Please, Evernote, wake up. I wanted you to win.

The thing that has disappointed me about Evernote forever is their complete and total lack of Linux support. This is a product that has Palm Pre and Windows Mobile clients but for whatever reason has decided that developing a Linux client isn't worthwhile.

A recent Hacker News poll of OS used day-to-day, Linux finished second in frequency behind Mac OS: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=687267 . People who do dev/database/IT work frequently need snippets of text like IP addresses and passwords and API keys and this sort of tool would come in handy for us. But a lot of us run Linux as well. Even ignoring the nerd market, Linux is increasingly run by regular people on their netbooks.

I guess the reason I don't get this is that tech savvy folks seem like a great market to go after with your software, as they tend to be very influential in their social networks' decisions as well.

Apples and Oranges, I know, but I use and love Dropbox in large part because it works with 2 of my 3 computers. On the other hand, Evernote runs poorly on my mac and can only be accessed via the web on the others. I actually use dropbox now as I would evernote, by keeping .txt files in my dropbox.

Evernote is even worse on Mac. I've been using Journler (http://journler.com/) because it's too much of a hassle to keep my stuff in OneNote on a separate partition, or run VMware.

I wish there was a OSX port for OneNote, which I think is the most usable not taking software I've ever tried.

I was pretty impressed with the app when I tried it a while ago, but was immediately turned off by the lack of secure uploads for the free version. That, and the $45/year cost and the complete inability to import / export anything means it's a lock-in tool designed to get them more money, not to improve my workflow. This is all in spite of several postings I've seen of the owner claiming to strongly support open standards. Put your money where your mouth is, and just maybe I'll believe you, instead of your application doing everything possible to show the opposite.

A lot of applications could learn a thing or two from the design, and the OCR is impressive. But it's an expensive lock-in, and I'm not touching it any more.

My startup, https://snaptic.com , is trying to help them wake up by building a better note taking app.

We are on Android, iPhone, and web.

Come hack with us in SF and scratch your own itch. hn@snaptic.com

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1089905 </shameless plug>

The strange thing is, my typical evernote usage rarely involves me actually writing notes myself. I always find myself spinning up a dropbox'ed tiddlywiki for fleshing out ideas and in general using a pen and scrap paper for temporary notes.

Instead I use it as a place to clip anything I read online and find useful/interesting. It is like using a bookmarking site that keeps a copy of the article in case the original vanishes and is searchable beyond the titles. For being sort of a permanent searchable extension of my brain's memory it works really well.

I also use it to clip pages I want to read in the future into a 'ReadItLater' notebook; a replacement for readitlaterlist that won't lose my articles if the source vanishes and allows me to search things easily. Due to my hn/reddit/rss addiction the 'ReadItLater' notebook is tremendously valuable for me. I tend to encounter far more things I want to read then I have time to so my backlog is perpetually increasing. However if I am searching I still will get results from this list.. Honestly, sometimes it feels like I am sending myself messages from the future saying "Hey this article is relevant to something your doing. Now is the time to finally get around to reading it".

I don't have a premium account yet, but with GDC looming ahead I think I might spring for it so that I can take advantage of the searchable PDF feature. I would love to just dump all the pdf whitepapers I run across directly in rather than my current practice of extracting the contents.

As others have pointed out though, Evernote does have some major concerns that need addressed. The native clients are poor (luckily the web client is pretty good), they feel very 'walled garden' (open up, open up, an app ecosystem awaits you!), no linux client, and clipping web pages means settling for an uglified unformatted version.

I think it's astonishing how nearly everyone posting here seems to have some complaining to do about Evernote for some reason or another. Please try to put yourself in Evernote's shoes - provide a Linux version? For which userbase? Will they get 50-100k+ Linux users with at least 1k+ premium users to make it worth their time (compared to other platforms)? Also, there are lots of unspecific complaints. It's great everyone can vent his anger and opinions, snark just doesn't really help. Does it help to just say "it sucks on platform x"?

How do you guys do your note taking? I'm surprised there's so many people. I'll probably be getting an ipad so I'm curious if there's any iphone experiences.

Note-taking software has continued to fail me by not including LaTeX support. I will not be taking notes without being able to format math. This affects Evernote and OneNote equally.

The funny thing is latest client is worse than the last client for Windows. Previous client was quite good actually, new one doesn't even look like a native Windows app.

I think they fall into "Let's rewrite this and make it better!" FAIL. You need to be pretty stupid to rewrite something that's actually working unless you got a great confident, team and time, and final client of them proves that they sucked, and now it's going to take them another 6 months to come up with something as good as their previous client.

When startups are going to learn to not to do obviously stupid like "OMG, our client is not good enough, instead of improving it, let's rewrite it, yay!" ?

BTW open sourcing their app wouldn't make a difference at all, actually it doesn't even make sense.