Seemingly producers of a random set of mobile apps [0] including a video editor, a basic photo retouching app, and a fitness routine tracker.
As an aside, their site is also aggravatingly self-absorbed, at least as it seems to me. Copy about how "we create our own cutting-edge technologies" and "Impossible. Maybe." just hurts to read when they're talking about a 30 day fitness app.
Yeah, maybe to young people that means "doing the impossible" but to me it means "tricking people into thinking you're doing something impossible" or "scam" for short.
They also call their employees "spooners" and talk about how they "they share one thing in common: a drive to become the best person they’re capable of being."
Statements like "Are you ready to come join us in the Spooniverse? We saved you a seat." also make it sound a little like it's a cult.
With that being said, their goals seem admirable and they are scoring pretty well on some employee satisfaction inquiries, so it's perfectly possible that they are actually living up to their ambitions. A fitness app might not seem like a lot, but they may just be working their way up to something bigger.
The only reasonably modern app developer company in Italy, I believe, for the little I heard. Considering the technological desert that is Italy these days, not bad.
evernote was one of the programs that trapped me,
it took some effort to finally migrate my data (I'm now using md files/ obsidian for mobile frontend synced with syncthing)
I migrated to Joplin (with a Docker container on my NAS as the server), the Windows app has "Import from an ENEX (Evernote Export)" and I haven't noticed anything missing. I've noticed the few encrypted notes I had being migrated as garble though.
The final thing that has me trapped with Evernote is the very good OCR for both images and PDFs. The second I figure out a replacement for that which works great on Mac and iOS I am gone.
I use swiftscan because I've been using it a long time (same reason you use evernote) but the Notes scanner is pretty effective if Notes works for you.
Do you know if Notes performs the OCR on files that [are imported over from Evernote?](https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205793) I have many hundreds (maybe low-thousands) of PDFs and images that I need to be able to access once in a blue moon, but when I need them Evernote's OCR makes it easy.
I guess I could just try it out with a subsection of notes.
I’ve imported a bunch of PDFs and various image formats and it doesn’t seem to be scanning them. I’ll check back later in case it’s a feature it does in the background.
On iPhone, Notes is excellent. In a browser on icloud.com it's terrible. I need it to work in a web browser because I do software development on Windows. Notes is not an option until the browser version works just as well as the mobile version. For now, I can use Notes for personal but not for work.
I think there are different apps that do this. Devonthink does and imports Evernote however many say it’s a bulky app that does a lot. I don’t feel that way but I like Devonthink.
I wish the UI/UX for Obsidian was better. It takes just long enough to search for a note that I want to edit that I end up just putting quick stuff in Google Keep due to its ease of use.
I had a great workflow going on with Evernote and my ScanSnap. I'd scan mail and paperwork right away, and it'd be full text searchable in Evernote. Maybe once a week or so I'd go through the latest uploads and tag them or put them in folders.
It took me a while to figure out an alternative for this because so many of the note tools I had seen were focused on just written notes and not the PDF file use case.
I tried self-hosting Paperless, but that seemed like a lot of work too. When we're talking about my document archive here it's a lot of important files and I don't want to be my own SRE just to save myself $100 or so a year.
The best I have now is I upgraded my scanner to a new Fujitsu that OCRs and pushes the files into Dropbox, and paid Dropbox plans have full text search.
I'm curious why you moves from ScanSnap (which I use) to a Fujitsu. Just time for an upgrade, or do you prefer some newer feature(s)?
I use my ScanSnap with OCR turned on and haven't had any problems, but I'm always looking for what will replace it when it finally died (still going strong at about 10 years or so, I think!).
Silly me! I should have realized (or remembered) that it's a Fujitsu product. It's just the name "Fujitsu" isn't on the machine anywhere, so I tend to forget (just double-checked, and no name on the outside!)
Thanks for sharing the model numbers, too. I'll be sure to check out the newer models!
I fired up EN at one point recently. Wanted to add a note in a certain category and it took me like 20 seconds to get to the point where I can type in the actual note text. It wasn't even connected to the internet and still the app was slow. 5-10 second pauses for something that should be done in a millisecond. Useless popups.
WTF were they thinking?
I mean, I know exactly what happened. Everyone who cared about having a good app has left the company by this point.
Anyways, I really like Joplin. Android app works fine. Desktop app works fine. It even has a TUI mode. Server side for self-hosting (webdav) was pretty straightforward to set up.
Has Joplin become any faster? I tried the switch a year or two ago. The export and import went somewhat smoothly, but Joplin was so incredibly slow to sync that I ended up going back to Evernote. I do have many years of notes in Evernote, but it just took forever, both in initial sync but also opening on phone even after the initial sync. Something in their algorithm was just very slow back then.
Yup - it stopped being a functional note taking app. Which is the only reason I used it in the first place.
It used to just get out of the way and let me take notes in my browser with the comfort of knowing I could get them from anywhere later.
Now it's this horrible, janky app that tries to do too many things, shoves constant feature popups in my face, and isn't very good for taking notes.
I used it constantly 10 years ago. I don't use it at all today. I just loaded it up again to see if I'm missing anything -
It takes nearly 10 seconds to load on a developer machine on a gigabit internet connection.
It immediately asks for permission to send me popups
It tries to show me 7 different features on the home screen (notes/scratchpad/pinned notes/recently captured/notebooks/tags/shortcuts) instead of just fucking showing me my last note.
It takes multiple clicks to start a new note every time.
---
Basically - it's now worse than a physical notepad in basically every way.
I really liked Evernote. Yearly subscription instead of the monthly Netflix like prices that ever half baked app asks for these days. Integration amongst all my devices phone, table, various desktops. All nice. And no further dependency on Microsoft, Google or Meta.
Product development stalled a long time ago though. I do hope this thing stays in the air, cause I got a lot of notes in there.
Recently their development pace really picked up. Unfortunately that was due to them replatforming as an electron app. Development speed improved, but the app itself felt sluggish and I had really started to hate it.
Same. It was ahead of its time and incredibly useful, then behind its time and useful, and now antiquated but still full of my important notes.
Do I have a loyalty club membership at that one hotel I stayed in halfway around the world 15 years ago, when I had a different email address? Evernote is the only place I can find out.
As soon as there’s a dead simple migration path to OneNote, I’ll have $50/year more spending money.
Though basically the same lock-in issue is what kept me from starting to put all my notes into OneNote years ago. Admittedly at this point, OneNote is presumably not going anywhere. But I still make the tradeoff to mostly keep notes in text files.
Yeah, was my favorite app for a few years, I was even a paying subscriber, but then thy started pushing adds for some group chat thing and other random stuff. And the webapp became almost unusable after a redesign to this "modern" information sparse style where you have to hunt around and click an excessive amount of times to get simple things done.
I ended up moving over to Obsidian, and while I am not entirely happy with it, it's at least better than what Evernote has become.
I'm using Obsidian and Inkdrop now. I need to download Simplenote. I'm also putatively trying Joplin and Notion, but they seem to be losing out; I need to try harder with them for a bit and then drop them if they don't catch on.
I'm being so picky because I used Evernote for ten years and could conceivably use my next choice even longer. I can't believe I used Evernote for over a decade and used it to create thousands of notes. What a shame they destroyed it.
I was using Evernote extensively back in 2008. It was a real tossup between Evernote and OneNote (which at the time wasn't cloud based and required syncing the files).
Then Evernote proceeded to cease all feature development on the main app. They where releasing food apps while the main product grew stale. Instead of making Evernote incredibly powerful, they didn't touch it and people left any of the dozen competitors that exist today.
I loved the integration among all my devices as well. I think that's table stakes for note-taking apps. So often I jot something down at my computer and then walk out the door with only my phone.
However, their constant UI changes were maddening. The breaking point for me, which resulted in me now using several different competitors until I settle on one, was they decided that your cursor should start in the body for a new note instead of in the title field. I get that searching is supposed to replace every other single form of organization, but note titles are important in their interface, and actually really vital when searching! They got way out over their skis, discouraging you from adding titles when their own UI makes it a nightmare to have a lot of untitled notes. And it really was an effective nudge — after the change I struggled to consistently add titles even though titles are important for my workflow. I struggled between having a mess of untitled notes or applying constant discipline to fight the nudge, and I finally gave up.
