I've been meaning to move off of Evernote because their OSX client is just slow as all hell. Are there any alternatives, aside from something like Dropbox? Evernote's OCR implementation was/is really useful.
I've found Google Drive on Desktop/Android is pretty good. You get all the OT goodness with .gdoc and Quickoffice (from Google) is free for .docx editing.
I agree. I've had multiple friends swear by Evernote and every time I tried, I'd get a few hours into it and find some annoying limitation. DevonThink gives me everything I need. They're a bit behind on having a good sync solution for iOS, but they've been actively working on it for a long time now and it should be coming soon.
I use DevonThink as well and love it... but I also don't need to sync between multiple devices. All of my dissertation sources, notes, files, etc are in DevonThink - love the tagging and search features, folder levels, etc. I'm able to quickly find, navigate, and even discover relations I didn't discover before. Also, multiple file types and I now have the PDF -> OCR stuff for older documents. I keep my footnotes/endnotes/bibliographic info in Zotero.
Not to sound like [something negative], but I really like pen and paper. I carry around a notebook and a few different pens because I like to draw, and because jotting notes down is kinda fun in its own way.
Oh ... it just doesn't work right. If you type in two words, instead of giving you fewer results it gives you more results as it matches separate instances of the single words in the query ... pretty dumb actually.
Onenote comes to mind, and it does OCR on client side so is quite fast. Also does audio transcription which can be enabled (Disabled by default). Also has version control built in, so you can you can look at older versions and do manual merges (if required)
Word 2011 (OS X) offers OneNote-like functionality if you choose the Notebook view. Defaults to list, auto-headings, and it even lets you doodle in the margins. That's all I ever did in OneNote, so I'm not sure how feature complete Word 2011 is in comparison.
About a year ago I tried it for receipts due to the OCR but at least half the scanned images got lost (some in transit, some after they had been viewed in evernote). Shame as I'd have have gone for at least one paid account if it had worked.
If speed is of importance, I would second the SimpleNote suggestions. You might also want to take a look at Notational Velocity and its fork, nvALT - the speed of launching, searching and creating notes is unbelievable, and both apps can sync with the SimpleNote service.
I remember the day a year and a half ago when I went out apartment hunting in a new town, looking at my notes on apartments in Evernote's Android app. It was a complex note, with lots of text in deep hierarchies of bullet points. At one point I tried to edit it, and after a few visual glitches, the text of the note disappeared. Then it synced, and there was no undo or history option in the app as far as I could tell.
I was able to get the note back by driving back to my hotel, retrieving my laptop where the note was cached, and opening Evernote while offline to ensure it wouldn't sync and wipe out that copy. Pretty frustrating. I've learned some tough lessons about cloud services and free stuff.
I'm hoping someone does a cloud service for note syncing using a code control back-end. I would really love to be able to look at the changes and rollback a change or delete.
+1 for Orgmode. Its wealth of features is astonishing. And it just gets better and better; the community supporting it and driving ongoing development is fanatically committed. Bonus: it comes with a pretty good text editor. :)
Microsoft already has. OneNote supports page versioning, edit history, and deleted pages go into a 'Recycling Bin' for 30 days before being deleted permanently. If you sign into OneNote with a Microsoft account, you get auto-syncing to SkyDrive.
They also have pretty snazzy Android and iOS apps for OneNote, although IIRC the mobile apps require an Office 365 subscription.
Out of everything that comes out of Redmond, OneNote is definitely one of the best consumer products.
Though OneNote lacks the integration of Evernote. Evernote is integrated with many services and apps (IFTTT, Drafts, many other writing apps) which OneNote lacks.
Just wondering. A simple git frontend could do that pretty well - just strip it down to message-free one file commits.
That enables you to display the history of a file by handling the output of <git log $file> without confusing the user too much (it's linear, just like his changes), you get full reverts, syncing (push if you have internet), multi-device-support (clone). You'd even be independent from the actual repository host with the app itself, since git doesn't care about it's remote location.
It sounds like a pretty good idea just from thinking about it for a minute.
I use nvALT (http://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/). It's a Notational Velocity fork that syncs with SimpleNote. Since it saves the notes in text files, I have put them in a Dropbox folder. The notes directory is itself a git repo which is committed every hour with a cron job on my laptop. It's actually working out pretty well. I have double backup (Dropbox and Simplenote) with infinite versions through Git. If any one of these services loses my notes, I still have them on my laptop. I could also push it go Github, but I haven't gone that far yet.
