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Comment by saidajigumi | Hacker News Reader

I've been an Evernote user for a long time, but it's been ages since I've felt that they're actually user-focused by way of improving holes like poor functional parity across their apps(1). As a outsider, a huge amount of energy felt squandered on a shotgun-strategy of special-purpose apps while a stream of core app rebuilds launched, none of which significantly moved the functional needle.

I've been exploring alternatives, but so far nothing has stuck. Last time I looked at OneNote it seemed promising, but the lack of tags (seriously?) was a showstopper. DevonThink Pro was interesting, but the Mac experience and UI is archaic to the point of being unusable IMO. Esp. the way that DT bakes a really terrible styling onto imported Evernote notes.

I'd love to hear migration success stories from those of you who've moved on.

(1) One example: Want to create or modify a table on the iPad app? Nope. Baffling.

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I would be happy if Evernote was "done". I pay for a subscription, I am not interested in paying for new features, I would simply be happy if it went into eternal feature freeze and only did security and compatibility updates.

Of course this kind of thing won't happen but maybe it says something about the optimization pitfalls of our economy.

This would never happen for numerous reasons, but imagine if you could fork a company somehow. Take the existing state, but just take it in an entirely different direction.

For companies that don't produce physical goods, this would actually be somewhat doable..

Isn't this kind of what Alphabet did?

I once worked at a company that had a successful product ($40M in sales, $15M in arr via support plans). They did a rewrite, that of course went a year long and was poorly handled by sales and marketing ie it was talked about freely with customers and prospects; contributed to sales drying up while they all waited for the new hotness.

I knew the rewrite was going take a lot longer than they were saying, both due to common sense and because there were conflicting goals from ceo and cto.

I went to the ceo and made a case for a back up plan, myself and a few others could continue on the old busted version; bug fixes and minimal enhancements only, insurance if you will. I really thought about buying it but had no way to finance anything like that. CEO didn’t bite and was in process of selling the company to a PE firm.

I left when the new version finally shipped with half the features and twice the bugs. The PE installed CEO wrecked the sales org and sales never recovered.

As a side note, a foreign firm had pirated a much older version 10 years prior, rebranded and was #3 with it in that market.

Netflix did something sort of like that when they split off shipping dvds into a completely different unit.

They announced it (Qwikster, I believe), and then they immediately canceled that plan after massive backlash.

It’s back. DVD.com is Netflix’s DVD by mail business.

Really? I wonder how it will compete with Redbox? We rarely watch movies (we don't even have a Netflix subscription), but when we do it is a spur of the moment thing so we just run around the corner to redbox and grab something. Waiting for a movie in the mail? That's so 2010 ;-)

Netflix still has almost 3 million DVD subscribers. (https://www.statista.com/statistics/250940/quarterly-number-...)

They compete by having a larger library.

But before you get too smug, the idea of going to Redbox to get a physical disc is not exactly cutting edge compared to just clicking on a button and renting a movie on demand from your cable provider/Apple/Amazon/Google/Vudu.

Sorry if I came off as smug. Wasn't my intent. We typically spend about $1-2 a month on Redbox. Any streaming movie rental would be at least four times that amount.

Usually $3.99-$5.99.

I’m lazier than I am cheap.

But honestly, most of my movies fall off the back of a truck onto my Plex server.

And I was just giving you hard time about being smug.....

> We rarely watch movies (...), but when we do it is a spur of the moment thing so we just run around the corner to redbox and grab something (...)

I find it fascinating that this is core idea that made Netflix so successful, they just rely on much lazier customers than you!

Their library was far bigger than any storefront. Even if you never used the more rare stuff, it was a selling point.

Yeah, that is a good example of a company making a badly timed business decision and ultimately recovering completely unscathed (although it seemed like they were in hot water at the time).

> but maybe it says something about the optimization pitfalls of our economy

Of the tech economy, perhaps. Or perhaps that's what you meant by "our", this being a tech site.

A huge amount of the workforce is engaged in work that doesn't change much at all. Construction workers, skilled labor like service plumbing or mechanical maintenance, engineering, retail work, etc. It's fairly optimized and if it changes, it changes in reaction to something or because new technology opened new opportunities. Really, it seems like mobile and web applications are the most stuck into this loop of having to add something new. An emacs users who used it 25 years ago could still use it today.

Seriously. I will happily keep paying for EN without anything more than maintenance updates, I like knowing I'm helping the servers stay on.

I'm the same. Happy with current functionality and the current price.

It doesn't need to be the only product or have the most users it only needs to be functional and make enough money for it to be worthwhile except with vc funding it has to constantly chase growth and returns.

This. I've paid for it since 2012, my world would be rocked if they shut it down or modified it significantly.

It does make you start to question why you are paying for a service whilst locking yourself in when the rug can be pulled at any minute.

Mostly agreed. But the reality is that EN isn't a "lifestyle" company, but instead took a ton of VC investment. AFAICT, this generally means a future of terrible mismanagement by a board looking for an exit on a company that didn't turn out to be their darling unicorn.

