Hacker News Reader

Comment by lazerwalker | Hacker News Reader

This is nifty enough, but Evernote has so many problems with its client UI design that I hate to see them spending front-end engineer development time on side diversions like this. I recently let my Evernote Premium subscription lapse and migrated my notes to another system because I was so frustrated with the painful user experience across their various clients, despite their core product idea being so awesome and their syncing/OCR/backend services working well.

View on HN

I have the same impression about Evernote - I used Windows client, iPhone app, and online version (website), and all three kind of sucks (bloated UI, slowness...).

I myself migrated to simplenote. It's more lightweight and text-only, but I can live with that. iPhone client is quite decent and for Windows there is ResophNotes, or one can just use the online version. Everything is stored in text files, which is another advantage.

What'd you switch to, out of curiosity? I loved the idea of it but the UI kept me from ever really getting into it.

I'd like to know what you switched to?

As a Premium subscriber to EverNote, this news about a very bad flash card app indicates to me that they aren't serious about improving their core product and instead want to capitalize on the brand with gimmicky spinoffs.

Basically I just lost a lot of confidence in the EverNote brand.

I replaced most of my Evernote usage with Markdown-formatted text files in Dropbox, using Elements as an iOS client. Dropbox gives me syncing, versioning, and online (read-only) access, and Elements lets me store all the notes locally on my iOS devices (as well as just being an otherwise fantastic app). There's no support for tags, but for the way my notes are organized a light folder structure works just as well.

I'm still using Evernote for collecting receipts, though. The combination of some smart Gmail filters (Amazon/iTunes/Steam/etc receipts all auto-forward to my Evernote email address) and the automatic PDF OCR (I've got a document feeder scanner) still make it simpler than anything else for that. I reference my receipts so rarely that I can put up with the painful UI once every few months.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com