I installed it recently but I don't use sync (main pro of it imo) and since it didn't have a dark theme I went on to try other local note taking programs.
It seems to really be for mainly syncing, like dropbox but notes.
The dark theme has been a feature request for years, I believe the top voted one on their forum. It's been ignored completely, afaik no staff even commented on it. Pretty weird, I mean, why would you ask people to vote on feature requests if you're going to ignore them anyway.
Since OneNote became available everywhere and for free I'm not even sure if Evernote still can be considered doing it well considering just how much better OneNote is for actual note taking.
Or even just a text editor for a lot of purposes. I'm probably near the perfect target audience for something like Evernote. (I do a lot of research, note taking, and writing.) But I never really got into a single master tool to do everything, especially a master tool that wouldn't allow me to simply output what was in it into a standardized format.
I've been using Evernote for a while. But since the time MS made a shift to the cloud and has put a lot of effort into OneNote and Office 365, OneNote was doomed to decline in use. Why would you pay for it when you already have Office subscription?
On top of that I was struggling with the UX, it didn't fit my habits.
OneNote is also more importantly completely free on all platforms including all of it's cloud features.
Besides OneNote being much better for handwritten and typed note taking as well as "rich notes" one of the most best features it has is email to note which means that even if you have to take notes on a machine that doesn't have it or you can't log in into OneNote from it or if you want to take notes from someone else it can be easily done via emailing to your you@onenote.com address and the auto formatting is pretty awesome.
You can email to Evernote, and it's better than OneNote, if anything, since you can email to your Evernote from any account. OneNote needs the email account to be yours and associated with the notebook you want to send it to.
After I noticed that their forum thread [1] about requesting LaTeX-style math notes was almost as old as my Evernote Premium subscription, I came to the conclusion that this is just a ripoff. I paid all these years only to keep my access and for the occasional design update but the core experience stagnated.
Dropbox Paper already provided a better note-taking experience and with Notion.so I finally found a full replacement. The product is in active development [2] and I don't feel like I am just paying to keep the servers running.
Paper does this right with single `$` for inline math and double `$$` for math blocks. Currently, Notions supports only math blocks and you can invoke those with `/math`.
I really like the UX of paper, but I feel like it stopped moving forward, and unfortunately it seems to be moving further away from straight markdown little by little. That said, it's still my go-to for writing anything that requires quick and easy inline styling and formatting.
Notion looks great, but I'm still on the fence about it. I tried it a couple months ago and can't say I loved the mobile experience on Android. I should probably give it another shot.
Notion looks great... but I just can't seem to keep using it consitently (maybe too many features?)
Now I am back to markdown files strucuted in folders
I think I may have the same issue. There's a bit too much going on for me.
Markdown has definitely become my format of choice. It's like the JSON of plain-text files: Imperfect, but simple and everywhere.
I'd like to simplify down to markdown files in folders as you have, but I can't seem to find a native editor that I actually like on Ubuntu. They all feel incomplete, or they insist upon "preview" mode, which I can't stand.
Paper has the best editor UX for me, where the formatting happens inline, immediately, as I type. The automated TOC driven by headers is pretty great as well. I do wish I could "view source" once in a while, but for the most part I never actually have to.
I'm pretty late on this response, so I'm not sure you'll ever see it, but after your recommendation I downloaded Typora. It's excellent. I'd tried it a couple times in the past and was not impressed, but I am now. It's fast, it works predictably well, and the documentation is really good.
I wish they had a means of adding plug-ins (or if it were open-source, so I could figure out how to add my own).
Thanks for the recommendation!
As for vscode, I may try it at some point as vscode is pretty impressive, although I tend to live in the Jetbrains world, and happily so. That said, I haven't really been a fan of any Markdown plugin on Jetbrains apps.
I think I post this every time I read something about Dropbox Paper but I think it's important: Every note is shared by default when you know the URL, nothing is private by default. You explicitly need to make every single note private so no one can access it. I really want to use paper but I think this really sucks IMHO.
The problem with both Dropbox and Evernote is that their minimum pricing tier is too expensive for what they provide - particularly when both functions are provided as part of the Microsoft Office package with is the same price as Dropbox alone.
I used both for years and would have happily paid a couple of dollars a month as I do for the basic tier of Google Drive. I abandoned both when the 2 device limit came in.
This. Office 365 package provides full office suit + 1TB of storage + 50GB ad-free mail box for the same price and they are already profitable at this price tag. If you are an startup offering any service more expensive than office 365 you are doing something really wrong.
Well it's not so much that you're doing something wrong. It's that Office 365 has such a ridiculous market share so their developments costs make up almost none of the price. Any start up is almost inevitably going to find their first development costs push their price up so they've really got to offer something new.
A lot of startups price themselves out of the competition simply by believe the nonsense concept of pricing based on "value" == charge users more than they really should.
I agree 100% about the price. I subscribe at the $36/year level (I don't think they advertise it) mostly because I want to support the company. I probably only open the app once or twice a month which means every time I do, it costs me $1. By that standard, it's the most expensive app I use.
I tried using it years ago over the span of a couple months and found syncing to be absolutely atrocious. It'd delete pages of notes if they didn't exist on the other computer I was syncing to and then they were simply gone forever.
Dropbox was getting huge around the same time. I started just saving my text notes in a dropbox folder. Never had any syncing errors, deleted Evernote, and never looked back. I'm sure they've improved since then, but it's hard to go back after such a sour first impression.
That and the Mac and Windows versions had functionality that didn't work in the web or Android versions. So you could read notes that others sent you.
The web version would also reasonably regularly save 100 versions of the same note. Support queries on this got a shrug response and "yeah don't use the web client".
So I switched how I do notes and ditched Evernote.
