Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons | Hacker News Reader

Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

evernote.com

384 pointstaldo344 comments

They must be incredibly jealous of all the successful note taking apps (Notion, Ulysses, Bear, Craft). Evernote were first, and blew it. No other way to describe it.

I dumped Evernote when they restricted their free accounts to 2 devices. Ironically I'm now paying for Ulysses, money I might have give to Evernote had they not been so awful to early adopters.

Still upset when Evernote lost my lecture notes when I synced after turning off WiFi to save laptop battery (back in 2010)

roam, obsidian, logseq, etc so many new or really interesting players in this space.

I'd stopped using Evernote involuntarily because their 2FA recovery scenario was broken and I got locked out of my account despite that I still had access to my email. I moved on. I checked it again years later, and they fixed it, but never went back. Such small omissions can create a whole chain of losses.

I don't know that Evernote the company or it's management would be jealous - Evernote probably has more annual revenue than all of those app combined.

Actually, their experience is pretty pleasant and the product works very well after they have rebuilt their apps.

They don’t need to be jealous. Their relative utilitarian take on the matter is what makes them so unique and powerful in the market.

Yes, I love markdown, and Evernote just provides a slightly more powerful, WYSIWYG version of it. I neither want “everything and the kitchen sink” vision of Notion, and desktop centric view of Obsidian.

Ulysses and Bear are Apple first systems, and while I use Apple mobile devices, my ecosystem is much more varied, and Evernote accommodates all, with feature parity.

They are good and understated. Hope that I won’t need to move out after that acquisition.

A "Relative utilitarian take" is not how it would describe a product that tried to incorporate an entire chat app into it.

They had a relatively good product around v5X series and I left because they just started to fragment and add more and more non-notetaking related things at the expense of the entire product stability and core functionality.

They tried to be “everything and the kitchen sink for the enterprise”, and failed, not because of the features they added, but feature disparity between platforms, and some reliability problems. I was doing my Ph.D. when they debuted chat, and it was useful.

Similarly, I miss their presentation mode for the notes. It was extremely useful, and the output was very pretty, too.

However, after the CEO change and rebuild, they really found themselves. I’m a pro subscriber, and the value they add into my life is immeasurable.

> Their relative utilitarian take on the matter is what makes them so unique and powerful in the market.

Man this was not my experience at all. Granted I dropped Evernote quite a while ago, but for years they kept adding a kitchen sink of features that I didn't care about, while regressing at the basics like syncing and merging text notes across multiple devices.

They were maybe first company I experienced that blew up a really solid app I liked after raising a truck load of VC money and trying to take over the world.

I’m talking about their current iteration and roadmap so far. Previous iteration had its fair share of issues, I concur.

The previous issues were bad enough for me to drop Evernote as a paying customer.

I would get notes that would not sync correctly, forcing me to resolve it by hand. Even after doing that, it would still have sync conflicts. This was core functionality that just didn't work.

During this time, they were busy jamming in features I definitely didn't want or need. Every release would be a slower, buggier version of its previous incarnation.

It was during this time frame that a lot of people jumped ship. The app was so bloated and buggy by that point that even OneNote seemed like a viable option.

It didn't help that Evernote made it as difficult as possible to get your notes out of their system. It took several download attempts to successfully get my archive out of there. It might have also been due to the large number of people leaving their platform.

The handwriting was on the wall when they started selling knick-knacks on their website. Things like Evernote branded Moleskine notepads and dress socks. It's like they completely abandoned their core competency and went off in some left-field marketing direction.

It's a real shame, too, because Evernote was an amazing app when it first came out.

I'm giving org-mode a spin these days on my desktop. Need to figure out if there's a way to sync/view it on my Android device, but I'm getting kind of tired of dealing with all the different, proprietary SaaS note taking services that go to shit after a few years. At least with Emacs and org-mode, that's one less thing to deal with.

I really, really want to know what kind of person sees a pair of socks with a productivity app logo on them and thinks "I need these in my life."

I worked at a startup that gave “store credits” away as, try not to laugh, morale boosters so employees could buy company swag.

It was pretty hilarious.

That seems like a less bad version of handing out specific items of company swag ("woo, a t-shirt in the wrong size"). At least you can pick something that's useful to you.

Same - pretty common in the direct sales/MLM world!

We get a certain amount of money a year to buy GitHub swag, but in fairness, I think our shirts and swag is pretty great and most employees appreciate it/use it.

Most companies have a swag budget anyway, getting to pick which items you like is an improvement.

same, I think we might have been colleagues!

I still have some citusdata socks that I wear. They also have an elephant on them.

It's probably someone who is really into productivity and self-improvement, makes it part of their identity, mentions it to their family... and then has 10 pairs gifted every xmas.

Bingo. When they started to add every feature known to man because they had to live up to some $1b valuation that never made sense, the core product really suffered.

Not everything is meant to be a multi-billion dollar business and that’s ok!

I hope you are taking notes, Dropbox.

Thanks for sharing your take. I dropped Evernote years and years ago. Like iPad 2 long ago. I feel like they were some of the early subscription services and probably copped a lot of my rage about it. I still hate subscription fees.

I would prefer to pay for my storage (or host my own) and have apps use my cloud backend. Every app running cloud server to sync all sorts of things has become too much for me.

I still rock 1Password 7 and use iCloud sync. I’d pay for the app but it’s free. I pay for iCloud storage.

Anyway I might give there new apps a look.

I'm also generally on the same boat with you. I'd rather pay for the infrastructure and deploy my own tools on top of that, however with the features some applications provide, it becomes either impossible to replace them, or the time required for maintaining them becomes too much for my life.

People say "Installing your own servers is cool, why don't you do that?". I do that, but for small things. At work, I have a fleet of servers, and managing them is enough. After being able to play with cutting edge stuff, renting a VPS from DO and putting stuff on top of it is neither fun, nor satisfying.

Instead, I diligently select and use services, and offload maintenance of such systems to the provider. Of course I take my backups and take my precautions, but I don't want to manage every service I use.

I personally don't like subscription services mostly, but some subscriptions provide real services which I see worthy, and I happily pay for them. Evernote is one of them.

> Ulysses and Bear are Apple first systems, and while I use Apple mobile devices, my ecosystem is much more varied, and Evernote accommodates all, with feature parity.

I think you can add Craft to that list.

Too bad, they all look nice, but I've completely left the Apple ecosystem.

If they don't have Android and Linux desktop apps, they don't really compete for the same market

Yes, I thought I was going nuts after seeing all the negative comments about Evernote here.

Personally, I started using Evernote seriously only a month ago after several years, and recently trying pretty much everything else (notion, obsidian, joplin, workflowy and 10s more..). So I don't have any of the baggage from whatever mistakes they made years ago.

It's been awesome. Very wide featureset like more than just markdown, web clipping, auto scanning & OCR, sketching support on iPad, tags and fully cross platform. I found every other application to fall short somewhere and just be too opinionated. Evernote is solid and powerful enough to support almost every usecase I have but not opinionated.

I wonder if this backslash is based on reality or not. I mean, what is gonna happen? Maybe these guys are able to solve the technical problems that Evernote has been having. Maybe the product, which now works well on desktop, but slow on mobile, improves and they just sustain it without increasing prices. But it may also happen that they try to squeeze every penny from Evernote before dumping it into the trash. Who knows!

I think many people have burnt by the old Evernote. I've also almost stopped using them, and their new apps saved me as a customer.

Since many of the people who despised of Evernote never tried their new apps, and doesn't know what changed and how it works now.

It's still not perfect, and based on Electron, yet it's leaps and bounds better when compared to yesteryear, and it really works well for my case.

I think we need to see where it's going to go. As I said elsewhere, I don't want to abandon them when thinking how I use them, and hope that they don't do some drastic changes.

I'm considering as this hasn't happened, until the new changes start to rollout.

Your position is wise. I'll do the same, but with one difference. I'll stop using Tasks. I love it, but tasks are not exportable by tools like Yarle. So, to avoid the lock in I will switch to Microsoft ToDo for tasks and I will continue to use Evernote for the rest.

You know what, though? I've had a better experience with Obsidian because it's desktop centric. Trying hard not to be anecdotal, but I can't think of anybody I know that uses a note taking app that enjoys taking notes on a mobile device.

> Trying hard not to be anecdotal, but I can't think of anybody I know that uses a note taking app that enjoys taking notes on a mobile device.

And having this view is OK and valid. On the other hand, I tend to use Evernote a lot on my mobile device, mostly in read-only mode.

I keep a lot of technical documents and cheat sheets I've written and sometimes need them while only having my mobile device with me, and it saves a lot of time.

I also scan hand-written notes for later digitizing them, and Evernote OCRs them at the background, saving me time in the process.

It's definitely a horses for courses issue, and if Obsidian works for you, go ahead, use it with its full potential.

It's impossible to not "blow it" in the environment Evernote operated in. The default model for software startups was to leverage yourself to the hilt so can achieve some fantasy growth expectation VCs had for you. The growth requirements overextended the realities of a note taking app and so the product gets bloated in a desperate grasping for growth of any kind and the user gets pinched for every fee that can be forced on them.

Hopefully recent economic events will change the culture and more companies will actually factor in reality into their growth models.

What does leverage mean here?

Debt.

Right, that's the usual meaning, but it's quite unusual for software companies to be debt financed, isn't it? SaaS companies usually go the venture route AFAIK.

Leverage is probably the wrong choice of word, but VC's growth expectations make your average loan shark's interest rates look downright reasonable.

Leverage is a fine choice of words. In financial terms, debt and equity are not that different. Particularly VC equity, which can have some debt-like qualities to it (liquidation preferences, etc.).

Also, many startup investments use debt instruments like convertible notes instead of direct equity purchases.

Yep. If you have traditional debt and you miss your numbers, the banks will often have rights to get significant equity and force a change in leadership. If you have VC equity and you miss your numbers, you'll have been encouraged to be at a burn rate that forces you to raise a down round sooner rather than later, and at that point your existing VCs will get significant additional equity and perhaps even force a change in leadership due the terms of those agreements - and they might even be the sharks offering you that down round.

There's no free lunch, but taking investment can let you achieve great things and build incredible communities. Just make sure you talk with founder/banker/lawyer friends who have seen the dark side of things, and use their experiences as armor.

The definition of leverage is the ratio of a company's debt to its equity. Being pressured to grow too fast by your investors because their model is for every invetment to either go light speed or bust is just a different thing. That is the source of the confusion.

