Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
It seems perfectly reasonable to create a new subscription license for a new cloud product.
Like couldn't 80% of the value of Evernote be written as a simple, intuitive piece of software that a middle-aged programmer in Boise could maintain in his free time?
Natural selection at work, I'd say.
Without proper direction people just keep adding features that are only used by a tiny subset of the userbase, and you end up with a bloated application that's slow to use because it's full of functionality that nobody uses.
And of course, you still need to pay those developers, so you shift the burden onto your userbase through ads or fees, making your application less appealing.
WinZip was a good example of this.
I’m just worried about exporting my data before they go out of business, but to put into what? Is there any good, ideally open source, alternative that can accept Evernote as is?
I’ve also had trouble with OneDrive. I like most Microsoft software, but MS needs to rework its schema for auto-save products. They’re seamless 99% of the time, but come with the black swan risk of catastrophic failure at the worst time. I’d rather just ctrl+s and email backup copies to myself.
And, if you take VC money, you don't even get that option.
I did note renderer and editor (HTML, WYSIWYG) for EverNote 2. Later that code became Sciter Engine (https://sciter.com)
For now it stores notes only locally but in next version it will be possible to use clouds (DropBox, GoogleDrive, etc.) for sharing and accessing notes from Mobiles and browser. https://notes.sciter.com/2019/06/28/note-sharing-is-coming/ (or to use dedicated server for that (paid option)).
Yet: I am looking for co-founder of the project : https://www.sideprojectors.com/project/project/11572/scitern... - please contact me if someone is interested.
And business' look for a sustainable business model, because it's literally a question of life and death for them.
If people ain't paying for newer release (as in old good charge-for-major-upgrades model), maybe that piece software can be considered "done" and it's time to go after another sector?
Evernote sounds like a company that tried too hard to be something it wasn't. "Smart covers for your feet"? Really?? The founders of Evernote could have built a very successful low-expenses high-margin lifestyle business that would have made them very rich. "Unicorn or bust" isn't always a winning strategy. I hope the other startup featured in NYTimes today - Superhuman - learns from Evernote's failings
- simple plain text note-taking; - available on android, iOS and web; - available offline and syncs (more or less) reliably; - full text search.
I do not want more features on my note-taking app. I do not want it to go on steroid. Google Keep is not trash. It is perfect for the intended audience. You are just not part of that audience.
It is also very easy to save your notes as a google doc. I don't think there is a lot of risk...
Anything destined for for that pit of despair I write in vi and excel, and copy/paste or import. Docs is not quite awful, but nowhere close to nice to use.
And "just search" as an organizing principle for docs from lots of people who aren't information nerds ends up leading to a bucket of ass. Newhires end up doing broken things because they found an outdated doc, you have to pick through multiple versions of other people's crap that never goes away, etc.
I keep all my docs to myself and render-to-Google when something needs to be shared. Reminds me a bit of blogging, really, with crappier tools.
Come on people, when is sharing an opinion worth a downvote?
I definitely had some syncing issues with in the past as well, but I understand it has improved.
And if they are currently making close to $100M in annual revenues, then $1B valuation doesn’t seem far off.
Lock-in effect is quite substantial after you have a couple of years of tagged information.
As a user, I just wish they would have a smoother implementation of their current product-offering.
My shorter term hope is that they fix the android app bug that cropped up a couple weeks ago, making notes take 10-30s to open...
1.6M knowledge workers paying an average $5 a month for their primary note taking app - apps on every platform: iOS, Android, iPad, Mac, Windows, ChromeOS, Linux, encrypted cloud sync, and integration with other apps - feels like a very plausible reality that gets the company to a $1B valuation.
For $7/m, I could get OneNote plus the entire office suite, and OneDrive.
Out of those that do there are perfectly good things like paper notepads that are fit for purpose. Then there is Notepad.exe in Windows that actually does it for some. I have met someone at the other extreme, using git and 'vi' for notes including 'must buy milk' type of things.
To most people who have some system - bookmarks in the browser, a paper notebook, emails to themselves or whatever, there is no seeking out of the superior Evernote solution. Or even OneNote. I used to work with a guy who was teased for using OneNote and wanting the company to pay for his special program (when there was a perfectly good stationary cupboard).
It is just a hard sell. And now people can just take pictures on their phones it is an even harder sell.