However, this setup doesn't do pictures and audio notes, but I don't really need them very much.
I don't think it's a good idea to store a .git folder in Dropbox. Dropbox doesn't know how to resolve conflicts deep in git internal files and will break your repository.
I love nvAlt though. Been using it for years and never had any data loss.
I actually had my entire workspace in Dropbox for the fear of losing data, and Dropbox handled git fine. As long as the files are small enough, Dropbox does a great job of getting the file up as fast as possible so that conflicts generally don't happen.
Since most of my changes to the notes happen on one device (my laptop), I have never had any conflicts. Using nvALT on different computers sharing the same notes folder through Dropbox does have some problems which the nvALT website recognizes as well.
Yeah. I lost substantial data in their web client.
All developers know that feeling when using an app: you're dealing with something a little half-assed. Evernote has always had that feel for me. Switching over to something else, preferably based on flat files using something like Markdown, is on my to-do list.
Try nvAlt. It saves all notes to .txt or .rtf, supports markdown (limited), and is super fast. I just switched to it my self and love it. I only wish I could attach files to notes. OSX only but there is a cross platform clone, the name escapes me though.
The Notational Velocity platform is pretty sweet! You might be thinking of nvpy - https://github.com/cpbotha/nvpy . I haven't tried it. Instead, I use nvAlt on Mac, Simplenote on my iPhone, and ResophNotes on Windows.
I've made that switch recently, after losing some stuff in Evernote for what I decided was the last time. I briefly messed around with SimpleNote, which was immediately doing weird stuff with tags (duplicating, not accepting changes). Then, I replicated my Evernote structure with folders and txt files in Dropbox. It works perfectly. And, there's a bunch of clients that edit txt files right in Dropbox, like Byword (OS X and iOS), Plaintext (iOS), Notesy (iOS), Ulysses (OS X), TextEdit + Spotlight (OS X), etc. You can switch apps on a whim and leave your data in place, and the syncing has been great. Simple, clean, and non-proprietary. I haven't checked into audio recording + Dropbox, but surely there are mobile apps for that, too.
Totally. I've got an encrypted sparsedisk image for anything that needs to be truly secure. That's definitely a caveat though, because its contents can only be edited from my Mac. On the other hand, I didn't trust Evernote that much either.
I don't mean to downplay this but seriously, make backups of all data that is important to you. Lots of things can go wrong everywhere and they do go wrong. Maybe it is a sucky app or maybe your own error -- if you have a backup, you don't need to worry.
I know this is no excuse for Evernote's app being at fault, but if something matters this much to you, you should not be trusting anyone or anything and the only way to stay safe is to have backups in multiple places. Might seem like a PITA but it is worth the effort.
Not being an Evernote user, I'm not sure about this, but-- it sounds like the author recorded the corrupted file using Evernote (...sometimes instinct steers me toward the green elephant’s "record" button and I play for a while.).
A backup of a corrupt file wouldn't solve the problem.
Both my wife and I have also lost notes in Evernote. I'm a paying member and just last week exported everything out into text files within Dropbox. I have to get the workflow right but at least I know my files won't disappear.
I've been using a Windows desktop app for years that's a lot like Evernote. I have many MB of notes, especially code snippets. But also lots of other stuff, exactly like what Evernote is intended to do. I would love to migrate it all to Evernote to get cloud access to it all, but my experience with a Evernote is that it is just not trustworthy.
My fear with the desktop app is that a Evernote is killing it. It's a great app, though. Never let me down, not once. Never crashes, never lost a note. And it has more features, more flexibility in formatting, and the ability to have deep nesting of what Evernote calls notebooks. But the UI look & feel is very outdated.
Check it out. It's called Info Select from miclog.com.
