Evernote just slashed 54 jobs, or 15 percent of its workforce
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
500+ employees with an annual revenue estimated to be below $10MM. That's $20k of revenue per employee! I mean I can just imagine what it's like there, insane meetings about metrics where 15 marketing managers show the powerpoint slides they spent the last week emailing back and forth to highlight the 2% growth last quarter, while they need to grow by 2000% in the next 48 months just to stay alive. Then in 3 months they have the same meeting.
Evernote has been severely mismanaged (I've been saying this since 2012, links below). I wonder how they feel about all the VC money they spent developing ports for WebOS, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and Windows Phone?
B2C companies are hard, partially because it takes lots of C's to make the B viable, and working with C's is expensive.
Yes, that is true. It’s still possible to hire too many people, be it engineers or designers or sales reps.
Well, at least these guys have been diametral to Evernote's effectivity for me. I used to use the app daily as a paying customer - after the "everything needs to be white or a very light shade of grey" update, I hardly do anymore - it's just too exhausting and confusing to operate.
I have not yet pulled the plug on my subscription - but most likely will once a serious contender with OCR comes around.
Yes, but not much more, especially if you're just a glorified notes app, which other companies manage to be with 1/10 the workforce.
And all that "copy, art, offers, banner ads, ux, reporting, email marketing" hasn't worked that well for Evernote.
Like I tried Evernote once, for example, and I'm probably counted in that list of users, but I never used it for more than a couple of days before going back to Google Keep and Google Docs (with some Scrivener when I want to make an ebook).
Apparently there's more to marketing than "copy, art, offers, banner ads, ux, reporting, email marketing".
All of these are tactics and don't tell you how you're going to make money or what your product and positioning should look like when your low-end use case is given away for free on 90% of phones (Notes, Google Keep), and the high-end is bundled in at zero-marginal cost with the Office 365 subscription your workplace has (OneNote).
How many companies are competing with Google, Apple and Microsoft?
But it has worked for companies like say, Airbnb, which in its inception was a glorified Craigslist, but today is the world's biggest "hotel company" by some metrics.
Much like Uber, skirting & ignoring local regulations pays off handsomely.
Lets say you were just hired as the President of a furniture company. The owner says he knows it's good furniture but even despite huge investments they can't seem to sell any furniture. Your job is to turn things around.
You start on the factory floor. The furniture is made by a combination of machines and human workers. Some people are employed to set up and configure the machines to make furniture parts. Around 150 people work on actually making furniture, either assembling it, doing quality tests, or setting up and operating the automated machinery. Things aren't perfect, but you aren't going to make any changes on your first day so you make some notes and move on. The furniture hasn't changed much over the years, it is still basically the same as it was when the furniture store opened. The furniture gets 'improved' from time to time, you see a step stool with an alarm clock, a small safe, and a webcam built into it, but when you ask the foreman he tells you nobody has ever turned on the alarm clock or used the safe or connected the webcam on any of the step stools. People seem to mainly use the stools so they can reach things that are up high. There is a problem where sometimes people slip when the stools are wet, so they worked out how to add a nonslip pad, but the product managers have decided that the next feature will be to add scents to the stools, so you can buy a stool that smells like cinnamon or one that smells like apples. They have a big advertising campaign already paid for and they already sent out the press release announcing "ScentedStools", so the machines need to be set up to start stamping out stools that smell like "Fresh Linen" by the end of the week. There are daily status meetings to update them on the progress. If the "Fresh Linen" stools aren't being produced by Thursday they are going to start having two status meetings per day.
You hear it's someone named Jim's last day, so you set up an exit interview. Jim tells you that the bosses and people upstairs don't really know what is going on in the factory. Most days he just sits and reads the news, his "nontechnical" manager doesn't know anything about furniture or how Jim does his job so there's no way for the manager to know what is going on other than to ask Jim. Supervision primarily consists of making sure Jim is sitting at his desk and looking at his monitor. Since US labor laws don't allow Jim's manager to set specific hours for him to be at work, his manager has started scheduling 9AM meetings every day to force people to turn up. Every week or so Jim has to update some Product Managers upstairs about what is going on, and he just says they are making steady progress and comes up with some specific problem to explain why they aren't done, pretty much anything with jargon will work since nobody upstairs "could tell white oak from red oak". It takes about 5 minutes to give his status update but he's expected to stay for the entire 1 hour meeting, so he brings his laptop so he can read furniturenews.com. He says he is quitting to take a much lower paying job because he is bored and doesn't respect his manager.
Next you go upstairs to the office space and find 300 people having meetings with each other about annual plans and prioritization, writing mission statements and meeting to discuss mission statements. The 300 people upstairs are constantly in motion and complaining about how over worked they are. They each have 5, 6 or even 7 (sometimes more!) 1-hour meetings every day, but you only see them meet with each other, nobody has any meetings with anyone from outside the company, nobody has meetings with possible customers, and only very rarely do you see anyone from the factory floor in these meetings, and then it is almost always just to give a status update. None of these folks really understand furniture very well, they can't really tell good furniture from bad furniture, they literally don't know the difference between solid oak and cardboard, they don't know how long it takes or how much money it costs to build a chair. After a few days of meetings you haven't met anyone who cares about furniture at all, they all seem to want to work at the furniture factory because it pays well, or they like the prestige of being 'in furniture'. Mostly they talk about how overworked they are and make the case for hiring a few more people. If they could hire another person for their team they wouldn't be so far behind. You aren't sure what they are getting behind in, are they talking about meetings they can't attend because it conflicts with another meeting that is more important somehow? Do they need more time to work on power point slides for the next days meetings? Some of the office folks have degrees in furniture science, but none of them have ever successfully built or designed any furniture outside of little school projects.
Then you go out behind the factory and see a massive mountain of furniture stacked up to the sky. The factory workers have been building furniture every day for years. People all agree that it is good furniture, maybe the best there is. Nobody ever buys any of it. It's not sold in any stores. No hotels buy it. No businesses buy it. Lots of people are lined up as far as you can see to pick furniture out of the pile for free.
How do you fix this company?
I think Evernote sucks and they need to refocus, things that have already been said to death. But it's amazing how a narrative, storytelling, can make me re-examine my own initial opinion like that.
They have all those employees but does Evernote do anything new to make people's life easier in a different way the past ten years??? I answer no.
I don't think Evernote sucks in whole ... I very happily pay for Evernote annually-renewed premium subscription, and it's great at doing what I rent it for ...
+ it accepts documents, scans, photographs, text in notes that I can put in categories
+ it clips web page content through browser extensions and saves them as notes
+ it accepts emails composed and sent to it, and emails forwarded to it, turning them into notes
+ it does great OCR on scanned/photographed notes and documents
+ it does great matching on searches, from both explicit text and OCR'ed content
+ the browser interface is great, the Android, macOS, Windows apps are pretty decent
... and that's all I want.