Some things are table stakes with an operating system. A clock. A calculator. A means of taking a screen shot. A web browser. An image viewer. A document viewer. But once upon a time people tried to make people pay for these things. As it turned out nobody needed the MS-DOS TSR calculator with as many memory stores as hotkeys. Evernote is a bit like that in that it has features most but not all don't want to pay for.
We probably would never have heard of them had they not taken the VC money and rammed the product down our throats with the marketing budget. To some extent it is a remnant of a product that never was going to happen - the handwriting input. This had been the dream in the 80's, 90's and 00's. Palm, Apple, Microsoft and everyone else with a dog in the game wanted it to happen. But it never did.
Note taking and search should be an operating system level thing. And it kind of is already.
Then they stopped adding relevant features – why did I have to manually title a note that was being OCRed? – and started adding cruft. Even now, if they pivot back to perfecting the document storage product they can lead that market.
Or if they wait for Apple to add OCR to Notes they can lose it forever.
It was also really good at clipping web pages and helping you find them later. I really really liked it for free form research, like when you spend a couple weeks looking into a business idea to write up a detailed report later and want to find the reference to that concept or statistic you remember.
Ten years ago that kind of thing was really hard to do reliably and they were good at it.
But then instead of building on that success the product got worse. Oh well.
Small groups of engineers can do amazing things but in most companies amazing things worth doing run out and staff keeps growing. Salaries need to be paid and diminishing returns start.
I have been thinking about the economics of being done with a piece of commercial software. Shut down feature additions, lower the price in regular increments, and open source after a high bar of total revenue is reached.
Alternatively work out a company sale that doesn't include the name or the product. Sell the team, the office space, the experience, and a copy of the product which must be rebranded or reengineered into something else but leave the original product and name on the market with a maintenance staff and original copyright.
I like your sunset strategy better as a customer, but it sounds like something you could only really do if you don't have investors.
Plenty of companies will deliver just as much, if not more, with a 30 person strong team, as they would with 600, or 10,000.
But a thirty person strong team isn’t going to get a multi-million cash injection unless they plug it all into a swanky office and an ever-growing wage bill.
I greatly admire Basecamp and it’s founders, DHH and Jason Fried, for completely bucking this trend. And they’re as successful as ever.
Evernote seems to have some sort of "reality distortion field" which is somewhat like Apple's, but somewhat mis-calibrated. (Apple's own "reality distortion field" originated with Steve Jobs, and has been losing its calibration ever since he departed this world.) They have a tendency to start with things which feel "magic" then have them fade into "meh." I've tried Evernote a few times, but it just never stuck. It's in that category of, "It seems like it could be really cool, but for some reason, it isn't."
I might be missing something, but it feels like it's trying to solve a problem I don't have. In fact, it feels like a problem that doesn't even exist.
If you're interested, this blog post gets into how I use it: https://www.tempestblog.com/2017/08/16/how-i-stay-organized-...
That may be why. Lots of people don't have a GTD system. I, personally, can't see myself ever using one.
Maybe I'm just way too low in conscientiousness but I find systems like that so oppressive that I get very unhappy and abandon them.
FFS, they still haven't implemented a dark theme yet. . . isn't that something you can just do in CSS?
The ability to instantly recall past notes with Elephant-like memory will always be needed, so their core product principle is spot on.
But at $8/10GB per month, I can't help but wonder if Evernote is making some data storage vs retrieval performance trade-offs that impact adoption.
It's at https://apse.io. It has been working really well for me. I'm happy to answer questions if that sounds interesting.
The issue with "unicorn" failures is that a product can be really successful in objective terms (users, revenue, profit..) but still an investment failure, if it fails to live up to valuations.
So, if investors in 200X thought (and paid as if) the company had N potential... N becomes definition of success. They'll also, in all likelihood have already begun to spend accordingly to that N level. Failure of one kind leads to others
As I said, it sounds like there are fundamental company issues with Evernote, but it also could be that it's more of a failure to live up to expectations (we should have been slack!) than failure in objective terms.
..I know people who like Evernote.
IIRC he bought it from the investors for cheap (so they could get it off their books) and then just ran it as one guy (maybe a few more added part time later)... and it does just fine in that conext, and who knows what might happen from there.
Kinda makes me think that a lot of Unicorn style world domination or nothing, result in some business opportunities being lost if those are the only two options.
I think a lot of companies are doomed because of that attitude. Companies with high valuations like Slack, Github and others can't just keep a nice business going but they have to expand like crazy to justify their valuation. And most of them end up converting a very good core product into a big mess.