I assume it means something more like burn rate and product roadmap "debt" leverage than the normal technical financial meaning.

It's easy to get yourself as a founder into a situation where you're trading fundamentals for next-round narrative, and a lot of times that's that can be the deathknell.

The leverage is the difference between valuation at most recent round and what a more boring company performing the same role in the market would have as a public market cap.

The difference between those two values represents a gap that has to be closed before you're on steady ground, and the gap widens at a higher-than-normal rate because of the growth expectations of the VC money.

Anyway, that's what it looks like to this complete outsider. Companies full of very capable people, pushed to do desperate things, and to do those things quickly. And, like the churn of leveraged Wall Street finance, there are plenty of people who live for the froth of it all.

> Hopefully recent economic events will change the culture and more companies will actually factor in reality into their growth models.

How would it, and how would they?

The way I understand it, the growth model is pretty ultimately set in stone when a company takes VC money. It's a Faustian bargain - you get a big and cheap loan, at the price of aiming for "some fantasy growth", or dying in the attempt. Companies that want sustainable growth take loans from banks.

> They must be incredibly jealous of all the successful note taking apps (Notion, Ulysses, Bear, Craft).

One point of anecdata: I haven't heard of any of those.

How do you define success?

Keep in mind Evernote was created in 2000 and the web version was launched in 2008.

I doubt any of the stuff in your list will be around in 14 years.

Bear was Apple’s number one app for 2016 - it’s Mac/iOS only.

Well to be fair, three of the four apps are Apple ecosystem apps (although Craft now expanding to other platforms).

Maybe Roam, Obsidian, Logseq would be better examples of booming apps note-takers jump ship to? But then, I think all of these apps are rather niche compared to Evernote.

Will Evernote be around in 14 years?

Why not?

Selling to Bending Spoons isn't a success story

I think jury is out on that one until we see the effects.

Trello's acquisition was not as disastrous as I thought yet, for example. Wunderlist became Microsoft To Do. As a result, they are burrowed deep into the Microsoft ecosystem and got forgotten on the other hand.

Let's see where it goes and what's gonna happen to the ecosystem. I like Evernote at its current state, hope they won't turn it upside down.

haven't heard of Notion ???

You haven’t heard of any of these? How are you even on HN? J/k.

Honestly, the goal with a free account should be to convert users into paying users or by making the platform more useful for paying users of the service.

If you cancel an account that didn't pay them any money, what exactly did they lose?

I pay for todoist because I love using it and the free account doesn't have a must-have feature (reminders). I could dump them and find something else, but I get plenty of value for the money I spend with them.

> Honestly, the goal with a free account should be to convert users into paying users or by making the platform more useful for paying users of the service.

That's true for normal companies. Startups operate by a different set of rules.

> If you cancel an account that didn't pay them any money, what exactly did they lose?

A user, and a potential source of future users.

For many startups, userbase growth matters much more than revenue, to the point they'll happily go negative on per-user profitability just to get more people on-board. Particularly those that aggressively pursue further funding ("actually making us profitable is something we'll consider after the next round") or an exit ("it'll be a problem for the sucker that buys us").

Yes, it is a source of a lot of pathology you see with today's software products, like products getting bloated with irrelevant pseudo-features ("oh shit, we can't actually make this sustainable; quick, let's try to extract all value we can from the userbase, and hopefully have something left after paying off the investors"), or getting acquired and shut down ("ha ha, we knew it was never going to be sustainable; we bought it to cheaply acquire talent and/or get you out of the way so you don't compete with our offering").

In every case, VCs and founders win, users lose.

Don't know... These guys already made a fortune. Maybe they just don't give a s** anymore.

Ulysses is great, I'm glad I found them as well.

Evernote was still decent enough before the ditched the native app for a dreadful Electron webframe.

In some ways the Electron app is better because there's more formatting options (code blocks, finally!) but most ways not. On my systems it's so slow to startup, and I don't have that complaint about other Electron apps.

Yeah I completely brought my quite powerful machine to a halt at the time, it would eat up resources like all Electron apps do - and I'd hate to think of the potential security exploits with a Electron / unsandboxed chrome that formats clipped websites and attachments etc... - not good.

Ugh. Note taking apps need to be instant.

I care far less about the feature set than I do getting the whatever written down and out of my head.

If you make we wait while you load a website's worth of js or phone home with surveillance data or whatever, I'm just going to delete you. I'd rather use a 1995-era Textedit or Notepad - they're instantly functional.

Just to make sure I maintain my curmudgeon's rep, I'll add - advertise AI and I'm also gone. I have zero need for assistance from a tripping robot to type in my work life.

Yup. This is actually why I dropped Evernote so many years ago -- the distance from "thought" to "blank screen to start writing in" was too much. I just use Google Keep. It has some weaknesses, but it's good enough for my use case and is snappy.

Notion seems to be planning to add some kind of AI-based tool for their app, by the way - https://www.notion.so/product/ai

Not only decent, Evernote was great before they ditched their native apps.

Agree. But you can still download the legacy native apps.

https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/360052560314-Ins...

Once these legacy apps are discontinued I’m out. My concern is that this takeover will hasten that.

Evernote has ran my brain for 12 years but I can’t cope with new Electron app - no tabs?!

Yes, still use the older Android version. There are still show-stopping search bugs in the newer versions that haven't been fixed in 3+ years.

France here. I knew some Evernote developers and PO. They were blowing money and adding features like there’s no tomorrow. When there was indeed no tomorrow at Evernote, they used their unemployment benefits from our state and worked in parallel, which was legally dodgy and ethically out of the line. They created a consultancy which almost exclusively works on state-derived funding, a bit like half of science projects in USA depend on Darpa, except it was education money which they used to invent some AI model to find at-risk pupils that every teacher could qualify anyway, but you know, AI+education makes a sexy startup. They only got public funding and customers who themselves were publicly funded.

Such people are a dead weight on our society, sucking at education funds, not weighing the cost they have, and giving lessons to everyone.

Those guys will never understand how to provide a service that customers are willing to pay for.

Evernote has been in business (albiet, not growing) for 22 years!

I think we need to fast forward 10 more years to see how Notion is doing to make the comparison.

I dumped Evernote when they spontaneously deleted half my notes from my desktop and their backup server and couldn't recover them.

Thank God I happened to have my most important note open on my laptop, which was closed at the time. I opened it, shut down the wifi as quick as I could so it couldn't update, and copied that note into OneNote, which frankly works better anyway. I will never trust Evernote again.

> They must be incredibly jealous of all the successful note taking apps (Notion, Ulysses, Bear, Craft). Evernote were first, and blew it. No other way to describe it.

Yup they did. Blew it when they didn't add 2FA. I emailed them repeatedly in the early years asking for them to add it citing risks of having all my information in a note taking application with poor security -> no replies. Then they got p0wned hard. Luckily I had my data out of their systems by then.

See screenshot of emails at https://twitter.com/GeoffreyHuntley/status/15930599365060894...

I just read a DHH blog on this that seems relevant because it mentions Notion:

> Same deal with Notion. They raised a $343M Series C on Oct 8, 2021 at $10 billion in valuation.

>These are all crazy numbers from a crazy time, and now the economic hangover is due.

https://world.hey.com/dhh/the-bubble-has-popped-for-unprofit...

Maybe the acquisition will change the nummber of devices to > 2??

I loved evernote ~10-15 years ago; used it for ~all personal stuff. Eventually it became more metered/locked down (I don't remember specifics anymore) and i moved to OneNote.

This is going to be a disaster - Bending Spoons is not a good actor:

“let’s talk about Bending Spoons’ business model. The basic concept is very simple:

- Find a solid app that someone else built and buy it from them (see Splice (acquired from GoPro) and 30 Day Fitness)

- Optimize the monetization of said app (by implementing from scratch or fine-tuning existing subscriptions), thereby driving higher lifetime value (LTV)

- Take that higher LTV and use it to bid on expensive ad inventory (on Google, Facebook, Apple Search) where you can acquire more users (aka drive more downloads) - i.e. leverage performance marketing for growth

- Convert those new downloads to paying users

- Massively ramp revenues and cash flow by combining the new users + the better monetization

- Use the new cash flow - plus the debt from those lovely Italian banks - to fund the next acquisition

- Lather, rinse, repeat

There is absolutely nothing wrong with this business model. What differentiates Bending Spoons, though, is how they do it.

Remini - Bending Spoons’ new app that the press is gushing over - is $10 a WEEK. And Splice, the app that started it all? That’ll set you back a cool $5/week.

Does anyone really think it’s appropriate to pay $10 a week for a photo editing app?”

https://open.substack.com/pub/impassionedmoderate/p/ryan-rey...

The really key bit is right afterwards:

“There is absolutely nothing wrong with this business model… What differentiates Bending Spoons, though, is how they do it.

Remini - Bending Spoons’ new app that the press is gushing over - is $10 a WEEK. And Splice, the app that started it all? That’ll set you back a cool $5/week.”

In short, they buy apps, add aggressive and practically exploitative monetization, and ride the revenue stream until it dries up.

I must admit it's not entirely obvious why that business model makes them "not a good actor".

And what's with the snark about Italian banks?

> is $10 a WEEK.

The issue is that people are at least somewhat "locked in" to whatever apps they're already using, so sudden major price increases are a bit extortionate: Either you pay us a bunch of money, or lose access to your data/workflow.

Prior to acquisition, one could reasonably expect Evernote not to announce sudden, shocking price changes, because they were trying to build a long-term brand. Now, suddenly, that's not the case.

This is made worse when the app doesn't do a good job of letting you export your data in the first place.

From September 2022:

> Italian app developer Bending Spoons has raised more than 340 million euros ($327 million) from investors including Hollywood actor Ryan Reynolds and Kerry Trainor, the former CEO of video streaming platform Vimeo.

> Bending Spoons, whose apps include popular video editing tool Splice and Remini, an image editor based on artificial intelligence technology, said the money could be used for acquisitions.

> A source close to the company said former Google Executive Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt was among the investors. Other backers included Italian banks Intesa Sanpaolo and Banco BPM.

None of what you wrote makes them sound like a "bad actor". All of these are good things for a failing business. Why shouldn't a photo editing app be $10/week? If you don't think you are getting that much value out of it then don't subscribe. Yet there is probably a group of power users who will gladly pay that amount. Evernote needs to be catering to them, not the millions of users who will endlessly complain but never spend an actual dollar on their services.