That was just the straw that broke the camel's back. There were so many other fiddly UI changes that constantly forced me to learn new habits. I would gladly pay $30 per month (not kidding) just to have a version of Evernote frozen in time. I remember loving it for years starting around 2012 or so, then a few years of horrible quality problems that I wouldn't want to revisit, and then it was fine except for constant annoying changes.
I'll be paying my subscription until I settle on a replacement and figure out a workable export/import process to transition my notes to it (which I expect to be a struggle, based on the tools I've tried.)
Yea, I'm in the same boat as you. The notes I have in there are really valuable.
Curious, would you have been willing to become an investor in Evernote to avoid this acquisition? And if so, what order of magnitude? I'm curious why they didn't just do a crowdfunding campaign.
I am honestly okay with development stalling, as I don't really have that many features I needed.
Except one: speed. Evernote is dog slow, whereas Apple Notes is fast. This is what killed my reason for subscribing to Evernote. Though it has far fewer features, I can press CMD+N and start jotting down my ideas/things I have to remember.
I have no objection to paying for good tools, but they are tools and must support me in what I am trying to accomplish.
imagine being at the local tech happy hour and someone asks you where you work and you have to yell over the loud music "BENDING SPOONS, I'M A L3 SRE" ... "what?" ... "BENDING. SPOONS."
Interesting to see this now, I was thinking of switching to a new platform for tasks and notes because Evernote’s free tier is quite limited and Apple Reminders often doesn’t even show the correct reminder if there are multiple open. I was just reading about Evernote’s profitability last night.
Reminders has been perpetually flakey, particularly around new OS releases and if your iPhone/Watch/iPad/Mac are in different states of latest vs non-latest OS.
At long last, Evernote takes an Incredible Journey to be broken down for parts by its new owner. Can't get any more fucked up than it already has been, it went from being an important part of my daily workflow to a place of pain. The rewrite is part of why my last graphic novel ground to a halt, I was using EN to collaborate on scripts with my partner and it is just agony to use any more. I cancelled my subscription a few years back and really have not found anything to fill that hole. Every theoretical replacement is either a shitty sluggish web view, owned by a megacorporation I don't want to get involved with, or both.
Personally I think the best thing the new owners could do would be to dig up the pre-EN10 codebase, get it compiling again, and make that available. I would resubscribe in a heartbeat.
I tried a few alternatives and landed on Apple Notes. It's blinding fast, and while it's not exactly feature-rich, it does everything I need while being seamlessly synced to the cloud and my devices.
I use Apple Notes because I realized that, for my needs, all the structure and organization that so many other note taking apps/services provide really just make things more complicated and isn't beneficial. Notes is simple, has one level of folders, and supports labeling. I'll almost never look at 95% of my notes again, but in case I do, I can just search by keyword and usually I'll find it.
My one gripe with Notes is that the search function really isn't all that great. Maybe I need to force it to reindex or something. I've found many cases where it doesn't find a note by a word that I know it contains. I really don't get why it seems that nearly all search functions are terrible in any given app. It would be nice if Apple improved the search for Notes, and it shouldn't be that hard to do given that it's just using SQLite under the hood.
Same for me.
It does about 90%+ of what I'd ever need, it has rock-solid sync across all my devices, I can share notes with my wife without her having to sign up for a service and download an app, etc.
Not to mention that it avoids me onboarding to some unprofitable note taking tool that will languish until it gets stripped for parts.
There was a midtwit meme about productivity hackers vs "I just use apple notes" guys like this too haha.
That's awesome that it syncs that well, though one of the reasons I use it is because I can specifically opt out of the syncing and keep everything offline. I use Notes to jot a lot of things down, and that can mean some very intimate/private thoughts, and I've come to distaste having those thoughts floating in the digital ether. Most note taking apps don't seem to allow you to work entirely offline, and if they do, they still phone home a lot and harass you to sign up for an account.
The lack of export functionality without a Mac kept me from using it.
edit: HN won't let me reply so...
That sure is a lot of trouble just to grab a copy of my notes. This is something I do often enough that I don't want to have to go through two MFA prompts, and then another when the process is done. Not acceptable.
You can bulk export all your Notes through appleid.apple.com. They can come down as text files, or a JSON, I believe. I just went through the process recently to migrate notes into Joplin.
FYI, HN probably does let you reply (unless you’ve tripped the rate limit, but in that case it won’t let you edit, either), it’s just that in deep threads you need to either wait a bit or do it from the comment’s page[1].
Like most apple software, it only considers users who are totally bought into the ecosystem. I hardly know what you mean, "grab a copy of my notes", all my notes are copied to all my devices, as long as those devices run Apple Notes ;)
I'm on Andrid, I use a small file manager called MK Explorer [0]
Flow is, open the app, go to bookmarks->notes (this is a shortcut I set up), choose a folder (I have a bunch for different things), then menu button->new file, enter a title, and use the file explorer's own text editor. It's not as quick as opening Google Keep and tapping plus, but at least I know I can trust it.
I like a lot of things about it except for the part where I can't collaborate with my Windows-using collaborator.
"Make them use it on iCloud.com" is a non-starter, I don't wanna inflict a shitty web-app on them after fleeing EN mostly because it turned into a shitty web-app crammed into an app container.
Everybody on HN seems to talk about what they use to "take notes". I personally use Trello as an organization tool for things such as my to-do list, checklists (packing for a trip this weekend, for instance), random thoughts and ideas, lists of music and movies people suggest, transcriptions of phone conversations, etc. Is this the same use case as when people talk about Evernote/Apple Notes/OneNote/org-mode, and if so am I a total weirdo for using a Kanban tool for this purpose? I've used it this way for almost a decade and the abstraction of boards of stacks of cards is very flexible and intuitive to me.
I've yet to find a reasonable mobile version of org-mode. Which is, frankly, a non-starter for me personally. 90% of the time I am probably referencing something from my notes when mobile, but I need those notes to:
1. Be accessible an up to date
2. Easily searchable, and to do so quickly
3. In the rare case that I need to take a note, it is best if I can do so easily and have those go back to my computer quickly and painlessly so I can do what needs doing to get that into the system better.
Org-mode simply does not do this well in any of my experience with it. It's fine if all you're doing is taking notes on a computer, but as soon as you add a mobile device to the mix, it goes belly up for me.
Simplenote is a web app by necessity - most Markdown ones are since Markdown is just a way to write simple HTML. I don't think there really are native notetaking apps anymore, let alone multiplatform ones. OneNote's probably the only big player left.
I don't think Simplenote really handles file attachments, so it'd be a complete no go.
I don't understand why you wouldn't just use google docs or microsoft word to collaborate on a graphic novel? Evernote is not and was never a word processor.
The creators of the street angel graphic novel series said all of their ideas are in a google drive folder.
I don't like web apps and don't want my life in Google. Also I had been a paid user of Evernote for a few years already when Google Docs came out, I had already learnt that "if you're not paying for it, you're the product".
I'm not a fan of Microsoft, either. I've never had to swap Word documents around so that's not in my lie at all.
Evernote was on my computer, and on my phone; it's where I'd note down an idea when I had it, and since it was there I may as well just expand on it in there. When I'm doing solo comics then most of my notes in EN were collections of vague outlines, dialogue fragments, and photographs of scribbly sketchbook pages; actual writing mostly happened in Illustrator. It was easy to expand that to have a script sitting there in EN, since we were both already used to using it. Plus since EN is about keeping notebooks rather than files it's pretty nice to just have one place that holds all the various words and pictures related to getting from "some ideas we've kicked around" to "a script that I can turn into a bunch of Illustrator files on my hard drive".
This is similar to how there are a lot of programmers who do everything in Emacs. You're already there all the time, and it may not be perfectly built for this, but you can do most of what you need in it, so why not?
