in it. This news is discomfiting and I look forward to checking out some of the contemporary alternatives. Lately, I've been putting more technical/nerdy stuff into Quiver, which understands code and does syntax highlighting and all that good stuff. I don't like it as much for the free-form stuff I do in Evernote, but for code snippets it's great.
I was an Evernote loyalist in the early days of the company, but eventually the apps got too sluggish and too complicated. The product started as a nice interface that got out of your way, but that went out the door as they tried to scale and make actual money.
I was then burned by OneNote (the MacOS app is pretty bad, and has terrible export options).
I now almost exclusively use plain-text files in a Dropbox folder, and I don't regret it at all.
369 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 179 ms ] threadWhich competitors have blossomed and are also cross-platform? I can think of OneNote, but the 'clip from web' feature in Evernote is superior IMO. But I hate Evernote's "rich" (my foot) text editor for being so dumb and so basic, and the lack of organisation that tags and notebooks give, and am always keen to find a replacement.
Replacements always seem to have better features, but the cost of getting a note into them is higher.
If Evernote did not take funding, they likely would have had a path to profitability, even a meager one.
But, if Evernote did not take funding, it's likely another note-taking app would have, and Evernote would not have been able to compete with free VC money and RSU compensation.
Edit: To be clear I'm paying for Standard Notes right now. So I'm not someone against paying for good things.
Evernote does OCR things, can take audio or camera notes, and has a tool to grab copies of webpages with various levels of cutting out non-content.
>Why do I need Evernote if I have Google Docs or Office 365?
It's a bit like asking why you'd need a PostIt note if you already have a piece of paper. They're tools that do pretty similar things that specialize in very overlapping but slightly different tasks.
The OCR results I have now is not terrible nor wonderful.
I can't argue the logic, but this makes me sad. Can't someone make a product that people will pay for that is sustainable over time (even if # new users == # lost users )? Why does everything have to be huge to exist?
(They don’t, but just illustrating that not every business needs hockey stick growth to be viable).
I just do this:
>Hello I am a quote that is extremely long lined with no newlines. I will break based on the width of your device just like any other normal text inside an HTML element. Look how long I am wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.
Works pretty well for me, thought I'd mention it.
>Your version just mixes in with everything else you typed, and hardly looks like a differentiable block of text at all, regardless of whether it wraps or not.
If ">" doesn't differentiate the quote enough, use italics with it:
> Everyone recognizes this as a quote, and it renders perfectly on every device. I didn't have to do any manual wrapping. It's easy!> Use a blank line to separate paragraphs.
Google Keep for anything fleeting.
Evernote for keepers.
Google Docs for structured stuff.
Keep has a very simple and convenient design. There's a note length limit that I find annoying sometimes, but encourages switching to a Google Doc instead if the note is getting too long. Also love the syncing between devices (web, multiple Android devices)
A company grows into its funding, not what it needs to do (and they raised more than $300M over the years).
That and “could build it in a weekend”.
I have a scanner that with the push of a button scans records and sends them to Evernote, I then shred the paper. Receipts, invoices, various mailed things all go into Evernote.
I also use Evernote web clip to save a copy of a web article (or often a recipe) which I would like to either finish later, have for reference, or share with someone.
I also save notes about computer things. Research for all my options to do X, or commandline snippets to make Y happen.
Then I can scroll back in history and it helps recall to see the things I have been doing.
https://www.tempestblog.com/2017/08/16/how-i-stay-organized-...
Evernote also allows me to embed PDFs (or any file really), which is nice, but as a minimum spec, I insist on the ability to drop in images.
[0]https://www.giuspen.com/cherrytree/#features
The thing that killed it for me is that unlike every other text editor in the world, you can't apply formatting to text until after you've typed it.
I'm trying Joplin now, but maybe I'll give Turtl another shot too..
Also, we have a new version coming out very soon, v0.7.0, that will have significant UI/performance/stability improvements. I think it's worth checking out (although obviously I'm biased).