> is $10 a WEEK.

Paxys. You probably don't have a clear idea of what kind apps he was referring to. There are no power users in this case.

https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/plans.html

Completely different type of applications, I remember an old thread on twitter about one useless wallpapers app being sold for that kind of money. And it was not the only one. It's a business model.

Not sure what "useless wallpaper" app you are talking about but I just took a look at https://bendingspoons.com/products and everything there seems pretty useful and well designed.

That minuscule subset is well designed, yes, the rest decent BUT some of them with in my opinion predatory pricing in many cases, $9/wk to download some wallpaper or some sleep noises app. But yes, they are not the only ones doing it. If you are interested search on the appstore among the boatload of apps they have.

Okay well you should be able to link to a single one then.. I still can't find any examples of how this company is fraudulent.

search “wallpapers” in the app store and try the top results: 1. 188k reviews, 4.99/week https://apps.apple.com/us/app/live-wallpapers-for-me/id10693... 2. 120k reviews, 4.99/week https://apps.apple.com/us/app/live-wallpapers-for-me/id10693... 3. 243k reviews, 4.99/week https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wallpapers-widgets-myscreen/id...

Tricking users into these high priced subscriptions is a tried and true strategy in the app store. The press caught on late (2018) but it was happening from the moment apple opened up subscriptions to all developers in June 2016. Started with crappy coloring book apps and then spread like wildfire from there. Bending Spoons is simply the evolution of that.

https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/15/sneaky-subscriptions-are-p...

I wouldn't say "fraudolent", no laws are being broken here. And I'm not trying to be snarky with this, but I'm not doing your research for you on a well known issue of the App Store. I'm ok if you keep being not aware of it.

This specific company has a decade long history of being in the grey zone in regard to App Store rules. Like many others, yes, but let's not normalize it.

if you browse Bending Spoons' site on archive.org you'll see that a few years ago they indeed sold wallpaper apps and keyboard apps for debatable prices. They had even more apps, but most of them were removed entirely from their portfolio, and some ended up in the account of Easy Tiger Apps, LLC [1], including a 4,99€/week step counting app that is a blatant rip off of a more famous one

[1]: https://apps.apple.com/tz/developer/easy-tiger-apps-llc/id57...

They are the abuser that benefits from the lock-in. Evernote has gradually made it harder and harder to export (50 notes per try, not everything makes it out) and now they exit to these guys.

It’s the worst of the post-VC models. Seems like they have been positioning for this for a while.

Ahh, good to know. I jumped ship with a full ENEX export to Joplin about 4 years ago. Haven't looked back since then, although my needs are simple, not power user-like.

You can export full notebooks now. Also you can use Legacy for the exports.

I see this complaint a lot and it never really made any sense to me. If something is a scam it has to do with the delivery or the advertisement of the product. But the pricing? No. It is not possible for the price of something by itself to render something a scam. If it costs too much it costs too much, this does not imply malfeasance on the part of the seller.

I agree - it’s about how the developer communicates (or in this case obfuscates) the price to the user. Check out the substack link and you’ll see screenshots of how Bending Spoons does it (it’s highly misleading).

Generally I’m of the opinion that consumers are responsible for their own choices; but Apple has allowed bad actors to exploit the availability of weekly subscriptions and prey on suspecting users.

I disagree that "$9.99/week" below a continue button leading to a purchase dialog is in any way misleading.

I looked at the screenshot before reading the surrounding justification, and the understanding I got was that continuing would charge me $9.99 on a weekly basis until canceled (which would also show up in the purchase confirmation). It turns out that is exactly what happens.

So who exactly is being misled here? People who are functionally literate enough to use a smart phone and download an app but illiterate enough to not know what $9.99 a week means? I don't think that person exists. Maybe children but they shouldn't be allowed to sign up for subscriptions without parental oversight anyways.

This is a common response. unfortunately it doesn’t hold water: the average lifetime of a paid user of Splice is somewhere in the 7-10 week range (source is confidential).

What super users of editing products do you know that only stay 10 weeks?

None. What’s actually happening is Bending Spoons is exploiting the App Store’s ease of payment and dark patterns to trick unsuspecting users into enrolling in a super high priced subscription without their knowledge.

> without their knowledge

I've never had an iPhone so I'm not familiar with these dark patterns. Are you saying it's actually possible to get an Apple user to subscribe without clearly displaying the payment amount or frequency?

> Are you saying it's actually possible to get an Apple user to subscribe without clearly displaying the payment amount or frequency?

Both are displayed by a system-controlled modal but even with that there are many stories of people not realizing/noticing the frequency. Apple has forced developers to place the frequency more prominently on their info screens but it's only helped so much. I have a hard time seeing a legitimate use for a weekly subscription other than to trick users. I almost think that Apple shouldn't allow that frequency or they should have extra vetting/restrictions/alerts for users. I know Apple sends out an email before they charge a recurring subscription (or at least I've gotten them for my yearly subscriptions) but maybe a push notification on the phone/tablet (that you could disable per-app) would be a another way to help prevent this type of fraud/scam.

Came here to write something similar, you did it better.

I will never accept that selling wallpaper apps or something with the same level of complexity for hundred of dollars every year is an acceptable business model.

sigh well it looks like I’ll be jumping ship to Joplin this weekend.

I’ve honestly lost hope in Evernote and just kept using it out of laziness to migrate, but I don’t like what the future holds.

How dare they charge money for products they own that have value.

> Does anyone really think it’s appropriate to pay $10 a week for a photo editing app?

Apparently yes, otherwise it would have just been a failed experiment and revert back to $X/month

Even if they charged $100/week I don't see how it makes them a bad actor. If the pricing/cancellation policies are deceptive then sure, but that is irrelevant to the price.

I learned three things watching EN snatch defeat from the jaws of victory:

1) There is almost never a case for a total ground up rewrite of your core product. Just don’t do it.

2) Don’t abandon the users who made you successful in the first place. They’re the ones who advocate for you and get your foot in the door.

3) real time google docs style collaborative editing is table stakes for this software category. Build your V1 with it in mind. Otherwise you’ll have to do a rewrite later. See 1.

Disagree on #3. Social & collaborative features are the bane of my existence. No I don't want to share all my scraps of information, no I don't want to let my friends know what I'm listening to, no, I don't want to publish product purchases I make to twitter.

I think a better #3 would be: decide whether your audience is individuals or businesses, then build for that.

If you don’t want collaborative editing, don’t use it. I’m saying most users wanted it and started looking elsewhere when EN couldn’t deliver. It’s easier to add a lock on collaboration than to backfill later.

The problem is that the effort to do collaborative editing creates a lot of other problems.

I want to be able to just start typing, on my phone. Instead, I have to wait for it to sync. If I am in a place with bad reception, that will take a while. It lags and freezes, all in order to support collaboration that I do not want.

I want to add pictures. I want to add links to other notes. I pay for a subscription to get bullet proof cloud backup. Sometimes I want to share notes. I don’t want to collaboratively edit my personal notes with my private thoughts and journal entries.

Evernote stopped focusing on that.

I might switch over to Muse. It was designed to be local first and uses cdrt for sync.

I think collaborative editing was a mistake. According to Libin circa 2010, Evernote was supposed to be your second brain. Letting other people edit my notes doesn't fit the second brain model (IMHO). I wish Evernote had stayed small and tightly focused on a personal product.

Unfortunately, it's hard to sell to individuals compared to businesses, and so that's where their focus went once they had VC money driving the ship.

In addition to what other posters said, there are opportunity and maintenance costs. Building features for use-cases other than mine puts me in the position of wondering whether my use-case is part of the long term vision for the product. I want a note taking app that strives to improve at capturing quick notes. A document collaboration tool that happens to work pretty well for capturing quick notes is less likely to satisfy me long term.

Most EVERNOTE users wanted it? I sincerely doubt that even 20% of Evernote users want that.

People that want a collaborative Docs app already have Google Docs. Evernote is mostly a "digital cabinet". It's where notes and documents go to die (in a good way).

I've used the collaborative feature in google docs only a few times even tho i write google docs like daily. most docs are authored by 1 person. the side comments, however, are invaluable

I agree and disagree. I agree with you because I think they ruined a perfectly good product by trying to turn it into a "collaboration tool" that they could sell big corporate contracts for. On the other hand, I think collaborative editing could have been integrated seamlessly into the product without ruining or even changing the single-player experience.

"Collaborative editing" is table stakes for a modern note editor because even in a single user scenario you will have the same user editing the same note from multiple devices with different levels of connectivity. The product needs a reputation that it will not lose its user's edits, nor will it make annoying branch-style merge conflicts. To do this right you have to treat the other device as an almost-adversarial actor. Unless you want "glitchy" to be in the first sentence people use to describe you.

Very good point, one which I admit didn't come to my mind initially.

Any recommendations for good methods or good open source implementations of this that can be mined for ideas?

CRDTs, and Yjs specifically, are lowering the bar on this. I can't name any products I know are using them, though.

Figma uses CRDT. And Notion has their own thing based on CRDT(not fact checked)

To note, Figma use something inspired by but not quite CRDTs:

> Figma isn't using true CRDTs though. CRDTs are designed for decentralized systems where there is no single central authority to decide what the final state should be. There is some unavoidable performance and memory overhead with doing this. Since Figma is centralized (our server is the central authority), we can simplify our system by removing this extra overhead and benefit from a faster and leaner implementation.

> It’s also worth noting that Figma's data structure isn't a single CRDT. Instead it's inspired by multiple separate CRDTs and uses them in combination to create the final data structure that represents a Figma document.

https://www.figma.com/blog/how-figmas-multiplayer-technology...

HedgeDoc uses Y.js under the hood

I have this minset too, but I have one use case for sharing EN notes: when I write articles or short posts which needed to be approved or get an editor touch. I may use Google Docs for it, but there are too many downsides with them compared to EN.

I agree about the general anti social feature sentiment.

Collaborative editing makes sense for business users (taking meeting notes) and not much for individuals. That said, the tech that enables collaborative editing is kinda the same that allows solid sync and picking up your note taking session on a different device seconds after you put down another, which is something individuals do benefit from.

I like being able to go between my laptop and desktop very fast. Currently with Obsidian and using git for sync it kinda sucks a bit as if I am not careful I get merge conflicts.

