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Comment by sandgiant | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for sharing, but almost all "alternatives to Evernote" lack some of the most important (to me) features like web clipping, OCR and related notes.

The only real alternative to Evernote I've found is DEVONthink.

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These days I tend to rely on archive.org (+ archive.today) and a plain link rather than web clipping tools. I just find it more useful coming back later to have access to the full fidelity of a page and its context.

It also feels appropriate to be publicly preserving parts of the web that you've found useful enough to note down. As someone at archive.org said, 'If you see something, save something.'

Edit: n.b. archive.org does honour takedown requests, though they're rare and usually somewhat predictable. cf. gwern's drastic approach of archiving all the pages he's ever visited, https://www.gwern.net/Archiving-URLs

Interesting. But how do you keep track of archive links that are relevant to you?

Hmm? I meant, instead of taking a web clipping or screenshot, I keep only a link to the page in question (and submit it to the archive if it wasn't already crawled). Though I'm still not happy with how I track what part of a page is most relevant--usually it ends up being an ad hoc mix of quoting and outlining. Related: Wasn't there an HN post about highlighting being considered harmful?

I'm also undecided still on whether to always record the original URL or the archive URL when the original page is unlikely to change. Archive links contain the entire original URL, so there's no risk there; on the other hand, it tends to be clear from the date of the note which snapshot to retrieve, so there's not really a need. But dates are close to being metadata and might be lost somehow...

I think they meant that instead of saving links to articles directly, they will save references to archive.org links. This is a protection against the host taking down the article for whatever reason.

I personally save them using the SingleFile browser extension.

https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile

There's also ArchiveWeb.page, which records in the same WARC format as archive.org

https://github.com/webrecorder/archiveweb.page

This is my alternative which tries to convert a page to Markdown: https://github.com/deathau/markdownload

For me, the missing feature is usually adding a note on my computer and accessing it seconds later on my phone. There are a lot of notes that would be tedious to create on my phone because of their complexity, but which I use on the go. Examples are workout plans, shopping notes, and travel notes. With Evernote, I create the note on my computer, walk out the door, and already have access on my phone.

I love the simplicity and power of Obsidian. It also lets me sync desktop and iPhone for free via iCloud.

How does that happen? Is it triggered by changes, or can I trigger it myself by flicking the page down? As long as the sync isn't determined by a schedule or hidden inside a menu, it could work for me.

As far as I know, there’s no specific button or action to trigger iCloud sync. I haven't notice issues, but I use the mobile Obsidian app much less frequently. It always seems updated to me.

This [source](https://help.noteplan.co/article/86-how-to-force-sync) says that opening the iCloud Drive on Finder will trigger sync. On the mobile Obsidian app, you can flicker the page down to download updated data, obviously it will only work if the more recent data was uploaded.

Not exactly open source, but as far as "alternatives to Evernote" goes, I've been told about Obsidian[0] (though I've not jumped in yet), which has plugins for OCR and web clipping, and considering the community, I'd be surprised if related notes aren't a thing.

[0] https://obsidian.md/

Joplin has a web clipper addon at least

https://github.com/laurent22/joplin/blob/dev/readme/clipper....

There's also an offline OCR plugin based on Tesseract

https://discourse.joplinapp.org/t/plugin-offline-ocr-extract...

Thanks for pointing the web clipping. I've noted it. I can add this feature to GitNoter. Hopefully soon

The most important feature of Evernote for me is saving attachments locally so they can be modified on the client machine and then automatically synced. Most alternatives can only allow you to download the attachment and then reupload the attachment manually.

Give Joplin a try

I would suggest trying out bangle.io [1] - an opens source markdown web app that is completely local and will support GitHub based syncing.

[1] https://bangle.io

Web clipping?

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