This. I'm always particularly annoyed by the tech support when I've tried to submit bug reports. One time I found a reproducible bug in the Chrome Clipper and even offered a possible explanation/solution for what was happening and the person first insisted that it wasn't happening. I couldn't believe he was telling me what wasn't happening on my screen when I was looking right at it. I pay for prime so next requested to be put in contact with a developer to submit a bug report and was denied. Finally like the author they asked me for activity logs which I also refused to fork over because they seemed too personal so instead I just put up with a buggy clipper. I wish they focused less on selling socks and more on the software. [https://www.evernote.com/market/feature/socks?sku=SOCK00106]
Where I work, we have fans that have asked us for branded apparel. We have to tell them that despite multiple reqeusts from customers, we don't sell them. Your criticism on "focusing on socks" is one of the reasons we haven't done so, despite the fact that nearly all of the "socks" work would be outsourced or, at least obviously, not done by engineers.
Please take a long look at the linked page. While i agree with the general sentiment of your post, it's quite obvious that that product page cost quite a bit of money.
I still don't understand all the hate for the new version of Skitch; taking a screenshot and throwing a few shapes and text on it takes less than 5 seconds. What's the problem?
http://glui.me/ has been good for me - I use it to save/share via Dropbox, but it supports a bunch of services. Does one thing well and gets out of the way :)
I consider myself an informal evernote evangelist, but honestly, I kind of agree here. The new Safari web clipper is all sorts of buggy (and sometimes messes with websites and navigation).
And yes, the OS X client is quite slow and bulky. And I really don't appreciate not being able to resize the window to half of my screen (1440x900) size.
Hopefully there's an OS X client overhaul on its way?
Funny you should mention the web clipper, as I've been uninstalling it from all my browsers. It kept on inserting half-rendered HTML into random webpages I would visit.
Hah, I just got that this morning in Safari. It only happens for me after I disable the extension, on tabs which I had open with the extension enabled. Apparently disabling the extension doesn't clean itself up properly on safari, and it leaves those broken <iframe>s at the bottom of the page around until you refresh it.
That's not its only problem. I found Chrome would consistently make my laptop idle 8-10 degrees higher than it should have until I killed Evernote's web clipper.
Shit, here I am finally taking the time to see what Evernote is and finding that I could find use for it in my day to day. Yet now there is no way I could ever trust it with my data, everything I would put on it is important to me.
I just realized that I've stopped using my Evernote account ever since I upgraded to iOS7...and that's just because it kept crashing on me even if I had a brand new phone. This post just reminded me to cancel my Evernote pro-account and move all my stuff over to -- I guess, Google Docs? (as others have recommended). For receipts, I've been using the Flickr app to auto-upload my iPhone photos into a private folder. Then, I just send download links to accounting for reimbursement. It's even easier than Dropbox -- and it's free for up to 1 TB. The security issues are scary...it'd be interesting to see Evernote's reply.
I think this is a direct consequence of how thinly they're spreading themselves out across multiple platforms. They have a native app for every mobile and computer platform, along with web, plugins for every major browser, and then the other apps - skitch, penultimate, clearly, hello, etc...
It truly is in the face of the "do one thing and do it well" mindset that many other companies subscribe to. It's a shame too, because I love Evernote. I truly do live in it... true to Phil's vision, my mind is thoroughly mapped out throughout my Evernote account.
I've been using desktop app for quite some time now and it's good enough for the most part. Just recently I was considering moving to the android app when it hit me that Android app doesn't even have an option for so-called local notes even on premium subscription. Whatever you write there should eventually be synchronized with the cloud. That's no-go for me, I'm both paranoid and dealing with rather sensitive information.
Though I can't find a reasonable substitute on Android. Most apps in this category focus on getting notes easily or on some to-do/calendar side, and very few has a good set of features to organize and navigate through a vast db of notes. Springpad has the same notebook/tags system and pays a good deal of attention to the organization part, but alas it is a web app with no option for private local notes.
So I've never used Evernote before, but after reading this article I decided to try it out since I know a lot of people who swear buy it. My first time user experience was awful... I immediately started creating test notebooks, test notes, etc just to get a feel for how it worked. Within seconds the app was freezing on me every time I tried to delete something (this was on a brand new iPad Air). I had to either rotate the device or put the app into the background in order to unfreeze it. This is a common scenario and I can't believe there isn't quality control for that. I'm a developer and I understand not having time for edge cases...but freezing on delete? I can repro it 100% of the time
While this post must be pretty distressing for the Evernote team, their response time is pretty impressive! Within a couple hours of this post being published, Phil Libin has already contacted him. See the edit at the end of the post:
"Update: Evernote CEO Phil Libin contacted me and we spoke about the issues described. He apologized, saying the post rings true and that there is a lot of work to be done both on the application and service fronts — and that he hopes my impression will be reversed a few months from now."