I disagree. It even makes sense in a personal environment where I want to collaborate with my wife for example: shared to do lists, shopping lists we edit concurrently, shared ideas for vacations, packing lists, ideas for date nights, important phone numbers in regards to our kids, places and bars we've been to and would recommend to friends and visitors, etc etc.

We regularly collaborate on this stuff and for our intents and purposes, apple notes provides all we need

The thing I learned was that maybe a small successful app or service can just be a small successful app or service and not have to grow indefinitely. At some point it seemed like Evernote became obsessed with growing the revenue / business and not making a better product.

In other words, they took VC funding.

Regarding #1, this is now an often touted recommendation, even by folks like Joel Spolsky whom I greatly admire, but I'm not sure it's the right lesson. For example, I know that Google (at least in the 00s) rewrote huge, major pieces of their infrastructure multiple times and did so successfully. While I agree that broadcasting out a message of "We're going to stop the world and add no new features until we do a ground-up rewrite" is a bad idea, perhaps other lessons could be:

1. Don't write code that's such a spaghetti mess in the first place that you feel the need to throw your hands up and say "nothing can be done except a rewrite".

2. If you do need to do a major rewrite, make sure you have the ability to staff two teams - one doing the rewrite and another maintaining and adding new features to the existing product.

3. Kinda related to number one, but if you have well-organized code to begin with I find it's much easier to do a major rewrite in "sections" (though there are obviously difficulties with this approach).

> rewrote huge, major pieces of their infrastructure multiple times and did so successfully

I think that's different from a user facing rewrite. I suspect while Google did its infrastructure rewrites, users didn't notice a difference. Additionally, Google probably had the resources to continue delivering features to users while the infrastructure was being developed.

The problem with a front end rewrite is (a) things might break and users will notice, and (b) it's hard to deliver new features to users while the front end app itself is being rewritten.

Google isn't the only example here. Heck, just look at the transition from Classic MacOS to OS X. I definitely think Apple would have been dead long ago if they said "A rewrite is too expensive/risky, let's just incrementally improve Classic MacOS".

I guess my point is that there are right ways and wrong ways to do ground-up rewrites, and the fact that a lot of people do them the wrong way shouldn't mean the lesson should be to never do them.

Replacing one mature operating system with another, which itself was based on one even more mature, and adding stuff is not quite a rewrite. That was more like how Microsoft moved NT into its consumer OS. It was a bit of a mess but had a clear payoff once everything was updated or obsoleted. NT and BSD were both battle-hardened long before anyone thought to put them in consumer systems.

Apple actually tried to rewrite the classic OS from scratch with the Copland project and it failed (at enormous cost). OS X was not a rewrite-from-scratch since they acquired an already working OS from Next. The had to add compatibility layers (which was in itself a major undertaking) but they didn't write the OS from scratch.

4. If you're going to do the rewrite, don't take many years working on it, just to release a broken product missing lots of core features.

5. If you're releasing a broken product missing core features, don't take many YEARS after release to un-brake your product and build some of the missing features again.

Spolskys point back then was that you couldn't stop the world, do nothing for two years and then come back with your rewritten product.

It was not that you couldn't rewrite part of the product here and there over time, and end up with something that is only the same as the original product in the way the greek ship was.

I think number 1 could be done, but not like Evernote did.

It's been what? 3 years since they released their javascript app, and they still didn't rewrite some important old features. Just last week we got back the option to start writing a note in the title instead of the body.

3 years!

I could write an entire Evernote competitor from scratch in 3 years, as a single developer (as a javascript app, not as multiple native apps).

And they STILL don't have reliable note-synching.

It took them too long, and their app is too crappy. But a GOOD rewrite would have worked just fine.

Why is it so hard to implement apparently simple features? This is surprising to me.

A rewrite is not the same as a writing a similar app from scratch.

You need to worry about deciding what functionality to preserve, what to change, and what to throw away. Most rebuilds either fail because they skip this step and the result is inadequate for the job, or they do this step and get bogged down in the minutiae of locking down requirements, digging into edge cases, and stakeholder management.

It is much harder to rewrite an existing product since you have to retain compatibility. If the old version of the app was crap then presumably the persistent data structures are also crap, but you can't discard them. So you end up building a compatibility layer or migration process, but in the end you have to support the same general data model as the old version.

#2 and #3 seem in conflict with each other.

I adopted Evernote for its ability to synchronize my checklists and notes across all devices. Collaborating with others was not an initial feature IIRC (?)

> 1) There is almost never a case for a total ground up rewrite of your core product. Just don’t do it.

I've espoused this before, but I've come around to moderating my take on this.

"Almost never" is an exaggeration. I agree that they "almost never" work, but that's not the same as there being no case (there's a difference between "should not have done" and "should have done differently".

After many years of seeing both play out (rewrites and decided-not-to-rewrites) I'd edit this adage to: "there is almost never a case to rewrite yourself" (for the individual) or "there is almost never a case to get the same team to rewrite" (for management).

I'm not saying that engineers can't learn from their own mistakes but if you wrote the software & you think it needs a scratch rewrite rather than a refactor, you're unlikely to have learnt enough within that gap of time to make the rewrite significantly better than a refactor.

The other reason for failure outside of the original architect repeating their same mistakes 2nd time around is outsourcing the rewrite. Wholesale outsourcing is an unbelievably inefficient & failure-prone way to build in-house software.

My moderated version: you are almost never going to do better at meeting the same goals with a full rewrite. Even when there is a good case for it, it is unlikely to work out.

> you think it needs a scratch rewrite rather than a refactor, you're unlikely to have learnt enough within that gap of time to make the rewrite significantly better than a refactor.

Relentless Refactoring replaces the ship piece by piece while it's under way. If you are effective at it, you can effectively (both definitions) rewrite the entire app with few people being any the wiser.

If you are not good at decomposing a problem into digestible, coherent steps, then you are also lousy at Relentless Refactoring. If you can't decompose the problem, your top-down rewrite is statistically guaranteed to fail. Someone somewhere will get lucky, accidentally beating 1:4 odds over and over for 50 failure points, but that person will probably not be you.

The people who can Relentlessly Refactor don't need to ask for a top-down rewrite. They just get down to doing it. Therefore most of the people who ask for one are incapable of taking advantage of such permission.

Ultimately, the only people who ask for a top-down rewrite are the people who don't deserve it. They believe in do-overs instead of doing the hard work of removing obstacles. They believe in the Second System (without the attendant Syndrome), not in observing and adapting to new information as it becomes available. They have, in essence, trained themselves to continue to misbehave in the face of new wisdom. They will repeat that behavior during the rewrite.

I enjoy Relentess Refactoring as much as the next guy, but one dimension here is that it is much easier to do in a headless app (or in the backend) than in an app with a major UI. At some point there must be a complete switch from the old UI to the new UI, and that step is extremely complex. It also invites a big rewrite, in an almost irresistible way - "since we'll change the UI, let's just do it from the ground up".

The main lesson of the CI/CD era is that pain is information and ignoring it until later just makes things worse.

"Let's replace the whole UI at once" and "Let's replace the whole app at once" are bandaid-ripping activities, and the point of ripping off a bandaid is to get it over with before your pain receptors have a chance to tell you what an asshole you are right now. I'm sure most people have at least one experience, of their own or of someone they know, where ripping off the bandaid took a chunk of skin with it, possibly creating a bigger wound than the bandage originally covered.

> unlikely to have learnt enough

There is an important caveat here - sometimes the original is rough not because you didn't know how to do it better, but because you were emphasizing speed and flexibility e.g. very early stage startup and you don't really understand the product here.

[see also, ship the prototype problem]

A successful rewrite of a core product requires a mix of peers: Old blood, who know the wins and sins of the past, and new blood who'll bring a fresh perspective.

Was there any other company doing real time collaboration in 2008 (when Evernote launched)? IIRC that predates even Google docs, so I wouldn't consider that snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

Google docs didn't exist when Evernote started. Their competitor was OneNote.

Agreed on point 3 for modern editors in 2022, as real-time collaboration and collaborative editing are table stakes today if you want to compete. But to give EN credit, when they launched (web 2008?) this was not the case, and a complete rewrite on point 1 could very well be necessary when the new CEO took over recently.

We started with OT [1] in mind for V1 of Taskade [2] with the intention to make our editor collaborative, but it was still a bumpy road before we were able to iterate on the product and speed up our dev cycle,. It continues to be a challenge to support the various use cases and customers, as improvements for offline editing, cross-device syncing, and recovery never ends.

This problem isn't fully solved and there are no perfect out of box solutions.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_transformation

[2] https://www.taskade.com

Notion still doesn't have (3) and I find it compelling enough to continue using.

(e.g. when simultaneously editing, text will randomly disappear from one or both writers)

Yeah.

> And enterprises of great pith and moment, > With this regard, their currents turn awry, > And lose the name of action.

Hamlet, William Shakespeare

I was employee #3 at original Evernote, when we were just implementing that brilliant idea.

Here is the photo of pretty much precise moment when Evernote was born: https://notes.sciter.com/2017/09/11/motivation-and-a-bit-of-...

What a memory, I really miss that atmosphere ...

The GUI is giving me Windows XP Plus! pack throwbacks, thank you for sharing.

Hey, thanks for your hard work making a great tool that I used for most of a decade.

Thanks for sharing! The state of application development is rather sad, that screenshot just conveys a feeling of speed and efficiency to me that is lacking in modern software.

I loved Evernote and was a paying subscriber right up until they changed their TOS to let their employees read all my notes to work on ad targeting. They backpedaled after a while but trust was lost, I cancelled immediately. I have no sympathy for their failure.

Similar experience here, it was a series of changes, none of which made my experience better and a lot of dodgy privacy affecting TOS updates that caused me to can my paid account.

They never really tried to re-engage me either, and have just continued on since then with a bare bones series of notes while I keep the critical stuff elsewhere.

Shame evernote was the first killer 'cloud native' app for me, the thing I couldn't do without once I had it.

I paid off and on through the years but for me it was when they started selling physical products and advertising them in the app. I can't remember what they were. T-shirts? Mousepads?

And socks!

https://www.aivanet.com/2013/09/evernote-gets-physical-why-a...

Moleskine notepads. But hey, it was more reliable and quicker to use than their software offering.

That's horrible. It's the reason I'm still somewhat suspicious of a simplistic note taking app (Colornote) I use on my android. I oftentimes get the sneaky feeling it might be sending my (sometimes highly private) notes to a server somewhere in China, but the app is so simple to use that no matter how many time I decide to, I simply can't get myself to wipe and uninstall it

This was right around the time I exited as well. They backpedaled, sure, then charged forward with it anyways.

