Hacker News Reader

Comment by laocoon | Hacker News Reader

I used to use Evernote all the time, although I wouldn't consider myself a power user. I don't think I utilized all of the features very well. I came to it through Tim Ferriss, I believe, and it was really amazing for me at the time.

I hardly ever use it anymore, using mostly notebooks for actual note taking now. I used to use the web clipper to save articles, but I found that when I would put something in Evernote, I hardly ever went back to access it later. It was like putting things in a vault. That probably all speaks more to me than the product. I am curious what new features they can provide with access to all of Google's machine learning APIs.

View on HN

I'm there with you. I used to use it all the time and even paid for Evernote business for the office (I think only 7 or 8 other in the office use it), however I've been using it less and less lately and will probably drop it at renewal time. It seems like I'm always stepping over useless features (Work Chat? uh, no) while hoping they actually implement features their users are asking for (e.g. dark mode - https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/94974-dark-mode-for-ma...). I probably just need to bite the bullet and figure out how to export everything I have in it to OneNote or something.

OneNote is vastly better, IMHO. (With the major caveat that it's not available for Linux, which will be a dealbreaker for many. Works on OSX/iOS/Android, though.)

I really don't understand what happened to Evernote. It was very good and getting better all the time; then a few years back they decided to pivot to...something else, I'm still not sure what...and essentially abandoned all the features I used to start pushing lots of features I never would.

It looks like it is free now. Given Evernote's horrendous move to limit the number of devices a user can access their notes with (literally the dumbest gating mechanism I've ever heard of in this day and age where device-agnosticism is table stakes), I'm looking for a free alternative.

Are there any downsides moving from a free Evernote account to a free OneNote account in your opinion?

A couple of things I noticed when moving to OneNote:

- OneNote doesn't have tags

- search function is pretty primitive compared to Evernote

- The Webclipper is frustrating: Websites are often clipped as an image. Very frustrating if you actually need to work with the content afterwards.

- ON seems to generate much more traffic on my phone.

- publishing notes with Evernote is much better: You get a public link, etc. Everything looks more polished. Also, when publishing clipped websites you automatically get the link to the source. In ON it just looks bad. (I use Evernote for press articles.)

- Spellchecking is a mess in ON. For some bizarre reason they've decided to set the notes language to your keyboard locale. It is ugly as hell. But there's a macro for OneTastic to reset the locale.

- no Context.

Good things in ON:

- free form canvas

- no more messing your notes up when you work on them cross platform.

- Excel-tables natively supported

- as somebody noted, Evernote is practically a vault where you never touch stuff again. you basically hide everything behind tags. Then you use the search to get only relevant stuff. That's partly due to the UI. In OneNote you organise your notes more "optically" and actually reread stuff.

I introduced ON at work and we now couldn't do without it. I've been using Evernote in privat for several years. Now I'm using both - EN for press and my literature library, ON for everything else.

Visual hierarchical organization as opposed to tag search is what I prefer, so that's a plus for Onenote. Evernote actually used to be better at doing that, but they obfuscated it for no reason, like so many things.

Also, Onenote seems to handle sync conflicts better than Evernote. I once emptied my trash in Evernote and it decided to delete the live versions of all the old sync-conflict duplicates I'd trashed. I lost about a third of my notes. That's when I realized I needed to change.

One other downside is that the OS X version of Onenote is not quite full-featured. It's not missing anything essential, but e.g. you can only have one window at a time, for some reason.

Basically, my use case is personal notes and data, mainly formatted text rather than images or websites, for my own use, organized hierarchically for easy browsing. Onenote is ideal for that. If you're big on group sharing, or clipping web pages, or tag search, or whatever the hell else Evernote thinks they're optimizing for, then I can't tell you much.

I'm in the same boat, I would try to save articles into it, especially recipes but there are two reasons why I stopped.

The awful search with the web clipper plugin. It seems to match any single word in a saved article. It just ends up being faster to ignore the evernote typically unrelated results and look through Google results.

Inability to embed YouTube videos. Once again with recipes I'm better off using a browser since I'll have to open one up to view the video anyway. Most of the good cooking sites include a video embedded with the recipe, making for a more pleasant experience in the browser.

Instapaper is a pretty nice evernote alternative

Maybe before it was acquired by Pinterest, but who knows now?

For recipes I can highly recommend Paprika. It does a great job of importing recipes and it is cross-platform/device (except linux but you might be able to run it in wine). Only downside is you have to buy it on desktop/tablet/phone separately but it was well worth it for me at a total of $30 ($20 Mac, $5 iPad, $5 iPhone) and it all syncs together. I stumbled across it randomly and now it's all I use. I used to just use my iPad for cooking with the website pulled up or AllRecipies but now I can't imagine going back.

[0] https://paprikaapp.com/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com