That’s what I like about SimpleNote. It’s done. It is just text, tags, and search. It works on any device. It’s rock solid.

I really like it but the lack of a native Linux client is what stopped me using it.

I'm still writing some notes in Evernote on my mobile, but on desktop I've just switched to markdown notes in a Dropbox folder. I have a vim plugin now that generates a html preview as I type.

I think markdown is the most future proof technology for the moment because you can just use pandoc to convert it or most note systems will accept markdown as an input format.

I'm not sure how tags would work in markdown, I guess you can create links manually but that's not really what you want.

I suppose the set of features I need covered include:

- Web clipping. Evernotes browser plugins are pretty darn good here.

- Notes with attachments (images, PDFs, etc.). Some of these are mixed-media notes, where text, images, and/or file attachments are mixed to create a comprehensive document about some topic. Others are "pure" attachments, e.g. "store this PDF where I can retrieve it by search".

- Note taking. This, in isolation, is the easiest.

- Note syncing, mobile and desktop. This gets a bit harder.

- Search. Let's be clear, this was the first and biggest killer feature of Evernote. Notebook and tag organization are important, but rather than just providing direct hierarchical/taxonomic organization, they're largely there to support search with user-defined search facets.

I'd also love good Markdown support – that's one of my most-wanted features from Evernote in the first place.

So, you feel search in Evernote is good? Personally I've found it severely lacking. I can't tell you how many times I've searched for something that I know is there (and that I do find after manually looking for it), but search comes up empty.

I think you have found most people's problems, not just with Evernote, but with all other clipping services: it's write often, read once (if at all).

Yeah I prefer ripgrep with a bunch of markdown files.

That's interesting, and absolutely not my experience. Search has been robust, finds what I need, and absolutely worth having. Might be worth a support request -- maybe there's some undetected lossage in your account's search indices and they need a rebuild. (Or maybe you can kick that off self-service?)

> Note syncing, mobile and desktop. This gets a bit harder.

The dropbox text editor works 'ok'. It's not great, but it's clean enough that I can edit my markdown notes and they'll be synced with dropbox.

What vim plugin do you use?

https://github.com/euclio/vim-markdown-composer

Requires a rust compile of the code in the plugin, but once that's working it works well.

I'm a happy DevonThink user (but not a super fanboy, so I won't lose sleep if you don't like it as much as I do). What did you think was archaic about its UI? It has several different layouts to choose from. Do you think they're all bad? I won't disagree, but maybe because I've been using it for so long I don't really notice it. Also, what does it do to the Evernote imports? I've never used that so I haven't seen that before.

That said, it's really good at filing and searching. I'd highly recommend trying it long enough to look past the UI to its capabilities. I'd hate to be without it now.

> a huge amount of energy felt squandered on a shotgun-strategy of special-purpose apps

Never mind random apps, what about socks? [1]

1: https://mashable.com/2013/09/26/evernote-market/

that was just a marketing gimmick, it's not like core engineers will be busy knitting the socks.

I doubt core engineers were working on Skitch either (for one, it was an acquisition), but GGP still points out that Evernote lacked (still lacks?) focus. Selling branded stuff (they also did business card holders and bags) is another piece of that.

Personally I use Ulysses which has been great on desktop & mobile (supports code blocks, markup & more). However I'm not sure how I feel after they switched over to the whole subscription-model thing...anyone else have any success with similar alternatives?

I used Ulysses but I ended up moving to Bear[1]. It's still. a subscription fee, but much cheaper ($1.49/mo). It's lightweight and perfect for what I use it for - taking notes.

If I was going to suggest something for longer-form writings (e.g., journaling, blog posts) and you find that inadequate, I've heard good things about iA Writer[2].

1. http://www.bear-writer.com

2. https://ia.net/writer

If you live in the Apple ecosystem, I highly recommend mweb[1]. It ticks all the boxes I've been looking for:

  - intuitive UI: lets me see 1) raw markdown syntax or 2) formatted preview... no weird in-betweens
  - sync to/from mobile, with preview & edit support
  - markdown support with nice preview and support for code (similar to github style)
  - search
  - support for folders (and potentially tags, if I ever find a good use case for them)
  - pdf export
  - no subscription model

Alternatives I've tried which haven't done as well for one reason or another:

  - Bear: confusing preview/editing mode
  - Evernote: no markdown
  - Ulysses: subscription model shift
  - Standard Notes: confusing/buggy UI
  - Quiver: poor mobile support

[1] https://www.mweb.im/

>so far nothing has stuck.

Have you tried diigo.com and it's apps? I highly reccomend it to everyone looking for Evernote alternative, especially for web clipping and organizing.

Not yet, but I'll definitely have a look. Thanks!

Both Evernote and Quip were such great apps when they did "one thing well"... keep multiple devices synchronized on simple notes and checklists.

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