At long last, Evernote takes an Incredible Journey to be broken down for parts by its new owner. Can't get any more fucked up than it already has been, it went from being an important part of my daily workflow to a place of pain. The rewrite is part of why my last graphic novel ground to a halt, I was using EN to collaborate on scripts with my partner and it is just agony to use any more. I cancelled my subscription a few years back and really have not found anything to fill that hole. Every theoretical replacement is either a shitty sluggish web view, owned by a megacorporation I don't want to get involved with, or both.

Personally I think the best thing the new owners could do would be to dig up the pre-EN10 codebase, get it compiling again, and make that available. I would resubscribe in a heartbeat.

Could be worse. Wait till they start selling advertisers access to data-mine your notes.

I tried a few alternatives and landed on Apple Notes. It's blinding fast, and while it's not exactly feature-rich, it does everything I need while being seamlessly synced to the cloud and my devices.

I use Apple Notes because I realized that, for my needs, all the structure and organization that so many other note taking apps/services provide really just make things more complicated and isn't beneficial. Notes is simple, has one level of folders, and supports labeling. I'll almost never look at 95% of my notes again, but in case I do, I can just search by keyword and usually I'll find it.

My one gripe with Notes is that the search function really isn't all that great. Maybe I need to force it to reindex or something. I've found many cases where it doesn't find a note by a word that I know it contains. I really don't get why it seems that nearly all search functions are terrible in any given app. It would be nice if Apple improved the search for Notes, and it shouldn't be that hard to do given that it's just using SQLite under the hood.

Same for me. It does about 90%+ of what I'd ever need, it has rock-solid sync across all my devices, I can share notes with my wife without her having to sign up for a service and download an app, etc.

Not to mention that it avoids me onboarding to some unprofitable note taking tool that will languish until it gets stripped for parts.

There was a midtwit meme about productivity hackers vs "I just use apple notes" guys like this too haha.

That's awesome that it syncs that well, though one of the reasons I use it is because I can specifically opt out of the syncing and keep everything offline. I use Notes to jot a lot of things down, and that can mean some very intimate/private thoughts, and I've come to distaste having those thoughts floating in the digital ether. Most note taking apps don't seem to allow you to work entirely offline, and if they do, they still phone home a lot and harass you to sign up for an account.

small nit pick. Apple Notes have support for nested folders:) But agree with the rest.

The lack of export functionality without a Mac kept me from using it.

edit: HN won't let me reply so...

That sure is a lot of trouble just to grab a copy of my notes. This is something I do often enough that I don't want to have to go through two MFA prompts, and then another when the process is done. Not acceptable.

You can bulk export all your Notes through appleid.apple.com. They can come down as text files, or a JSON, I believe. I just went through the process recently to migrate notes into Joplin.

FYI, HN probably does let you reply (unless you’ve tripped the rate limit, but in that case it won’t let you edit, either), it’s just that in deep threads you need to either wait a bit or do it from the comment’s page[1].

[1] https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/blob/m...

Like most apple software, it only considers users who are totally bought into the ecosystem. I hardly know what you mean, "grab a copy of my notes", all my notes are copied to all my devices, as long as those devices run Apple Notes ;)

TIL Apple Notes supports Evernote .enex import. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205793 https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/migrate-from-evernote-to-ap...

I have a directory of .txts on my phone. There are nicer solutions but at least I 100% will never lose access to my notes since they're just files.

How do you quickly make a new note? Is this Android or iOS?

I'm on Andrid, I use a small file manager called MK Explorer [0]

Flow is, open the app, go to bookmarks->notes (this is a shortcut I set up), choose a folder (I have a bunch for different things), then menu button->new file, enter a title, and use the file explorer's own text editor. It's not as quick as opening Google Keep and tapping plus, but at least I know I can trust it.

[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=pl.mkexplorer....

Apple Notes might do a lot of things or do them well, but seamless sync is not one of those.

I like a lot of things about it except for the part where I can't collaborate with my Windows-using collaborator.

"Make them use it on iCloud.com" is a non-starter, I don't wanna inflict a shitty web-app on them after fleeing EN mostly because it turned into a shitty web-app crammed into an app container.

Everybody on HN seems to talk about what they use to "take notes". I personally use Trello as an organization tool for things such as my to-do list, checklists (packing for a trip this weekend, for instance), random thoughts and ideas, lists of music and movies people suggest, transcriptions of phone conversations, etc. Is this the same use case as when people talk about Evernote/Apple Notes/OneNote/org-mode, and if so am I a total weirdo for using a Kanban tool for this purpose? I've used it this way for almost a decade and the abstraction of boards of stacks of cards is very flexible and intuitive to me.

If you put multiple images in an Apple Notes note, it’s insanely slow and also it only exports as txt files so no images afaicr

Would some of the open-source alternatives fit the bill? Something like SimpleNote?

Org-mode, yo.

I've yet to find a reasonable mobile version of org-mode. Which is, frankly, a non-starter for me personally. 90% of the time I am probably referencing something from my notes when mobile, but I need those notes to:

1. Be accessible an up to date 2. Easily searchable, and to do so quickly 3. In the rare case that I need to take a note, it is best if I can do so easily and have those go back to my computer quickly and painlessly so I can do what needs doing to get that into the system better.

Org-mode simply does not do this well in any of my experience with it. It's fine if all you're doing is taking notes on a computer, but as soon as you add a mobile device to the mix, it goes belly up for me.

Orgzly doesn't fit the bill for you?

I tried it and cannot recall why that one failed. It missed one of my requirements of

* must be a native app, not a shitty web app

* must be able to run on my Mac & iThings as well as my collaborator's Windows & Android phone

* must be able to collaborate with other people

* must be able to ingest a decade of Evernote gracefully

* that includes attached images and PDFs, I make comics

* must deal with actual rich text, markdown is nice for commenting on the internet but notes need more

Simplenote is a web app by necessity - most Markdown ones are since Markdown is just a way to write simple HTML. I don't think there really are native notetaking apps anymore, let alone multiplatform ones. OneNote's probably the only big player left.

I don't think Simplenote really handles file attachments, so it'd be a complete no go.

I was in the same spot in January of 2021. Did some exploring, and settled on Notion. I love it.

If you're on Mac, try DevonThink

I don't understand why you wouldn't just use google docs or microsoft word to collaborate on a graphic novel? Evernote is not and was never a word processor.

The creators of the street angel graphic novel series said all of their ideas are in a google drive folder.

I don't like web apps and don't want my life in Google. Also I had been a paid user of Evernote for a few years already when Google Docs came out, I had already learnt that "if you're not paying for it, you're the product".

I'm not a fan of Microsoft, either. I've never had to swap Word documents around so that's not in my lie at all.

Evernote was on my computer, and on my phone; it's where I'd note down an idea when I had it, and since it was there I may as well just expand on it in there. When I'm doing solo comics then most of my notes in EN were collections of vague outlines, dialogue fragments, and photographs of scribbly sketchbook pages; actual writing mostly happened in Illustrator. It was easy to expand that to have a script sitting there in EN, since we were both already used to using it. Plus since EN is about keeping notebooks rather than files it's pretty nice to just have one place that holds all the various words and pictures related to getting from "some ideas we've kicked around" to "a script that I can turn into a bunch of Illustrator files on my hard drive".

This is similar to how there are a lot of programmers who do everything in Emacs. You're already there all the time, and it may not be perfectly built for this, but you can do most of what you need in it, so why not?

If you want to be totally anal about doing it The Traditional Industry Way then you can use a complex word processor template adapted from screenwriting templates and deal with rigid page counts. If you are not working as part of an assembly line with distinct separations between Writers and Editors and Pencillers and Inkers and Colorists and Letterers then your script can a pretty casual thing with simple formatting, and Evernote can handle that just fine. Or at least it could before v10 threw all performance in the toilet for that shitty Electron rewrite.

Lately I have been vaguely fiddling with using Scrivener for roughing out scripts of short pieces, and really need to get my partner on this long-brewing GN still kinda trapped in Evernote to give it a shot. If we can get a decent sync pathway to bring the .scriv files between our disparate devices then maybe my dusty Evernote notebook exports will turn into a handful of Scrivener projects, along with the scattered notes in Joplin and Apple Notes that have happened since I finally said "fuck this abusive relationship with New Evernote".

I've written comic scripts myself and I'm sure you are probably aware of this but the traditional way is really not complex word processing templates based on screenwriting templates. It's just whatever random format the author likes.

Scriviner has no collaborative features and IMHO you are making things unreasonably difficult for yourself by using the wrong tools for the job.

I've kept using Evernote "legacy" (or whatever its called, the pre electron version ) without upgrading to v10 so I don't even understand why you've created this problem for yourself if you still like Evernote.

How did you feel about Dropbox Paper?

“Incredible journey?”

The End of an Error for the world's most disappointing note-taking app.

I think part of the struggle here is that no two people can agree on what ailed them.

From lack of innovation for years, to an incomprehensibly bad rich text editor interface that broke all established conventions, to 0-60 from "zero monetization" to "monetize every time you even think about clicking a button", to a ground-up rewrite that put it on part with it's counterparts from 2012, etc.

It's almost like it's failure was overdetermined.

Fascinating case study in a journey from ubiquity to obscurity.

> The End of an Error

not sure if that is autocorrect, or a joke, or autocorrect making a pun from "end of an era" with "error" given the sentiment.

either way, it's funny!

Yeah, regardless of the two it is, I'm saving that for later.

Very much on purpose and I stole that from somebody else long ago.

I really liked Evernote. Yearly subscription instead of the monthly Netflix like prices that ever half baked app asks for these days. Integration amongst all my devices phone, table, various desktops. All nice. And no further dependency on Microsoft, Google or Meta.

Product development stalled a long time ago though. I do hope this thing stays in the air, cause I got a lot of notes in there.

Not stalled. They created Tasks, which I use every single day!

If tasks is their big accomplishment they are screwed. How about allowing you to change the default font on a note or a task?

I've been using Evernote for a while now, and I just don't get the pace of their development. Their changes seem almost incremental and take forever.

Recently their development pace really picked up. Unfortunately that was due to them replatforming as an electron app. Development speed improved, but the app itself felt sluggish and I had really started to hate it.

Same. It was ahead of its time and incredibly useful, then behind its time and useful, and now antiquated but still full of my important notes.