Another paying anxious victim here. I'm anxious to the point that I've kept a separate copy of notes I add to evernote on my local machine as well. Recently, I've limited myself to using it as a glorified bookmarker and am questioning my own sanity in paying for a service like evernote.
The kind of response you're talking about is not enough. This kind of speed of response in addressing the issue must have been given when the OP filed the report, not only when he decided to go public with it.
Given that the technology required for evernote isn't advanced or cutting edge or experimental researchy stuff, I find the bug rate appalling.
Hi, OP here. It was very gracious of him, but I should note that I've met Phil several times over the years (including while I was formerly a TechCrunch reporter), which I suspect had something to do with the speed.
Impressive in some sense, but also rather disturbing when the CEO of Evernote admits that the product basically doesn't work.
I've always found Evernote to be clunky, so I don't use it, and now I know it's buggy as hell and loses (by admission of their CEO) and I feel good about my decision to push people away from Evernote.
I found it rather reassuring. I was expecting a simple "sorry, here's a small freebie to make you happy" but the CEO recognizing the problems is exactly how to make me think they might actually fix them soonish.
I understand your feeling. On the other hand, what we get a lot of in this industry (every industry, actually) is a CEO who will not admit that the product has problems, even though it clearly does. So I'm encouraged. Although I will also probably be migrating my data out of Evernote this weekend. But I'll keep an eye on it, and perhaps get back into it later if they improve and I haven't come up with something better in the meantime.
That's because it's PR triage rather than actually addressing the issue. It shows they are listening and care about their image, which is good, but not much more.
org-mode is vastly superior in every way. If you want to organize audio files, you can do that to with the attachment feature.
Oh and most importantly, you host the data yourself - no verbose plaintext logs containing your sensitive data and no support calls. Org can also encrypt your Org files on-the-fly:
I evaluated Evernote once two years ago. The iOS app crashed as I was appending to a text note. The app lost a half hour of unsaved meeting notes. I never trusted Evernote again. In my mind, a shoddy rich text editor cast serious doubt on the durability of Evernote's distributed revision control.
Same thing happened to me. I don't even try to use to ios app any more, unless its absolutely dire. Just opening the app, navigating to a note, waiting for it to load then trying to edit it takes forever.
Yep. Lost 3 hours of writing once. No chance of recovery apparently. Now I've learned to not edit existing notes on mobile devices if I can avoid it. Copy the note to a new one and edit that so I have a backup.
I had to go find the original version of skitch, built by a different company, because of how badly the Evernote team massacred it. They just seem like a company more interested in high level bullshit than actual user experience.
Well, the core OCR/HWR function of Evernote was developed by a different company, in a sense. The company was headed by Pachikov who is a veteran of the HWR field. He is currently retired, to the best of my knowledge.
I am not sure, who took the course of codebase/feature sprawl. Retrospectively, that was a bad choice.
If only HWR was available separately from all that disorderly bunch.
I've had a lot of the same issues in the Windows client. one particularly annoying bug is how a simple slip of hitting backspace in the wrong spot can delete an audio recording with no possible way of undoing the operation. I've started using the service less and less over the years to where I barely open it at all anymore, relying on services like git and drop box instead.
I've been an avid Evernote user since the beginning (one of the first few thousand users). I use it to record all sorts of ideas, thoughts, notes, reminders, research, and references.
One year ago, my girlfriend was using Evernote (on my suggestion) to write her travel journal on our trip to Southeast Asia. I saw her note sync a bunch of times (the iOS app shows a little blue arrow when it's uploading). But one day she opened it and the note was gone. I contacted support but they couldn't do anything. (They offered her a year of free Premium service and "apologized for the inconvenience".)
Since then, I've stopped recommending it to people because I don't want to feel personally responsible if they lose notes too. I also have a tinge of doubt every time I record important information. My biggest worry is Evernote quietly losing a note, because once I record something in Evernote I typically push it from my internal memory.
On top of that, their iOS app is incredibly slow. When I want to quickly jot an idea down, it's very inconvenient.
I've started using SimpleNote lately, which is far faster, but I don't know to what extent I should trust it to keep my data safely.