Evernote's seen their missed opportunities and has tried to catch up:
+ they want to be Slack with channeled- and threaded-messaging -- Slack works better
+ they want to be the business document repository -- I much prefer Confluence (or other Wikis) for structuring and storing long-term relevant information
+ they want to be an issue tracker
+ ... every other collaboration thing under the sun
They've been pushing hard on all these multi-user shared-content angles. It seems like both a technical and marketing challenge -- they likely are too boxed-in and the jump a customer needs to make to envision using Evernote's new business/multi-user/collaboration features is too big.
> How do you fix this company?
I'll take a shot : you don't, the free market does it for you (ie. the company isn't going to last long, or the plant get shut down if part of a group). It's the VC/Angels money that allows such theoretical stories to be actually applied to startups.
>> How do you fix this company?
> I'll take a shot : you don't, the free market does it for you (ie. the company isn't going to last long, or the plant get shut down if part of a group).
That's a pretty lazy, ideological answer. They're giving away their product for free and there's no mention of a sales team in the whole story. Before you get all enthused with "creative destruction," someone could try laying off some of the useless employees and actually selling their product first. Destruction shouldn't be the first solution, it should be the last.
If you're the head of a plant where nothing produced is sold for a price that cover your expanses, then no, sorry, the system [0] will soon have your company closed down, depending on your amount of emergency cash. And if you're part of a group then you are in for a very rough time with the group's C[E/O/F]Os, and odds are that this will ends up with the plant being shut down (machines/peoples may be rebased at other plants).
> Nobody ever buys any of it. It's not sold in any stores. No hotels buy it. No businesses buy it. Lots of people are lined up as far as you can see to pick furniture out of the pile for free.
This is something that can't realistically happen for a furniture plant. You can't pile up furniture up to the sky without paying your wood suppliers.
[0] suppliers, banks, state - what I maybe shouldn't have called "free market" in order to avoid epidermic reactions
It seems like you are saying you'd give up because it's pointless anyway. Maybe it is pointless (maybe Evernote has too much debt they can never repay), but if someone were paying you to fix a problem in this hypothetical scenario, giving up shouldn't be an acceptable response.
Have you ever seen $300MM worth of wood? I specifically said the owner had pumped a huge amount of money in the company.
Well, I'm not sure about wood, indeed, but I guess specials species can cost a lot. But I definitely saw $300MM of metal in a single stocking rack, not even speaking in terms of machines and buildings.
> I specifically said the owner had pumped a huge amount of money in the company.
Yes, I read that but I put it apart a bit too quickly, apologies. I would love to be pointed to real cases where huge amount of cash were invested in finished-good producing plants with no sales whatsoever. Off the top of my head I can think that Tesla's industrial activity can come close to the description for the investment story, however they do sell - their problem is more of meeting the production target.
I've seen with my eyes plants coming out of nowhere [0] with banks backed cash, but they definitely had customers commands already passed.
[0] https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...
But they are also sitting on war-chests worth multiples of their yearly incomes (or at least a big chunk of 1 yearly income) and they are close to monopolies in some of their markets.
Even if they'd break down this badly, they'd be around for decades. Heck, IBM is still around :)
As a matter of fact, if you were Ikea's CEO with a rather important war-chest (however not at the level of Apple assuredly), you would never let "live" one of your plant if all it's finished goods were given for free because nobody would want to buy it.
Burn the furniture pile (or move it into a warehouse or build a fence around it or something).
Hire a new COO who is the head salesman, and compensated purely by how much furniture they sell. Give them freedom to hire whoever they want so long as they are also being paid based on commission (and don't let them hire anybody already at the company).
As for the factory floor workers, optimize this later, sales is the focus so don't get distracted trying to optimize production until you forecast that it will fall behind sales. Get out and Sell! Get that furniture into stores.
Don't even fire the 300 people in the office, it's not worth the time you would put into it. Hire a consultant that specializes in downsizing to do it for you. Anyone who works in the office is considered contagious so no exceptions.
Oh, so magic the problem away?
And no one wants to work for your company on commission.
I would argue basically the opposite. If you're selling sofas at $4500 and your main competitors are giving them away, you're only going to sell to customers that really like your particular sofa. If you sell them at $500, and they're quite a bit better than the ones your competitors are giving away, you might be able to stay in business.
What's the point of expanding? Would you even be making much more money per employee by growing huge? If I were the founder, I would much rather try to get the company stable, and have it become a passive income stream and have the time to make a new thing, instead of spending my life milking every last drop out of it until it becomes an irreparably bloated mess.
They hire talent with the same growth mindset... not the sustainability mindset. They don’t tend to think, “what moves do I need to make to be around 100 years from now?”, they think “how can I get 20x growth in X time”. Unfortunately now they are thinking “how can I keep my job”.
At most companies, tech or otherwise, it is hard to get more pay by doing a better job. You often cannot just get paid more for delivering faster, or delivering less buggy code, or closing more bugs than anyone else.
You get paid more for having a team. HR uses "# reports" as a metric for pay at almost every company i've been to. So I hire. I hire 3 when i need 1. I hire 5 when i need 2. Ideally, you end up doing no technical work and "managing up" the whole time. Recipe for success.
You set the metrics and i behave accordingly.
Fire the marketing team. (Seen this happened at colleges before)
Hire someone within from the floor as upper management that is the furniture expert. Give them actual power to ruffle feathers.
Hire outside a few middle managers from successful companies and pay them well.
CEO talks about how everyone needs to love what we make and do, furniture.
Company has managers work the floor for two weeks on a rotating schedule for the first 6 months. Each manager does two different jobs for a week each. Pepsi does this every year. Friend of mine was in upper management and he drove a truck and delivered products a week a year.
Restructure after 9 months and get rid of people who don't buy in who more then likely will leave on their own.
Management?
Why do you think those 300 people will work against their own interests?
Well the question is if you were the CEO. The CEO is going to have to roll up their sleeves and be the change maker. The environment will have to change. Staying the same is not an option in the long run.
> Why do you think those 300 people will work against their own interests?
When the company environment is one of empowering people to change themselves or help them move out of the way, because change is coming, allows current management a choice. Believing the best about people and that they also want the company to succeed and that deep down they also are frustrated by the low profits. That they actually just need someone to guide them to the promise land. I guarantee you that this management team is totally in paranoid "How are we still in business?" mode. If you can say, "We are turning this ship around and making this company survive through hard work and tough decisions will get people to leave or to actual apply themselves.
You have to change the work place environment and pretty much that will take care of the majority of the 300 people. The hardest thing to do is to change the workplace environment that really can only happen from the top down.
One thing about change, good or bad is that change is difficult. In environmental change at work it is unbearable for months and months. You keep meetings with fewer and fewer people and they will start looking for greener pastures and search and find these articles.
https://www.techrepublic.com/blog/10-things/10-tips-for-deal...
If people are comfortable they will not look for new opportunities.