If you want to be totally anal about doing it The Traditional Industry Way then you can use a complex word processor template adapted from screenwriting templates and deal with rigid page counts. If you are not working as part of an assembly line with distinct separations between Writers and Editors and Pencillers and Inkers and Colorists and Letterers then your script can a pretty casual thing with simple formatting, and Evernote can handle that just fine. Or at least it could before v10 threw all performance in the toilet for that shitty Electron rewrite.
Lately I have been vaguely fiddling with using Scrivener for roughing out scripts of short pieces, and really need to get my partner on this long-brewing GN still kinda trapped in Evernote to give it a shot. If we can get a decent sync pathway to bring the .scriv files between our disparate devices then maybe my dusty Evernote notebook exports will turn into a handful of Scrivener projects, along with the scattered notes in Joplin and Apple Notes that have happened since I finally said "fuck this abusive relationship with New Evernote".
I've written comic scripts myself and I'm sure you are probably aware of this but the traditional way is really not complex word processing templates based on screenwriting templates. It's just whatever random format the author likes.
Scriviner has no collaborative features and IMHO you are making things unreasonably difficult for yourself by using the wrong tools for the job.
I've kept using Evernote "legacy" (or whatever its called, the pre electron version ) without upgrading to v10 so I don't even understand why you've created this problem for yourself if you still like Evernote.
I learned three things watching EN snatch defeat from the jaws of victory:
1) There is almost never a case for a total ground up rewrite of your core product. Just don’t do it.
2) Don’t abandon the users who made you successful in the first place. They’re the ones who advocate for you and get your foot in the door.
3) real time google docs style collaborative editing is table stakes for this software category. Build your V1 with it in mind. Otherwise you’ll have to do a rewrite later. See 1.
Disagree on #3. Social & collaborative features are the bane of my existence. No I don't want to share all my scraps of information, no I don't want to let my friends know what I'm listening to, no, I don't want to publish product purchases I make to twitter.
I think a better #3 would be: decide whether your audience is individuals or businesses, then build for that.
If you don’t want collaborative editing, don’t use it. I’m saying most users wanted it and started looking elsewhere when EN couldn’t deliver. It’s easier to add a lock on collaboration than to backfill later.
The problem is that the effort to do collaborative editing creates a lot of other problems.
I want to be able to just start typing, on my phone. Instead, I have to wait for it to sync. If I am in a place with bad reception, that will take a while. It lags and freezes, all in order to support collaboration that I do not want.
I want to add pictures. I want to add links to other notes. I pay for a subscription to get bullet proof cloud backup. Sometimes I want to share notes. I don’t want to collaboratively edit my personal notes with my private thoughts and journal entries.
Evernote stopped focusing on that.
I might switch over to Muse. It was designed to be local first and uses cdrt for sync.
I think collaborative editing was a mistake. According to Libin circa 2010, Evernote was supposed to be your second brain. Letting other people edit my notes doesn't fit the second brain model (IMHO). I wish Evernote had stayed small and tightly focused on a personal product.
Unfortunately, it's hard to sell to individuals compared to businesses, and so that's where their focus went once they had VC money driving the ship.
In addition to what other posters said, there are opportunity and maintenance costs. Building features for use-cases other than mine puts me in the position of wondering whether my use-case is part of the long term vision for the product. I want a note taking app that strives to improve at capturing quick notes. A document collaboration tool that happens to work pretty well for capturing quick notes is less likely to satisfy me long term.
Most EVERNOTE users wanted it? I sincerely doubt that even 20% of Evernote users want that.
People that want a collaborative Docs app already have Google Docs. Evernote is mostly a "digital cabinet". It's where notes and documents go to die (in a good way).
I've used the collaborative feature in google docs only a few times even tho i write google docs like daily. most docs are authored by 1 person. the side comments, however, are invaluable
I agree and disagree. I agree with you because I think they ruined a perfectly good product by trying to turn it into a "collaboration tool" that they could sell big corporate contracts for. On the other hand, I think collaborative editing could have been integrated seamlessly into the product without ruining or even changing the single-player experience.
"Collaborative editing" is table stakes for a modern note editor because even in a single user scenario you will have the same user editing the same note from multiple devices with different levels of connectivity. The product needs a reputation that it will not lose its user's edits, nor will it make annoying branch-style merge conflicts. To do this right you have to treat the other device as an almost-adversarial actor. Unless you want "glitchy" to be in the first sentence people use to describe you.
To note, Figma use something inspired by but not quite CRDTs:
> Figma isn't using true CRDTs though. CRDTs are designed for decentralized systems where there is no single central authority to decide what the final state should be. There is some unavoidable performance and memory overhead with doing this. Since Figma is centralized (our server is the central authority), we can simplify our system by removing this extra overhead and benefit from a faster and leaner implementation.
> It’s also worth noting that Figma's data structure isn't a single CRDT. Instead it's inspired by multiple separate CRDTs and uses them in combination to create the final data structure that represents a Figma document.
I have this minset too, but I have one use case for sharing EN notes: when I write articles or short posts which needed to be approved or get an editor touch. I may use Google Docs for it, but there are too many downsides with them compared to EN.
I agree about the general anti social feature sentiment.
Collaborative editing makes sense for business users (taking meeting notes) and not much for individuals. That said, the tech that enables collaborative editing is kinda the same that allows solid sync and picking up your note taking session on a different device seconds after you put down another, which is something individuals do benefit from.
I like being able to go between my laptop and desktop very fast. Currently with Obsidian and using git for sync it kinda sucks a bit as if I am not careful I get merge conflicts.
I disagree. It even makes sense in a personal environment where I want to collaborate with my wife for example: shared to do lists, shopping lists we edit concurrently, shared ideas for vacations, packing lists, ideas for date nights, important phone numbers in regards to our kids, places and bars we've been to and would recommend to friends and visitors, etc etc.
We regularly collaborate on this stuff and for our intents and purposes, apple notes provides all we need
The thing I learned was that maybe a small successful app or service can just be a small successful app or service and not have to grow indefinitely. At some point it seemed like Evernote became obsessed with growing the revenue / business and not making a better product.
Regarding #1, this is now an often touted recommendation, even by folks like Joel Spolsky whom I greatly admire, but I'm not sure it's the right lesson. For example, I know that Google (at least in the 00s) rewrote huge, major pieces of their infrastructure multiple times and did so successfully. While I agree that broadcasting out a message of "We're going to stop the world and add no new features until we do a ground-up rewrite" is a bad idea, perhaps other lessons could be:
1. Don't write code that's such a spaghetti mess in the first place that you feel the need to throw your hands up and say "nothing can be done except a rewrite".
2. If you do need to do a major rewrite, make sure you have the ability to staff two teams - one doing the rewrite and another maintaining and adding new features to the existing product.
3. Kinda related to number one, but if you have well-organized code to begin with I find it's much easier to do a major rewrite in "sections" (though there are obviously difficulties with this approach).
> rewrote huge, major pieces of their infrastructure multiple times and did so successfully
I think that's different from a user facing rewrite. I suspect while Google did its infrastructure rewrites, users didn't notice a difference. Additionally, Google probably had the resources to continue delivering features to users while the infrastructure was being developed.
The problem with a front end rewrite is (a) things might break and users will notice, and (b) it's hard to deliver new features to users while the front end app itself is being rewritten.
Google isn't the only example here. Heck, just look at the transition from Classic MacOS to OS X. I definitely think Apple would have been dead long ago if they said "A rewrite is too expensive/risky, let's just incrementally improve Classic MacOS".
I guess my point is that there are right ways and wrong ways to do ground-up rewrites, and the fact that a lot of people do them the wrong way shouldn't mean the lesson should be to never do them.
Replacing one mature operating system with another, which itself was based on one even more mature, and adding stuff is not quite a rewrite. That was more like how Microsoft moved NT into its consumer OS. It was a bit of a mess but had a clear payoff once everything was updated or obsoleted. NT and BSD were both battle-hardened long before anyone thought to put them in consumer systems.