The website is open-source/jekyll: https://github.com/turtl/www, and if you have ideas we can collaborate here: https://github.com/turtl/tracker/issues/165
I've seen this thread[1], any updates or plans on entering F-Droid?
Also, what is the minimum Android version supported?
[1] https://www.f-droid.org/forums/topic/turtl/
The minimum supported Android version is 6.0/Marshmellow (sdk v23). This is mainly due to the Keystore version we use for the "Remember me" feature.
Have you thought about having Turtl sync to a local directory, or using something like nextcloud/dropbox? I don't know much about the backend of Turtl, so I'm not sure how reliant it really is on the server process..
I'll look for the 0.7.0 release and check it out, thanks!
Turtl's main goal is to make security easy. If you have to setup Dropbox or Nextcloud to get syncing working, then it didn't attain that goal, I believe.
Also, by providing a service on top of the server, I can eventually make some money from this thing I've spent years building =]. I hope you like v0.7.0 when it launches!
I re-downloaded 0.6.x for now to give it another try. One of the things I remember not being completely happy with was the web clipper. Has that changed at all with 0.7.0, or do you plan on improving it in the near-future?
There are a few other issues/questions I have, but I'll troll through the issue tracker first before bothering you too much :P
https://joplin.cozic.net/
Evernote import is also supported and as far as I can tell works well for many users. If you find any glitch or issue though, feedback is welcome.
The app is still under development with, at the moment, a focus on bug fixing and improving the desktop and mobile usability.
The problem is the people running it now don’t have the passion for it. And a bunch of core employees either got fired or left since Phil left.
Evernote from the outside appears rudderless. The founders gone and it's clear that the MBA's running the place not only don't have a passion for the product - I'm willing to bet they don't regularly use it.
I'm still convinced with the right leader it can be salvaged because so far there hasn't been a compelling product to seize its market.
And yet EN on a number of occasions had (probably still has) sync bugs that lost either parts of notes or entire notes.
I stopped using them after they made it clear they had no interest in supporting a linux client. Not sure if they have changed their attitude since then, but that ship has sailed as far as I am concerned.
Personally I want to think this is happening because better alternatives have been popping up. There's bear and omnifocus and, recently, notion.so that does a lot more than Evernote for a relatively cheaper price.
Also all of them have dark modes while Evernote doesn't.
These companies start a desperate, doomed-to-fail chase of a gigantic market, at the expense of their small-but-profitable niche. It's understandable from their board members' perspective, because a nice 5% ROI is not what they're after. They need that moonshot, even if chasing it likely results in losing everything.
See also: Every company that decides that their platform now needs a social media element.
For OmniFocus in particular I also have the assurance that its maker isn’t just going to up and vanish any time soon. They’ve been around since the NeXTSTEP days and are quite healthy.
Evernote guys, please leave your paying users alone.
Microsoft already discontinued OneNote (the Office version). The last version will be 2016. They're offering OneNote as a modern app now that requires a Microsoft account and syncs to the cloud - and of course it doesn't have equivalent functionality.
For every single thing, make a piece of functionality specific to that note type, subject or person. Do this hundreds/thousands of times and review what helps you grow.
Here's a brief list of person types:
- People: GTD, Event planner, Programmer, OCD, Bullet Journal-er
- Note Type: Generic Note, Todo List, Wedding, Mood Board, etc.
- Subject: Scientific/Maths notes, Programmer notes (i.e. python/jupyter notebooks, observablehq.com), Notes for specific industries, designers, school teachers, etc.
I can't really give good examples of these until I see the usage but you get the idea.
It really feels to me Evernote is for one a or two very specific types of people/use cases/subjects (the founders probably) rather than making something their users really want.
I was actually pretty blown away people are paying for the features Evernote offers, the only advantage from my disorganized workflow (aside from it being a little more organized) is looked prettier (albeit no dark mode kinda killed that too).