I guess I am saying that people don't take a self-assessment of their work till they are feeling left out or can't meet some challenges. Either way you have a better company from your management when they do. People will either flight or will challenge themselves, but staying the same is not an option.
I like that idea. Let managers deal with the details of the product or service. Have them exposed to countless, tiny, everyday pains and problems, which are invisible when handling big picture ideas.
For companies that deal with digital goods instead of physical products temporary low level support rotation might be a chance to get higher level positions down in the trenches. Basecamp seems to use such a system: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3676-everyone-on-support
Before you can actually accomplish anything at this furniture company, I think a few other things have to happen:
1. Who has the power to fire you? The owner is the obvious answer, but maybe there are more people -- perhaps they are people who report to you. What do they want done? Can you get some political capital by executing on those things, even if they don't really matter?
You are coming into a dysfunctional place and at some level trying to make it functional. You will inevitably be subjected to backlash and are a candidate for host rejection, and you need tools to fight against that if you are going to succeed.
2. Find allies. This is a 500 person company, and you may be the boss but you can't be everywhere. People already inside the company could make great allies, but you have to worry about whether they are already too institutionalized or if there are political dynamics that you are unaware of. People from outside the company will be seen as outsiders, but may otherwise be more able to share your vision.
3. How long do you have to execute? The company is obviously burning a ton of money, so how much longer can that / will that be allowed to continue? You don't want to plan to use every second of that time, but knowing the order of magnitude (6 weeks, 6 months, 6 years) can be hugely helpful. Slow changes may be easier to roll out, but you most likely don't have 20 years to right the ship. If you don't have enough time to get to your end goal, then you need a new goal.
4. Is the product actually any good? What is the core institutional strength that you're working with? In this case, is the furniture actually made well? Is it made quickly? What do you have -- even if its a very small thing -- that gives you any kind of edge? Find a way to make that the core of your business.
5. What is the goal / what does success look like? This is the big one. You need to pick something (and get buy-in) and work towards that. Trying to fix everything about a company at once is doomed to failure. Trying to do twenty things and getting 10% on all of them is probably a waste of time. You need to be able to clearly articulate this for different audiences in different mediums in order to get the resources to execute on it. You may not be giving the same message to all groups.
In the case of the furniture company, I could see success as a few different things.
Option 1: Reduce burn and gradually spin down the business. This might sound like failure, but if you have no core strength and no way to get one, making the inevitable company collapse more gradual and graceful may be the best win you can get for yourself, the owner and the employees. If you had any customers, it would be helpful for them as well. This means figuring out who to cut in what order, what resources can be sold to return funds to the owner / other investors, and so on.
Option 2: Divide the business into the working and non-working parts, in order to contain and eventually excise the diseased parts. If the existing operating constraints and burdens are too great, you may need to give up on parts of the business.
Find teams or individuals who seem to execute well (if there are any) and quietly move them to work together on something that can be made, sold, marketed and shipped isolated from the teams that can't handle those tasks. You might need to outsource large parts of this vertical, or maybe even every part of it. Eventually you separate the businesses throughout a spinoff or an acquisition, unless you get the right signals and proceed to Option 3 instead. This is a way to succeed now without having to also pay off all of the debts of the past however many years (which you leave with the old business).
Option 3: Actually fix the entire business. You have all of that furniture piled up that people are taking for free, so that could mean that people will pay for what you make if only you sold or marketed it effectively.
This could also be a false signal. People will take things for free that they wouldn't be willing to pay for -- you have polluted your potential market by devaluing your product -- and you may not be able to overcome that. You also have the twin problems of the humongous historical costs and current operating overhead to produce product at this level. You will have to greatly increase your ACV or profit margins in order to not only pay for today's operating costs but to eventually cover all of the costs of getting to this point.
This option seems to be what Evernote has tried to do, by moving up-market into more enterprise-y things like team chat. I think that path is hopeless for them, and they will never achieve success that way. It might be too late, but they should probably try to get to a different successful outcome.
It depends. First company of Evernote founder was run by engineers, had a contracts with Apple (Newton handwriting recognition technology), Disney, Microsoft, and their tech is still sorting mail at USPS[1]. This is the photo of the Paragraph team circa 1991 - https://maxkotin.com/2018/03/12/book-about-paragraph/
[1] https://www.parascript.com/usps-awards-parascript-contract-f...
Most of these are done by a) outside agencies or if they're big enough b) in house design staff or c) templates
When facebook & "viral" was mainstream, our marketing staff decided they wanted to make something go viral. It was an image with the word 'SALE' (90% of image area) & our company logo (10% of image area).
Company wide email: "blahblah blah..Let's make this go viral!!"
It was then that I realised job titles don't equate to talent or impact. Marketing is 90% admin and the 10% that is creative can be better handled by more creative people(frequently not in the marketing dept - engineers/designers)
My assertion is that it truly takes all kinds. I find it remarkable that Evernote can serve 225M people with 500. I think that the people who give effort to find the genius in every department themselves become enlightened.
The issue with Product Manager, Marketing managers etc is that those people are usually really good at marketing THEMSELVES and creating a mess of internal politics by doing so. They are needed but if you have too many of them pass a certain threshold and the whole company will never recover.
This seems to be unfortunately what is happening at Evernote.
I really don't agree. The person in charge needs to have enough technical insight to have a good sense of the overall health of the team and whether reasonable progress is being made. They also need to have a sense of what is a 'good' product and what about the product needs to be improved.
Lets say the person in charge is not technical. The first thing that will happen is someone will get behind on what they are working on, and they will make some excuse (the database was reindexing or some nonsense), and the boss will believe them. From then on everyone knows they can slack off and get away with it, so productivity drops to almost 0.
Next the boss brings in technical managers to supervise the programmers, because he knows nothing is getting done but he doesn't know enough to call anybody out. This makes things much worse, since each manager is primarily motivated to be promoted, and the best way to be promoted is to demonstrate your ability to manage a large team. To get a larger team managers will deliver everything just a little too slow but hold out the carrot that if they had another person things could get done more quickly. In reality the managers are even less technically capable than the Boss, because they were interviewed and hired by the Boss. Boss's love throwing money at a problem, and team size grows and grows but managers can't actually push the team to get more done because they don't have any idea what is going on. The managers basically don't care about that anyway, since increasing productivity wouldn't help them and they can get favors in return by hiring someone's cousin.
Now there are hundreds of programmers and a dozen managers getting less done than the original 5 programmers. Lots of the programmers are extremely incompetent, hired due to nepotism or by mistake. They will never be fired because the manager would be admitting they made a mistake, or worse they might not get to hire a replacement if they fire this person, and this conflicts with their main goal of increasing their teams size to get a promotion.
