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Comment by okhudeira | Hacker News Reader

Related, here's a post by the author [1] about Evernote which sheds light on why he went about making this. Interesting read.

[1] https://medium.com/@mobitar/evernote-is-what-happens-when-yo...

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Interesting is one word for that, given the main thesis that venture capital is universally to blame for the failure of centralized things we rely upon (with zero evidence to support this assertion), and that building another centralized service with less functionality is somehow the better answer. Speaking personally, I completely rely upon PDFs and images and things accompanying my notes because of the nature of the work I do (I have about 4,700 pages of research and almost a gigabyte of imagery all tied together in a Scrivener project for a single piece of work, for example), and the frozen feature set so proudly advertised smacks of "people need to take notes exactly the way I do," which is an immediate turn-off for me. That it's taken further and somewhat arrogantly called "standard" notes really chills me on liking this product at all, given that it completely and intentionally omits useful things to a lot of people -- including me. Then there are extensions, of course, pushing out all the useful features to extensions which will work even less over time.

Maybe some people will like this, but the motivations and decisions just seem ill thought out so far, particularly when it's "VC is going to kill Evernote, so you should rely upon a hostname I personally administer instead and you get exactly what I give you" as the main call to action when I go to the page.

I agree. I spent quite a few years working in Digital Preservation, and what we found is that as evil as you paint them, a big corporation with lots of money will outlast an individual with pure motivations. That's why we can still read DOC files today.

Speaking realistically, investing your personal data in this project is currently a much greater risk than using Evernote.

> Speaking realistically, investing your personal data in this project is currently a much greater risk than using Evernote.

I fail to see any risk in investing your personal data in this project. According to the website you can simply output your data to a text file:

  - [..]
  - exporting all data as a human readable file
  - [..]

(I have no stake in this app, but personally use vimwiki and thus have all my notes in markdown text files anyway)

The app doesn't work without an active web connection -- it's just an empty shell. So if the website goes down, I've still lost my data unless I back it up in advance.

I'll bet that .txt files (which is what I currently use to store notes) will outlast .doc

Great read. Nothing new but it's important to put the spotlight in the cause of the rot of this industry.

I don't agree with the author much. Ok, Windows Evernote client is a bit bloated, I agree, but I can still immediately enter new note and immediately search notes via a shortcut. And there is a normal windows listview where I can see a lot of notes at once.

On the contrary, this is like a web application optimized for tablet converted to a windows app. Frankly the list of notes looks horrible on desktop.

Anyway, I look forward to this project, and it could be successful in the end, similar way the Visual Studio Code is. Good luck.

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