I just wanted something that was a bit more tailored to how my normal workflow, something a little closer to just using my text editor like when I'm programming. Something that supported Markdown, syntax highlighting, organizing into folders, tagging, and preferably with a dark theme (I won't stop using something if there isn't one, I'll just try to find an alternative with one if possible). Had Evernote offered these features, or a package with these features, that are a little more tailored to how I work, I probably would've bit the bullet and got a subscription.
Fortunately, thanks to some kind commenter here actually, a few weeks ago I found Boostnote[1]. And it was exactly what I was looking for, and didn't find in Evernote. First class markdown support, dark theme(s), syntax highlighting, the ability to setup cloud storage for syncing across devices, and it's even free and open source! But, that's not even the best feature (for me at least), Boostnote supports VIM keybindings! And honestly, that's one of the biggest reasons I never got around to getting one of these notetaking apps, because of the lack of VIM keys it's so jarring to break from my normal workflow where my editor is either vim or is using the keybindings, I used the vim Chrome/FF extensions, but until now I couldn't try to take notes without slamming esc a bunch and sighing because I just typed "kjkkkkhlkjlkjh" for the millionth time.
If you're a developer looking for an Evernote alternative, definitely give Boostnote a look. It fit right into my workflow instantly, no bugs, no ads, no bullshit, and it's got all the features you would get with Evernote, but with a touch of specialization for developers. If it weren't FOSS, I hands down would've almost immediately bought it/subscribed, because it literally had everything that I wanted out of Evernote. And, now I get that devs aren't the general public, and the basic note taking functionality will likely be just fine for most. But, at first glance, I don't see a single thing it does in the free tier, or the first paid tier, that you couldn't accomplish with OSX's Notes & Preview app, so I don't see how offering just the most basic note taking feature set is a sustainable business model when so many free (and often even builtin) apps do exactly the same thing. It certainly wouldn't hurt for them to start offering something unique, more specialized, like one of your examples Bullet Journaling. I'm only semi-familiar with it, and have been meaning to look into more, however one of the reasons I haven't was I wasn't able to find the "Evernote of Bullet Journals" online. And for people like School Teachers, if they built out some functionality specific for them, like a first-class lesson planner, alongside their normal notes, and an idea board, etc... I'm sure teachers would flock to it (if it didn't suck that is), I know my mother would love a nice looking, easy to use app, that she can take notes, work out lessons plans throughout the day, and ...
And you've been that kind commenter today for me. Boostnote is the first suggestion here that actually seems feasible for me, properly cross-platform, the UI seems very well done, lots of customizations, and (if I understand correctly) plain Markdown storage, not yet another obscure unnecessary format that's unreadable without the app. I've been using Simplenote after Evernote started being too bulky and unreliable, but Simplenote is not quite polished and doesn't seem to be getting any love. I'll give this a try, it'll be really good if this pans out. Thanks!
(Another issue is that it's not really "highly customizable" once you get into it - even though "customizable" is a proud part of their tagline - but at least that doesn't seem to be intentional, just some messy disconnected design of the Preferences page, according to an Issue comment on github.)
I'm not sure that company could be successful -- they raised so much money there's no way the investors could be made whole just on that product. I believe (from public info) their revenue is in the single digits per quarter.
It doesn't help that their CEO is an ex googler. I don't mean this as any insult to Google nor to him specifically, but working at G doesn't prepare you for a more resource-constrained environment where the product's traction and success is of existential import. I've seen this problem play out over and over.
E.g. "All items in EverNote within 30 miles of X and with a rating >= 4 stars"
I am describing a flexible database with a cracking UI. And nobody has done it AFAIK (except one startup a couple of years ago that took funding then burned)
Tangential: For bonus points, add other modes to the note taker. A WorkFlowy-esque outliner, one of those where you add cards to the right of each item to drill into detail. There's lots of different types of notes people want at different times.
I don't know why Dropbox is still about, and I don't know why Evernote is still about.
Dropbox seems to have found value in a flooded market although I don't know why, so it is conceivable that Evernote will do the same.
The pain of Evernote was enough to make me switch. Dropbox has not yet pained me enough to switch away from being a paying customer despite the fact that I have a 1GB OneDrive plan with Office.