Somebody has to plan work for all these programmers, and most of them are incompetent and don't care about the product. As a result, the quality is terrible. When confronted by the obvious bugs, they try to weasel out of it, and the boss is now very busy trying to keep customers and deal with emergencies (the database is down again!) to keep checking for all the obvious problems, so armies of QA people are hired. At some point a product manager is hired and once one is in the building they will hire 5 more within a year. Now you have 6 product managers having meetings with each other literally all day, and having not even a basic idea of what is going on they will start making plans. Since the programmers look busy when they are not seen or heard from so they just hide as much as possible and try not to attract attention, or put on headphones and stare at their monitors. The Product Managers look busy when they are having meetings, so they are always in every meeting, and pretty soon they insinuate themselves as the go betweens since they are always talking to the boss and the programmers are never around. Now the boss has even less idea what is going on since all the information getting to the boss is going through PMs who have literally no understanding of what is going on, and who get almost all of their information from other PMs, who get almost all their information from other PMs.
If this is a small company it is now basically in the same situation as Evernote is in now, and will go out of business soon, and if it's a large company the original boss has made such a mess and wasted so much money that the team he manages is large enough that the boss can get promoted to VP.
OR
The person in charge has enough technical understanding to keep his 10 programmers honest and make reasonable plans and be respected, and he keeps the team size at 10 super productive, happy programmers. If it's a small company he sells it to a big company for a huge pile of money, and if it's at a big company he gets passed over for promotion to VP because the job goes to some idiot that has managed to hire 500 incompetent programmers, 250 QA testers, and 200 PMs.
What they don't realize is that if you put nontechnical people in charge of programmers, nothing will get done.
The Product Managers at our company seem to:
1. Optimize going to lots of conferences which always happen to be at great locations
2. Cant provide more detailed "what did you learn at the conference" responses than useless boilerplate "customers are excited about xyz and there is huge growth there"
3. Create "partnerships" that sounds great with nice press releases but there is almost never any retrospective on how much sales $ these partnerships brought
4. Usually know very little about actual platform constraints and push cool-sounding ideas which incur massive technical debt
5. Love to create one-off demonstrations products that conveniently avoid hard questions about the technical platform and nicely shine to the c-suite and stick the ugliness of technical debt they bring to the engineers
6. Spend most of their day on Linked In hunting for the next sucker company
People will tend to believe and trust them more, and so they can spin the narrative however they'd like (and often they're the layer of separation between devs and the higher-level management that precludes the higher-ups even getting first-hand exposure to some issues).
Edit: I also think charismatic others can do this without always knowing it i.e. in a self-interest sort of sense.
Product managers are also insanely famous for killing features just to assert authority(This apparently comes while trying to appear like Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs said no to features, so we say no.).
The people managers don't put up a fight because they too are probably over staffed. The Managers/Real-Contributor ratio is high, and they know if they open their mouths and protest, their jobs are on the line next. So they let things go on.
A while back 'Program Managers' were in a similar state in most companies. I know places where they fired the entire Program management org and didn't notice any change, not even a faint pain. That was how contribution-less the whole hierarchy was.
The other part is obvious. These companies are full of VC money. They didn't earn it. The founders didn't earn it. Its free. After all its not like a loan you pay back, if the company falters, the founders or anybody of authority doesn't owe a dime to the investors. So they splurge. They spend on people. Most importantly they spend on their friends, who can help them get jobs else where.
Even with my engineering background (full stack, leaning closer to front-end) I still pair with my engineering team lead for all planning activities for the quarter.
I’m not sure what org/comapny you work for, but in my experience (little over a year) I’ve had engineers tell me I make their lives a lot easier b/c I’m the umbrella that keeps them out of meetings, always dedicate some of the quarter to tech debt, and try to get them involved in early meetings as needed around the larger “moon shot” type of product features.
So maybe n=1, but I’ve also had zero attrition on my team of 10 engineers and hiring has been easier but most engineers haven’t had a product manager who used to be an engineer (I’ll always claim to be one heart) so maybe the issue is lack of technical awareness around the product they’re owning.
Case #1: Only product manager for the entire company. Spend all day trying to understand what's the most important thing to do for the current sprint. Comes out with nothing.
Case #2: One of the several product managers trying to find something to do to show to our boss.
Both doesn't end well.
The article said that the layoff letter claimed Q3 revenue was $27mm, or an order of magnitude higher than what you're claiming here.
Second, I’m highly skeptical that the CEO is making fraudulent financial claims in his letter to the employees. Unlike you, he: a) actually knows the facts, and b) is liable for his false statements.
Finally, it’s clear you have some kind of bizarre axe to grind against Evernote, hence the baseless speculation and outright lies over the years. No idea why, but it’s pretty sad.
You can respond if you want but I won’t be reading or replying.
I've basically been coding mad and heads down for 2 months building it. I think we will have a release candidate in another week or so...
My hope / goal is to make a BETTER Evernote that's open source and lasts 20-30 years.
We have some AMAZING Open Source apps like VLC that just seem to last the test of time.
I think we deserve better!
One of the other things I wanted was something that was inherently hackable with a plugin API. The data is stored on disk and persisted via JSON so it's easy for write 3rd party apps that use the data.
It also works with git, dropbox, etc if you want cloud sync. I'm probably going to build in native cloud sync though and probably use Amazon Appsync since it supports offline sync easily.
I’ve long thought that dealing effectively with PDF or other complex, crufty formats is a good candidate for a “shlep blindness”[1] style startup, and I hope it works out for you.
I need to update the screenshots though. One day at a time.
The guys on the Discord list were really really wanting tags in the repo view so I just banged them out on Monday.
I’m looking for something exactly like polar. IPad support is a must for me though. Browser based access could work. Meanwhile stuck with mendeley...
No Electron on iPad... :-/
https://github.com/burtonator/polar-bookshelf
and if you have a blog or a twitter account please give us a shout out. Polar is a brand new baby , only 60 days old, so not many people know about it yet.
The quicker we grow the more contributors we get which means the quicker we grow :)
- More contributors.
- Help more people.
it looks really promising to me, specially when all of the other knowledge maps are going for the SaaS model.
I tried to use Evernote and it just never stuck with me. It felt like it was too much overhead just for capturing quick ideas.
Bear is working well for me. The only thing I don’t like is no audio notes and weird formatting which makes copy pasting bulleted notes into other editors somewhat painful. Still my default note app and likely to stay that way for the foreseeable future (or until I have thousands of notes again causing performance to degrade...)
Bear has a very good story when it comes to sync with the iPhone. But if you need cross-platform support, tables, equations, and such features org-mode, Typora, etc. are much better options.
If tables and equations are "crucial" it's not just about a notes app anymore...
Besides where does one stop in a note taking app? One could also ask for footnotes, bibliography management, graphs and plots, handwriting recognition, PDF management, and so on...
Most of my notes are relatively ephemeral, perhaps lasting for a task or project. Rarely to I need to reference things that aren't in relatively recent history. When I do, I'll just scroll back or do a universal search.
It does exactly what you mention.
It is expected that it will be released in Beta for macOS in the next few months.
[1] - https://getdrafts.com/
Not a fan of its looks but the functionality is just the right mix of usefulness and function over form.