Apple actually tried to rewrite the classic OS from scratch with the Copland project and it failed (at enormous cost). OS X was not a rewrite-from-scratch since they acquired an already working OS from Next. The had to add compatibility layers (which was in itself a major undertaking) but they didn't write the OS from scratch.
4. If you're going to do the rewrite, don't take many years working on it, just to release a broken product missing lots of core features.
5. If you're releasing a broken product missing core features, don't take many YEARS after release to un-brake your product and build some of the missing features again.
Spolskys point back then was that you couldn't stop the world, do nothing for two years and then come back with your rewritten product.
It was not that you couldn't rewrite part of the product here and there over time, and end up with something that is only the same as the original product in the way the greek ship was.
I think number 1 could be done, but not like Evernote did.
It's been what? 3 years since they released their javascript app, and they still didn't rewrite some important old features. Just last week we got back the option to start writing a note in the title instead of the body.
3 years!
I could write an entire Evernote competitor from scratch in 3 years, as a single developer (as a javascript app, not as multiple native apps).
And they STILL don't have reliable note-synching.
It took them too long, and their app is too crappy. But a GOOD rewrite would have worked just fine.
A rewrite is not the same as a writing a similar app from scratch.
You need to worry about deciding what functionality to preserve, what to change, and what to throw away. Most rebuilds either fail because they skip this step and the result is inadequate for the job, or they do this step and get bogged down in the minutiae of locking down requirements, digging into edge cases, and stakeholder management.
It is much harder to rewrite an existing product since you have to retain compatibility. If the old version of the app was crap then presumably the persistent data structures are also crap, but you can't discard them. So you end up building a compatibility layer or migration process, but in the end you have to support the same general data model as the old version.
I adopted Evernote for its ability to synchronize my checklists and notes across all devices. Collaborating with others was not an initial feature IIRC (?)
> 1) There is almost never a case for a total ground up rewrite of your core product. Just don’t do it.
I've espoused this before, but I've come around to moderating my take on this.
"Almost never" is an exaggeration. I agree that they "almost never" work, but that's not the same as there being no case (there's a difference between "should not have done" and "should have done differently".
After many years of seeing both play out (rewrites and decided-not-to-rewrites) I'd edit this adage to: "there is almost never a case to rewrite yourself" (for the individual) or "there is almost never a case to get the same team to rewrite" (for management).
I'm not saying that engineers can't learn from their own mistakes but if you wrote the software & you think it needs a scratch rewrite rather than a refactor, you're unlikely to have learnt enough within that gap of time to make the rewrite significantly better than a refactor.
The other reason for failure outside of the original architect repeating their same mistakes 2nd time around is outsourcing the rewrite. Wholesale outsourcing is an unbelievably inefficient & failure-prone way to build in-house software.
My moderated version: you are almost never going to do better at meeting the same goals with a full rewrite. Even when there is a good case for it, it is unlikely to work out.
> you think it needs a scratch rewrite rather than a refactor, you're unlikely to have learnt enough within that gap of time to make the rewrite significantly better than a refactor.
Relentless Refactoring replaces the ship piece by piece while it's under way. If you are effective at it, you can effectively (both definitions) rewrite the entire app with few people being any the wiser.
If you are not good at decomposing a problem into digestible, coherent steps, then you are also lousy at Relentless Refactoring. If you can't decompose the problem, your top-down rewrite is statistically guaranteed to fail. Someone somewhere will get lucky, accidentally beating 1:4 odds over and over for 50 failure points, but that person will probably not be you.
The people who can Relentlessly Refactor don't need to ask for a top-down rewrite. They just get down to doing it. Therefore most of the people who ask for one are incapable of taking advantage of such permission.
Ultimately, the only people who ask for a top-down rewrite are the people who don't deserve it. They believe in do-overs instead of doing the hard work of removing obstacles. They believe in the Second System (without the attendant Syndrome), not in observing and adapting to new information as it becomes available. They have, in essence, trained themselves to continue to misbehave in the face of new wisdom. They will repeat that behavior during the rewrite.
I enjoy Relentess Refactoring as much as the next guy, but one dimension here is that it is much easier to do in a headless app (or in the backend) than in an app with a major UI. At some point there must be a complete switch from the old UI to the new UI, and that step is extremely complex. It also invites a big rewrite, in an almost irresistible way - "since we'll change the UI, let's just do it from the ground up".
The main lesson of the CI/CD era is that pain is information and ignoring it until later just makes things worse.
"Let's replace the whole UI at once" and "Let's replace the whole app at once" are bandaid-ripping activities, and the point of ripping off a bandaid is to get it over with before your pain receptors have a chance to tell you what an asshole you are right now. I'm sure most people have at least one experience, of their own or of someone they know, where ripping off the bandaid took a chunk of skin with it, possibly creating a bigger wound than the bandage originally covered.
There is an important caveat here - sometimes the original is rough not because you didn't know how to do it better, but because you were emphasizing speed and flexibility e.g. very early stage startup and you don't really understand the product here.
A successful rewrite of a core product requires a mix of peers: Old blood, who know the wins and sins of the past, and new blood who'll bring a fresh perspective.
Was there any other company doing real time collaboration in 2008 (when Evernote launched)? IIRC that predates even Google docs, so I wouldn't consider that snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
Agreed on point 3 for modern editors in 2022, as real-time collaboration and collaborative editing are table stakes today if you want to compete. But to give EN credit, when they launched (web 2008?) this was not the case, and a complete rewrite on point 1 could very well be necessary when the new CEO took over recently.
We started with OT [1] in mind for V1 of Taskade [2] with the intention to make our editor collaborative, but it was still a bumpy road before we were able to iterate on the product and speed up our dev cycle,. It continues to be a challenge to support the various use cases and customers, as improvements for offline editing, cross-device syncing, and recovery never ends.
This problem isn't fully solved and there are no perfect out of box solutions.
I used to work for a company that rented a portion of Evernote's HQ, in Redwood City. Nice office and location. Evernote eventually recovered and kicked us out.
Just my personal piece of nostalgia.
Wow, that's quite the downsizing! Evernote at one point occupied all 5 floors of that building and their new HQ looks like a single level over retail shops. I guess it makes sense with the move to remote work.
I loved Evernote and was a paying subscriber right up until they changed their TOS to let their employees read all my notes to work on ad targeting. They backpedaled after a while but trust was lost, I cancelled immediately. I have no sympathy for their failure.
Similar experience here, it was a series of changes, none of which made my experience better and a lot of dodgy privacy affecting TOS updates that caused me to can my paid account.
They never really tried to re-engage me either, and have just continued on since then with a bare bones series of notes while I keep the critical stuff elsewhere.
Shame evernote was the first killer 'cloud native' app for me, the thing I couldn't do without once I had it.
I paid off and on through the years but for me it was when they started selling physical products and advertising them in the app. I can't remember what they were. T-shirts? Mousepads?
That's horrible. It's the reason I'm still somewhat suspicious of a simplistic note taking app (Colornote) I use on my android. I oftentimes get the sneaky feeling it might be sending my (sometimes highly private) notes to a server somewhere in China, but the app is so simple to use that no matter how many time I decide to, I simply can't get myself to wipe and uninstall it
The only reason I've stuck with Evernote is because it scans all of my old paperwork and lets me search by the OCRed text. Without it, so many years of personal data would be locked in images I'd never have time to eyeball.
Please someone release me from this foul daemon by suggesting an alternative with this key feature.
If you port over those images to Apple photos, you can literally search the for the text right inside the photos app. It works pretty accurately for all printed text ime.
Evernote came preinstalled
On my second android phone, I think a Galaxy Note 2.
It could not be removed and demanded to be allowed to update itself constantly.
I’ll never know whether it was any good, because it annoyed me from the word go.
If you’re a cool, tech-crowd oriented tool, for god’s sake don’t let Samsung install you as a ‘system’ app…
The End of an Error for the world's most disappointing note-taking app.
I think part of the struggle here is that no two people can agree on what ailed them.
