Why Evernote failed to realize its potential (2021)
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Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33623402 - Nov 2022 (113 comments)
What I need is a textual data store that can be efficiently and effectively indexed, searched and (automatically) tagged, and for the ability to quickly filter streams and feeds of targeted information from that data store (with the option to share them publicly via RSS - my public feeds are in my profile for the curious).
It needs to be able to contain the 3 primary text-based sources of information I consume (with all of the table-stakes additional metadata): highlights from webpages, internet commentary, and highlights from eBooks.
Nobody seemed interested in making this so I just made it myself and I've been using it for the last 2 years very happily.
There are quite a few high-quality discussion threads on those previous posts that are worth checking out if you're interested in learning more!
Based on your profile, I presume you're talking about https://notado.app/?
I have a gigantic EPUB library and have yet to find a good way to export my notes and highlights from all these books (mostly read in KOreader).
There are other services available that will take your oauth login details for your Amazon account and spin up something like Selenium on their end to scrape all of https://read.amazon.com after logging in on your behalf, which is a bit more like what you're describing (it's not instant, but scheduled), but in my experience this sacrifices a lot of flexibility (deciding which books you want to import highlights for) and reduces the quality of the content in your data store over time. The other downside of this approach is that you need to reauthorize the service every couple of weeks or so.
Thank you, I am currently struggling to navigate in the world of RSS feeds, bookmarks, notes, reminders and everything else. I will check your app out if you don't mind.
I think the later versions got worse. Eventually I switched PCs and it had an error syncing my notebooks. There was a mix of local and cloud copies, randomly, and it worked like 3 separate accounts on the same ID that could never combine files.
I did a sync anyway and it just deleted a bunch of notebooks randomly, and one of them became corrupted so I lost a ton of data.
I just use text files in a folder now after apple notes had an update once a few years ago that snuck in a “you consent to irreversibly delete all old notes to use the new version” in small text on the “what’s new” pop up, as if that’s not a critical thing to double confirm.
I say that to say, I’m interested in your app. I was late to things like Pinboard and Delicious so I never got into the whole “public online bookmarks” thing.
It has some surprising other uses, too. For example, after being frustrated at how difficult it is to find story and world-building refreshers (without spoilers) when going back to a multi-novel fiction series, I have started using feeds to keep spoiler-free Kindle highlights that focus on key elements of the world, story and characters to ease me back into a series (and to share with others who might be interested in the series).
One year was wasted on trying to make it as WPF application, .NET all that ... 5, if not more, years were wasted on making it work as Electron'ish like application (CEF was integrated).
Evernote is a typical companion application - the thing that sits in tray and pops up as quickly as possible when needed.
Management read once that "Premature Optimization Is the Root of All Evil" but missed the critical point - this kind of application MUST be lightweight or dead.
The elephant was born instead.
Means don't drop down to asm to save a few cycles. It doesnt mean "dont fill your 10fps GUI app with crap".
Today, it more or less should be killed-off as a phrase. There isn't anyone optimizing anything, let alone "prematurely"
But usually managers interpret it this way: let's mold it now from that pile of shit and firewood and think about concrete foundation later. VC driven development they say.
It makes sense in some cases of course. But not in cases when concrete foundation is the cornerstone feature of the application. That kind of application shall serve users during whole their lifetime. And so application core shall not rely on particular OS and its features.
Yes, but in a slightly different way than one might think at initial read of this. Most of the performance choices for a user-facing application have been made by the time the language and UI framework are decided. And these are just chosen out of inertia, to conform to a company standard or to use what you already know.
There's little one can do to make a WPF or CEF application super responsive.
It might be a matter of hacking-in a caching layer or something, but it feels like probably more things are possible than people think.
A framework is just code, and you can pick-and-choose.
Not just technical, but remember when they expanded into physical products that made no sense? I don't mean the handful of scanner implementations - those made sense even if they were made obsolete. The notebooks with "smart" scanning were okay at the time as well, even if they quickly became obsolete too
But I mean stuff like backpacks and socks.[1] That never made sense to me.
I kind of wish Apple had never made iPod Socks, because then we could have a very good indicator of sock-selling as a sign that things will not end well.
Other socks I have around: Snap, Yak, a handful of defunct delivery apps.