I will actively keep an eye on this. Thank you
I don't even use Notational Velo anymore, since OrgMode converted me to an emacs zealot. Turns out, there's a workalike mode called deft that gets me all the same awesome search behavior.
On iOS, I use a mix of Drafts and Editorial (well, and BeOrg, for the orgmode files).
By going this way, I'm no longer dependent on someone else's product map for my notes. Sure, I guess Dropbox could become problematic or something, but there are other options there -- in this context, it's just plumbing.
For the general public to catch on to whatever the next Evernote is, I think it will have to have; inviting visual elements like Notion, collapsible text like workflowy, better reminder/project management. So many of the top feature requests of Evernote that have been neglected, some since nearly the beginning.
I don't see what is special about Evernote that guarantees its viability.
Both are free. Both do about 90% of what Evernote Basic does.
OneNote syncs to OneDrive - so if you have O365 your storage space is quite large, whereas free users only have 5GB (though compared to Evernote's 25MB this is still plenty)
Evernote is better for filing documents / archiving things - whether those are PDFs, web pages, business cards, physical mail, etc. OneNote is better for free-form notetaking and editing. Each page feels like an open canvas.
In particular: I can't drop a file directly onto the OneNote icon to archive a file - I have to make a "page" and drop it into the page's canvas. OneNote doesn't provide tagging. It enforces a certain organization that only makes sense for notes (notebooks > sections > pages). Attachments always feel like a second-class citizen inside of a page (which isn't to say OneNote's attachment handling is wrong, it's just designed for storing handouts in class alongside your handwriting, as opposed to archiving every piece of paper on your desk).
In my use case, I use Evernote (with a ScanSnap scanner) to archive every piece of physical mail I receive. It's great that I can just throw in a pile of mail, push one button, let the scanner bundle it into PDFs/JPEGs/contact cards as appropriate, apply metatadata, and OCR/index it. I tried to move this workflow to OneNote, and couldn't get anything as smooth.
I use both. I use OneNote for notes in class, and Evernote for long-term archival/recall of everything else.
(Personally, I think that DevonThink is a closer replacement to Evernote than OneNote is.)
I now store all my scans in Google Drive and use the OCR that comes with the ScanSnap. It works just as well, the search is Google fast and I can share them easily.
With OneNote, he’d have to have some sort of filing system to organize that. With Evernote, he knew it was there and he could search for it if he needed it. That’s not to say you can’t search in OneNote, just that the archiving model of Evernote works far better for his workflow.
(I use OneNote anyway, since it's so much better then Evernote for me, it's just kind of annoying given that I switch between Mac and Windows a lot.)
Also, the free (non-Office) version of OneNote is missing some features, I think.
Is it? I've been using Excel cross-platform for a while and I haven't found a missing feature yet. (Although some keyboard shortcuts are annoyingly altered.) I don't use the rest of the Office suite as much, but OneNote is the only outlier I've seen personally.
For some reason only MS seems to create products that fall flat on their face so quickly.
It didn't become the next Google or the rightful FB competitor (like analysts predicted) but it's doing well in its own right.
Evernote is spinning around the drain and early employees and VCs alike are trying hard to dump their shares on the secondary market.
I don't think anyone thinks Twitter is doing well in its own right. It's shedding users, it's possibly harming democracy, their moderation is being questioned daily in the national US press and many users don't know how to use Twitter.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/09/technology/google-russian...
But in the hopes of getting everyone to love Twitter, a lot of people think they lost focus on their existing users, which didn't make their existing users happy but never ended up enticing significant numbers of non-Twitter users either (FWIW I am in the "non-Twitter user camp", so not complaining they broke my experience)
Evernote could have skipped those VC meetings, skipped renting the huge, insanely expensive office just off Rt. 1 by SF, skipped putting huge, expensive light up Evernote signs on that office, and skipped hiring hundreds of engineers in the most expensive place in the world to hire engineers. They could have rented a small office in a commercial park in San Jose and only hired 10 people and now they would be quite profitable. They could have done this by only taking a few million dollars in funding, and now they wouldn't need an insane valuation to exit.
For a company success should be making a profit, treating your employees well and making something worthwhile.
Having said that, I can see skepticism surrounding the app based on erratic updates they've been shipping for a while now.
The app has been ruined by :
- Wildly Inconsistent UI (Windows app > MacOS)
- Switch to table layout (monster margins look ugly and quite frankly, unbearable)
- Uncertain updates (more often than not it'll break an existing feature)
Few months ago, I mistakenly updated the Mac app and it was such a painful experience, I had to dig into archives and reinstall 2016 version to restore some sanity. As someone who is heavily dependent on the app, these changes have been frustrating. I'll be jumping ship the moment a viable alternative appears.
Simple things just as being able to highlight multiple words to change fonts or even have auto capitalization not have a toggle.
The only thing I did like was the ability to repeat the last command you took but that shouldn't have to exist for stuff like changing fonts of certain words one at a time.
I do miss the desktop version of onenote as that had a lot more features that I was hoping to find on the windows 10 app version.
From my perspective, Evernote has gotten consistently worse over the past few years (some of this is due to the core product not scaling as people put more notes in - the search craps out and the organization sucks):
* No way to easily exclude say web clippings from search; in general the search results are inadequate (and doesn't factor in recency or frequency appropriately) of cache things intelligently - this effectively makes Evernote a PITA for anything but write-only usage
* Rather than helping people categorize things, they've made it progressively harder by making Notebook organization clunkier. I never got into using tags because it didn't make very good suggestions, and there's no hierarchy. With dysfunctional search, in the end it's all just a "pile."
* The original appeal of Evernote was seamless syncing across all platforms, but I'm almost entirely on Linux these days and there's no official client or good alternative, and the web interface is awful. That pretty much killed my usage for good, but every time I launch the iOS app, it seems to launch slower. There's way too much friction for creating notes.
I'll probably be exporting and cleaning house sometime soon. While the web clipper is great, I can probably find a better alternative (or just switch to Zotero for everything, as it does fine page snapshotting and the collections/subcollections largely work like you'd want). The OCR is probably the nicest thing I'd miss, but besides occasionally scanning some receipts or other papers, I'm not sure there's anything else I use it for. Also, their security/privacy updates from last year also made me hold my nose.
There are some neat open source projects that have started up recently, but I'm also starting to think about my notes and research in a more long term view (keeping and syncing, but also publishing).
Simple things like not being able to put different colors on text in the same block or even just putting a simple table (no not a database) into a block have put me off it. Also it is difficulty (re: impossible) to copy and paste notes over from another application without it getting all messed up.