Do I have a loyalty club membership at that one hotel I stayed in halfway around the world 15 years ago, when I had a different email address? Evernote is the only place I can find out.

As soon as there’s a dead simple migration path to OneNote, I’ll have $50/year more spending money.

Though basically the same lock-in issue is what kept me from starting to put all my notes into OneNote years ago. Admittedly at this point, OneNote is presumably not going anywhere. But I still make the tradeoff to mostly keep notes in text files.

Reminds me of Derek Sivers how he keeps all his writing in plain text, always, everywhere. https://sive.rs/plaintext

Edit: Apparently he posted this on HN 8 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30521545

It's up 79$/year now for personal accounts.

Ugh. Ok, one more year. THEN I migrate.

Yeah, was my favorite app for a few years, I was even a paying subscriber, but then thy started pushing adds for some group chat thing and other random stuff. And the webapp became almost unusable after a redesign to this "modern" information sparse style where you have to hunt around and click an excessive amount of times to get simple things done.

I ended up moving over to Obsidian, and while I am not entirely happy with it, it's at least better than what Evernote has become.

I'm using Obsidian and Inkdrop now. I need to download Simplenote. I'm also putatively trying Joplin and Notion, but they seem to be losing out; I need to try harder with them for a bit and then drop them if they don't catch on.

I'm being so picky because I used Evernote for ten years and could conceivably use my next choice even longer. I can't believe I used Evernote for over a decade and used it to create thousands of notes. What a shame they destroyed it.

I was using Evernote extensively back in 2008. It was a real tossup between Evernote and OneNote (which at the time wasn't cloud based and required syncing the files).

Then Evernote proceeded to cease all feature development on the main app. They where releasing food apps while the main product grew stale. Instead of making Evernote incredibly powerful, they didn't touch it and people left any of the dozen competitors that exist today.

I loved the integration among all my devices as well. I think that's table stakes for note-taking apps. So often I jot something down at my computer and then walk out the door with only my phone.

However, their constant UI changes were maddening. The breaking point for me, which resulted in me now using several different competitors until I settle on one, was they decided that your cursor should start in the body for a new note instead of in the title field. I get that searching is supposed to replace every other single form of organization, but note titles are important in their interface, and actually really vital when searching! They got way out over their skis, discouraging you from adding titles when their own UI makes it a nightmare to have a lot of untitled notes. And it really was an effective nudge — after the change I struggled to consistently add titles even though titles are important for my workflow. I struggled between having a mess of untitled notes or applying constant discipline to fight the nudge, and I finally gave up.

That was just the straw that broke the camel's back. There were so many other fiddly UI changes that constantly forced me to learn new habits. I would gladly pay $30 per month (not kidding) just to have a version of Evernote frozen in time. I remember loving it for years starting around 2012 or so, then a few years of horrible quality problems that I wouldn't want to revisit, and then it was fine except for constant annoying changes.

I'll be paying my subscription until I settle on a replacement and figure out a workable export/import process to transition my notes to it (which I expect to be a struggle, based on the tools I've tried.)

Yea, I'm in the same boat as you. The notes I have in there are really valuable.

Curious, would you have been willing to become an investor in Evernote to avoid this acquisition? And if so, what order of magnitude? I'm curious why they didn't just do a crowdfunding campaign.

I am honestly okay with development stalling, as I don't really have that many features I needed.

Except one: speed. Evernote is dog slow, whereas Apple Notes is fast. This is what killed my reason for subscribing to Evernote. Though it has far fewer features, I can press CMD+N and start jotting down my ideas/things I have to remember.

I have no objection to paying for good tools, but they are tools and must support me in what I am trying to accomplish.

I do miss the old Evernote. Many of the 'enhancements' over the last few years just get in the way of the main benifit of the tool.

Indeed. Thier every 'enhancements' makes me feel that they have absolutely no idea what their strengths are.

Yep, if I could subscribe to the old Evernote then I would, but it's long gone.

Yup - it stopped being a functional note taking app. Which is the only reason I used it in the first place.

It used to just get out of the way and let me take notes in my browser with the comfort of knowing I could get them from anywhere later.

Now it's this horrible, janky app that tries to do too many things, shoves constant feature popups in my face, and isn't very good for taking notes.

I used it constantly 10 years ago. I don't use it at all today. I just loaded it up again to see if I'm missing anything -

It takes nearly 10 seconds to load on a developer machine on a gigabit internet connection.

It immediately asks for permission to send me popups

It tries to show me 7 different features on the home screen (notes/scratchpad/pinned notes/recently captured/notebooks/tags/shortcuts) instead of just fucking showing me my last note.

It takes multiple clicks to start a new note every time.

---

Basically - it's now worse than a physical notepad in basically every way.

Ah, I drove past their office just last week and noticed all the lights were out and the parking lot was empty.

At the time I assumed they'd actually gone under, but now I realise that that would have been the "there is no spoon" scenario.

Bit late to the thread. This is a hbit of a shame but also quite clarifying.

I had been holding on to EN as there is no app that does quite what it does quite as well. I liked being able to mix notes, to-dos, captured images, web content, etc, and organize it into folders. The fact that they are working towards a Linux client helped, as well.

What I didn't like was their prioritizing of features that were aimed at enterprise customers at the expense of everything else. The world didn't really need another collaborative text editor for teams with chat, and I never saw EN being anyone's choice for that.

It is a shame. Seems like yet another company that could have made a nice living for its employees by servicing their natural customer base but was instead destroyed by the ambitions imposed on them by their investors.

They took a bunch of VC cash. Like a lot. They’re going to want 10-1000x on that, and consumers are only willing to pay so much. Apple Notes and Google Keep sucked away most of the consumer market.

These are mostly negative reviews of Evernote. Yet, I do like the product and I am yet to find a replacement that offers these must-haves:

* Multiple tags per note

* OCR/search on attachments

* Web clipping (full page and individual sections)

* Mail to Evernote (with attachments)

* Decent WYSIWYG

* Good scanning support ("scannable" app)

It did have its problems and did lose 3 or 4 notes due to syncing issues but today's web version is usable and the product seems stable now. I agree that the acquisition is probably not good news. So, if anyone knows of a replacement with these features, pls reply!

I did some searching via [1] and it turns out amplenote comes closest to my requirements list.

[1] https://www.noteapps.info/apps

[2] https://www.amplenote.com/

Hey, thanks!

Amplenote and OneNote are pretty much what comes to mind with those requirements. Both OCR images, but don't do PDFs.

Wow, I'm sure I'm not alone in having completely forgot about Evernote after importing all my notes into Bear. They fell off my radar with such force that I literally haven't even thought of them in years, except for one moment months ago when I noticed their logo on maybe a physical notepad sitting in some old bookstore window. Other than that, I have not even seen the logo anywhere else. Like others, it was the device restriction, but also just terribly glitchy note editing/pasting etc.. Moving to Bear (which has also now stagnated pretty hard, but is still good) I was just stoked on the fact that editing was a smooth experience and it kind of got out of my way.

I love Bear but it's been a big disappointment in how quickly it ships features. They've been working on the web version for what seems like a few years now. If you're 100% in the Apple ecosystem it's great. I have an iPhone and M1 Air for personal use but my last 3 jobs have used Windows, being able to transfer knowledge across devices is a massive pain. I ended up switching to Obsidian due to that.

There must be a good reason for why its taken so long, they've created a solid app so it doesn't make sense that they dropped the ball on the web version.

Agreed on all points. I just happen to only use it on mac. My guess is that other things came up, or it just wasn't as lucrative as they were hoping. For most non-markdown notes I just use physical notebooks with satisfying Muji pens.

Yeah I think they started with good intentions and hit some kind of blocker

Yeah it’s been extermely slow with the updates. The Bear 2.0 is currently on Mac-only beta but not yet open (unless you join their beta forum and ask for access), but even then, it doesn’t have the web app. I’ve seen the Bear team say that they did a full rewrite (in C++ I think?) so that it would be easier to implement the web app in future but who knows how many years in the future that is.

I may be wrong on the features on Bear 2.0 but it doesn’t seem like a lot new features. A full rewrite in C++ may be why it’s taking so long but it definitely feels like they’ve quietly dropped the web version.

It’s fair enough if they want to focus on the Apple ecosystem but they let people think they were developing the web version for a while.

This is unrelated to the news, but does anyone here ever get unknown charge from "Google Play Bending Spoons"? It doesn't appear in the Google Transaction History, but my ewallet provider confirmed it was from Google Play.

Someone has asked about it in Google Play Help and got no meaningful answer https://support.google.com/googleplay/thread/159064766/help-...

Related ongoing thread:

Why Evernote failed to realize its potential (2021) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33626047 - Nov 2022 (143 comments)

The only reason I've stuck with Evernote is because it scans all of my old paperwork and lets me search by the OCRed text. Without it, so many years of personal data would be locked in images I'd never have time to eyeball.

Please someone release me from this foul daemon by suggesting an alternative with this key feature.

If you port over those images to Apple photos, you can literally search the for the text right inside the photos app. It works pretty accurately for all printed text ime.

Is there some way to link to those photos via URL, or something like that?

Yeah... same boat. Photographed my notebooks and put them in. Sigh.

On macOS, Devonthink

Pretty sure OneNote does this, I don’t know how the bulk move experience would be though.

OneNote and Amplenote have OCR built in. Images only, not PDFs, mind you, but it's there in any case.

imagine being at the local tech happy hour and someone asks you where you work and you have to yell over the loud music "BENDING SPOONS, I'M A L3 SRE" ... "what?" ... "BENDING. SPOONS."

Bending Spoons is based in Milan so you would be at an aperitivo sipping a Negroni or spritz with not so loud music :)

I used to work for a company that rented a portion of Evernote's HQ, in Redwood City. Nice office and location. Evernote eventually recovered and kicked us out. Just my personal piece of nostalgia.

You’re in luck that space might be available again. They moved out of that building several months ago[0].

[0] https://walkingredwoodcity.com/?s=Evernote&submit=Search

Wow, that's quite the downsizing! Evernote at one point occupied all 5 floors of that building and their new HQ looks like a single level over retail shops. I guess it makes sense with the move to remote work.

Can we all please go back to buying stable desktop software without continuous upgrade nags, now?

But without software as a service how will companies expand indefinitely until they bust?

I still hate that Evernote bought Skitch. Really wish the new team would revive it or sell it off to an interested dev.