You may never be as big as Slack but there's probably a business there.
It's not impossible to compete but just much harder.
There are two companies backed by deep pocket investors who are happy to lose money, their products are straight sold at a loss because they desperately need market share gains to hopefully dominate and survive when they finally worry about profits.
Now the company I'm at is doing fine as we're small and such and we haven't lost customers to do the absurdly low cost pricing from the other two companies. But I know of others who have lost customers, nobody can match the pricing, and simply because they don't have the backing they will not survive.
It's very possible the two deep pocket companies won't survive either, but it seems like a fairly destructive pattern to have a market torn up ... when the driving force isn't even creating a stable company / what I would think of as typical market forces that help everyone.
A great example is Uber: they’re dominant but they have a ton of debt and neither their customers nor, especially drivers, have a reason to stick with them if the money is better somewhere else. They could conceivably make that up through superior logistics but if you thought you could do better, say in a particular geographic area where you can get drivers who know where anything is, it might be reasonable to compete if the absence of such a huge amount of debt gives you enough leeway to support an app development team and treat your drivers enough better that they’ll favor your clients.
gitlab and bitbucket ain't github, but as github started burning, they started picking up steam. github sold for $7.5 billion. If they can get 1% of that value, that's still $75 million. If they can do so on the cheap, maintaining control, that's not a bad return. I doubt something like gitlab requires more than 5 people to do well enough to achieve that, given patient, low-overhead investors. Done well, that's $75 million returns for a $10 million investment. If you toss the investor $50 mil, and each employee $5 mil, it's not bad.
On the other hand, as far as I know, patient low-overhead investors are a myth.
Thanks to rutierut who remembered it better than I did ;)
Most business activity in America is far from the Bay Area. It concerns itself with the sorts of quotidian businesses opportunities you speak of.
If they end up closing down or pivoting they have helped to create the market and all their users will be looking for an alternative.
Or it was the failure of the investors to gauge the potential properly and start out with too high expectations. Why should that count as company failure?
It's a somewhat funny situation: if you feign optimism to access stupid money you're a fraud, but if you are just as stupid as the money and believe it yourself, everything is fine.
Of course if you give something away for free or sell it cheap enough at a loss, you'll get a lot of "customers". I could do the same by opening a free taco stand on the street. But it is in no way a sustainable business model.
See Uber vs Lyft.
You'd be better off investing in a real business with a real revenue plan. Still, yes, your model works in an environment where collusion can take place. Which is why collusion and the VC aristocracy is so damaging.
Value creation doesn't come from the absence of other value creators.
The reason Evernote is dying is because it wasn't a good product. Nobody could fix the long-term tech debt they accumulated, which grew to become regular bugs in the product. And rampant feature bloat.
There are a slew of able replacements to Evernote now available. The landscape of note taking software in 2019 is a very different place than it had been when Evernote started. For them to beat back companies like Notion (and imho Amplenote) would have required heroics on par with what it took to build the company in the first place. Simply getting sync right is itself profoundly challenging for a company with their legacy [1]. It's years of infrastructure decisions, and a consistent dedication to an unpleasant development task. Newer competitors (incl free options like Google Docs/Keep) were ready and waiting to do better.
[1] I've spent the last couple years trying to build an Evernote replacement. Sync for us is very tough, but must be a pit of despair for companies liked Evernote who built their note content out of HTML
It feels like there is a tendency of projects like this to grow too far, too fast, until they fail - dollar signs in their eyes obscuring a reasonable vision of their scale and potential, which is far more modest than they realise.
But then again, the ones that remain reasonable don't get in the news I suppose.
Isn’t Google Docs CRUD to some extent? Any idea how much it is worth or even how many people support Google Docs?
Anyway, I’m not debating whether Evernote is actually worth whatever is it’s current valuation. I don’t agree with how can something be worth so much because its just CRUD.
...
> it misses the point. Good products are entitled to charge a price for their use.
Please don't conflate these entirely separate issues. You can charge a reasonable price for a product without use of the particularly destructive bait-and-switch Evernote pulled in 2016. I was a paying customer (having used Evernote since the early Time Band days), and quit my account in disgust.