I'm in the same boat with the text files in a dropbox folder. I thought about just emailing myself notes to a notes-only account, but I'm not sure there much of an advantage there over Dropbox. Still, files in a folder checks all the boxes for me. Compatible with everything forever, can organize and reorganize as creatively as I want, lightweight, can search my notes and sort a bunch of different ways, and osx even supports tags.
Granted, this is a little clunkier on mobile, but for quick notes I use drafts which is the speediest note taking app I've found (opens directly to writing prompt, one button save or append to dropbox files).
I've tried Drafts (and pretty much every other app that supports Dropbox sync) and none felt as intuitive as Notebooks[1]. There is even a free iPhone version[2] you can try. Has support for Markdown and Webdav as well!
I don't think Evernote need(s/ed) a team version, but I do think its not sufficiently better to current alternatives for note-taking and bookmarking. I use Pocket for tagged bookmarks and OneNote when I want more context.
Where there is a gap in the market, tying notation to memory and productivity, would be some kind of notation context and intelligent reminder (e.g these web tabs, that note, this tag) tied to some event or place where it would be useful - you're in the workshed and picking up some old project; its someone's birthday you wanted to remind them about xyz. Now that would be a genuinely useful memory aid.
I saw a guy pitching a location based notes app years ago one morning on CNBC. I believe it was called "Acorns" (not the investment app). I was super hyped for it. Would mean the wife could just jot a note about grocery items at any point during the week and I'd get an alert whenever I got to the grocery store. Brilliant. No "don't forget milk" texts, which I forget because it's not on my actual list.
But it never launched. Or did under a new name I was unaware of. I've been waiting for location features for a long long time.
I use google keep, it has time and location based reminders. I think there is even an option to create shared note with your SO
edit: yes it works :D I managed to share a note with my gf and she sees it. Now she tried to set up a reminder that will ring my phone when either of us gets close a certain groccery store that we visit
Keep is my current go to. They've added a lot to it recently, but I was unaware they've added locations. The ML predictions for grocery items when you're writing a list is a nice touch.
I'm trying to get off Google's teat, but it looks like I'm on the Keep train, until they abruptly discontinue it in 12-18 months.
According to posts I've read here on HN, Keep is a one-developer, 10%-time project. I've no doubt it will be killed whenever Google feels like it (or when its developer gets a new job). They'll probably dump its data into Docs, like they did with Notebook (remember that?).
I'm still using it, because it works quite well (better than Evernote!), but I don't expect anything I store in it to be very permanent.
KolabNow Noted (and I'm sure just about any CalDav protocol supported email provider) was a perfect drop in replacement for Goo Keep for my somewhat basic needs.
If you're in the Apple ecosystem, there's an app called Grocery[1]. It uses the built-in reminders database, but does lots of excellent grocery-specific things (remembering the order of items in the store, using geofencing to know which store you've arrived at, Apple Watch support for checking items off). And, since it's just Reminders under the hood, you can tell Siri "Add Foo to my grocery list", and it works.
> Where there is a gap in the market, tying notation to memory and productivity, would be some kind of notation context and intelligent reminder
If I were running the company, there's no way I would start chasing idea like this. I like how they used to describe the product 10 years ago - your external brain. It's an application for taking notes, not calendaring or task management.
There are lots of apps that do exactly what you are describing. I think it's a core Android features. You can say "ok google, remind me to buy eggs when I'm at the store" and it just works. I believe iOS has the same functionality.
Reminders of that sort are pretty basic; I had something more like "Now where was I?" in mind - recovering the context, or at least easing the context switch cognitive load. E.g. a task which pops out of the backlog based on your current context of being at the hardware store, to remind you to get a claw hammer, along with the why (you may have forgotten). A memory aid as a synergy of todos, note-taking and reminders basically. It also reduces the constant re-iteration and procrastination over important but not urgent items or ideas that you can push off the top of mind to your note taking app if you can trust it to bring it back at the right time and place or in the right context.
I cannot share notes using URL, because notes are encrypted on a cloud drive in way that prevents even the cloud providers from reading them, but that is the only inconvenience I have for having 100% control over my data.
I think the nail in the coffin for me was lack of support for Linux (this was years ago). I know that Linux is a tiny subset of their potential users, but I needed my notes to be everywhere, not just on the main platforms.
Ironically, I'm not using Linux as much now, but going back to Evernote was unappealing. I'm now using a combination of Bullet Journaling and Notion.
What a strange article. It's a note taking program. It has search. The author called it brilliant. Huh? As a long-time (no longer avid) user, the screenshot of the old version made me nostalgic, but I don't remember the search as different to a standard search function.
I found it weird too how they presented as revolutionary a note taking app with search. Evernote's strength was great execution and good timing (having the app on the App Store very early) but other than that it was just a note taking app, and plenty of them existed before Evernote.
Search in Evernote can also use metadata. So if you jotted down something you wanted to remember while you were on vacation and now you can't recall what that was, you can search for all the notes you created in Ibiza.
Is that useful? You already get date created/modified in every OS. Shouldn't be hard to figure out when you were in ibiza and sort your notes folder by date.
It is for me. It saves me a step searching me email for flight or hotel info to get the dates.
If it is a note I made on vacation last week, then I would do what you are suggesting. If it was for a note I made on vacation in 2013 (or was it 2014), then the metadata makes things much easier.
But it only started to do it from the mobile app, and I didn't realize the idea behind it, it annoyed me because I just wanted to take a general note, nothing to do with the location (which is how interpreted it, a location based note would be something like "This is where I parked my car).
Honestly, who was sitting there in the middle of a CS class at Standford taking notes and found themselves so absolutely bored to a point of absurdity that they frustratingly sighed out loud,
"man, if only there was a way more exciting way to go about doing this.";
Which prompted the "ahah" lightbulb moment of the guy sitting just within earshot, one row over, who just so happened to be jotting down his own notes on some promising startup ideas?