I'm good friends with one of the founders of Skitch. He effectively got less than nothing for that sale. It was an acqui-hire with vesting stock valued in the several $million, but when he couldn't handle working in the big corporate environment at Evernote, he had to leave, and lost his stock with zero remuneration. He couldn't even pay off the debts he'd incurred over the years building Skitch. Terrible outcome for him, as well as the product. So sad.

For anyone looking for an INCREDIBLE note-taking app, check out UpNote. https://getupnote.com/

- Sleek UX/UI. It does not overoptimize there either. Just the right amount of perfect for me.

- Importantly, cross-platform: as someone on Android and Mac, it works seamlessly

- $24.99 Lifetime pricing. No subscription BS.

- Developers pay close attention to user feedback but they're also not dumping features there left, right, and center. Most updates are targeted at making this faster than bigger. (It is already fast enough)

- No "Social/collaborative" BS. I want my notes to be mine.

- Export capability to PDF, HTML etc.

Disclaimer: No, I have no affiliation with the product. Just a super-happy user who'd like to recommend this to everyone. I have tried many note-taking apps out there but this one really hits it out of the park

Thanks for the recommendation! I'm going to try them out now.

EDIT: I was able to export my main "Evernote" notebook into a 1.8GB .enex file, and have started importing all the notes into UpNote. It works well so far! I really like the Markdown editor, that's already a lot more comfortable to use. I will probably switch to this.

It's just a bit strange that importing notes from Evernote is a premium feature, so you can't even try it out properly before paying. There should at least be a free trial.

Glad to hear you tried and liked it

There’s FOSS https://fsnot.es.

Looks quite flexible. Exports, iCloud Sync, Deopbox, can also have notes as a Git repo.

But big drawback — Apple ecosystem only. But since it syncs to things other than iOS I think other apps can be used on other platform.

Dev has made it clear he will not be able to develop for other platforms.

I have not used it a lot (still on Simplenote and exploring). It looks good and it’s open source so I thought one could check it out.

I guess Phil Libin's plan to make a company that could last 100 years didn't quite work out.

https://www.businessinsider.com/how-evernotes-phil-libin-pla...

How the mighty have fallen.

Who the heck are Bending Spoons?

Seemingly producers of a random set of mobile apps [0] including a video editor, a basic photo retouching app, and a fitness routine tracker.

As an aside, their site is also aggravatingly self-absorbed, at least as it seems to me. Copy about how "we create our own cutting-edge technologies" and "Impossible. Maybe." just hurts to read when they're talking about a 30 day fitness app.

[0] https://bendingspoons.com/products

30 days?!?!?

I just got the reference. Bending spoons, doing the impossible, like in the matrix. At least the name makes sense now.

Isn't spoon-bending a "hoaxy" magic trick?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoon_bending

Yeah, maybe to young people that means "doing the impossible" but to me it means "tricking people into thinking you're doing something impossible" or "scam" for short.

Even in the modern usage the principle is to recognize that it's all an illusion. No spoons are ever actually bent in The Matrix.

It's also a heroin usage trope.

They also call their employees "spooners" and talk about how they "they share one thing in common: a drive to become the best person they’re capable of being."

Statements like "Are you ready to come join us in the Spooniverse? We saved you a seat." also make it sound a little like it's a cult.

With that being said, their goals seem admirable and they are scoring pretty well on some employee satisfaction inquiries, so it's perfectly possible that they are actually living up to their ambitions. A fitness app might not seem like a lot, but they may just be working their way up to something bigger.

In some parts of Europe they still try to look cool behaving like if they were some hip company from Silicon Valley. Depressing stuff imho.

The only reasonably modern app developer company in Italy, I believe, for the little I heard. Considering the technological desert that is Italy these days, not bad.

Can someone educate me on the difficulties in raising money from your user base?

It seems like businesses like this should give fair warning to their users before transactions like this occur to make sure they don't have a better option than shutting down or selling out.

Evernote has tens of millions of paying users. It doesn't seem too far-fetched to believe that each user would fork over on average $50 (as an investment, presumably) to just freeze product development, fix bugs, and improve performance.

Put another way, I'm pretty sure Evernote could have raised hundreds of millions from their user base.

Why not try that approach? Are there regulatory issues that make it unfeasible?

ICOs are technically a way, and scams aside which wouldn’t apply to Evernote if they would have used it, there is still a fair amount of legal ambiguity in doing it. There has been many voices pushing for creating a regulatory framework to allow doing what you are asking for.

Paying recurring for an app should make this problem non-existent. If $5/mo or whatever doesn't allow you to deliver a stable, performant product, then you need to reconsider your pricing or your business model. Evernote isn't a startup and they should have this figured out by now. And do not do a release that amounts to "look at this whizzy, non-core feature we've been working hard to add (see: chat) which means we didn't get around to fixing all the boring issues with the core product you're paying for"; that's just insulting. The only thing I imagine worse, if I'm already paying you money for the product, is for you come to me with "Oh...you want it to work? Fix the bugs and the performance? That'll be a $50 'investment'.". That guarantees I'm going to look elsewhere real fast, because fixing bugs and improving performance isn't a one-time thing and you'll be back to extract more from me at some random time in the future where your business decisions don't cover the next shortfall.

I'm imagining that $50 raised from 10 million people ($500m raised) would allow for an outright recap of the entire company, including bringing in new management that serves the users' best interests.

I agree it isn't ideal, but as a user, it's far better than allowing Evernote to get sold to someone whose goal is to raise prices and squeeze profits. Many Evernote users like me are in a situation where the switchover cost is several orders of magnitude larger than $50. So, the dynamics might look more like 1% of the user base investing $5000 each.

$500 million is something on the order of the annual opex budget of my entire division of ~800 people. Are you seriously proposing that an app like Evernote requires that kind of a nestegg to deliver on users best interest in addition to a subscription model? Better than "maybe we should charge $1 more a month" or similar? Color me dubious.

Huh? You're misunderstanding my point. It's not that a crowdsourced financing is required to achieve some outcome. I'm simply pointing out that it would have been a better option for all stakeholders than what just happened.

I had enjoyed and even paid for Evernote for several years, until their "restructuring" and they dropped the export of everything but "Evernote Database"... I think they have since restored an export to HTML, but that always was the biggest problem for me... I want to be able to export (and backup) my notes in TXT or MD, not just HTML or their proprietary format.

No idea if they've since added in more reasonable export features, but it was a dealbreaker for me (a big plain-text fan).

"At Bending Spoons, we create our own cutting-edge technologies and products."

https://bendingspoons.com/

evernote was one of the programs that trapped me, it took some effort to finally migrate my data (I'm now using md files/ obsidian for mobile frontend synced with syncthing)

I migrated to Joplin (with a Docker container on my NAS as the server), the Windows app has "Import from an ENEX (Evernote Export)" and I haven't noticed anything missing. I've noticed the few encrypted notes I had being migrated as garble though.

The final thing that has me trapped with Evernote is the very good OCR for both images and PDFs. The second I figure out a replacement for that which works great on Mac and iOS I am gone.

On ios this is now baked into Notes.app

I use swiftscan because I've been using it a long time (same reason you use evernote) but the Notes scanner is pretty effective if Notes works for you.

Do you know if Notes performs the OCR on files that [are imported over from Evernote?](https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205793) I have many hundreds (maybe low-thousands) of PDFs and images that I need to be able to access once in a blue moon, but when I need them Evernote's OCR makes it easy.

I guess I could just try it out with a subsection of notes.

I’ve imported a bunch of PDFs and various image formats and it doesn’t seem to be scanning them. I’ll check back later in case it’s a feature it does in the background.

I think you have to scan directly from notes.

Nope, looks like it indexed over night!

Time for the giant migration!

On iPhone, Notes is excellent. In a browser on icloud.com it's terrible. I need it to work in a web browser because I do software development on Windows. Notes is not an option until the browser version works just as well as the mobile version. For now, I can use Notes for personal but not for work.

Amplenote has OCR for images and a pretty Evernote like interface.

I think there are different apps that do this. Devonthink does and imports Evernote however many say it’s a bulky app that does a lot. I don’t feel that way but I like Devonthink.

I wish the UI/UX for Obsidian was better. It takes just long enough to search for a note that I want to edit that I end up just putting quick stuff in Google Keep due to its ease of use.

Really? Search is instant for me on Obsidian, with about 4000 notes spanning 11 years. Maybe you had some kind of indexing issue?

I had a great workflow going on with Evernote and my ScanSnap. I'd scan mail and paperwork right away, and it'd be full text searchable in Evernote. Maybe once a week or so I'd go through the latest uploads and tag them or put them in folders.

It took me a while to figure out an alternative for this because so many of the note tools I had seen were focused on just written notes and not the PDF file use case.

I tried self-hosting Paperless, but that seemed like a lot of work too. When we're talking about my document archive here it's a lot of important files and I don't want to be my own SRE just to save myself $100 or so a year.

The best I have now is I upgraded my scanner to a new Fujitsu that OCRs and pushes the files into Dropbox, and paid Dropbox plans have full text search.

I'm curious why you moves from ScanSnap (which I use) to a Fujitsu. Just time for an upgrade, or do you prefer some newer feature(s)?

I use my ScanSnap with OCR turned on and haven't had any problems, but I'm always looking for what will replace it when it finally died (still going strong at about 10 years or so, I think!).

I suppose to be precise, the new scanner is also a ScanSnap; the ScanSnap IX1600 (but ScanSnap is a Fujitsu brand name).

https://www.fujitsu.com/global/products/computing/peripheral...

I had been using the S1300M before that, which had held up since 2010 for me.

Silly me! I should have realized (or remembered) that it's a Fujitsu product. It's just the name "Fujitsu" isn't on the machine anywhere, so I tend to forget (just double-checked, and no name on the outside!)

Thanks for sharing the model numbers, too. I'll be sure to check out the newer models!

I'm curious; what are the benefits of using syncthing over the git plugin, if any?

I understand if you already use syncthing for other stuff, but having the power of git for my notes is quite nice.

none, I just use it for other stuff too

I migrated to Joplin some time ago. Evernote was great but you could see them slowly trying to build that 'walled garden".

I'd prefer flat MD files and a fairly decent GUI. Joplin has zero hold on me and this is a great thing.

Same, migrated to self-hosted Joplin recently.