Dark mode, or even just themes, as they would continuously break anyone who did client side decorations until they gave up. Their blistering white theme hurt my eyes to use and last I checked years later it's still one of the most requested features and still not done. You know what had themes? OneNote. I paid for it and even though I preferred Evernote in many ways, it didn't hurt my eyes to use it. Just in case I'm not being clear I'm not being figurative, the white themes in a lot of devices really hurts to look at. I switched back to Android from Apple for the same reason.
The second feature was a solid export option to text. Which frankly I could have waited for and still been happy paying.
I loved their inline images which still most apps don't do as well. They just refused to add the features and broke them if you added them yourself with every release.
Agreed. I'm in the same boat as you, and a huge amount of engineering and architecture went just into syncing. And it still has problems. Being client-side encrypted also complicates things because the server can't just apply diffs, so whole objects are being passed around for small modifications.
I paid for a Plus monthly subscription (a lower tier) and there were constant advertisements within the app to upgrade to Premium. Upgrade buttons that would reappear even when I remove them, notices on the bottom of the note UI, etc.
I could understand the constant advertising for free accounts, but for paid accounts it was infuriating.
You can't trust Evernote to have searchable archive anymore. Instead it's a convoluted app with lot of useless features. They lost their focus.
There's a lot of gee whiz out there.
I think the latter part is key: VC funding means people are pressured to chase huge returns and over-compensating staff (especially at the executive level) as if they’re a billion-dollar company. That frequently leads to neglecting the “little” things which would actually make it better for users — in the case of Evernote, I stopped using it because the sync was unreliable and the apps desperately needed a QA/UX team with veto authority. Tossing everything into Dropbox should not have — but almost always was — a better experience for me and I stopped using them around 2013.
[0] https://apse.io
The second order effect is that the valley is still way too concentrated, there are billion dollar ideas out there that can really make a dent in the universe, and inspiring entrepreneurs across the globe -- but with such a myopic view, Sand Hill Road will never be able to reach out farther than suburban Redwood City.
>Lots of once-hyped companies live on the “Remember this?” spectrum. On one end, there is a cluster of fast flameouts — the Yo-Ello-Peach-Meerkat-Stolen-Clinkle-Secret-Color coterie.
That makes me think someone should create (maybe has) a start-up graveyard for folks to peruse.
I don't really think its in the self interest of someone trying to make a successful product in tech to take a landslide of outside capital to try to grow a functioning, healthy business. But its definitely in the self interest of the founders if the goal is to get big and blow up. Because getting big alone has many benefits - besides the aforementioned pay, you become connected and influential in the industry in ways that can absolve you of responsibility to outside money in your future ventures or interests.
Investors throw so much money at these guys and by doing so... can create incentives that straight leads to driving the investment into the ground and walking away with a bag of cash / future prospects.
I want Evernote Personal which would be just the core product and a web clipper. The only advanced feature I really would want included is OCR of text in images. Every time I search for something and it finds a snapshot of a whiteboard with that text on it, I get a little thrill.
FWIW, I am on the $35/year plan even though I only use it maybe 10 times per year.
Joplin[1] seems to be the best in my view. It's cross-platform, has decent sync capabilities, plus a web clipper. I've been using this for a while and have liked it a lot so far.
I used Quiver[2] for a while when I used to run macOS, but moved away from it because it was macOS specific. It also had some features lacking, namely no spell check (an issue that Joplin also has, although I believe this is being worked on). It also dosen't have a web clipper.
OneNote is ok, but I don't run Windows (I used it at work at one point). The killer feature it has is collaboration with other uses on the same domain, a la Google Docs. If that's not a use case you have, it's probably not worthwhile. Also no web clipper.
I briefly tried zim[3], but found that it lacked polish, and didn't have a mobile client or a web clipper, so I never fully moved on to it.
For a long time, I used Sphinx[4] plus several extensions and wrote everything in rst, with syncing accomplished via git. This turned out not to be very ergonomic to use, had no mobile client, and no web clipper.
Some other note taking apps that I've heard of but not tried personally:
* Turtl[5]
* TagSpaces[6] - tried the demo briefly, but didn't like the UI, also the iOS client was abandoned at that time
* Standard Notes[7]
* Inkdrop[8]
1 - https://github.com/laurent22/joplin
2 - http://happenapps.com/#quiver
4 - http://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/usage/restructuredtext/b...
6 - https://www.tagspaces.org/
Disclaimer: Ex-MSFT/onenote engineer.
It’s still not as useful as the Evernote clipper, but it’s not as awful as I said it was.