Your Mileage May Vary.
Filesystem integration with the Mac was disastrous. Three problems: 1- some characters are not permitted in filenames; you find this out when synch fails and have to guess where the problem is; 2 - some files simply silently don't synch; and 3 - a couple of times a day it would decide it had lost synch and then would have to re-index the repo, which not only took up cycles (I could survive that) but meant there was no synching while that was happening.
Whereas I just have almost everything in my DB directory tree and even do all my development there (builds and all).
At my last company we had Box which is almost identical with Dropbox but with a much more complex interface to satisfy corporate I/T. Total overkill for a startup!
They've also built a lot of good will from me over the years with promotional offerings. I don't actually pay for a subscription, but I've got about 13gb of quota.
Having said that, I can see skepticism surrounding the app based on erratic updates they've been shipping for a while now.
The app has been ruined by :
- Wildly Inconsistent UI (Windows app > MacOS)
- Switch to table layout (monster margins look ugly and quite frankly, unbearable)
- Uncertain updates (more often than not it'll break an existing feature)
Few months ago, I mistakenly updated the Mac app and it was such a painful experience, I had to dig into archives and reinstall 2016 version to restore some sanity. As someone who is heavily dependent on the app, these changes have been frustrating. I'll be jumping ship the moment a viable alternative appears.
Simple things just as being able to highlight multiple words to change fonts or even have auto capitalization not have a toggle.
The only thing I did like was the ability to repeat the last command you took but that shouldn't have to exist for stuff like changing fonts of certain words one at a time.
I do miss the desktop version of onenote as that had a lot more features that I was hoping to find on the windows 10 app version.
From my perspective, Evernote has gotten consistently worse over the past few years (some of this is due to the core product not scaling as people put more notes in - the search craps out and the organization sucks):
* No way to easily exclude say web clippings from search; in general the search results are inadequate (and doesn't factor in recency or frequency appropriately) of cache things intelligently - this effectively makes Evernote a PITA for anything but write-only usage
* Rather than helping people categorize things, they've made it progressively harder by making Notebook organization clunkier. I never got into using tags because it didn't make very good suggestions, and there's no hierarchy. With dysfunctional search, in the end it's all just a "pile."
* The original appeal of Evernote was seamless syncing across all platforms, but I'm almost entirely on Linux these days and there's no official client or good alternative, and the web interface is awful. That pretty much killed my usage for good, but every time I launch the iOS app, it seems to launch slower. There's way too much friction for creating notes.
I'll probably be exporting and cleaning house sometime soon. While the web clipper is great, I can probably find a better alternative (or just switch to Zotero for everything, as it does fine page snapshotting and the collections/subcollections largely work like you'd want). The OCR is probably the nicest thing I'd miss, but besides occasionally scanning some receipts or other papers, I'm not sure there's anything else I use it for. Also, their security/privacy updates from last year also made me hold my nose.
There are some neat open source projects that have started up recently, but I'm also starting to think about my notes and research in a more long term view (keeping and syncing, but also publishing).
Simple things like not being able to put different colors on text in the same block or even just putting a simple table (no not a database) into a block have put me off it. Also it is difficulty (re: impossible) to copy and paste notes over from another application without it getting all messed up.
And it does really the few things that I most care about:
* Seamlessly syncs/accessible on all my devices (I wish it did better offline access though)
* Has a rich, modern WYSIWYG editor (w/ markdown shortcuts, supports attachments and different types of embeds, comments/etc)
* Has a tree hierarchy on the left - I would prefer faceted nested collections (you can't put a note in two folders), but it's much more effective than single-pane organization like GDocs or Dropbox Paper
I've used a few the tables a bit and it's pretty rudimentary - if you don't need the organization, from what you've outlined, honestly it sounds like GDocs still might be what you need (I've always had a lot of GSheets I link out to from my notes - sucks it's not all in one place, but for notetaking, I think the more important thing is that I have a way to organize/find pointers to things, which GDocs completely fails at).