I've yet to see a note app that didn't just serve up the same functionality of plaintext files and calendar events in a bloated, proprietary, and pricey package.
The problem with Evernote (and most of desktop apps) is that, it requires a bunch of RAM and CPU usage to use it. (Can relate with Slack desktop app, or Github desktop app).
Just like user/customer could blame your web app if it starts too slow. The same applies to desktop apps, too.
I don't compare to anything. The point here is, it requires my RAM and CPU usage.
Just like, i prefer using Google Docs cloud to opening an Excel document on my computer.
In my case, open/close a web app on a new tab is much much faster than openning an Excel file. It's the point. And they're different.
Well every single application or website you could run requires RAM and CPU. If you're not comparing to anything then you're complaining that it uses any RAM and CPU? That's not a reasonable thing to say is a problem. Why do you have RAM and CPU if you don't want to use them at all?
Maybe, my computer is slow, maybe for another reason i don't know. But openning a google docs file on my Chrome is much faster than openning a local Excel file.
Maybe in your case it's different.
That's my experience with most of desktop apps.
The only exception, is VSCode and iTerm2. Can't live without them.
If your key point is 'it requires my RAM and CPU usage' then you're going to be disappointed to learn that a website also requires your RAM and CPU usage.
I don't know. I've it open all day, I'm editing plenty of notes because I'm preparing a seminar... it consumes 44.1 MB of memory right now, I just looked it up (running W10).
Slack, totally idle, oscilates between 225-250 MB for some reason - now this I agree is a resource hog.
On my Mac it's using 708MB of memory and the CPU, which should be <1% since it's in the background and presumably not doing anything, bounces around constantly but is almost always in the 20%-30% range, which makes Evernote a ridiculous battery wasting abomination.
The memory use also grows for no reason. I have caught it consuming 20GB+ after a day or two. There's obviously an egregious memory leak and that's been true for at least a year; I can only conclude that Evernote is a crap company that doesn't care at all about bugs, even critical ones.
I have taken to only running Evernote on my desktop when I absolutely have to, and I try to remember to quit it so it doesn't gobble CPU and RAM, but sometimes I forget.
Intrigued, I checked again. It's at 21.5 MB now. I wonder to what extent is the difference caused by platform implementation (Mac vs. Win), and to what extent by the content (admittedly my notes aren't media-heavy).
I just checked again. After 4 hours of sitting idle in the background with its window minimized, Evernote is now using 901MB of memory, up almost 200MB. And it's not really "idle": it was using 34.1% CPU when I just checked. For what???
I do have a lot of notes, like 20,000, and many of them are HTML pages, but I don't have any huge graphics or videos or anything. Even if I did, I can't imagine why it would need so much RAM to just display a list of note titles, or why it would constantly be using between 5 and 40% of a CPU, or why the RAM usage would constantly creep up. It's just really terrible software. It galls me that I'm paying $7.99/month for this crap, and I would instantly pay that much or more for an alternative that worked properly.
It's absolutely crazy some of the reasons stated for evernote failing to get investment early on. Today people would be clamoring to invest in a company that was bringing in users by offering the product for free. The sell is so compelling "Get our users to write everything in evernote, build a huge userbase and then you can start to monetize because you've got a fantastic way of keeping them". I feel like that's one of the most common uses of VC money today.
I think it's opposite actually. 10 years ago, it was way easier to raise without any profitability story.
Then a ton of VCs got burned, and Paul Graham wrote "Ramen Profitability" (2009), and later "Default Alive or Default Dead?" (2015).
Nowadays, you NEED to have a story for how you're going to become default alive, and not rely on investor cash. That's because of what we learned from all of the failures from Evernote's era.
Think about other companies that started in that era – Facebook, Twitter, Yelp. The entire strategy was user growth and figure out monetization later. You don't see that as much today.
I suppose Uber/Lyft are good counter examples, but they at least had massive revenue along the way, and a great story about future profitability. (Swap out drivers with self-driving cars.)
But they gave the full feature set away for free. Hoping that users would be generous enough to "make a small donation over on Patreon" (to use today's language). In a shit economy.
No one does that today, not even Google. You get limited features for free.
I'm a paid customer of Evernote, I must say that it works great and it has no reasonable replacement.
I use it for all kinds of notes, like for example short tutorials on the command line, issuing commands that are hard to remember, TODO lists (both at work and for grocery shopping), meeting notes, listing pros and cons, everything.
In meetings I like the ability to record audio, or to add pictures I take with my phone, which isn't necessarily a capability of your average open source alternative.
Its search capabilities are also great. I have a ton of notes in my Evernote and I never have issues finding what I'm looking for. Compared with Google Docs for example, which is terrible.
My problems with it is that the data is not easy to port, I would have liked for example periodic Markdown backups to my Dropbox. Also support for encryption is weak. Apps like Evernote can be end to end encrypted, there's absolutely no reason for Evernote, the company, to have access to my notes.
I also worry about Evernote, the company, dying on me like many other startups before it.
> My problems with it is that the data is not easy to port, I would have liked for example periodic Markdown backups to my Dropbox.
Because Evernote is so common, there are tools that understand Evernote's export format. You might be able to find a tool that can convert an evernote export file?
> I also worry about Evernote, the company, dying on me
I'm a paid user as well and also worry about the company dying. Frankly, I wish they would focus 100% on the core product and kill features that aren't part of that core. For example, get rid of chat. Other companies do it better.
Due to some weird bug in Evernote, I lost about 10% of all my notes. Some of them critical. This happened about a year ago, and I never found out the actual cause. I think it was some kind of bug triggered by the combination of syncing from/to the mobile app and the desktop app. But I completely stopped trusting Evernote after this and stopped using it.
This has happened to me as well. Not just entire notes, but even while I am typing it will have a synching hickup and delete everything I have written and rollback to the previous synching state. It is really really bad at synching.