From lack of innovation for years, to an incomprehensibly bad rich text editor interface that broke all established conventions, to 0-60 from "zero monetization" to "monetize every time you even think about clicking a button", to a ground-up rewrite that put it on part with it's counterparts from 2012, etc.
It's almost like it's failure was overdetermined.
Fascinating case study in a journey from ubiquity to obscurity.
This is going to be a disaster - Bending Spoons is not a good actor:
“let’s talk about Bending Spoons’ business model. The basic concept is very simple:
- Find a solid app that someone else built and buy it from them (see Splice (acquired from GoPro) and 30 Day Fitness)
- Optimize the monetization of said app (by implementing from scratch or fine-tuning existing subscriptions), thereby driving higher lifetime value (LTV)
- Take that higher LTV and use it to bid on expensive ad inventory (on Google, Facebook, Apple Search) where you can acquire more users (aka drive more downloads) - i.e. leverage performance marketing for growth
- Convert those new downloads to paying users
- Massively ramp revenues and cash flow by combining the new users + the better monetization
- Use the new cash flow - plus the debt from those lovely Italian banks - to fund the next acquisition
- Lather, rinse, repeat
There is absolutely nothing wrong with this business model. What differentiates Bending Spoons, though, is how they do it.
Remini - Bending Spoons’ new app that the press is gushing over - is $10 a WEEK. And Splice, the app that started it all? That’ll set you back a cool $5/week.
Does anyone really think it’s appropriate to pay $10 a week for a photo editing app?”
“There is absolutely nothing wrong with this business model… What differentiates Bending Spoons, though, is how they do it.
Remini - Bending Spoons’ new app that the press is gushing over - is $10 a WEEK. And Splice, the app that started it all? That’ll set you back a cool $5/week.”
In short, they buy apps, add aggressive and practically exploitative monetization, and ride the revenue stream until it dries up.
The issue is that people are at least somewhat "locked in" to whatever apps they're already using, so sudden major price increases are a bit extortionate: Either you pay us a bunch of money, or lose access to your data/workflow.
Prior to acquisition, one could reasonably expect Evernote not to announce sudden, shocking price changes, because they were trying to build a long-term brand. Now, suddenly, that's not the case.
This is made worse when the app doesn't do a good job of letting you export your data in the first place.
> Italian app developer Bending Spoons has raised more than 340 million euros ($327 million) from investors including Hollywood actor Ryan Reynolds and Kerry Trainor, the former CEO of video streaming platform Vimeo.
> Bending Spoons, whose apps include popular video editing tool Splice and Remini, an image editor based on artificial intelligence technology, said the money could be used for acquisitions.
> A source close to the company said former Google Executive Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt was among the investors. Other backers included Italian banks Intesa Sanpaolo and Banco BPM.
None of what you wrote makes them sound like a "bad actor". All of these are good things for a failing business. Why shouldn't a photo editing app be $10/week? If you don't think you are getting that much value out of it then don't subscribe. Yet there is probably a group of power users who will gladly pay that amount. Evernote needs to be catering to them, not the millions of users who will endlessly complain but never spend an actual dollar on their services.
Completely different type of applications, I remember an old thread on twitter about one useless wallpapers app being sold for that kind of money. And it was not the only one. It's a business model.
Not sure what "useless wallpaper" app you are talking about but I just took a look at https://bendingspoons.com/products and everything there seems pretty useful and well designed.
That minuscule subset is well designed, yes, the rest decent BUT some of them with in my opinion predatory pricing in many cases, $9/wk to download some wallpaper or some sleep noises app. But yes, they are not the only ones doing it.
If you are interested search on the appstore among the boatload of apps they have.
Tricking users into these high priced subscriptions is a tried and true strategy in the app store. The press caught on late (2018) but it was happening from the moment apple opened up subscriptions to all developers in June 2016. Started with crappy coloring book apps and then spread like wildfire from there. Bending Spoons is simply the evolution of that.
I wouldn't say "fraudolent", no laws are being broken here.
And I'm not trying to be snarky with this, but I'm not doing your research for you on a well known issue of the App Store. I'm ok if you keep being not aware of it.
This specific company has a decade long history of being in the grey zone in regard to App Store rules. Like many others, yes, but let's not normalize it.
if you browse Bending Spoons' site on archive.org you'll see that a few years ago they indeed sold wallpaper apps and keyboard apps for debatable prices.
They had even more apps, but most of them were removed entirely from their portfolio, and some ended up in the account of Easy Tiger Apps, LLC [1], including a 4,99€/week step counting app that is a blatant rip off of a more famous one
They are the abuser that benefits from the lock-in. Evernote has gradually made it harder and harder to export (50 notes per try, not everything makes it out) and now they exit to these guys.
It’s the worst of the post-VC models. Seems like they have been positioning for this for a while.
Ahh, good to know. I jumped ship with a full ENEX export to Joplin about 4 years ago. Haven't looked back since then, although my needs are simple, not power user-like.
I see this complaint a lot and it never really made any sense to me. If something is a scam it has to do with the delivery or the advertisement of the product. But the pricing? No. It is not possible for the price of something by itself to render something a scam. If it costs too much it costs too much, this does not imply malfeasance on the part of the seller.
I agree - it’s about how the developer communicates (or in this case obfuscates) the price to the user. Check out the substack link and you’ll see screenshots of how Bending Spoons does it (it’s highly misleading).
Generally I’m of the opinion that consumers are responsible for their own choices; but Apple has allowed bad actors to exploit the availability of weekly subscriptions and prey on suspecting users.
I disagree that "$9.99/week" below a continue button leading to a purchase dialog is in any way misleading.
I looked at the screenshot before reading the surrounding justification, and the understanding I got was that continuing would charge me $9.99 on a weekly basis until canceled (which would also show up in the purchase confirmation). It turns out that is exactly what happens.
So who exactly is being misled here? People who are functionally literate enough to use a smart phone and download an app but illiterate enough to not know what $9.99 a week means? I don't think that person exists. Maybe children but they shouldn't be allowed to sign up for subscriptions without parental oversight anyways.
This is a common response. unfortunately it doesn’t hold water: the average lifetime of a paid user of Splice is somewhere in the 7-10 week range (source is confidential).
What super users of editing products do you know that only stay 10 weeks?
None. What’s actually happening is Bending Spoons is exploiting the App Store’s ease of payment and dark patterns to trick unsuspecting users into enrolling in a super high priced subscription without their knowledge.
I've never had an iPhone so I'm not familiar with these dark patterns. Are you saying it's actually possible to get an Apple user to subscribe without clearly displaying the payment amount or frequency?
> Are you saying it's actually possible to get an Apple user to subscribe without clearly displaying the payment amount or frequency?
Both are displayed by a system-controlled modal but even with that there are many stories of people not realizing/noticing the frequency. Apple has forced developers to place the frequency more prominently on their info screens but it's only helped so much. I have a hard time seeing a legitimate use for a weekly subscription other than to trick users. I almost think that Apple shouldn't allow that frequency or they should have extra vetting/restrictions/alerts for users. I know Apple sends out an email before they charge a recurring subscription (or at least I've gotten them for my yearly subscriptions) but maybe a push notification on the phone/tablet (that you could disable per-app) would be a another way to help prevent this type of fraud/scam.
Came here to write something similar, you did it better.
I will never accept that selling wallpaper apps or something with the same level of complexity for hundred of dollars every year is an acceptable business model.
> Does anyone really think it’s appropriate to pay $10 a week for a photo editing app?
Apparently yes, otherwise it would have just been a failed experiment and revert back to $X/month
Even if they charged $100/week I don't see how it makes them a bad actor. If the pricing/cancellation policies are deceptive then sure, but that is irrelevant to the price.
on MacOS/iOS, Bear was the best note taking app I found. If you need cross platform capability and/or want free and open source I like Joplin a lot as well.
I used Evernote for a decade before switching to Apple Notes a couple years back. It took some getting used to but now it feels seamless. I'd highly recommend it if you don't need anything too fancy.
I switched to Joplin a couple of years back and don't regret the move. Was able to import all my Evernote stuff as well, which was one deciding factor.
