Comment by FreezerburnV | Hacker News Reader

Comment by FreezerburnV | Hacker News Reader

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While I certainly appreciate the attempt to create more competition in this market, as well as adding an open-source competitor, it has a ways to go before it will actually be a competitor. And it doesn't have a few features that I find incredibly invaluable as an Evernote user:

* Native UI and sync to every device under the sun. I have a Windows gaming desktop, a Macbook Air, iPad, and Windows Phone. Being able to access everything in Evernote across all devices is highly valuable to me.

* Indexing of documents and text in images. I'm the kind of person who still keeps a paper journal and pen with him at almost all times, which is finally starting to be replaced because of Evernote. They have an app for writing on the iPad which syncs with their service, and they later index all of my handwriting so I can search it. That is one of the most valuable things to me, and any competitor would have to do as well or better for me to want to switch.

* Hooks in with different types of apps. Such as Evernote Food. I love to cook and collect recipes, and I would need to be able to do something similar, easily, in any competitor. This also hooks in with the image text indexing, where I can take photos of recipes from my iPad and eventually I'll be able to search for the text in the recipe.

* Web clipper. I cannot even begin to express how valuable this is. There have been multiple times where I was able to find something I clipped from a couple years ago that I desperately needed. Or a recipe that I clipped, which I now can't find via search engine but is comfortably nestled in Evernote.

Don't take this as a downer comment. I love it when there is more competition, because it makes everyone step their game up. Meaning I get better quality of service, as well as everyone else who uses any of those services. It's a hard field you entered into, with a couple of great competitors. But keep up the hard work, and keep improving.

> it has a ways to go before it will actually be a competitor. And it doesn't have a few features that I find incredibly invaluable as an Evernote user:

[list of features snipped out]

As an Octave developer, I frequently hear exactly the same things about Octave vs Matlab, and if I listen too closely, I find it disheartening. Why work on something that will forever suck and not be a competitor, and can't implement the full list of features because we don't have the giant budget of our non-free competitor?

But then I remember that people are typically more flexible than they appear to be when they write these lists, and you'll discover that they may do without some of the features that they list, at least in some circumstances. And that there exist many other people with different lists of sine qua nons who will use the free as in freedom alternative you're working on because they have different needs.

So, to the OpenNote developers and to anyone else implementing a FAIF replacement I say this: don't let these giant lists of features and suggestions about how you'll never be competitive grind you down. There are many people out there who will appreciate your work, sometimes even the people who compiled these lists. Look at the lists, see what you can implement, and don't be disheartened by the parts that seem impossible to implement. Who knows, maybe some day someone will come along and help you implement the parts that seem so hopeless to you.

Keep your chin up, free software devs!

Octave is awesome. MATLAB can go die in a fire (purely for the reason of being non-free, otherwise it's great too).

If there's one thing that Octave is absolutely better than MATLAB is the alternative syntax for things like strings and ~=.

Octave is indeed awesome. I completed my Machine Learning course at Coursera thanks to it. :) Always take what the vocal minority says with a grain of salt.

I'm not a paid user of Evernote, so perhaps I don't matter, but I am a daily user, and I only use the first bullet point listed here -- native applications on three different operating systems. I don't use any of the advanced features of Evernote and I don't even use multiple notebooks.

That is to say, an open-source Evernote competitor won't be able to meet the needs of 100% of Evernote's users, but it will be able to capture some fraction of those users. I'm personally very interested in an open-source Evernote that I can run on my own server.

I agree with you and same points will keep me with Evernote for some time.

I'd love to see the app evolve though! Something that I can deploy on my server and have access to all the code is definitely great.

Its open source, so all of the features can be added relatively painlessly.

Yes, they can be added. But it will be far from painless. And it will take a while. Even creating a UI for iOS that feels good and works well will take months. Especially because people have to donate time out of their busy lives to add to the project.

A lot more people have less busy lives than you think. I know of at least two forks that started this afternoon. :)

Good to hear it's getting forked. Hopefully those turn into real pull requests for the project :) And that it gains real momentum.

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