And it does really the few things that I most care about:
* Seamlessly syncs/accessible on all my devices (I wish it did better offline access though)
* Has a rich, modern WYSIWYG editor (w/ markdown shortcuts, supports attachments and different types of embeds, comments/etc)
* Has a tree hierarchy on the left - I would prefer faceted nested collections (you can't put a note in two folders), but it's much more effective than single-pane organization like GDocs or Dropbox Paper
I've used a few the tables a bit and it's pretty rudimentary - if you don't need the organization, from what you've outlined, honestly it sounds like GDocs still might be what you need (I've always had a lot of GSheets I link out to from my notes - sucks it's not all in one place, but for notetaking, I think the more important thing is that I have a way to organize/find pointers to things, which GDocs completely fails at).
LOL. You haven't used Org-mode.
I used to use evernote but have since switched over to vimwiki. Like you, I did not find OneNote better than evernote.
Personally I want to think this is happening because better alternatives have been popping up. There's bear and omnifocus and, recently, notion.so that does a lot more than Evernote for a relatively cheaper price.
Also all of them have dark modes while Evernote doesn't.
These companies start a desperate, doomed-to-fail chase of a gigantic market, at the expense of their small-but-profitable niche. It's understandable from their board members' perspective, because a nice 5% ROI is not what they're after. They need that moonshot, even if chasing it likely results in losing everything.
See also: Every company that decides that their platform now needs a social media element.
For OmniFocus in particular I also have the assurance that its maker isn’t just going to up and vanish any time soon. They’ve been around since the NeXTSTEP days and are quite healthy.
Evernote also allows me to embed PDFs (or any file really), which is nice, but as a minimum spec, I insist on the ability to drop in images.
The thing that killed it for me is that unlike every other text editor in the world, you can't apply formatting to text until after you've typed it.
I'm trying Joplin now, but maybe I'll give Turtl another shot too..
Also, we have a new version coming out very soon, v0.7.0, that will have significant UI/performance/stability improvements. I think it's worth checking out (although obviously I'm biased).
The website is open-source/jekyll: https://github.com/turtl/www, and if you have ideas we can collaborate here: https://github.com/turtl/tracker/issues/165
I've seen this thread[1], any updates or plans on entering F-Droid?
Also, what is the minimum Android version supported?
The minimum supported Android version is 6.0/Marshmellow (sdk v23). This is mainly due to the Keystore version we use for the "Remember me" feature.
Have you thought about having Turtl sync to a local directory, or using something like nextcloud/dropbox? I don't know much about the backend of Turtl, so I'm not sure how reliant it really is on the server process..
I'll look for the 0.7.0 release and check it out, thanks!
Turtl's main goal is to make security easy. If you have to setup Dropbox or Nextcloud to get syncing working, then it didn't attain that goal, I believe.
Also, by providing a service on top of the server, I can eventually make some money from this thing I've spent years building =]. I hope you like v0.7.0 when it launches!
I re-downloaded 0.6.x for now to give it another try. One of the things I remember not being completely happy with was the web clipper. Has that changed at all with 0.7.0, or do you plan on improving it in the near-future?
There are a few other issues/questions I have, but I'll troll through the issue tracker first before bothering you too much :P
Evernote import is also supported and as far as I can tell works well for many users. If you find any glitch or issue though, feedback is welcome.
The app is still under development with, at the moment, a focus on bug fixing and improving the desktop and mobile usability.
The problem is the people running it now don’t have the passion for it. And a bunch of core employees either got fired or left since Phil left.
Evernote from the outside appears rudderless. The founders gone and it's clear that the MBA's running the place not only don't have a passion for the product - I'm willing to bet they don't regularly use it.
I'm still convinced with the right leader it can be salvaged because so far there hasn't been a compelling product to seize its market.
And yet EN on a number of occasions had (probably still has) sync bugs that lost either parts of notes or entire notes.
I've been a premium user since 2011 with literally thousands of notes all categorized, tagged etc. I finally decided it was time to jump ship and migrated everything over to DEVONthink. Assuming you only need to have it on apple products (its iOS/MacOS only), it has everything Evernote has and then some. Its got some awesome system integrations as well as some cool scripting capabilities that allow you to extend it to suit your needs. Oh and you can encrypt the data stored in it and store it wherever you want. You can even choose different locations for different databases.
I didn't know this when I bought it, but DT is also way more capable than EN at handling large complex file types like Logic sessions and such. You can open and play them right out of there like any other file. I've been looking for a way to better manage all my multitrack recordings and be able to sync them between my home and music studios. Looks like DT might just do the trick. Highly recommend.
Great specific product that solves one, or a few, problems very well, maintained by a passionate group.
Into
'Ok' broad product that tries to solve 50 problems in an 'ok' way, maintained by a group that doesn't care all that much.
Not all products are destined for mega million profit. Trying to make them into that very often ruins the kernel of truth. It's really disappointing.
I have a scanner that with the push of a button scans records and sends them to Evernote, I then shred the paper. Receipts, invoices, various mailed things all go into Evernote.
I also use Evernote web clip to save a copy of a web article (or often a recipe) which I would like to either finish later, have for reference, or share with someone.
I also save notes about computer things. Research for all my options to do X, or commandline snippets to make Y happen.
Then I can scroll back in history and it helps recall to see the things I have been doing.
https://www.tempestblog.com/2017/08/16/how-i-stay-organized-...
I was then burned by OneNote (the MacOS app is pretty bad, and has terrible export options).
I now almost exclusively use plain-text files in a Dropbox folder, and I don't regret it at all.
Also, note-taking apps are part of a suite. See Apple, Microsoft, Google, Zoho (disclosure: I am with Zoho and we compete in note-taking space with Zoho Notebook). It is a challenge for any independent app provider to compete with a single app against suites in the long run. It’s surprising Evernote didn’t expand to other productivity apps beyond note-taking.
It’s a project I’ve been working on for a couple years, and has made its rounds on HN in the past. Thought I’d share again for anyone seeking alternatives.
For every single thing, make a piece of functionality specific to that note type, subject or person. Do this hundreds/thousands of times and review what helps you grow.
Here's a brief list of person types:
- People: GTD, Event planner, Programmer, OCD, Bullet Journal-er
- Note Type: Generic Note, Todo List, Wedding, Mood Board, etc.
- Subject: Scientific/Maths notes, Programmer notes (i.e. python/jupyter notebooks, observablehq.com), Notes for specific industries, designers, school teachers, etc.
I can't really give good examples of these until I see the usage but you get the idea.
It really feels to me Evernote is for one a or two very specific types of people/use cases/subjects (the founders probably) rather than making something their users really want.
I was actually pretty blown away people are paying for the features Evernote offers, the only advantage from my disorganized workflow (aside from it being a little more organized) is looked prettier (albeit no dark mode kinda killed that too).
I just wanted something that was a bit more tailored to how my normal workflow, something a little closer to just using my text editor like when I'm programming. Something that supported Markdown, syntax highlighting, organizing into folders, tagging, and preferably with a dark theme (I won't stop using something if there isn't one, I'll just try to find an alternative with one if possible). Had Evernote offered these features, or a package with these features, that are a little more tailored to how I work, I probably would've bit the bullet and got a subscription.