Thanks for sharing! The state of application development is rather sad, that screenshot just conveys a feeling of speed and efficiency to me that is lacking in modern software.
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[ 28.0 ms ] story [ 789 ms ] threadWho the heck are Bending Spoons?
As an aside, their site is also aggravatingly self-absorbed, at least as it seems to me. Copy about how "we create our own cutting-edge technologies" and "Impossible. Maybe." just hurts to read when they're talking about a 30 day fitness app.
[0] https://bendingspoons.com/products
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoon_bending
Statements like "Are you ready to come join us in the Spooniverse? We saved you a seat." also make it sound a little like it's a cult.
With that being said, their goals seem admirable and they are scoring pretty well on some employee satisfaction inquiries, so it's perfectly possible that they are actually living up to their ambitions. A fitness app might not seem like a lot, but they may just be working their way up to something bigger.
I use swiftscan because I've been using it a long time (same reason you use evernote) but the Notes scanner is pretty effective if Notes works for you.
I guess I could just try it out with a subsection of notes.
Time for the giant migration!
It took me a while to figure out an alternative for this because so many of the note tools I had seen were focused on just written notes and not the PDF file use case.
I tried self-hosting Paperless, but that seemed like a lot of work too. When we're talking about my document archive here it's a lot of important files and I don't want to be my own SRE just to save myself $100 or so a year.
The best I have now is I upgraded my scanner to a new Fujitsu that OCRs and pushes the files into Dropbox, and paid Dropbox plans have full text search.
I use my ScanSnap with OCR turned on and haven't had any problems, but I'm always looking for what will replace it when it finally died (still going strong at about 10 years or so, I think!).
https://www.fujitsu.com/global/products/computing/peripheral...
I had been using the S1300M before that, which had held up since 2010 for me.
Thanks for sharing the model numbers, too. I'll be sure to check out the newer models!
I understand if you already use syncthing for other stuff, but having the power of git for my notes is quite nice.
I'd prefer flat MD files and a fairly decent GUI. Joplin has zero hold on me and this is a great thing.
I fired up EN at one point recently. Wanted to add a note in a certain category and it took me like 20 seconds to get to the point where I can type in the actual note text. It wasn't even connected to the internet and still the app was slow. 5-10 second pauses for something that should be done in a millisecond. Useless popups.
WTF were they thinking?
I mean, I know exactly what happened. Everyone who cared about having a good app has left the company by this point.
Anyways, I really like Joplin. Android app works fine. Desktop app works fine. It even has a TUI mode. Server side for self-hosting (webdav) was pretty straightforward to set up.
It used to just get out of the way and let me take notes in my browser with the comfort of knowing I could get them from anywhere later.
Now it's this horrible, janky app that tries to do too many things, shoves constant feature popups in my face, and isn't very good for taking notes.
I used it constantly 10 years ago. I don't use it at all today. I just loaded it up again to see if I'm missing anything -
It takes nearly 10 seconds to load on a developer machine on a gigabit internet connection.
It immediately asks for permission to send me popups
It tries to show me 7 different features on the home screen (notes/scratchpad/pinned notes/recently captured/notebooks/tags/shortcuts) instead of just fucking showing me my last note.
It takes multiple clicks to start a new note every time.
---
Basically - it's now worse than a physical notepad in basically every way.
Product development stalled a long time ago though. I do hope this thing stays in the air, cause I got a lot of notes in there.
I've been using Evernote for a while now, and I just don't get the pace of their development. Their changes seem almost incremental and take forever.
Do I have a loyalty club membership at that one hotel I stayed in halfway around the world 15 years ago, when I had a different email address? Evernote is the only place I can find out.
As soon as there’s a dead simple migration path to OneNote, I’ll have $50/year more spending money.
Edit: Apparently he posted this on HN 8 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30521545
I ended up moving over to Obsidian, and while I am not entirely happy with it, it's at least better than what Evernote has become.
I'm being so picky because I used Evernote for ten years and could conceivably use my next choice even longer. I can't believe I used Evernote for over a decade and used it to create thousands of notes. What a shame they destroyed it.
Then Evernote proceeded to cease all feature development on the main app. They where releasing food apps while the main product grew stale. Instead of making Evernote incredibly powerful, they didn't touch it and people left any of the dozen competitors that exist today.
However, their constant UI changes were maddening. The breaking point for me, which resulted in me now using several different competitors until I settle on one, was they decided that your cursor should start in the body for a new note instead of in the title field. I get that searching is supposed to replace every other single form of organization, but note titles are important in their interface, and actually really vital when searching! They got way out over their skis, discouraging you from adding titles when their own UI makes it a nightmare to have a lot of untitled notes. And it really was an effective nudge — after the change I struggled to consistently add titles even though titles are important for my workflow. I struggled between having a mess of untitled notes or applying constant discipline to fight the nudge, and I finally gave up.
That was just the straw that broke the camel's back. There were so many other fiddly UI changes that constantly forced me to learn new habits. I would gladly pay $30 per month (not kidding) just to have a version of Evernote frozen in time. I remember loving it for years starting around 2012 or so, then a few years of horrible quality problems that I wouldn't want to revisit, and then it was fine except for constant annoying changes.
I'll be paying my subscription until I settle on a replacement and figure out a workable export/import process to transition my notes to it (which I expect to be a struggle, based on the tools I've tried.)
Curious, would you have been willing to become an investor in Evernote to avoid this acquisition? And if so, what order of magnitude? I'm curious why they didn't just do a crowdfunding campaign.
Except one: speed. Evernote is dog slow, whereas Apple Notes is fast. This is what killed my reason for subscribing to Evernote. Though it has far fewer features, I can press CMD+N and start jotting down my ideas/things I have to remember.
I have no objection to paying for good tools, but they are tools and must support me in what I am trying to accomplish.
Reminders has been perpetually flakey, particularly around new OS releases and if your iPhone/Watch/iPad/Mac are in different states of latest vs non-latest OS.
Personally I think the best thing the new owners could do would be to dig up the pre-EN10 codebase, get it compiling again, and make that available. I would resubscribe in a heartbeat.
My one gripe with Notes is that the search function really isn't all that great. Maybe I need to force it to reindex or something. I've found many cases where it doesn't find a note by a word that I know it contains. I really don't get why it seems that nearly all search functions are terrible in any given app. It would be nice if Apple improved the search for Notes, and it shouldn't be that hard to do given that it's just using SQLite under the hood.
Not to mention that it avoids me onboarding to some unprofitable note taking tool that will languish until it gets stripped for parts.
There was a midtwit meme about productivity hackers vs "I just use apple notes" guys like this too haha.
edit: HN won't let me reply so...
That sure is a lot of trouble just to grab a copy of my notes. This is something I do often enough that I don't want to have to go through two MFA prompts, and then another when the process is done. Not acceptable.
[1] https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/blob/m...
Flow is, open the app, go to bookmarks->notes (this is a shortcut I set up), choose a folder (I have a bunch for different things), then menu button->new file, enter a title, and use the file explorer's own text editor. It's not as quick as opening Google Keep and tapping plus, but at least I know I can trust it.
[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=pl.mkexplorer....
"Make them use it on iCloud.com" is a non-starter, I don't wanna inflict a shitty web-app on them after fleeing EN mostly because it turned into a shitty web-app crammed into an app container.
1. Be accessible an up to date 2. Easily searchable, and to do so quickly 3. In the rare case that I need to take a note, it is best if I can do so easily and have those go back to my computer quickly and painlessly so I can do what needs doing to get that into the system better.
Org-mode simply does not do this well in any of my experience with it. It's fine if all you're doing is taking notes on a computer, but as soon as you add a mobile device to the mix, it goes belly up for me.
* must be a native app, not a shitty web app
* must be able to run on my Mac & iThings as well as my collaborator's Windows & Android phone
* must be able to collaborate with other people
* must be able to ingest a decade of Evernote gracefully
* that includes attached images and PDFs, I make comics
* must deal with actual rich text, markdown is nice for commenting on the internet but notes need more
I don't think Simplenote really handles file attachments, so it'd be a complete no go.