I've always had a terrible experience using Evernote across multiple devices. Editing a note on mobile seemed like a surefire way to get a merge conflict. I believe I also experienced a mysterious disappearance of a large chunk of my notes.
I just opened for Evernote for the first time in years and it looks like all my notes are now duplicated for some reason. Awesome.
I've always thought the Evernote sync issues got much less attention than they deserved. Both myself and my co-founder were repeatedly burned by Evernote sync when working on notes between mobile and desktop. Sync was the foremost reason we began working on a replacement.
We picked "sync" and "security" as the two core values we wanted to put most focus on when building our note app (https://www.amplenote.com/).
It's curious to me that Notion has so little to say about the effort they put into sync and security -- these seem like such essential features to a great todo app, and I don't think either can be done right unless it is an active, top-tier priority.
I also lost some data. I used to keep a personal journal in some random website, but when they closed that I copied it as a single huge block of text, encrypted. One day, it cropped 80% of it. Gone forever.
If Evernote will pursue the "Spaces" route, it's going to end up like Google+, trying to be like others without truly understanding why.
What they should do, is double-down where the puck is going in the context of individual productivity.
What is interesting in cases like this - it's all there, in their own forums. A roadmap vector based on their own WHY in a form of their userbase voice.
That being said, I still use Evernote. For existing Evernote users there are no real alternatives to it atm in my opinion (yup I'm using Notion, but for diff purpose). It's astonishing how much bullets can an original purpose-driven WHY take over the years and still keep going.
Also i know, at least for me, that when i find myself wanting to take notes most is whenever its a spur of the moment kind of idea that i dont want to lose.
In that kind of scenario, i find that a small notebook and pencil is still superior to an app simply because i don't have to think too much about the process of getting myself into a position where i can actually record the idea.
Its just too hard to get into the habit of remembering you have a note taking app on your phone that you can use whenever the good idea has just hit you.
You are too excited about the idea and trying your hardest to recall all the key details and keep them freshly in mind to be able to navigate to the app, wait for it to load up, press the + button, type in the idea using your thumbs, write in a title, save it, shit the app just crashed, load the app back up, great my idea wasnt saved, guess ill try writing it again, damn it i wish these notifications would stop popping up and pinging me, uhhh crap what was the clever angle to my idea again? Damn it.
Plus if im pulling out my phone, why not just use the voice controlled virtual assistant to record my ideas?
Not only does it have speech to text recognition but its actually quicker and more reliable than pulling out your notepad, flipping to an empty page, and hoping your writing utensil doesnt break/run out of ink.
What do you do about ideas you think of when you're not at a computer? Or when you're at a computer that doesn't have access to the network you usually store notes on?
One thing I like about paper and pencil is that I tend to have a better signal to noise ratio in my to-dos and notes. I guess the extra effort to write encourages me to trim the fat. I also can't check my mail from my note pad, so there's that.
After over 30 years of Franklin Planners, Apple Newtons, GTD, Sharp Wizards, Ecco (how I miss you), Field Notes, and a laundry list of others I have forgotten, I believe I have found the Holy Grail: a combination. Leuchtturm 1917 notebook for the bullet journal, Bear Notes on the Apple devices, vimwiki for heavy lifting on "real computers".
Most of my time is spent in the paper journal for day-to-day. I use the Bear Notes complication on the Apple Watch to take a quick transcribed note that will probably end up in the paper journal. I also use Bear for shopping lists and checklists that I keep on the phone. And then for project notes, lab notes, anything worthy of an outline, or anything I don't want to hand-write or fiddle with on a phone, I use vimwiki. (I'd use Bear, but I have a Windows desktop at work, and Bear is Apple-only.)
To put it another way, there are three tiers:
1. Hand-written, used most frequently day-to-day.
2. Digital Lite: Bear for quick notes, or reference when not at a desk. Don't particularly care about long-term persistence of these. If persisted, often goes in #1 ('do taxes next week').
3. Digital Industrial Strength: Long-term storage, and long form documents.
Trying to squeeze it all into one do-it-all tool became a fool's errand, IMO. Sometimes I need to just hammer a nail, sometimes I need to split wood; one hammer won't do both.
>navigate to the app, wait for it to load up, press the + button, type in the idea using your thumbs, write in a title, save it, shit the app just crashed, load the app back up, great my idea wasnt saved, guess ill try writing it again, damn it i wish these notifications would stop popping up and pinging me, uhhh crap what was the clever angle to my idea again? Damn it.
This is like the black-and-white scene in an infomercial in which a person dramatically fails to perform a simple, everyday task.
If using an app is truly that hard, use a different app.
I have an "email to self" app on my phone. One tap and it opens my email app with my personal email address pre-loaded. Then I write whatever in there, or use voice dictation, and hit send. Syncing, backups, distribution to all my devices - all taken care of already because it's email. Fancy stuff.
What it sucks for is any idea that is better explained or formulated with a drawing. For that I use paper. When I'm done, I take a picture with my phone, and then it gets synced to the cloud.
Also sticking to email for notes. It's the one account that I expect to migrate between providers when need arises,whereas something specific to notes I would likely just abandon. Advanced features like sync between devices is already set up and it's searchable, I have encryption when I want it, the UI is familiar.
For even more transient notes I have a widget on my phone's main screen that is just a single, persistent multiline text field without even something as complicated as a save button. It will typically show the number of a hotel room I stayed in months ago or something like that.
I use the app “launcher” at the top of the iOS widget area with slots that are pre-filled in templates that append to specific Evernote notes via email.
Also, use a Siri voice shortcuts that launch specific Evernote notes. Have a Siri voice shortcut that transcribes what I say and appends to a specific note. Many solutions to get stuff into Evernote on iOS and I’m sure Android too. Paper is still superior at times, but stuff ends up in EN eventually.