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Sometimes a product is enough as it is, and man does the modern software world have a problem with recognizing that.
A wishlist for Keep: * An API. I'd love to use Keep as a durable data store for all my notes. I want o be able to dump snippets collected from a Chrome extension or a PDF reader in there. Their current API provides just a few enterprise access knobs, and not the full data-plane API I'm asking for. * A better search in the sidebar companion app they have for Gmail, Calendar, etc. For some reason, search in the Keep sidebar doesn't return the same results as with the main Keep web or iOS apps.
A key feature for me is being able to (with the legacy desktop app) open multiple notes at once, something that I've not seen anywhere else. (I assume this is because the legacy app is a native Windows executable, whereas multiple windows are not supported in the cross-platform frameworks everyone uses nowadays. I may be wrong.)
On a new tablet I was forced to install their new app, and I find it just OK. I don't like it as much as the older one, but it's usable.
Once Evernote shuts off the legacy apps, I will be searching for an alternative once again.
Have you given Notesnook a try? While it doesn't have multi window support they have it on their roadmap: https://notesnook.com/roadmap
Most of the decisions made regarding product features were user-hostile not just to the free tier, but also to paying users who did not want the "features" they kept pushing out.
You mean greed.
- Increase prices - which will drive some of your customers away.
- Revenue through ads - which will drive some of your customers away.
- New products - risky, and if successful it sometimes means the original product becomes abandonware.
- New features to try to increase the audience for your product or monetize directly - what it seems like Evernote did.
But not every product can have billions or even millions of users. So sometimes these all fail anyway. Basically investment, whether from VCs or an IPO, is often death for a small business serving a niche market.
The problem is that the PMs are incentivized to deliver features, even if that is not the right thing to do.
See: Postman.
If a PM is just delivering features without tying it back to user needs, business growth & product strategy then they are just a "feature factory" which is bad product management.
I was a paid user of the lower tier, and I decided to leave when they kept showing me nag screens to push me to buy the higher tiers. Totally unacceptable in a product I was paying for.
I disagree.
I have came back to paid plan last year and Evernote works really well on Mac (except slow startup, but that has also improved over last year), quite well on ChromeOS (in browser)... Evernote web capture extension is superior to everything else I have tried especially behind paywalls.
Evernote works so well, and it is quite polished and stable. So much that it had became base for my daily workflow which is mostly journaling with lots of attachments..
I might be mistaken in my viewpoint however, of later I have noticed a huge trend toward providing user experiences that target a team workflow. Personal workflows are an afterthought, at best. For some tools this works out but for note taking apps I think it creates a huge void. Not everyone wants a thousands ways to integrate, publish whole websites, buy & sell, and create presentations using their notes app.
Can I add pictures and links to other entries?
Can I import my existing Evernote notes?
If I wanted a team workflow, I'd use Google Docs and Notion. This is for just personal note and knowledge base I can tap into quickly via my phone.
Yep. Everything is offline-first stored right on your device. Syncing works mostly well but there a few rough edges which we are sorting out.
> Can I import my existing Evernote notes?
Yes. We have an official importer: https://importer.notesnook.com/
No, and the main deterrent for this is our commitment to keeping everything E2E and client-side. Something like Tessaract or Paddle might work for OCR but I haven't looked too deeply into it.
Thanks for responding to my question. I wish you success in your efforts.
Dug deeper and I see paying gets you more storage for things like attachments.
I would love to see this on F-Droid, looks pretty good otherwise. I don't love needing an account, but I guess that's probably the easiest way to handle syncing. SyncThing integration would've been cool to decentralize things.
Can people host their own server if they want? Not sure if it's just the client on GitHub.
We are working on open sourcing the sync server so it can be hosted later on.
F-Droid is also coming.
I don't feel tempted.
* Joplin had some issues I've checked year ago.
* Apple notes while I have iPhone there's no Windows app.
* OneNote is just trully horrendous app.
* Obsidian just can't convince myself. I'm forcing myself to use it work, while it works, it's not something I enjoy doing.
* Notion is odd, everything is a block and sometimes formatting is just meh...
* Google keep is just simple note and that's it(unless something has changed).
Any worthy apps to look at besides those?