Fortunately, thanks to some kind commenter here actually, a few weeks ago I found Boostnote[1]. And it was exactly what I was looking for, and didn't find in Evernote. First class markdown support, dark theme(s), syntax highlighting, the ability to setup cloud storage for syncing across devices, and it's even free and open source! But, that's not even the best feature (for me at least), Boostnote supports VIM keybindings! And honestly, that's one of the biggest reasons I never got around to getting one of these notetaking apps, because of the lack of VIM keys it's so jarring to break from my normal workflow where my editor is either vim or is using the keybindings, I used the vim Chrome/FF extensions, but until now I couldn't try to take notes without slamming esc a bunch and sighing because I just typed "kjkkkkhlkjlkjh" for the millionth time.
If you're a developer looking for an Evernote alternative, definitely give Boostnote a look. It fit right into my workflow instantly, no bugs, no ads, no bullshit, and it's got all the features you would get with Evernote, but with a touch of specialization for developers. If it weren't FOSS, I hands down would've almost immediately bought it/subscribed, because it literally had everything that I wanted out of Evernote. And, now I get that devs aren't the general public, and the basic note taking functionality will likely be just fine for most. But, at first glance, I don't see a single thing it does in the free tier, or the first paid tier, that you couldn't accomplish with OSX's Notes & Preview app, so I don't see how offering just the most basic note taking feature set is a sustainable business model when so many free (and often even builtin) apps do exactly the same thing. It certainly wouldn't hurt for them to start offering something unique, more specialized, like one of your examples Bullet Journaling. I'm only semi-familiar with it, and have been meaning to look into more, however one of the reasons I haven't was I wasn't able to find the "Evernote of Bullet Journals" online. And for people like School Teachers, if they built out some functionality specific for them, like a first-class lesson planner, alongside their normal notes, and an idea board, etc... I'm sure teachers would flock to it (if it didn't suck that is), I know my mother would love a nice looking, easy to use app, that she can take notes, work out lessons plans throughout the day, and keep her to-do lists all in one place.
Unfortunately, given the OP, I'm not anticipating that Evernote is going to be jumping on building out specialized feature sets anytime soon.
Edit: I did just log into my Evernote account that was linked to an old gmail, and was able to stumble upon some notes I apparently "tried" taking during university, one of which is titled "Thread Safety" and it's contents are "It’s good to keep your threads safe." Maybe it's not Evernote I'm not a fan of, it could just be I'm just not a fan of taking coherent/useful notes.
And you've been that kind commenter today for me. Boostnote is the first suggestion here that actually seems feasible for me, properly cross-platform, the UI seems very well done, lots of customizations, and (if I understand correctly) plain Markdown storage, not yet another obscure unnecessary format that's unreadable without the app. I've been using Simplenote after Evernote started being too bulky and unreliable, but Simplenote is not quite polished and doesn't seem to be getting any love. I'll give this a try, it'll be really good if this pans out. Thanks!
(Another issue is that it's not really "highly customizable" once you get into it - even though "customizable" is a proud part of their tagline - but at least that doesn't seem to be intentional, just some messy disconnected design of the Preferences page, according to an Issue comment on github.)
I'm not sure that company could be successful -- they raised so much money there's no way the investors could be made whole just on that product. I believe (from public info) their revenue is in the single digits per quarter.
It doesn't help that their CEO is an ex googler. I don't mean this as any insult to Google nor to him specifically, but working at G doesn't prepare you for a more resource-constrained environment where the product's traction and success is of existential import. I've seen this problem play out over and over.
E.g. "All items in EverNote within 30 miles of X and with a rating >= 4 stars"
I am describing a flexible database with a cracking UI. And nobody has done it AFAIK (except one startup a couple of years ago that took funding then burned)
Tangential: For bonus points, add other modes to the note taker. A WorkFlowy-esque outliner, one of those where you add cards to the right of each item to drill into detail. There's lots of different types of notes people want at different times.
It seems like empathy 101 to me to not make the layoff of an employee about you, the one that made the decision to probably throw their life into chaos, but it seems to be almost ubiquitous in these announcements.
It's lists, kanban boards, images and a lot of other stuff at one place. Any TODOs I use Quip these days.
Evernote guys, please leave your paying users alone.
Microsoft already discontinued OneNote (the Office version). The last version will be 2016. They're offering OneNote as a modern app now that requires a Microsoft account and syncs to the cloud - and of course it doesn't have equivalent functionality.
Google Keep for anything fleeting.
Evernote for keepers.
Google Docs for structured stuff.
Keep has a very simple and convenient design. There's a note length limit that I find annoying sometimes, but encourages switching to a Google Doc instead if the note is getting too long. Also love the syncing between devices (web, multiple Android devices)
What sense does it makes to have some guy from the heavily sheltered and insane Google X running a real business and product? He probably doesn't have the first clue of whatever he is doing.
There's also an android app (called quaver) that someone else (not the original developer), has built using the open JSON specs. It works, but isn't that great.
Syncing the JSON data to the cloud keeps all devices in sync. It also has an import feature that allows you to import your Evernote notes.
A company grows into its funding, not what it needs to do (and they raised more than $300M over the years).
That and “could build it in a weekend”.
Evernote has great discoverability of notes. Search works. And when viewing a note it suggests related notes. With the browser extension it even suggests notes in Google's Search (too bad I'm now using DuckDuckGo), related to what you searched for.
I also like the multimedia support, like being able to record audio. Other people like web clippings. Unfortunately their business isn't sustainable, as we can see and I'm thinking of switching.
The "encrypted text within a note" is pretty cool too, although I haven't used it much.
Frankly, I can't find a replacement that works as well. I hope they can restructure, but with only $10MM annual revenue, I don't see how that's possible.
So on the alternatives I'm thinking of:
1. Other proprietary alternatives — like Dropbox Paper, which is nice, but Dropbox has killed products I liked before, therefore sorry Dropbox, but you're not fooling me again; this actually goes for other note taking apps out there; fool me once, shame on me, etc.
2. Something based on open standards — e.g. Apple Notes is OK, but very basic when you sync it with FastMail or a Google Account; this is what I was using before Evernote; I might go back to it
3. Open Source — Standard Notes (standardnotes.org): love the idea, open source, end to end encrypted, does daily backups in Dropbox which is awesome; unfortunately it's not very polished, had issues with it
So if I'm going to switch, I'm going to choose either open source or something that syncs with my email or Dropbox account.
I've been using it for so long now. I don't specially like the product but it does the job. I use it on daily basis for notes, lists, ideas, reminders, todos, backlog…
My only issue is that the free plan is limited to 2 devices and I've never felt like paying for Evernote. Not sure why. I just checked the pricing and it's actually super low. Maybe I should upgrade.
I'm up to 7000 words in one document. The feature I'm missing in Dropbox Paper is around organising my notes and research for what I'm writing. Think of Scrivener or other writers' tool, which knows you're writing on many levels and need a scratchpad around, and to keep the outline bullet points even after you've written prose for that section.