Getting stuff into it isn’t a problem I have with it.
I wanted a way to keep a pen tucked into the journal. And I didn't want a spiral-bound cheap one. Most of the journals I've seen don't have a way to store a pen.
Semi-ironically, I use a BIC Atlantis pen with it, because I don't like most Cross pens...
I hate glue-bound notebooks, because the page I'm writing on pillows up a bit. It's a personal tic for me, but I want the page to lie perfectly flat so it doesn't give while I'm writing.
I finally found the perfect notebook. It's ring-bound, and you can add or remove pages from it easily. The paper is very smooth and heavy enough that you can use both sides without bleed-through. Even with a fountain pen.
So this is my shill post for the Aqua Drops notebook. It's awesome:
Same, sometimes pen and paper is just better for my needs. I keep flirting with digital pens. The idea is awesome, you write with a pen on paper and it's automatically digitized and backed up. (There's special markings on the paper to help the digitizer). In practice there's been some glitches, but in the worst case it's still paper and ink.
I tried a Livescribe Echo pen for awhile. It always felt kinda bulky in the hand, and there were some glitches. It also had audio recording, and probably the best feature was you could point at your writing and it would fast-fwd/rewind the audio to the moment in time that you wrote that word. Great for filling in gaps when taking notes. Livescribe tried to integrate with Evernote at some point. Seemed like a great idea, but either Evernote or Livescribe failed terribly on that integration. Lost functionality from the stand alone Livescribe app, and never gained the functionality of Evernote. Ultimately my pen fell prey to a failed OLED problem that many of those pens had.
Recently trying again with a Neo Smartpen. The first one had a firmware bug and after a few days it couldn't re-charge anymore. Customer service replaced it, and replacement seems fine. This pen feels much more like a regular pen. Power on/off is triggered by removing/replacing the pen cap, so I barely even notice it's not a normal pen. Digitizing quality has been solid. Not as many features as the Livescribe had, but the transcribing quality (OCR) is much better. (Of course, I'm comparing a brand-new Neo to a previous-gen Livescribe. Could be cool to check out the new version of Livescribe, too)
Android at least has specific tasks in apps' home screen context menus (hold over app icon, get list of tasks). Those can be dragged to the home screen so you get buttons for specific actions. I have a host of quick capture tools on my home screen:
"New Note" task icon (personal notebook)
"Add new task" icon (adds new task in my todo app - personal or work depends on which one was open last)
Office Lens (camera, documents, whiteboards)
a shortcut to my work notebook's "quick notes" section (would be another "new note" button but OneNote can't handle that)
I can pretty much press a button and instantly be capturing what I need to capture. The drag-a-task thing is also useful with Outlook, since the default Outlook shortcut opens the email client. Luckily, Outlook's tasks include "Open calendar", "new event" and "new email". Bam, calendar has its own icon on the homescreen too.
For me taking notes on my phone is usually as easy as clicking on an app, clicking new page and then typing. I have never had any problems with crashing, synching, notifications or opening the app that you mention. I find it much easier and better than taking notes on paper.
My handwriting is terrible and I can type faster on my phone than handwrite things. I have become significantly more organized since transitioning all my note taking and ideas to my phone rather than handwriting on some notebook where it will be forgotten and likely illegible.
I've been trying to retain / sync / archive / etc my electronic notes since the mid 1990's - starting with one of the early Palm models.
It's always been a fraught experience, especially if you're relying on someone else's algorithms to give you peace of mind.
The most recent experiments were using Evernote, later Nixnote (because Evernote didn't care about anyone using free software operating systems) I've now moved to a breathtakingly basic platform of Google Keep + script that reliably syncs between several devices, and allows me to pull in all my notes nightly, pop them into git, and propagate to 3 hosts / 2 sites. The same server pulls in and archives my Trello boards nightly, along with a bunch of other more mundane backups.
It's on my todo list (in trello :) ... but haven't got to it yet.
I use a combination of Unison(-gtk) and Foldersync (android) to replicate some quite large data sets between desktop, server, a couple of laptops, and tablet & phone. Keybase and Synthing are definitely on the list of potential replacements for the manual, periodic sync.
How does Syncthing go insofar as replacing a note-taking system (tagging, collaboration, etc)?
There isn’t any explicit notion of collaboration, and tagging can be accomplished by way of a folder structure. I haven’t tried symlinks, which is how you’d make multiple tags work on a regular file system.
Syncthing’s purpose is to ensure that a specific directory remain synchronized across multiple computers and/or mobile devices. It accomplishes this goal with the minimum of fuss, and (in my experience) works better than Dropbox in that it burns fewer CPU cycles and doesn’t crash/hang/nag me to upgrade.
I think when I looked at it a while back my concern was how it would cope with one or more of my devices being off-network for days at a time (a regular occurrence).
The other devices wouldn't be, and changes would only be done wherever I happened to be, but the cost of evaluating this solution was unfortunately higher than not making any changes. As I say, it's on my list. The suite seems to be quite robust - but given Evernote's primary stated purpose was to ensure none of your data was ever lost (and yet many people have sad stories of data loss) I'm extra-cautious about changing my workflow.
Actually much more pedestrian than that, as I'm confident it works on cases more complex than me. It's simply that I've got a series of mechanisms that work acceptably, and it takes time and effort to run up a VM, set up an archive process, test a new suite & workflow over several weeks.
Yea...I don’t understand anything Evernote has done that’s new since I’ve been using them. I also never understood why they charge based on upload volume vs total storage, say 1000 notes or pictures, like every other storage provider, or don’t fix the syncing errors. Like others have mentioned I’ve never had syncing errors with google drive or box or Dropbox like I’ve had with Evernote.
