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Comment by isaacfrond | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.)

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.

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 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.

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.

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