Exact same thing happened to me last week, took notes on a one hour video, clearly saw the online app sync on multiple occasions, after closing the note, only the first 15 minutes of my content was saved. Incredibly irritating.
This happened to me early in Evernote's rise with a very important note. I don't know, shame on me for trusting software I guess? I kept using Evernote for awhile, but gradually I fully transitioned to OneNote which fit my graduate school needs a bit more, and ultimately became more pivotal to my life. I'm now one of the biggest OneNote advocates, a rarity for me with most software I like.
You can use the web-app version of OneNote on OSX. There is also a third party client called outline (http://outline.ws) which now supports writing to OneNote files.
MS Word on OS X has very OneNote-like features, just choose the Notebook view. I haven't used OneNote proper in a very long time (2007?), but notebook view Word 2011 does automatic lists and you can even doodle.
I love it! It's one of the things that keeps me using Windows. I think its just too heavy for casual users and mobile support is meh. But it's not the kind of software I'd use on a mobile device really.
I dislike hearing software described using broad adjectives like "bulky" without supporting analysis. Does this mean it contains features you find useless? (Which ones?) Do you find the interface unintuitive? Or does it run too slowly? One person's "bulk" or "bloat" or "cruft" is another person's key feature, so it seems to me it is important to specify what exactly the bulk consists of. Without more detail, it's akin to an ad hominem.
1. iOS: App has always been slow! Syncing takes time(should be seamless), animations hang up in between and there is sometimes seconds of gap between a tap and result. When you search, it takes lot of time (I have iPhone 4S and iPad 4th gen, same on both, so not a device issue!) A handy feature is document mode for taking pics but it chokes on multiple images. Many times, it crops images randomly and throws them out of order.
2. Windows: Features and apps are not well thought out. They have Skitch for screnshots but it sends screenshots ONLY to default notebook. I want to keep them in a different notebook but it won't let me customize. The editing is very hard and you can't paste HTML text reliably. Windows client has many good shortcuts for sure, but it also has unusual behaviour like tab not taking you to next relevant field (enter a note title, hit tab, suddenly you have selected the notebook!)
3. Web: Web clipper has improved in latest version but still has lot of issues like not syncing PDFs and images(happened twice to me, had to manually copy image). Going to PDF (Chrome) and then Saving it will not work. It will sync indefinitely. But right click the link and boom, it syncs!
While I appreciate the features, they are bulky in the sense that sometimes, they get in the way and don't let me take notes quickly. In fact, I have setup a different app(Drafts) on both iPad and iPhone to take notes in Markdown and then save to Evernote, saves me from lot of headache and data is never lost as it is at different places.
The Fetchnotes site is so slow I migrated away from it before it even loaded. I went back to see what SaaS app could possibly have such a slow website and components were trickling in one at a time.
Hey! Alex from Fetchnotes here — we actually JUST released a new web app that is way faster. Check it out and let me know if it's still giving you trouble: www.fetchnotes.com
Their iOS app has always been this slow. However, sync across platforms is quite important to me. So, I have set up Drafts for fast note taking and shortcuts to send notes to relevant notebook.
Since notes are saved in Drafts as well, there is very low chance of losing them. Plus, Drafts has markdown support!
I am sure you'll find this setup better for notes!
Sometimes you'll get hosed because of the attachment upload limit, which does not degrade gracefully. Originally, it just logged that you couldn't sync. When they did add a notification, it was something along the line of "sux2bu [ok]".
I know the Mac App Store and download versions are different (never install the MAS version, just add the download version to your puppet setup.). As the Windows and iOS versions are obviously different as well, I have this feeling there's a bunch of #ifdef hell in their builds that doesn't get tested well before releases.
I'm a premium Evernote member, but I've also had lots of problems.
The iOS app is slow and clunky. I hate using it. It crashes all the time, especially when I'm trying to take snapshots of a document with many pages (and all previous snapshots simply disappear).
The desktop app is better, but they really could improve the writing experience. Pasting HTML blobs is impossible, and so is formatting my notes the way I want (I use TextExpander for sanity).
Evernote is great when it works, but they really need to fix their stability and bug problems.