> I also never understood why they charge based on upload volume vs total storage, say 1000 notes or pictures, like every other storage provider
Because the purpose was to encourage you to trust them to store information "forever" - having a storage limit is antithetical to that because at some point you will be encouraged to clear out old things to make space. With an upload limit, once it's in you don't need to worry about it ever again, in theory.
I use Evernote for anything that is relevant to others in my family. We can keep each other up to date on things like shopping lists and trip planning, family events or projects. Plus take notes. It’s one of the only apps I use and pay for. Chose it because it works on all devices and is simple. They could handle syncing a little better, when a change is made on two devices at once. But the almost unforgivable sin is that they don’t have a calendar. It’s hard to use a tool to organize your life that doesn’t have a calendar.
Same. I have been using it for my consulting business for years, keeping daily notes for client work as well as personal items in a notebook that my wife and I share. Evernote has proven to be quite useful for me.
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[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 289 ms ] threadI've been a subscriber for 2 years and use it daily on desktop and Android without complaints or data loss.
If there is be a thing to complain about it's their api. It's rather quite annoying to work with and some of the language SDK's are outdated.
It seems to really be for mainly syncing, like dropbox but notes.
Besides OneNote being much better for handwritten and typed note taking as well as "rich notes" one of the most best features it has is email to note which means that even if you have to take notes on a machine that doesn't have it or you can't log in into OneNote from it or if you want to take notes from someone else it can be easily done via emailing to your you@onenote.com address and the auto formatting is pretty awesome.
Dropbox Paper already provided a better note-taking experience and with Notion.so I finally found a full replacement. The product is in active development [2] and I don't feel like I am just paying to keep the servers running.
[1] https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/16445-request-support-...
[2] https://www.notion.so/notion/What-s-New-157765353f2c4705bd45...
[1] https://www.overleaf.com/learn/latex/Mathematical_expression...
Notion looks great, but I'm still on the fence about it. I tried it a couple months ago and can't say I loved the mobile experience on Android. I should probably give it another shot.
Markdown has definitely become my format of choice. It's like the JSON of plain-text files: Imperfect, but simple and everywhere.
I'd like to simplify down to markdown files in folders as you have, but I can't seem to find a native editor that I actually like on Ubuntu. They all feel incomplete, or they insist upon "preview" mode, which I can't stand.
Paper has the best editor UX for me, where the formatting happens inline, immediately, as I type. The automated TOC driven by headers is pretty great as well. I do wish I could "view source" once in a while, but for the most part I never actually have to.
I wish they had a means of adding plug-ins (or if it were open-source, so I could figure out how to add my own).
Thanks for the recommendation!
As for vscode, I may try it at some point as vscode is pretty impressive, although I tend to live in the Jetbrains world, and happily so. That said, I haven't really been a fan of any Markdown plugin on Jetbrains apps.
Since I do not use Chrome, i canceled my premium account.
Dropbox was getting huge around the same time. I started just saving my text notes in a dropbox folder. Never had any syncing errors, deleted Evernote, and never looked back. I'm sure they've improved since then, but it's hard to go back after such a sour first impression.
The web version would also reasonably regularly save 100 versions of the same note. Support queries on this got a shrug response and "yeah don't use the web client".
So I switched how I do notes and ditched Evernote.
Granted, this is a little clunkier on mobile, but for quick notes I use drafts which is the speediest note taking app I've found (opens directly to writing prompt, one button save or append to dropbox files).
But between Pinboard & Drafts, I don't use Evernote any more.
[1] https://itunes.apple.com/nl/app/notebooks-write-and-organize...
[2] https://itunes.apple.com/nl/app/notebooks-for-iphone/id78044...
Perhaps even roll the dice on AR applications.
I say this as someone who has wanted to love Evernote, but has ultimately stuck with pen and paper and occasionally Google Keep.
Where there is a gap in the market, tying notation to memory and productivity, would be some kind of notation context and intelligent reminder (e.g these web tabs, that note, this tag) tied to some event or place where it would be useful - you're in the workshed and picking up some old project; its someone's birthday you wanted to remind them about xyz. Now that would be a genuinely useful memory aid.
But it never launched. Or did under a new name I was unaware of. I've been waiting for location features for a long long time.
I'm trying to get off Google's teat, but it looks like I'm on the Keep train, until they abruptly discontinue it in 12-18 months.
The teat is annoyingly hard to ween from! They get a lot right.
I'm still using it, because it works quite well (better than Evernote!), but I don't expect anything I store in it to be very permanent.
[1]: https://itunes.apple.com/US/app/id1195676848?at=10l3Vy&ct=UU...
If I were running the company, there's no way I would start chasing idea like this. I like how they used to describe the product 10 years ago - your external brain. It's an application for taking notes, not calendaring or task management.
There are lots of apps that do exactly what you are describing. I think it's a core Android features. You can say "ok google, remind me to buy eggs when I'm at the store" and it just works. I believe iOS has the same functionality.
I cannot share notes using URL, because notes are encrypted on a cloud drive in way that prevents even the cloud providers from reading them, but that is the only inconvenience I have for having 100% control over my data.
Ironically, I'm not using Linux as much now, but going back to Evernote was unappealing. I'm now using a combination of Bullet Journaling and Notion.
If it is a note I made on vacation last week, then I would do what you are suggesting. If it was for a note I made on vacation in 2013 (or was it 2014), then the metadata makes things much easier.
"man, if only there was a way more exciting way to go about doing this.";
Which prompted the "ahah" lightbulb moment of the guy sitting just within earshot, one row over, who just so happened to be jotting down his own notes on some promising startup ideas?
Just like user/customer could blame your web app if it starts too slow. The same applies to desktop apps, too.
In my case, open/close a web app on a new tab is much much faster than openning an Excel file. It's the point. And they're different.
That's my experience with most of desktop apps. The only exception, is VSCode and iTerm2. Can't live without them.