The creators of the street angel graphic novel series said all of their ideas are in a google drive folder.
I'm not a fan of Microsoft, either. I've never had to swap Word documents around so that's not in my lie at all.
Evernote was on my computer, and on my phone; it's where I'd note down an idea when I had it, and since it was there I may as well just expand on it in there. When I'm doing solo comics then most of my notes in EN were collections of vague outlines, dialogue fragments, and photographs of scribbly sketchbook pages; actual writing mostly happened in Illustrator. It was easy to expand that to have a script sitting there in EN, since we were both already used to using it. Plus since EN is about keeping notebooks rather than files it's pretty nice to just have one place that holds all the various words and pictures related to getting from "some ideas we've kicked around" to "a script that I can turn into a bunch of Illustrator files on my hard drive".
This is similar to how there are a lot of programmers who do everything in Emacs. You're already there all the time, and it may not be perfectly built for this, but you can do most of what you need in it, so why not?
If you want to be totally anal about doing it The Traditional Industry Way then you can use a complex word processor template adapted from screenwriting templates and deal with rigid page counts. If you are not working as part of an assembly line with distinct separations between Writers and Editors and Pencillers and Inkers and Colorists and Letterers then your script can a pretty casual thing with simple formatting, and Evernote can handle that just fine. Or at least it could before v10 threw all performance in the toilet for that shitty Electron rewrite.
Lately I have been vaguely fiddling with using Scrivener for roughing out scripts of short pieces, and really need to get my partner on this long-brewing GN still kinda trapped in Evernote to give it a shot. If we can get a decent sync pathway to bring the .scriv files between our disparate devices then maybe my dusty Evernote notebook exports will turn into a handful of Scrivener projects, along with the scattered notes in Joplin and Apple Notes that have happened since I finally said "fuck this abusive relationship with New Evernote".
Scriviner has no collaborative features and IMHO you are making things unreasonably difficult for yourself by using the wrong tools for the job.
I've kept using Evernote "legacy" (or whatever its called, the pre electron version ) without upgrading to v10 so I don't even understand why you've created this problem for yourself if you still like Evernote.
At the time I assumed they'd actually gone under, but now I realise that that would have been the "there is no spoon" scenario.
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-evernotes-phil-libin-pla...
1) There is almost never a case for a total ground up rewrite of your core product. Just don’t do it.
2) Don’t abandon the users who made you successful in the first place. They’re the ones who advocate for you and get your foot in the door.
3) real time google docs style collaborative editing is table stakes for this software category. Build your V1 with it in mind. Otherwise you’ll have to do a rewrite later. See 1.
I think a better #3 would be: decide whether your audience is individuals or businesses, then build for that.
I want to be able to just start typing, on my phone. Instead, I have to wait for it to sync. If I am in a place with bad reception, that will take a while. It lags and freezes, all in order to support collaboration that I do not want.
I want to add pictures. I want to add links to other notes. I pay for a subscription to get bullet proof cloud backup. Sometimes I want to share notes. I don’t want to collaboratively edit my personal notes with my private thoughts and journal entries.
Evernote stopped focusing on that.
I might switch over to Muse. It was designed to be local first and uses cdrt for sync.
Unfortunately, it's hard to sell to individuals compared to businesses, and so that's where their focus went once they had VC money driving the ship.
People that want a collaborative Docs app already have Google Docs. Evernote is mostly a "digital cabinet". It's where notes and documents go to die (in a good way).
Any recommendations for good methods or good open source implementations of this that can be mined for ideas?
> Figma isn't using true CRDTs though. CRDTs are designed for decentralized systems where there is no single central authority to decide what the final state should be. There is some unavoidable performance and memory overhead with doing this. Since Figma is centralized (our server is the central authority), we can simplify our system by removing this extra overhead and benefit from a faster and leaner implementation.
> It’s also worth noting that Figma's data structure isn't a single CRDT. Instead it's inspired by multiple separate CRDTs and uses them in combination to create the final data structure that represents a Figma document.
https://www.figma.com/blog/how-figmas-multiplayer-technology...
Collaborative editing makes sense for business users (taking meeting notes) and not much for individuals. That said, the tech that enables collaborative editing is kinda the same that allows solid sync and picking up your note taking session on a different device seconds after you put down another, which is something individuals do benefit from.
I like being able to go between my laptop and desktop very fast. Currently with Obsidian and using git for sync it kinda sucks a bit as if I am not careful I get merge conflicts.
We regularly collaborate on this stuff and for our intents and purposes, apple notes provides all we need
1. Don't write code that's such a spaghetti mess in the first place that you feel the need to throw your hands up and say "nothing can be done except a rewrite".
2. If you do need to do a major rewrite, make sure you have the ability to staff two teams - one doing the rewrite and another maintaining and adding new features to the existing product.
3. Kinda related to number one, but if you have well-organized code to begin with I find it's much easier to do a major rewrite in "sections" (though there are obviously difficulties with this approach).
I think that's different from a user facing rewrite. I suspect while Google did its infrastructure rewrites, users didn't notice a difference. Additionally, Google probably had the resources to continue delivering features to users while the infrastructure was being developed.
The problem with a front end rewrite is (a) things might break and users will notice, and (b) it's hard to deliver new features to users while the front end app itself is being rewritten.
I guess my point is that there are right ways and wrong ways to do ground-up rewrites, and the fact that a lot of people do them the wrong way shouldn't mean the lesson should be to never do them.
5. If you're releasing a broken product missing core features, don't take many YEARS after release to un-brake your product and build some of the missing features again.
It was not that you couldn't rewrite part of the product here and there over time, and end up with something that is only the same as the original product in the way the greek ship was.
It's been what? 3 years since they released their javascript app, and they still didn't rewrite some important old features. Just last week we got back the option to start writing a note in the title instead of the body.
3 years!
I could write an entire Evernote competitor from scratch in 3 years, as a single developer (as a javascript app, not as multiple native apps).
And they STILL don't have reliable note-synching.
It took them too long, and their app is too crappy. But a GOOD rewrite would have worked just fine.
You need to worry about deciding what functionality to preserve, what to change, and what to throw away. Most rebuilds either fail because they skip this step and the result is inadequate for the job, or they do this step and get bogged down in the minutiae of locking down requirements, digging into edge cases, and stakeholder management.
I adopted Evernote for its ability to synchronize my checklists and notes across all devices. Collaborating with others was not an initial feature IIRC (?)
I've espoused this before, but I've come around to moderating my take on this.
"Almost never" is an exaggeration. I agree that they "almost never" work, but that's not the same as there being no case (there's a difference between "should not have done" and "should have done differently".
After many years of seeing both play out (rewrites and decided-not-to-rewrites) I'd edit this adage to: "there is almost never a case to rewrite yourself" (for the individual) or "there is almost never a case to get the same team to rewrite" (for management).
I'm not saying that engineers can't learn from their own mistakes but if you wrote the software & you think it needs a scratch rewrite rather than a refactor, you're unlikely to have learnt enough within that gap of time to make the rewrite significantly better than a refactor.
The other reason for failure outside of the original architect repeating their same mistakes 2nd time around is outsourcing the rewrite. Wholesale outsourcing is an unbelievably inefficient & failure-prone way to build in-house software.
Relentless Refactoring replaces the ship piece by piece while it's under way. If you are effective at it, you can effectively (both definitions) rewrite the entire app with few people being any the wiser.
If you are not good at decomposing a problem into digestible, coherent steps, then you are also lousy at Relentless Refactoring. If you can't decompose the problem, your top-down rewrite is statistically guaranteed to fail. Someone somewhere will get lucky, accidentally beating 1:4 odds over and over for 50 failure points, but that person will probably not be you.
The people who can Relentlessly Refactor don't need to ask for a top-down rewrite. They just get down to doing it. Therefore most of the people who ask for one are incapable of taking advantage of such permission.