As an iOS developer this pains me to hear. It's not rocket science to make a stable highly dependable app. I don't use Evernote or know anything about how they do things, but I track all of our apps' crashes on a daily basis (lately almost none) and do extensively performance testing before release. Our QA staff is awesome and lets nothing get by them. I don't understand how other companies can't do this as well. Our apps are complex, have a complex mobile API on the server side and do ecommerce. So I really can't understand why this is so lame.
Definitely thought some of these issues were just me. My hypothesis is that Evernote gets increasingly unstable the more notes (and data) you have stored. Which sucks because I have over 1200 and I pretty much need Evernote at this point. The desktop app is damn near unusable, takes forever to create a new note.
I no longer trust that they will always have all of my notes, so I started to back them up to Dropbox via the HTML export. But I'm lazy, haven't done it for a while.
Perhaps this is an opportunity for a new company to do what Evernote is doing, better. Automatic backups to Dropbox, lighting fast no matter how many notes stored, reliable and instant syncing, etc.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 201 ms ] threadhttp://www.devontechnologies.com
No affiliation, just love the software.
Not to mention that their inline search is broken and they refuse to fix it
Disclaimer: Microsoft employee and Onenote user
http://notational.net http://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/
I was able to get the note back by driving back to my hotel, retrieving my laptop where the note was cached, and opening Evernote while offline to ensure it wouldn't sync and wipe out that copy. Pretty frustrating. I've learned some tough lessons about cloud services and free stuff.
And it's all free! Though obviously you could use paid Dropbox and Bitbucket/GitHub accounts as well.
Until fairly recently I used OmniFocus and Evernote, in conjunction with their mobile offerings, but I don't think I'll be looking back anytime soon.
[1] http://orgmode.org/
[&] http://mobileorg.ncogni.to/
I did lose one Google doc once (a drawing). About a year or so later it turned up again, really odd.
They also have pretty snazzy Android and iOS apps for OneNote, although IIRC the mobile apps require an Office 365 subscription.
Out of everything that comes out of Redmond, OneNote is definitely one of the best consumer products.
That enables you to display the history of a file by handling the output of <git log $file> without confusing the user too much (it's linear, just like his changes), you get full reverts, syncing (push if you have internet), multi-device-support (clone). You'd even be independent from the actual repository host with the app itself, since git doesn't care about it's remote location.
It sounds like a pretty good idea just from thinking about it for a minute.
However, this setup doesn't do pictures and audio notes, but I don't really need them very much.
I love nvAlt though. Been using it for years and never had any data loss.
Still risky though.
Nobody does that, they delete the doc, they don't erase the contents of it
All developers know that feeling when using an app: you're dealing with something a little half-assed. Evernote has always had that feel for me. Switching over to something else, preferably based on flat files using something like Markdown, is on my to-do list.
I know this is no excuse for Evernote's app being at fault, but if something matters this much to you, you should not be trusting anyone or anything and the only way to stay safe is to have backups in multiple places. Might seem like a PITA but it is worth the effort.
A backup of a corrupt file wouldn't solve the problem.
My fear with the desktop app is that a Evernote is killing it. It's a great app, though. Never let me down, not once. Never crashes, never lost a note. And it has more features, more flexibility in formatting, and the ability to have deep nesting of what Evernote calls notebooks. But the UI look & feel is very outdated.
Check it out. It's called Info Select from miclog.com.
is there a good alternative to skitch yet?
So I ditched it after that huge security incident by using cloudHQ to migrate to something else:
https://www.cloudhq.net/evernote
And yes, the OS X client is quite slow and bulky. And I really don't appreciate not being able to resize the window to half of my screen (1440x900) size.
Hopefully there's an OS X client overhaul on its way?
Then I stopped using Evernote.
What are some good Evernote alternatives?
It truly is in the face of the "do one thing and do it well" mindset that many other companies subscribe to. It's a shame too, because I love Evernote. I truly do live in it... true to Phil's vision, my mind is thoroughly mapped out throughout my Evernote account.
And see Dropbox as an example of something which supports every major platform WITHOUT losing data losing bugs.
Though I can't find a reasonable substitute on Android. Most apps in this category focus on getting notes easily or on some to-do/calendar side, and very few has a good set of features to organize and navigate through a vast db of notes. Springpad has the same notebook/tags system and pays a good deal of attention to the organization part, but alas it is a web app with no option for private local notes.