> is much faster than
If your key point is 'it requires my RAM and CPU usage' then you're going to be disappointed to learn that a website also requires your RAM and CPU usage.
"Faster" means speed.
Slack, totally idle, oscilates between 225-250 MB for some reason - now this I agree is a resource hog.
What is your reference scale?
The memory use also grows for no reason. I have caught it consuming 20GB+ after a day or two. There's obviously an egregious memory leak and that's been true for at least a year; I can only conclude that Evernote is a crap company that doesn't care at all about bugs, even critical ones.
I have taken to only running Evernote on my desktop when I absolutely have to, and I try to remember to quit it so it doesn't gobble CPU and RAM, but sometimes I forget.
I do have a lot of notes, like 20,000, and many of them are HTML pages, but I don't have any huge graphics or videos or anything. Even if I did, I can't imagine why it would need so much RAM to just display a list of note titles, or why it would constantly be using between 5 and 40% of a CPU, or why the RAM usage would constantly creep up. It's just really terrible software. It galls me that I'm paying $7.99/month for this crap, and I would instantly pay that much or more for an alternative that worked properly.
Then a ton of VCs got burned, and Paul Graham wrote "Ramen Profitability" (2009), and later "Default Alive or Default Dead?" (2015).
Nowadays, you NEED to have a story for how you're going to become default alive, and not rely on investor cash. That's because of what we learned from all of the failures from Evernote's era.
Think about other companies that started in that era – Facebook, Twitter, Yelp. The entire strategy was user growth and figure out monetization later. You don't see that as much today.
I suppose Uber/Lyft are good counter examples, but they at least had massive revenue along the way, and a great story about future profitability. (Swap out drivers with self-driving cars.)
No one does that today, not even Google. You get limited features for free.
I use it for all kinds of notes, like for example short tutorials on the command line, issuing commands that are hard to remember, TODO lists (both at work and for grocery shopping), meeting notes, listing pros and cons, everything.
In meetings I like the ability to record audio, or to add pictures I take with my phone, which isn't necessarily a capability of your average open source alternative.
Its search capabilities are also great. I have a ton of notes in my Evernote and I never have issues finding what I'm looking for. Compared with Google Docs for example, which is terrible.
My problems with it is that the data is not easy to port, I would have liked for example periodic Markdown backups to my Dropbox. Also support for encryption is weak. Apps like Evernote can be end to end encrypted, there's absolutely no reason for Evernote, the company, to have access to my notes.
I also worry about Evernote, the company, dying on me like many other startups before it.
Because Evernote is so common, there are tools that understand Evernote's export format. You might be able to find a tool that can convert an evernote export file?
Others suggest OneNote does exactly that.
>My problems with it is that the data is not easy to port
This is a fatal problem, and is a big reason I don't use either EN or ON anymore at all.
I'm a paid user as well and also worry about the company dying. Frankly, I wish they would focus 100% on the core product and kill features that aren't part of that core. For example, get rid of chat. Other companies do it better.
I think what you want to say is "paying customer"
It's unfortunate, but they -need- sync to be 100%. 99.99% is worse than 0% :(
I just opened for Evernote for the first time in years and it looks like all my notes are now duplicated for some reason. Awesome.
We picked "sync" and "security" as the two core values we wanted to put most focus on when building our note app (https://www.amplenote.com/).
It's curious to me that Notion has so little to say about the effort they put into sync and security -- these seem like such essential features to a great todo app, and I don't think either can be done right unless it is an active, top-tier priority.
What they should do, is double-down where the puck is going in the context of individual productivity.
What is interesting in cases like this - it's all there, in their own forums. A roadmap vector based on their own WHY in a form of their userbase voice.
That being said, I still use Evernote. For existing Evernote users there are no real alternatives to it atm in my opinion (yup I'm using Notion, but for diff purpose). It's astonishing how much bullets can an original purpose-driven WHY take over the years and still keep going.
P.S I just build a tool for Evernote (https://neuracache.com/) just because these are the things that were missing for me the most. Again it's all in their forums, just as an example in the context of my own itch : https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/82427-spaced-repetitio...
Not so difficult nowadays.
In that kind of scenario, i find that a small notebook and pencil is still superior to an app simply because i don't have to think too much about the process of getting myself into a position where i can actually record the idea.
Its just too hard to get into the habit of remembering you have a note taking app on your phone that you can use whenever the good idea has just hit you.
You are too excited about the idea and trying your hardest to recall all the key details and keep them freshly in mind to be able to navigate to the app, wait for it to load up, press the + button, type in the idea using your thumbs, write in a title, save it, shit the app just crashed, load the app back up, great my idea wasnt saved, guess ill try writing it again, damn it i wish these notifications would stop popping up and pinging me, uhhh crap what was the clever angle to my idea again? Damn it.
Plus if im pulling out my phone, why not just use the voice controlled virtual assistant to record my ideas?
Not only does it have speech to text recognition but its actually quicker and more reliable than pulling out your notepad, flipping to an empty page, and hoping your writing utensil doesnt break/run out of ink.
Most of my time is spent in the paper journal for day-to-day. I use the Bear Notes complication on the Apple Watch to take a quick transcribed note that will probably end up in the paper journal. I also use Bear for shopping lists and checklists that I keep on the phone. And then for project notes, lab notes, anything worthy of an outline, or anything I don't want to hand-write or fiddle with on a phone, I use vimwiki. (I'd use Bear, but I have a Windows desktop at work, and Bear is Apple-only.)
To put it another way, there are three tiers: 1. Hand-written, used most frequently day-to-day.
2. Digital Lite: Bear for quick notes, or reference when not at a desk. Don't particularly care about long-term persistence of these. If persisted, often goes in #1 ('do taxes next week').