Agree that Zim lacks polish, and that the Windows version is a few versions behind the Linux version. However it's really easy to import a bunch of plain text or markdown files (with .txt extension...just dump it in the data folder and restart)
Standard Notes puts a lot of emphasis on security but doesn't yet have native support for inline images.
Tagspaces seemed more like a file organizer that had word processing features tacked on.
OneNote...I wish they'd restore the ability to use notebooks locally, the newer version wants everything on OneDrive.
I've been using Dynalist, but Nimbus Note looks promising.
It's got rich text and Markdown support.
It also supports PDF documents as first-class objects. You can drag PDFs right into Devon and they get as PDFs, meaning that when you click on a note, you view the PDF.
The PDF support is top notch. The viewer is built into the UI, and also lets you open in tabs and new windows. Lots of markup tools right in the viewer. PDFs are indexed, of course.
Its rich text supports attachments, just like Evernote, but they're much nicer. Drag a GIF and movie into a text note and it becomes a live player.
You can drag URLs right into a folder and they'll come up as web pages or PDFs, depending. Then if you want to actually store the page/PDF, you can tell it to.
Its folder structure is much nicer than Evernote's. You just create folders and nested folders. None of this notebook nonsense.
It's got built-in iCloud syncing as well as syncing via other options (Dropbox, WebDAV, more).
You can run it local mode. Devon divides its data into "databases" which you can open and close. Databases can be encrypted. So, for example, you could store important private information (things like tax forms, government forms, 2FA recovery codes, etc.) in an encrypted database on a USB drive somewhere.
It has some weird features I don't use, but which some people might like. For example, "RSS feed" is a note type. Adding the feeds automatically ingests the RSS feed's items as new notes.
One neat feature is the inbox system that tracks what's read and unread. So you can just dump new stuff into the inbox for later categorization/deletion.
The search is great.
I also like that it's not opinionated about layout. You can change the layout a lot — to show the note editor or just the list of notes, for example.
Has a nice iOS app, too.
I am looking forward to iOS 13 Reminders and Notes. At least then my notes will not be on a platform that will probably dissolve within then next decade.
it wasn't easy at first switching to something that didn't let you add images like Evernote does but the speed the at which you can jot down ideas in Dynalist made me forget about that problem
I haven't even tried half of these apps but I'm tired of looking for the one true note taking app that won't annoy me.
It does seem like a problem that should have a solid, open source solution by now. Joplin is decent, but still lackin in a few areas.
(Archive link for those who prefer non-broken web experiences)
Then open it.
I wish this worked for the WSJ too, but it appears they're smart enough not to send the full article text in the initial request unless you're logged in
However, creating a subscription model doesn’t necessarily mean there is a service that warrants it.
I think having a cloud component is often used as an excuse to explain the subscription model.
A couple of alternatives:
1. Decouple the cloud syncing component and sell that as subscription, with a sync-less version for a fee. PWAs mean you don't even need to give up the web platform to do this nowadays.
2. (My personal favourite) is sell a perpetual license but charge for feature upgrades. Retro, I know.
3. Sell a subscription licence which includes a perpetual license for the latest copy of the software. If you stop paying, you stop getting updates. JetBeains works like this with their products.
- I use it regularly. (Which means I'll probably be upgrading to new versions anyway.)
- The price is reasonable for the value
- I can export my data in a form that's still useful/accessible once I cancel my subscription.
The problem is that all those conditions are frequently not met.
I think single-purchase licenses work for some things, but they're a hard sell for others. For example, I really, really can't justify paying for a password manager for example.
At the same time, monthly subscriptions make sense for some things but don't make sense for others.
I wonder if drilling into the whys of these choices would be useful. Like maybe password management is so crucial and with specific requirements that it makes no sense to pay someone else to take control of it.
I'm personally very willing to pay for smarter people than me to handle problems I have but maybe it's not always the case that they're smarter than me or maybe there is a really ergonomic solution I can retrofit to my needs.
With SaaS, you can simply cancel your subscription. With a single-purchase license though, it's basically money you have flushed down the drain (unless the company is really generous with their refund policy).
A great example of this is a little addition I've been using to Mail.app, called MailTags[1]. I've been using it for years, religiously upgrading as I go, because email is my primary communications mode and I had a great workflow built around it.
Now it has gone subscription and is storing metadata related to mail on Someone Else's Computer. That's a hard-no for me, and really too bad, but it did make me figure out that I can replicate the workflow I built around that with Mutt and a few shell scripts.