I've used OneNote for like 12 years now I think and I love it. It's where my school notes are and every note I've taken in my career since then. My personal diaries and life notes. Everything is in it.
I've been looking at Obsidian as well because I like the idea of self hosting but aside from that I've never seen a reason to leave.
So back to my question, what kind of notes do you take?
Nothing extraordinary.
I absolutely hate Onenote due to how it looks and forcing you to place a note on your note page to make a note :D
I don't just type notes, though. I do LOTS of handwriting as well, and LOTS of diagramming. In that context the floating text/note boxes are really, really useful. I'll have a single note with a diagram in it and several explanations floating around. Or I'll have a vertically scrolling note alternating between text, pictures, and diagrams. The way I use OneNote has made the note in a note thing really useful.
But every now and then when I'm just typing some quick info out it gets in my way. I just have all the context of it being a useful feature to make me tolerate it.
It's what Evernote was supposed to be. They've got some richer formatting open issues - but that's coming in V2.
Finding your note taking app is like finding sobriety. Some apps work for some people but any given app is unlikely to be “the one”. My strategy was to just keep trying them until one sticks, because I know note taking is crucial for my success.
Bookstack if you dont mind the lack of clients
My core data storage app is still OneNote, though. I moved there when Evernote started getting buggy, and it is a perfectly fine replacement. I don't understand the hate for it.
I really like Notion as a way to create little mini-databases of things. Businesses in my new city I just moved to that I want to visit later, what I thought about different teas, vendors for my hobbies, etc.
It makes me extremely nervous to keep all that info there. It feels like vendor lock in. My recent struggle to get everything out of Evernote in a semi-usable format, much less into another app was eye opening.
So I've been looking for some similar sort of Notebook + Freeform DB replacement.
I have exactly one setup, that works and I do not dare to change it, for the pain I had when trying anything else. Teams would not recognize my headphones. Only USB headset with integrated soundcard would work. All other programs did not have a problem using simply my headphones. This meant, that I could not use my 40€ mic with one turn of a switch on my aufio hub and have to have 2 headphones/sets lying around on my desk, only because of teams.
I have barely a workday, on which none of my coworkers are experiencing Teams issues. Mic not working, no sound, suddenly muted, suddenly crashed the whole thing, shown status of people and even oneself is wildly wrong, not being able to set status properly either to fix it ... All these are still a thing. Welcome to 2022.
Unfortunately the hard product work of simplifying the feature set and prioritizing server-side tech debt was overlooked. Therefore the new app was weighed down from the beginning because it had to support all these legacy systems.
IMO the best move for Evernote is to rethink the UX and tech architecture from first principals and have existing users opt-in to migrate their data over. It's a tough decision to make but I don't see any meaningful progress being made otherwise.
Also, I managed to lose note content in their iPhone app just by opening note which contained large image. Image simply disappeared nowhere to be found either on phone or computer. After that happened for a second time I kinda switched to iOS Notes and later to Joplin.
I uninstalled the app and deleted my subscription.
These days, I keep my notes as .md files and they stay in sync using Nextcloud. I've been using this for ~4 years now, and it works great!
just?
Evernote was early in this space but it already competed with (for eample) sending yourself emails. Nowadays there are all sorts of alternatives like Apple has a note-taking app on their devices, which is just free (it might use storage but that's a minor issue). Likewise, you can use Google Apps.
Evernote's attempts to make it a business by introducing the friction of a subscription to get syncing beyond 2 devices (and other variants I'm forgetting I'm sure) just exposed this FNAC problem.
Now could this have been leveraged to build a sustainable business of which note syncing was a part? Maybe. But that's not exactly easy either.
[1]: https://bothsidesofthetable.com/explaining-fnac-feature-not-...
I literally went to the apple notes discord once and asked them directly and their response was basically "Apple Notes isn't design to be used for more than 100 notes"... so be very very careful about choosing to use Apple Notes cause you may never get your notes out of there
Anyways, if you have access to a Mac you can sync your notes via iCloud and then on Mac you can easily access the SQLite DB containing the notes. If you can figure out the schema it would be easy to write a tool to export this automatically. I’d guess someone has already built such a tool.
Notes satisfies my three must-have requirements: it’s on every device my wife and I use, it allows mixing checklists with free form text, and we can effortlessly share information with each other.