I fired up EN at one point recently. Wanted to add a note in a certain category and it took me like 20 seconds to get to the point where I can type in the actual note text. It wasn't even connected to the internet and still the app was slow. 5-10 second pauses for something that should be done in a millisecond. Useless popups.

WTF were they thinking?

I mean, I know exactly what happened. Everyone who cared about having a good app has left the company by this point.

Anyways, I really like Joplin. Android app works fine. Desktop app works fine. It even has a TUI mode. Server side for self-hosting (webdav) was pretty straightforward to set up.

Has Joplin become any faster? I tried the switch a year or two ago. The export and import went somewhat smoothly, but Joplin was so incredibly slow to sync that I ended up going back to Evernote. I do have many years of notes in Evernote, but it just took forever, both in initial sync but also opening on phone even after the initial sync. Something in their algorithm was just very slow back then.

I'm adding here in case Evernote reads this thread.

I used to use Evernote extensively, mainly for web clipping, but also filing things away.

Nowadays I rarely use anything except the mobile apps, or the clipping browser plugins, but Evernote is essential to me for permanent filing which I can search at any time. I would be lost without it and am willing to keep paying for it. I'm sure other people want it for note keeping and I have no idea how well that works. What does work is their document/photo scanning app, which I use regularly.

A long time ago, the founder made much of the fact that my data was fully portable and provided the api details to enable me to export it out of Evernote completely. I think this is very important, especially for a company that may be seen as less viable for a while. I was disappointed, the other day, that I could no longer use Evernote's published query language to search using a boolean query. This may well be because the facility is now a pay-extra feature. I have to say that adding on little features and then asking users to pay for them is the worst thing when I am already a premium user! Please stop doing this.

That's my two penn'orth.

I was a paid Evernote user who didn’t use the service much but paid anyway, partially because I liked the company, until they raised prices in 2016 by like 40% for the premium plan.

I’m one of those whale customers that SaaS companies love because I’m fairly price insensitive and I often don’t have tons of usage or support needs. For a solid 5 or 6 years, I’d been giving Evernote $50 a year, even though I mostly used other services. But raising the price 40% (and neutering the free plan that was the only reason they had as many users as they did) was enough that even I took the time to cancel.

It’s a sad end to what was at one time such a good (if significantly overvalued) product, but the writing has been on the wall for 6 years.

OneNote is more than good enough for most people who want an Evernote sort of note system and for people who are more particular and want to pay, the new wave of single brain apps is just far, far better.

When Evernote tried expanding into food and all these other areas, that was a sign things were getting out of control.

I used to be mad about what happened to Skitch, but CleanShot has finally filled that void from me from back before Evernote neutered and abandoned it.

Result being that today I'll migrate everything out of Evernote and cancel my subscription.

That sucks.

Welp, guess it's time to finally cancel the subscription and move to Obsidian.

I was a bit like "Bending Spoons? Who?", so I followed the link to their website and looked at the products page...

Then vast amounts of scrolling down that giant page of marketing fluff looking for anything resembling useful information. Then the tab got closed as "Meh. Not for me then."

Why must they make these pages pretend to be some sort of glossy coffee table magazine?

There was clearly no rhyme or reason to their portfolio.

Basically the app store version of a private equity firm.

I suppose that's what their target audience wants to see.

That's literally their business strategy, total bullshits. It's all fluff

Evernote came preinstalled On my second android phone, I think a Galaxy Note 2. It could not be removed and demanded to be allowed to update itself constantly.

I’ll never know whether it was any good, because it annoyed me from the word go.

If you’re a cool, tech-crowd oriented tool, for god’s sake don’t let Samsung install you as a ‘system’ app…

Looks like these folks raised a big round (for the first funding round no less) last month:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bending-spoons-raises-340-mil...

So fund-to-acquire?

Bending spoon’s website is 100% bloat so that doesn’t bode well for a revitalized Evernote.

I am a many years paying user of Evernote. Startup time on Android became painfully slow several years ago. On Windows I just keep the app always open. Otherwise I don't see any benefit of switching to another app.

gets checkbook ready

The main reason I never stopped using Evernote is that somehow I got "stuck" on a personal plan that never really got updated for at least 7 years.

I live in a high inflation country and right now I'm paying the equivalent of 0.75usd/year.

There's has been several moments through the years that I planned to at least backup my notes to another service but thought: I am paying, so surely I won't lose my notes?

Hopefully you are backing them up now lol.

Another lesson from Evernote: if your primary business is digital (ie software) don’t make a corporate strategy of selling physical things (notebooks).

Any idea of how much Bending Spoons paid for Evernote ?

Ex Evernote employee here. Someone else posted this: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bending-spoons-raises-340-mil...

Employee shares are (apparently) being priced next to nothing. My understanding while working there was that if the company sold for $300m or less, we’d get nothing. So, $340m sounds about right. It’s a fire sale.

Seems unlikely they'd spend that whole round of funding on one app. I bet it was much, much less.

But how much was Evernote bringing in in revenues ?

I used to love Google Notebook. And then they shut it down. Evernote offered to take in that google notebook data and integrate it into their system.

Now evernote is being bought. I need to migrate my data out. Evernote was a great company early on. Not sure why they lost the race. But I think it has something to do with task managers, like trello, and heavy data collectors like database in notion.

Using notion to migrate my data out of evernote.

I'm not familiar with Bending Spoons. Anyone able to give me a bit more context on what this will likely mean for the future of the product?

They became sorta famous over here for developing the Covid19 contact tracing app "Immuni" that was then adopted by the Italian Ministry of Health. Being a government project, they probably got a life-changing amount of money because of that. I can't comment on the quality of the app as i never used it.

https://github.com/immuni-app

Actually this is wrong. They did not receive any funds from the Government. There is an article in Italian with the words of one of the founders.

https://www.corriere.it/tecnologia/20_aprile_22/luca-ferrari...

I stand corrected, thanks for the link.

The biggest mistake Evernote made was not looking at how their customers used the product.

They insisted on this to emphasize privacy (fair enough), but never stopped to consider 1. If their customers even cared 2. How they would learn how the product they were building was actually used.

The result is a note app that tries to do everything good, so it does nothing well.

I opened up File Explorer I and I see I made a full dump of Evernote on 30 July 2019. I was a paying customer for a few years but decided at the time to dump it before it was too late.

To this day, the one thing I truly truly miss from Evernote was the web archive. They had the best at the time, and I have yet to see it matched.

So, it seems from the thread that I should give it a try again?

I used to be a huge fan of Evernote, but a few things made me look at other solutions. One issue is the capturing of code was automatically formatted and I was burned a few times keeping my code snippets for reference.

Been using Notion for a few years but I prefer the tree view and there's not many note apps that work well with this method.

Everytime Evernote gets mentioend on HN, I love to promote my favorite replacement:

https://getupnote.com/

Right now, it's more of Bear app replacement than an Evernote replacement, but I feel like they're heading in the right direction.

Interesting to see this now, I was thinking of switching to a new platform for tasks and notes because Evernote’s free tier is quite limited and Apple Reminders often doesn’t even show the correct reminder if there are multiple open. I was just reading about Evernote’s profitability last night.

Apple notes is rock solid compared to reminders

Reminders has been perpetually flakey, particularly around new OS releases and if your iPhone/Watch/iPad/Mac are in different states of latest vs non-latest OS.

Apple Notes unfortunately does not let you export notes with the images attached, not always relevant but it really hurt me once.

If you want to delete your account: https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/360056549574-Per...

As much as I love (and still pay for) Evernote, I've just now realized that I haven't added to my collection there over 6 months. Without intending to, I seem to have largely switched to just saving websites with the "SingleFile" extension for Firefox.

Evernote is still the only product that meets my workflow needs. Hope they don’t mess it up.

EN (happy) customer since 2014 here. I just hope the acquiring company won't kill it.

I stopped using evernote when it kept having some sort of syncing issues and lost what I had written over and over again. Maybe they have fixed it, but I've lost any trust in them, so, I'm not willing to risk it.

Looks like the acquisition is for the customer base and data (for AI training). Bending Spoons is leaning on AI tech and Evernote has both customers and data they need for training their AI.

That's what I thought and I don't like it at all. My private notes, being used to train an AI. I have boarding passes and alike in there, which probably have my ID card number. Then, an AI somwhere will print my private data. Yes, they try to filter these things out, but we know how hard this is, as we saw with GitHub Copilot.

Good thing I moved off Evernote years ago. I use Simplenote since it seems to be in good hands with Automattic. They use it internally, so it's not likely to go away.

I used evernote for a long time. I migrated to Joplin seeking greater control and security. I use it to this day and never thought about going back to Evernote.

a) Happy for Evernote and hope they have found a new home. This app was pioneering the realm and leading for quite some time!

b) Obsidian [1] simplified the zettelkasten [2], that anyone must give it a chance. Just like you must give Vim.

    1. https://obsidian.md/

    2. https://zettelkasten.de/posts/overview/

Is that an announcement or a marketing jargon dictionary? I had forgotten this app even exists, but I can see why.

If you didn’t know “Bending Spoons” was an organization, the title would come across a bit differently.

I use paper & pencil. Works fine :D

They were such a cool company to work for in the Valley when they started started.

I didn't realize you could acquire a company just by bending some spoons...

on MacOS/iOS, Bear was the best note taking app I found. If you need cross platform capability and/or want free and open source I like Joplin a lot as well.

Bear was amazing but I dropped it because there's a lot of good enough alternatives (I use Craft right now) with more features and wider support.

Bear should have been ported to Android and Windows/Linux(browser version?) years ago.

I have also tried to find an alternative to evernote and i settled to Joplin for now.

I used Evernote for a decade before switching to Apple Notes a couple years back. It took some getting used to but now it feels seamless. I'd highly recommend it if you don't need anything too fancy.

I switched to Joplin a couple of years back and don't regret the move. Was able to import all my Evernote stuff as well, which was one deciding factor.

I for one released on simplenote.cpm for my noting needs

I've been using resophnotes as windows client for simplenote for years (and the ios client if I need to look something up on the go) after evernote become terrible 10+ years ago

Nothing sophisticated for sure, but a little windows macro and I can make a new note for something with a timestamp sorted the way I want with one keystroke

plain text is underrated though I think they are more sophisticated plain text options now but I don't feel like importing my database elsewhere when my current solution works pretty well

further, for super ad hoc stuff, I just need notepad++ open with 100+ tabs using pleasantly little memory...

Remember when Evernote was the shit? Oh how the mighty have fallen

Ever-ishNote

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