I don't know how common that is, but their attempt to extract regular revenue meant they lost revenue from me. I do sincerely hope it works out for them - I love indie devs! - but more and more, I find subscriptions lead me to substitute open source for whatever it is.
As a customer who values his time I have to manage one more recurring payment, I have to interact with (up)sales-people disguised as customer service and I have to keep records of canceling the service n years (depending on jurisdiction) because I don't know yet who will buy the leftovers of a company once it's not profitable so they can massmail "due payment notices" to all former customers, making a profit from those who fail to object in time.
Is this a common practice? It sounds very unethical, but the cynic in me can imagine it happening.
I should be a target for this sort of software and used something else in the same general vein for a few years. But I don't really like everything tied up in a proprietary format even if I can export bits and pieces to some degree. And more generally just tend to go back to text editors, word processing docs, etc.
Put another way, it's software that sort of demands 1.) That you want to carefully save/curate what you read and write for later reuse and 2.) You go all in on a particular program.
There's a total of twelve people listed on that about page, only three of whom are programmers. Most of them are also writers, including two of the programmers, and it sort of sounds like a lot of these jobs are part-time.
So yeah, definitely lifestyle business rather than unicorn.
I once read an interview with the founder of Genius, and something he said stuck with me: “I guarantee that 90% of you are working on the wrong things, and you think you’re working hard, but you might as well not be going to work at all."
Spot-on.
Search is hard. Google has the benefit of getting a lot of training data. Corporate intranet search, searching your documents, etc. has to actually figure out relevancy and can't infer it from having already served that query thousands of times in the last day.
Phil Libin was more concerned about stroking his ego and turning the company into a lifestyle brand like apple than actually improving the product.
I've been enjoying Joplin[1] very much. I could criticize a few things about it, but it does have a web clipper (which was Evernote's killer feature for me), and supports cross-device sync. It even has a decent mobile client (I use it on iOS, I won't speak for the Android one), as well as a CLI (also haven't used it).
All of these tools have their strengths and use-cases. But none of them has the power of Evernote (API that lets me access my notes via Python, boolean search, ocr search, saved searches, folders and tags that I can jump to, local copy of my notes on my Mac). But Evernote is old. I would love to use markdown in my notes (see BearApp!), more flexible and nested folders (see Bear or Notion). Also my gut feeling tells me that this company won’t exist in a few years from now. So I need to move on someday.
There are a few companies that shouldn’t have pitched VCs that expect billion dollar valuations. Evernote is one of those companies. Soundcloud is another.
[0] Notion: too slow, does not keep a local copy of my notes, search is not comparable to Evernote‘s search capabilities)
Since the big update a couple of versions ago Apple Notes is one of the better note apps. Syncing works great, and it has been far more reliable than any of my forays into Evernote.
Search for “Notes Exporter”
It appears to be a leitmotif with the apple ecosystem: they try to lure you in and then keep you in by limiting your choices of interoperability.
At some point, this should have a negative overall: the number of users gained vs. the number of users not joining due to fears of being locked in.
anyone know a way around this?
And I have hundreds of notes that I migrated from Evernote.
Actually, no I don't. I get two copies of the file, with no merge helper.
Unicorn, has no wings. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicorn#/media/File:Domenichin...
Pegasus has wings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus#/media/File:The-Winged...
Unicorns Exist Only When Money Is Free https://www.advisorperspectives.com/commentaries/2018/05/10/...
However, I will have to read up on Falkor.
Evernote lost me almost ten years ago. They somehow managed to lose about half of my data. Devices would sync and have merge conflicts, even when none of those files had updated (leading to an explosion of notes that were just duplicates). Search never seemed to produce relevant results. Google Keep came out and solved at least my most immediate needs, and I never went back.
At the end, I remember having real trouble trying to find features that I knew existed. The UI would change and I'd be lost. They had an explosion of features (like Office pre-ribbon) and nobody knew enough to (or had authority to) put their foot down and fix it. It's a real shame, but underscores the need for a smart product org and talented designers.
I'd look in "car" before heading out to the car, and see that note and remember to bring the SD card out to it. I'd habitually check all of these before doing anything, so I didn't keep forgetting things I needed to do like bringing an SD card with me when I head out instead of having to walk back into the house once I'm in the car and remember or bringing the new shampoo bottle into the shower before I get in it. Also useful would be repeatable checklists, for things like putting my xbox controller in my backback before heading out on a frequent long trip.