I've taken to having a separate Paper document to contain the research/notes/outline and one for the draft writing. If this is a use-case you consider for Paper, it'd be awesome to have more support.
If not, then HN can you suggest a better, shared writing environment?
I read about notion a few days ago and it's been smooth so far. It's everything I've been thinking of for when "I'm gonna make my own note-taking app I swear". I'm looking at moving maybe a third of my notes to it and use it for a few weeks before I consider moving fully and paying, I guess. The desktop client is an electron app so that might be a turn off for some. But! There's a web clipper on their road map too so that's one point for them that always makes me look back at evernote.
I haven't used evernote so I don't know all of its features, and I'm sure dynalist is missing many of them, but it's wonderful for all those things you mentioned (notes, lists, ideas, reminders, todos). The android app is a little sluggish, but that's pretty much my only complaint, I love everything else about it.
Few decades ago many applications such as C++ compilers, Word Processors, productivity applications and just applications in general were often built by a single person!
Now a primitive CRUD app takes hundreds of people of staff.
Say what?
What the f happened to productivity. Looks like someone's driven off the productivity cliff.
Evernote does OCR things, can take audio or camera notes, and has a tool to grab copies of webpages with various levels of cutting out non-content.
>Why do I need Evernote if I have Google Docs or Office 365?
It's a bit like asking why you'd need a PostIt note if you already have a piece of paper. They're tools that do pretty similar things that specialize in very overlapping but slightly different tasks.
The OCR results I have now is not terrible nor wonderful.
I don't know why Dropbox is still about, and I don't know why Evernote is still about.
Dropbox seems to have found value in a flooded market although I don't know why, so it is conceivable that Evernote will do the same.
The pain of Evernote was enough to make me switch. Dropbox has not yet pained me enough to switch away from being a paying customer despite the fact that I have a 1GB OneDrive plan with Office.
Your Mileage May Vary.
Filesystem integration with the Mac was disastrous. Three problems: 1- some characters are not permitted in filenames; you find this out when synch fails and have to guess where the problem is; 2 - some files simply silently don't synch; and 3 - a couple of times a day it would decide it had lost synch and then would have to re-index the repo, which not only took up cycles (I could survive that) but meant there was no synching while that was happening.
Whereas I just have almost everything in my DB directory tree and even do all my development there (builds and all).
At my last company we had Box which is almost identical with Dropbox but with a much more complex interface to satisfy corporate I/T. Total overkill for a startup!
They've also built a lot of good will from me over the years with promotional offerings. I don't actually pay for a subscription, but I've got about 13gb of quota.
I used to use Evernote daily (was even a paying user for a while) and I hardly ever do anymore.
After the last few redesigns have I have started searching for a decent alternative and recently came across Nuclino (https://www.nuclino.com/). It can do everything Evernote does and more for a way cheaper price - WYSIWYG editor, markdown support, hierarchical lists, kanban board, mind maps... Don't think I'll be going back.
Nuclino looks interesting, I'm going to give it a try!
It makes me fearful about the positioning of my own tool - https://thorny.io - an interactive notebook for decision making.
It could be categorised as a flavour of note-taking tool because it's like a cross between an outliner, a spreadsheet, and a logic-programming tool. If it is treated as a type of note-taking tool then it puts it into the red ocean. I'm not sure there is space for multiple note-taking tools in people's workflow. Spreading notes across tools would be a massive pain-point.
I just tried to use it for a new project and when creating a shared note it kept telling me my email address wasn't validated. Well there's no way to validate one unless you go to the web site, delete your address and add it again! It also offered to set up 2FA...only I'd used 2FA to log in! So I got a new set of replacement keys. This was frightening enough that I exported all my data.
But what tool shares phone/laptop and permits formatted text, attachments, and offline use? Apple notes almost gets there, but doesn't.
What is a good alternative for this? I’m willing for it to be a separate system to note taking.
Any recommendations?
Have now been using OneNote for longer than I used EN and really happy with it. Major downside is no Linux client and, although the ON web app is one of the best I’ve ever used, it still sucks.
Anyone recommend a solution re Linux? Anything out there as good as OneNote (‘just works’) that also supports Linux, please?
I'm still waiting for the killer extension where I can take all my restaurant reviews (for a city) and dump them on a map to see the closest one to me.
spacemacs http://spacemacs.org/doc/VIMUSERS.html
or
doom emacs https://medium.com/urbint-engineering/emacs-doom-for-newbies...
I use a flavor of emacs, spacemacs, that has had a TON of work to map it's controls to "vim-style" keybindings. If Emacs didn't have vim-style editing, I would not use it.
If you want a more lightweight solution, https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil-collection is a set of evil-mode keybindings to get you started.
Which competitors have blossomed and are also cross-platform? I can think of OneNote, but the 'clip from web' feature in Evernote is superior IMO. But I hate Evernote's "rich" (my foot) text editor for being so dumb and so basic, and the lack of organisation that tags and notebooks give, and am always keen to find a replacement.
Replacements always seem to have better features, but the cost of getting a note into them is higher.
If Evernote did not take funding, they likely would have had a path to profitability, even a meager one.
But, if Evernote did not take funding, it's likely another note-taking app would have, and Evernote would not have been able to compete with free VC money and RSU compensation.
Edit: To be clear I'm paying for Standard Notes right now. So I'm not someone against paying for good things.
the executive departures two weeks ago characterized
Evernote as “in a death spiral,” saying that user growth
and active users have been flat for the last six years
and that the company’s enterprise product offering
hasn’t caught on.
I can't argue the logic, but this makes me sad. Can't someone make a product that people will pay for that is sustainable over time (even if # new users == # lost users )? Why does everything have to be huge to exist?
(They don’t, but just illustrating that not every business needs hockey stick growth to be viable).
I just do this:
>Hello I am a quote that is extremely long lined with no newlines. I will break based on the width of your device just like any other normal text inside an HTML element. Look how long I am wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.
Works pretty well for me, thought I'd mention it.
>Your version just mixes in with everything else you typed, and hardly looks like a differentiable block of text at all, regardless of whether it wraps or not.
Hey look! A completely distinct
block of text. And wow! It's
monospaced too! This gives the
impression that it's reprinted
exactly as originally written!
And all I had to do, to make phone
people happy was manually wrap at
maybe, like 30 chars. Amazing!If ">" doesn't differentiate the quote enough, use italics with it:
> *Quote here*
> Use a blank line to separate paragraphs.
I switched to Notion recently, and never going back!
I stopped using them after they made it clear they had no interest in supporting a linux client. Not sure if they have changed their attitude since then, but that ship has sailed as far as I am concerned.
They gave me premium account for a month. I didn't use it. A couple of months later I wanted to check how it works, so I asked them to enable me the premium account for 1h or 1 day. I wanted to check how the features work. After a week I got an answer: the premium account is available when you will pay. So I resigned. I don't like paying for I-have-no-idea-what.