LOL. You haven't used Org-mode.
I used to use evernote but have since switched over to vimwiki. Like you, I did not find OneNote better than evernote.
I just tried to use it for a new project and when creating a shared note it kept telling me my email address wasn't validated. Well there's no way to validate one unless you go to the web site, delete your address and add it again! It also offered to set up 2FA...only I'd used 2FA to log in! So I got a new set of replacement keys. This was frightening enough that I exported all my data.
But what tool shares phone/laptop and permits formatted text, attachments, and offline use? Apple notes almost gets there, but doesn't.
It's lists, kanban boards, images and a lot of other stuff at one place. Any TODOs I use Quip these days.
[1]https://quip.com
I don't see what is special about Evernote that guarantees its viability.
Both are free. Both do about 90% of what Evernote Basic does.
OneNote syncs to OneDrive - so if you have O365 your storage space is quite large, whereas free users only have 5GB (though compared to Evernote's 25MB this is still plenty)
Evernote is better for filing documents / archiving things - whether those are PDFs, web pages, business cards, physical mail, etc. OneNote is better for free-form notetaking and editing. Each page feels like an open canvas.
In particular: I can't drop a file directly onto the OneNote icon to archive a file - I have to make a "page" and drop it into the page's canvas. OneNote doesn't provide tagging. It enforces a certain organization that only makes sense for notes (notebooks > sections > pages). Attachments always feel like a second-class citizen inside of a page (which isn't to say OneNote's attachment handling is wrong, it's just designed for storing handouts in class alongside your handwriting, as opposed to archiving every piece of paper on your desk).
In my use case, I use Evernote (with a ScanSnap scanner) to archive every piece of physical mail I receive. It's great that I can just throw in a pile of mail, push one button, let the scanner bundle it into PDFs/JPEGs/contact cards as appropriate, apply metatadata, and OCR/index it. I tried to move this workflow to OneNote, and couldn't get anything as smooth.
I use both. I use OneNote for notes in class, and Evernote for long-term archival/recall of everything else.
(Personally, I think that DevonThink is a closer replacement to Evernote than OneNote is.)
I now store all my scans in Google Drive and use the OCR that comes with the ScanSnap. It works just as well, the search is Google fast and I can share them easily.
With OneNote, he’d have to have some sort of filing system to organize that. With Evernote, he knew it was there and he could search for it if he needed it. That’s not to say you can’t search in OneNote, just that the archiving model of Evernote works far better for his workflow.
(I use OneNote anyway, since it's so much better then Evernote for me, it's just kind of annoying given that I switch between Mac and Windows a lot.)
Also, the free (non-Office) version of OneNote is missing some features, I think.
Is it? I've been using Excel cross-platform for a while and I haven't found a missing feature yet. (Although some keyboard shortcuts are annoyingly altered.) I don't use the rest of the Office suite as much, but OneNote is the only outlier I've seen personally.
For some reason only MS seems to create products that fall flat on their face so quickly.
It didn't become the next Google or the rightful FB competitor (like analysts predicted) but it's doing well in its own right.
Evernote is spinning around the drain and early employees and VCs alike are trying hard to dump their shares on the secondary market.
I don't think anyone thinks Twitter is doing well in its own right. It's shedding users, it's possibly harming democracy, their moderation is being questioned daily in the national US press and many users don't know how to use Twitter.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/09/technology/google-russian...
But in the hopes of getting everyone to love Twitter, a lot of people think they lost focus on their existing users, which didn't make their existing users happy but never ended up enticing significant numbers of non-Twitter users either (FWIW I am in the "non-Twitter user camp", so not complaining they broke my experience)
Evernote could have skipped those VC meetings, skipped renting the huge, insanely expensive office just off Rt. 1 by SF, skipped putting huge, expensive light up Evernote signs on that office, and skipped hiring hundreds of engineers in the most expensive place in the world to hire engineers. They could have rented a small office in a commercial park in San Jose and only hired 10 people and now they would be quite profitable. They could have done this by only taking a few million dollars in funding, and now they wouldn't need an insane valuation to exit.