"Update: Evernote CEO Phil Libin contacted me and we spoke about the issues described. He apologized, saying the post rings true and that there is a lot of work to be done both on the application and service fronts — and that he hopes my impression will be reversed a few months from now."
The kind of response you're talking about is not enough. This kind of speed of response in addressing the issue must have been given when the OP filed the report, not only when he decided to go public with it.
Given that the technology required for evernote isn't advanced or cutting edge or experimental researchy stuff, I find the bug rate appalling.
I've always found Evernote to be clunky, so I don't use it, and now I know it's buggy as hell and loses (by admission of their CEO) and I feel good about my decision to push people away from Evernote.
That's because it's PR triage rather than actually addressing the issue. It shows they are listening and care about their image, which is good, but not much more.
Oh and most importantly, you host the data yourself - no verbose plaintext logs containing your sensitive data and no support calls. Org can also encrypt your Org files on-the-fly:
http://orgmode.org/ http://orgmode.org/manual/Attachments.html
I am not sure, who took the course of codebase/feature sprawl. Retrospectively, that was a bad choice.
If only HWR was available separately from all that disorderly bunch.
One year ago, my girlfriend was using Evernote (on my suggestion) to write her travel journal on our trip to Southeast Asia. I saw her note sync a bunch of times (the iOS app shows a little blue arrow when it's uploading). But one day she opened it and the note was gone. I contacted support but they couldn't do anything. (They offered her a year of free Premium service and "apologized for the inconvenience".)
Since then, I've stopped recommending it to people because I don't want to feel personally responsible if they lose notes too. I also have a tinge of doubt every time I record important information. My biggest worry is Evernote quietly losing a note, because once I record something in Evernote I typically push it from my internal memory.
On top of that, their iOS app is incredibly slow. When I want to quickly jot an idea down, it's very inconvenient.
I've started using SimpleNote lately, which is far faster, but I don't know to what extent I should trust it to keep my data safely.
Might be worth a look.
1. iOS: App has always been slow! Syncing takes time(should be seamless), animations hang up in between and there is sometimes seconds of gap between a tap and result. When you search, it takes lot of time (I have iPhone 4S and iPad 4th gen, same on both, so not a device issue!) A handy feature is document mode for taking pics but it chokes on multiple images. Many times, it crops images randomly and throws them out of order.
2. Windows: Features and apps are not well thought out. They have Skitch for screnshots but it sends screenshots ONLY to default notebook. I want to keep them in a different notebook but it won't let me customize. The editing is very hard and you can't paste HTML text reliably. Windows client has many good shortcuts for sure, but it also has unusual behaviour like tab not taking you to next relevant field (enter a note title, hit tab, suddenly you have selected the notebook!)
3. Web: Web clipper has improved in latest version but still has lot of issues like not syncing PDFs and images(happened twice to me, had to manually copy image). Going to PDF (Chrome) and then Saving it will not work. It will sync indefinitely. But right click the link and boom, it syncs!
While I appreciate the features, they are bulky in the sense that sometimes, they get in the way and don't let me take notes quickly. In fact, I have setup a different app(Drafts) on both iPad and iPhone to take notes in Markdown and then save to Evernote, saves me from lot of headache and data is never lost as it is at different places.
Edit: Formatting.
Since notes are saved in Drafts as well, there is very low chance of losing them. Plus, Drafts has markdown support!
I am sure you'll find this setup better for notes!
I know the Mac App Store and download versions are different (never install the MAS version, just add the download version to your puppet setup.). As the Windows and iOS versions are obviously different as well, I have this feeling there's a bunch of #ifdef hell in their builds that doesn't get tested well before releases.
The iOS app is slow and clunky. I hate using it. It crashes all the time, especially when I'm trying to take snapshots of a document with many pages (and all previous snapshots simply disappear).
The desktop app is better, but they really could improve the writing experience. Pasting HTML blobs is impossible, and so is formatting my notes the way I want (I use TextExpander for sanity).
Evernote is great when it works, but they really need to fix their stability and bug problems.
I no longer trust that they will always have all of my notes, so I started to back them up to Dropbox via the HTML export. But I'm lazy, haven't done it for a while.
Perhaps this is an opportunity for a new company to do what Evernote is doing, better. Automatic backups to Dropbox, lighting fast no matter how many notes stored, reliable and instant syncing, etc.