Evernote acquires iPad app Penultimate | Hacker News Reader

Evernote acquires iPad app Penultimate

blog.cocoabox.com

54 pointsdrx28 comments

I've always loved Evernote IN THEORY. It makes sense to organize your notes through technology, to attach an 'external brain', if you will. Still, I've never been able to really use Evernote the way they intend. I'll throw up a few notes, only to drift away, leaving the notes alone. There's no organization that I've been able to achieve with the platform. Maybe it's just a threshold of initial effort that I haven't crossed, or maybe I just don't take enough notes.

Still, I'm glad for this purchase. I think it shows that Evernote understands their base and has a strategy in mind to improve their offerings. Maybe I'll start using Evernote more now.

I didn't get Evernote for the longest time but then it made way more sense to me when I bought a tiny double sided scanner and started scanning and shredding all my paper, bills, documents. Then I started forwarding all emails with attachments to my Evernote account. Then I started sharing my folders with my wife and using the mobile app. Now it's the central hub for all my information. Since it's all OCR'd I find anything instantly. Of course I had to upgrade to the paid version but at 1GB of NEW storage per month it's a pretty good deal.

The one feature I miss from MS OneNote is the ability to have audio synced to the text of a note which is fricken awesome for taking meeting minutes.

What kind of scanner are you using? This sounds like a great idea.

I'm doing something similar and I'm using the Fujitsu Scansnap S1300 which comes integrated with Evernote support.

Does it allow me to keep a budget and track expenses/info/receipts against that budget?

Unfortunately no. I use Mint for tracking income and expenses (at least the ones I pay with cards or online) but it doesn't integrate the receipts.

Wow I wonder how many are this organized/anal about tracking stuff. My bills sit in a pile on the table until the first of the month, I pay them, and throw them in a box, never to be seen again.

What value is there in scanning your electric bill and archiving it digitally? When have you EVER needed to refer to something like that after it's been paid. For me, never.

When I'm doing my taxes.

I found it surprisingly satisfying to get rid of paper completely. As a self-employed person, I need to keep most receipts including house expenses (for my home office). It's a lot easier to just scan everything as it comes in as opposed to thinking about whether it's worth saving, putting it in a box or file folder, then sometime later think about whether or not it's time to dispose of it. And you never know, maybe some day my grandchildren will be amazed to learn how cheap it was for grandpa to heat his house back in the early 21st century.

I found it takes some investment before it really becomes useful. I didn't get it at the start but now being able to search through notes and clippings I made years ago is really helpful. They have also made great improvements in notebook organisation which I love. I find it a bit unsettling that I'm storing so much data with one company (not that I don't trust them but that at some point they might go away) but they seem to me like a great company who would make it easy to get all your data out if they were ever shutting down.

On the mac, all of your data is in "~/Library/Application Support/Evernote/accounts".

You'll find xhtml files and images in there, one directory per note. (Additionally there is a clucene index, some ocr info, and "enml" versions of notes.)

Back it up, and you'll have a safety net for your notes.

Didn't know that, thanks!

I agree with your point about the drifting; the mostly flat structure of it means it can be easy to lose things if they aren't strictly organized. It seems like they've done very well with the capturing & sharing aspects but all the structural work is left to the user.

I completely agree with you. I'd add that I wish there was an option to store my data in my legal juridiction and not in the U.S. (or better yet privately).

Yep. This would make evernote the perfect tool. I would love to pay for the privilege of running my own evernote server, keeping my data private.

As far as a personal notebook that follows me everywhere, Evernote can't be beat. I have a folder for every sort of data imaginable, from camping checklists to common IOS commands and recipes I usually forget between times I need them.

Taken as an indexed, searchable, omnipresent notebook, it really has become my second brain.

I feel the same way. Evernote is extraordinary in terms of document acquisition, but you're alone once you have to work with it. There is no sane way to keep things organized, other than folders. Saved searches are a joke too. Document editing is really poor. For example, you can't highlight any document, scanned or not (that's on OSX). So I think they got the funnel part right and now they need to work on the processing and editing part. Hopefully the purchase of Penultimate goes in this direction.

Good purchase for Evernote. Integrating Evernote into Penultimate would make me use it a lot more and Evernote's OCR/search will hopefully be added to it.

Sigh.

Considering how much I love and use penultimate (Every. Single. Day), I'm hope that _this time_ acquisition won't result in a product getting a dose of its acquiring company spang in the middle of the interface, the simplicity, whatever.

Congrats to the cocoabox team, though—if anyone deserves it, they do.

Based on Skitch, I'd say the only changes will be to a) make it free and b) add options to make it easier to send content to Evernote.

Evernote is the one acquirer who I do not fear as a user.

Readable also got a lot of improvements when it turned into Evernote Clearly.

I've been waiting for this sort of acquisition from Evernote. As an avid Evernote user, this is a feature that has been sorely lacking, especially for the tablet note taking format. Love it!

Nice to see that Penultimate is going to come to "other devices", I'm assuming that will include Android.

I moved all my bookmarks to Evernote after the new owners broke^wenhanced delicio.us and haven't regretted it once.

All I need now is a native Linux client for Evernote...

This is going to sound strange at first, but hear me out:

Facebook, if it wanted to be really disruptive, should buy evernote.

The reason is that FB only offer superficial utility - the social utility layer of being able to track your friends lives and comment on them will atrophy over the next ten years.

FB will need a way to really bring together the daily activities, information, interests etc of its userbase and make it matter on a wholly individual level.

It seems that what FB does is interesting to its users on an individual level, but it is not. Without any friends at all on FB, the platform is useless.

There are two directions that FB can go to solidify longvity; make the platform useful to an individual even with zero contacts/friends and to make the platform a utility that ca be used by a group of people. Think, the ability to create a company/group effort, with tools in the FB platform that the team can use to manage those activities.

(There was a company called Huddle which was doing this - they seem to have good traction, though zero marketing/hype as I haven't heard anything about them in a long time, though they seem to be alive and well)

Evernote would allow FB to build on the actual actions of their users from a data-mining perspective.

As a man wholly dependent on Evernote, I hope to God they aren't bought by Facebook. I shudder to think how much insight that'd give them on my life.

DISCLAIMER: I no way was I actually condoning this idea. But if FB had deeper vision, they would already be looking at this.

I was shining light on a dark spot in what I feel is missing in FBs roadmap.

From everything I've read about Evernote and the CEO I think it would be very difficult to get him to sell. Facebook can obviously offer a lot of money (money that most people wouldn't say no to) but I think Evernote is in it for the long haul.

Congrats, Ben!!

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