3. Digital Industrial Strength: Long-term storage, and long form documents.
Trying to squeeze it all into one do-it-all tool became a fool's errand, IMO. Sometimes I need to just hammer a nail, sometimes I need to split wood; one hammer won't do both.
This is like the black-and-white scene in an infomercial in which a person dramatically fails to perform a simple, everyday task.
If using an app is truly that hard, use a different app.
I have an "email to self" app on my phone. One tap and it opens my email app with my personal email address pre-loaded. Then I write whatever in there, or use voice dictation, and hit send. Syncing, backups, distribution to all my devices - all taken care of already because it's email. Fancy stuff.
What it sucks for is any idea that is better explained or formulated with a drawing. For that I use paper. When I'm done, I take a picture with my phone, and then it gets synced to the cloud.
For even more transient notes I have a widget on my phone's main screen that is just a single, persistent multiline text field without even something as complicated as a save button. It will typically show the number of a hotel room I stayed in months ago or something like that.
Also, use a Siri voice shortcuts that launch specific Evernote notes. Have a Siri voice shortcut that transcribes what I say and appends to a specific note. Many solutions to get stuff into Evernote on iOS and I’m sure Android too. Paper is still superior at times, but stuff ends up in EN eventually.
Getting stuff into it isn’t a problem I have with it.
BTW, I should plug the Cross Jotzone journal:
https://www.cross.com/cr_en_us/ac281-2s
I wanted a way to keep a pen tucked into the journal. And I didn't want a spiral-bound cheap one. Most of the journals I've seen don't have a way to store a pen.
Semi-ironically, I use a BIC Atlantis pen with it, because I don't like most Cross pens...
I finally found the perfect notebook. It's ring-bound, and you can add or remove pages from it easily. The paper is very smooth and heavy enough that you can use both sides without bleed-through. Even with a fountain pen.
So this is my shill post for the Aqua Drops notebook. It's awesome:
https://www.jetpens.com/Lihit-Lab-Aqua-Drops-Twist-Ring-Note...
I tried a Livescribe Echo pen for awhile. It always felt kinda bulky in the hand, and there were some glitches. It also had audio recording, and probably the best feature was you could point at your writing and it would fast-fwd/rewind the audio to the moment in time that you wrote that word. Great for filling in gaps when taking notes. Livescribe tried to integrate with Evernote at some point. Seemed like a great idea, but either Evernote or Livescribe failed terribly on that integration. Lost functionality from the stand alone Livescribe app, and never gained the functionality of Evernote. Ultimately my pen fell prey to a failed OLED problem that many of those pens had.
Recently trying again with a Neo Smartpen. The first one had a firmware bug and after a few days it couldn't re-charge anymore. Customer service replaced it, and replacement seems fine. This pen feels much more like a regular pen. Power on/off is triggered by removing/replacing the pen cap, so I barely even notice it's not a normal pen. Digitizing quality has been solid. Not as many features as the Livescribe had, but the transcribing quality (OCR) is much better. (Of course, I'm comparing a brand-new Neo to a previous-gen Livescribe. Could be cool to check out the new version of Livescribe, too)
"New Note" task icon (personal notebook)
"Add new task" icon (adds new task in my todo app - personal or work depends on which one was open last)
Office Lens (camera, documents, whiteboards)
a shortcut to my work notebook's "quick notes" section (would be another "new note" button but OneNote can't handle that)
I can pretty much press a button and instantly be capturing what I need to capture. The drag-a-task thing is also useful with Outlook, since the default Outlook shortcut opens the email client. Luckily, Outlook's tasks include "Open calendar", "new event" and "new email". Bam, calendar has its own icon on the homescreen too.
My handwriting is terrible and I can type faster on my phone than handwrite things. I have become significantly more organized since transitioning all my note taking and ideas to my phone rather than handwriting on some notebook where it will be forgotten and likely illegible.
It's always been a fraught experience, especially if you're relying on someone else's algorithms to give you peace of mind.
The most recent experiments were using Evernote, later Nixnote (because Evernote didn't care about anyone using free software operating systems) I've now moved to a breathtakingly basic platform of Google Keep + script that reliably syncs between several devices, and allows me to pull in all my notes nightly, pop them into git, and propagate to 3 hosts / 2 sites. The same server pulls in and archives my Trello boards nightly, along with a bunch of other more mundane backups.
I've never felt so relaxed about my data.
[1] https://syncthing.net/
I use a combination of Unison(-gtk) and Foldersync (android) to replicate some quite large data sets between desktop, server, a couple of laptops, and tablet & phone. Keybase and Synthing are definitely on the list of potential replacements for the manual, periodic sync.
How does Syncthing go insofar as replacing a note-taking system (tagging, collaboration, etc)?
Syncthing’s purpose is to ensure that a specific directory remain synchronized across multiple computers and/or mobile devices. It accomplishes this goal with the minimum of fuss, and (in my experience) works better than Dropbox in that it burns fewer CPU cycles and doesn’t crash/hang/nag me to upgrade.
The other devices wouldn't be, and changes would only be done wherever I happened to be, but the cost of evaluating this solution was unfortunately higher than not making any changes. As I say, it's on my list. The suite seems to be quite robust - but given Evernote's primary stated purpose was to ensure none of your data was ever lost (and yet many people have sad stories of data loss) I'm extra-cautious about changing my workflow.
Or that it'll be egregious when it's time? Solution?
Because the purpose was to encourage you to trust them to store information "forever" - having a storage limit is antithetical to that because at some point you will be encouraged to clear out old things to make space. With an upload limit, once it's in you don't need to worry about it ever again, in theory.
Every other storage provider charges you by the number of files you store, not their size? Really?
Considering the kicking Flickr got for their 1000 image free limit, that’s…interesting.
I hope they stick around.
It is the one feature that impressed me (searchable hand written notes, etc.), but that was years ago.