Ultimately, the only people who ask for a top-down rewrite are the people who don't deserve it. They believe in do-overs instead of doing the hard work of removing obstacles. They believe in the Second System (without the attendant Syndrome), not in observing and adapting to new information as it becomes available. They have, in essence, trained themselves to continue to misbehave in the face of new wisdom. They will repeat that behavior during the rewrite.
"Let's replace the whole UI at once" and "Let's replace the whole app at once" are bandaid-ripping activities, and the point of ripping off a bandaid is to get it over with before your pain receptors have a chance to tell you what an asshole you are right now. I'm sure most people have at least one experience, of their own or of someone they know, where ripping off the bandaid took a chunk of skin with it, possibly creating a bigger wound than the bandage originally covered.
There is an important caveat here - sometimes the original is rough not because you didn't know how to do it better, but because you were emphasizing speed and flexibility e.g. very early stage startup and you don't really understand the product here.
[see also, ship the prototype problem]
We started with OT [1] in mind for V1 of Taskade [2] with the intention to make our editor collaborative, but it was still a bumpy road before we were able to iterate on the product and speed up our dev cycle,. It continues to be a challenge to support the various use cases and customers, as improvements for offline editing, cross-device syncing, and recovery never ends.
This problem isn't fully solved and there are no perfect out of box solutions.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_transformation
[2] https://www.taskade.com
(e.g. when simultaneously editing, text will randomly disappear from one or both writers)
[0] https://walkingredwoodcity.com/?s=Evernote&submit=Search
They never really tried to re-engage me either, and have just continued on since then with a bare bones series of notes while I keep the critical stuff elsewhere.
Shame evernote was the first killer 'cloud native' app for me, the thing I couldn't do without once I had it.
https://www.aivanet.com/2013/09/evernote-gets-physical-why-a...
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bending-spoons-raises-340-mil...
So fund-to-acquire?
That sucks.
Please someone release me from this foul daemon by suggesting an alternative with this key feature.
I’ll never know whether it was any good, because it annoyed me from the word go.
If you’re a cool, tech-crowd oriented tool, for god’s sake don’t let Samsung install you as a ‘system’ app…
I think part of the struggle here is that no two people can agree on what ailed them.
From lack of innovation for years, to an incomprehensibly bad rich text editor interface that broke all established conventions, to 0-60 from "zero monetization" to "monetize every time you even think about clicking a button", to a ground-up rewrite that put it on part with it's counterparts from 2012, etc.
It's almost like it's failure was overdetermined.
Fascinating case study in a journey from ubiquity to obscurity.
not sure if that is autocorrect, or a joke, or autocorrect making a pun from "end of an era" with "error" given the sentiment.
either way, it's funny!
“let’s talk about Bending Spoons’ business model. The basic concept is very simple:
- Find a solid app that someone else built and buy it from them (see Splice (acquired from GoPro) and 30 Day Fitness)
- Optimize the monetization of said app (by implementing from scratch or fine-tuning existing subscriptions), thereby driving higher lifetime value (LTV)
- Take that higher LTV and use it to bid on expensive ad inventory (on Google, Facebook, Apple Search) where you can acquire more users (aka drive more downloads) - i.e. leverage performance marketing for growth
- Convert those new downloads to paying users
- Massively ramp revenues and cash flow by combining the new users + the better monetization
- Use the new cash flow - plus the debt from those lovely Italian banks - to fund the next acquisition
- Lather, rinse, repeat
There is absolutely nothing wrong with this business model. What differentiates Bending Spoons, though, is how they do it.
Remini - Bending Spoons’ new app that the press is gushing over - is $10 a WEEK. And Splice, the app that started it all? That’ll set you back a cool $5/week.
Does anyone really think it’s appropriate to pay $10 a week for a photo editing app?”
https://open.substack.com/pub/impassionedmoderate/p/ryan-rey...
“There is absolutely nothing wrong with this business model… What differentiates Bending Spoons, though, is how they do it.
Remini - Bending Spoons’ new app that the press is gushing over - is $10 a WEEK. And Splice, the app that started it all? That’ll set you back a cool $5/week.”
In short, they buy apps, add aggressive and practically exploitative monetization, and ride the revenue stream until it dries up.
And what's with the snark about Italian banks?
Prior to acquisition, one could reasonably expect Evernote not to announce sudden, shocking price changes, because they were trying to build a long-term brand. Now, suddenly, that's not the case.
This is made worse when the app doesn't do a good job of letting you export your data in the first place.
> Italian app developer Bending Spoons has raised more than 340 million euros ($327 million) from investors including Hollywood actor Ryan Reynolds and Kerry Trainor, the former CEO of video streaming platform Vimeo.
> Bending Spoons, whose apps include popular video editing tool Splice and Remini, an image editor based on artificial intelligence technology, said the money could be used for acquisitions.
> A source close to the company said former Google Executive Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt was among the investors. Other backers included Italian banks Intesa Sanpaolo and Banco BPM.
Paxys. You probably don't have a clear idea of what kind apps he was referring to. There are no power users in this case.
Tricking users into these high priced subscriptions is a tried and true strategy in the app store. The press caught on late (2018) but it was happening from the moment apple opened up subscriptions to all developers in June 2016. Started with crappy coloring book apps and then spread like wildfire from there. Bending Spoons is simply the evolution of that.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/15/sneaky-subscriptions-are-p...
This specific company has a decade long history of being in the grey zone in regard to App Store rules. Like many others, yes, but let's not normalize it.
[1]: https://apps.apple.com/tz/developer/easy-tiger-apps-llc/id57...
It’s the worst of the post-VC models. Seems like they have been positioning for this for a while.
Generally I’m of the opinion that consumers are responsible for their own choices; but Apple has allowed bad actors to exploit the availability of weekly subscriptions and prey on suspecting users.
I looked at the screenshot before reading the surrounding justification, and the understanding I got was that continuing would charge me $9.99 on a weekly basis until canceled (which would also show up in the purchase confirmation). It turns out that is exactly what happens.
So who exactly is being misled here? People who are functionally literate enough to use a smart phone and download an app but illiterate enough to not know what $9.99 a week means? I don't think that person exists. Maybe children but they shouldn't be allowed to sign up for subscriptions without parental oversight anyways.
What super users of editing products do you know that only stay 10 weeks?
None. What’s actually happening is Bending Spoons is exploiting the App Store’s ease of payment and dark patterns to trick unsuspecting users into enrolling in a super high priced subscription without their knowledge.
I've never had an iPhone so I'm not familiar with these dark patterns. Are you saying it's actually possible to get an Apple user to subscribe without clearly displaying the payment amount or frequency?
Both are displayed by a system-controlled modal but even with that there are many stories of people not realizing/noticing the frequency. Apple has forced developers to place the frequency more prominently on their info screens but it's only helped so much. I have a hard time seeing a legitimate use for a weekly subscription other than to trick users. I almost think that Apple shouldn't allow that frequency or they should have extra vetting/restrictions/alerts for users. I know Apple sends out an email before they charge a recurring subscription (or at least I've gotten them for my yearly subscriptions) but maybe a push notification on the phone/tablet (that you could disable per-app) would be a another way to help prevent this type of fraud/scam.
I will never accept that selling wallpaper apps or something with the same level of complexity for hundred of dollars every year is an acceptable business model.
I’ve honestly lost hope in Evernote and just kept using it out of laziness to migrate, but I don’t like what the future holds.
Apparently yes, otherwise it would have just been a failed experiment and revert back to $X/month
Even if they charged $100/week I don't see how it makes them a bad actor. If the pricing/cancellation policies are deceptive then sure, but that is irrelevant to the price.
Bear should have been ported to Android and Windows/Linux(browser version?) years ago.
> And enterprises of great pith and moment, > With this regard, their currents turn awry, > And lose the name of action.
Hamlet, William Shakespeare
I was employee #3 at original Evernote, when we were just implementing that brilliant idea.
Here is the photo of pretty much precise moment when Evernote was born: https://notes.sciter.com/2017/09/11/motivation-and-a-bit-of-...
What a memory, I really miss that atmosphere ...