For a company success should be making a profit, treating your employees well and making something worthwhile.
https://getpolarized.io/
I've basically been coding mad and heads down for 2 months building it. I think we will have a release candidate in another week or so...
My hope / goal is to make a BETTER Evernote that's open source and lasts 20-30 years.
We have some AMAZING Open Source apps like VLC that just seem to last the test of time.
I think we deserve better!
One of the other things I wanted was something that was inherently hackable with a plugin API. The data is stored on disk and persisted via JSON so it's easy for write 3rd party apps that use the data.
It also works with git, dropbox, etc if you want cloud sync. I'm probably going to build in native cloud sync though and probably use Amazon Appsync since it supports offline sync easily.
I’ve long thought that dealing effectively with PDF or other complex, crufty formats is a good candidate for a “shlep blindness”[1] style startup, and I hope it works out for you.
[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html
I need to update the screenshots though. One day at a time.
The license are the best:
- Free Public License 1.0 - Zero-clause BSD
This is part of software freedom. Your end users do not have to distribute binaries or code to anyone that they don't want to. It's just that if they distribute a binary or code to someone, they have to grant the same freedoms they received.
Sometimes it's a bit hard to grasp these nuances (especially the, "Hey they can sell my software" bit). It's important to understand that before you choose a license.
The guys on the Discord list were really really wanting tags in the repo view so I just banged them out on Monday.
I’m looking for something exactly like polar. IPad support is a must for me though. Browser based access could work. Meanwhile stuck with mendeley...
No Electron on iPad... :-/
https://github.com/burtonator/polar-bookshelf
and if you have a blog or a twitter account please give us a shout out. Polar is a brand new baby , only 60 days old, so not many people know about it yet.
The quicker we grow the more contributors we get which means the quicker we grow :)
- More contributors.
- Help more people.
it looks really promising to me, specially when all of the other knowledge maps are going for the SaaS model.
I tried to use Evernote and it just never stuck with me. It felt like it was too much overhead just for capturing quick ideas.
[0]https://bear.app/
Bear is working well for me. The only thing I don’t like is no audio notes and weird formatting which makes copy pasting bulleted notes into other editors somewhat painful. Still my default note app and likely to stay that way for the foreseeable future (or until I have thousands of notes again causing performance to degrade...)
Bear has a very good story when it comes to sync with the iPhone. But if you need cross-platform support, tables, equations, and such features org-mode, Typora, etc. are much better options.
If tables and equations are "crucial" it's not just about a notes app anymore...
Besides where does one stop in a note taking app? One could also ask for footnotes, bibliography management, graphs and plots, handwriting recognition, PDF management, and so on...
Most of my notes are relatively ephemeral, perhaps lasting for a task or project. Rarely to I need to reference things that aren't in relatively recent history. When I do, I'll just scroll back or do a universal search.
It does exactly what you mention.
It is expected that it will be released in Beta for macOS in the next few months.
[1] - https://getdrafts.com/
Not a fan of its looks but the functionality is just the right mix of usefulness and function over form.
I will actively keep an eye on this. Thank you
I don't even use Notational Velo anymore, since OrgMode converted me to an emacs zealot. Turns out, there's a workalike mode called deft that gets me all the same awesome search behavior.
On iOS, I use a mix of Drafts and Editorial (well, and BeOrg, for the orgmode files).
By going this way, I'm no longer dependent on someone else's product map for my notes. Sure, I guess Dropbox could become problematic or something, but there are other options there -- in this context, it's just plumbing.
For the general public to catch on to whatever the next Evernote is, I think it will have to have; inviting visual elements like Notion, collapsible text like workflowy, better reminder/project management. So many of the top feature requests of Evernote that have been neglected, some since nearly the beginning.
I was then burned by OneNote (the MacOS app is pretty bad, and has terrible export options).
I now almost exclusively use plain-text files in a Dropbox folder, and I don't regret it at all.