Is there anything like this?
Or really, most any Note/ToDo that has first class support for GTD aka Getting Things Done which leverages the notion of @contexts.
Thanks for pointing me at OmniFocus, it looks really cool. Unfortunately, I'm an Android/Windows guy, and I doubt the Web version is going to be good enough at contexts for it to be worth it for me... :(
EDIT: Might give this one a try: https://appfluence.com/productivity/priority-matrix-omnifocu...
I cannot remember anything else about it but the idea seemed really useful if you could make it reliable.
In Trello, you could have one list per location and just add items to the lists, then archive each item when you're done.
I mean, all’s fair in love and war, but wow that really turned out to be a bad outcome for the developers of a product that, at its peak, made a pretty huge impact.
That's why I left Evernote. I can't imagine trying to tell their story without mentioning that.
Evernote never embraced privacy. On-device encrypted and analyzed notes would have made them a natural Apple acquisition, to boot.
Now I have a subscription to Dropbox and everything goes there. I edit notes with Emacs on my laptop and the builtin text editor in Dropbox on my phone. It's not great, but Dropbox has never lost my data and I don't have time to try yet another program that almost certainly won't sweat the details of how sync should work.
I have left bosses that don't deliver on promises, I'm not going to hire one.
But it won't help your Linux support issue :(
This new CEO sounds reassuring (https://evernote.com/blog/looking-ahead-evernotes-priorities...). Like he's got his head screwed on, and wants to build a great productivity app and a profitable, sustainable company - not be "the Nike of your mind" (sheesh).
It's slightly different than Evernote and more focused on reading + spaced repetition integration.
The next version I'm working on add support for folders and better three level notes preview.
The one thing I need to add, to enable a full Evernote alternative is the ability to take standalone notes.
Right now they have to be attached to books / PDFs which is a bit limiting.
In the bigger picture, it seems from a customer side that the vast majority of what they've been focused on developing over the past few years has zero value to me (i.e. work chat). They ought to be very concerned about their future if that's how their product is being perceived as evolving.
regarding evernote, i use this religiously, but mainly for personal note taking with sync across devices.
Left a little bit of a sour taste in my mouth as far as Evernote is concerned.
If I suddenly had the need to use it across more than 2 devices I'd have to pay but that hasn't come up yet.
What would HN crowd recommend as an Evernote replacement?
Nothing beats emacs/org-mode + beorg on iOS for me though. beorg even has scheme-based scripting, although I haven't tried it out yet.
Evernote users are accustomed to more than text files.
I can't even tell whether I should have more than one .org file.
How you use it is largely up to you. I usually break things into files when I feel like it's its own high level "thing".
My personal wiki includes several thousand .org files that are interlinked using hierarchical tagging. No other note-taking tool I've evaluated has all of the features and efficiency of Emacs and Org mode.
For example, Evernote doesn't allow users to enter tabular data and make calculations on that data, which Org mode supports. The suggested solution for Evernote is to attach a spreadsheet file. That's what I did with the various note-taking solutions I used back in the 90s. Now all of my small sets of tabular data are included in the same files as my notes.
They said at one point they were selling t-shirts.
I think we can refer to that as the age of 'cloud madness' where anything and everything cloud-related was the new hotness. I think we've forgotten just how strong the buzz-wordiness was around cloud, it was prolific.
One contributing factor may be the difference between surprise and planned outages: if you know things are going to be down and how the work is progressing, it doesn’t seem as dramatic as an outage of unknown duration.
I tried Notion and OneNote but their mobile apps were just too annoying and clunky (reaching 200+ MBs) for the value they provided for my barely 2-3mb of notes
Currently I'm back to Google Keep with occasionally using Trello and Google Tasks
- Joplin Editor is nice (due to KaTeX), "cloud" syncing can be made to work, iCloud not supported though
- Quiver https://happenapps.com/ , is paid, but math/equations are supported via MathJax, iCloud is supported
Currently, Joplin works for me but Quiver is overall better.
http://web.archive.org/web/20041114033908/http://www.evernot...
I had no idea OneNote even existed until well after Evernote, and I worked at a lot of places using Microsoft products.... strange.
PS: Any suggestions on alternatives?
It's not that a note app can't be successful, but clearly not with SV style funding and expectations.