I just checked and found that I have 1,321 total notes stored in iCloud. These range from my daily todo lists (invaluable for end of year performance review documents, saying nothing of just remembering what I’m supposed to do), to the all-important shared grocery list, which we will both update whenever we’re shopping at the grocery store.
That said, it *absolutely boggles my mind that there is no Markdown support*.
I choose to be stuck with OneNote 2010 because:
1. It has local files I can back up and sync, no cloud account or online requirement (also more privacy from cloud scanning)
1. It supports embedding files so I can back up the notebooks and not have to go find every file scattered all throughout my hard drive in order to make those up two
1. I can hand write and have text be searched or OCRed
1. It has embedding support for images and audio and have them be interactive (you can see the image, play the video, listen to the sound right in the program)
Writing such a program is a very difficult problem. If it were easy, we would be having all of these features and not just another round of markdown text file editors.
Xournal++ is considering moving to a file format that would enable you to embed files that would be zipped up as part of the file format, since it already supports handwriting recognition and has basic text and good enough image display, I continued to watch it to see if it can take over my onenote use cases, but it's just not there yet.
Although it's not open source like Joplin, I've switched over to Obsidian.
That alone wouldn't have been so bad, but even after I paid for their silver tier (or whatever it was called) they then started to nag me to upgrade to the gold one.
No respect for their paying customers.
On reflection it always looks kinda daft that this can end up happening but I think (at least in my case) its easy for orgs to lose sight of their product's failings which can be compacted by the need to always hype up their product in public and this bleeds into private and into strategy.
I don't know but it feels like a relatively common theme and perhaps there are factors that control its prevalence. I would tentatively suggest that refreshing decision making structures from time to time might help mitigate against complacency but you might also be rolling a dice if you're force-replacing to keep fresh.
Perhaps its more to do with how a business will diversify strategically without diversifying organisationally? I feel like there should be some form of conflict when resource is split from core product into diversification products (e.g. like Evernote food or Evernote market) and perhaps the absence of that conflict is a contributing factor to the speed at which the rot can set in.
Also maybe there's something to say about having a clear roadmap and never thinking the core product is done. Some of the most successful products I've seen seem to have some sort of force that is always seeking to iteratively improve it.
I don’t love it, it’s too bloated for that. But it still works (if not optimally).
I could switch, but doing research to find an alternative and then migrate would take quite a lot of time, and time is always a constrained resource.
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I would happily pay for a subscription because of the amount of legacy data I have in there, but $90/year seems silly, my usage dropped way off once they restricted the number of devices, and at this point there are OSS options that are about as good. I probably should hire someone of fiverr for $90 or less to export/import my data.
Along with useful (if slow) web clipping extensions, evernote is great for saving, tagging, and searching for visual information.
While I found the product useful for keeping tech notes, I was constantly getting tripped up by the formatting. It became clear to me this was aimed at journalist rather than software developers.
While I support journalist having a product that is a good fit for them, from a business perspective I think they were chasing a relatively poor demographic with a shrinking user base.
It's a shame though, it was a great product I was otherwise happy to pay for.
I can send an email to myself. If it's a person's info, I can put them in Contacts. Or I can have a Google Doc called "Notes" where I write stuff. All of those have interfaces I already know.
One can validly object that all of those methods have drawbacks. But they've worked well enough for me that I wasn't wishing for Evernote and one more thing to learn.
I don't think it mattered that Evernote was selling branded Moleskines and wallets -- that was a weird thing to do, but I have a hard time believing that sucked away all the resources from engineering for the core app.
At some point we'll just start recording our entire lives. Security, storage, indexing, access-from-anywhere, and autotagging will be the keys. Anyone working on that?
(and even if when you launched that was not the case, times change drastically on mobile. Evernote very quickly became a feature, not a product)
It's what happens when you don't care about building a decent product.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memex
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_We_May_Think
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m...
HN discussions:
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=memex
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
If the latter, could you share your solution (I took a quick crack at it, but the link structure seems to require nontrivial management?)
TIA
It definnitely takes some set up to make it work, but once working, it is pretty reliable. It requires an occasional merge conflict resolution, and setting the right files to be ignored.
I love that it is just folder with markdown files.