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Comment by alexholehouse | Hacker News Reader

Evernote + Dropbox means that I am basically device/OS/location agnostic for all my information needs, which given that I switch between 3-4 machines (all with different OSs) regularly is absolutely crucial.

That said, some PAINFULLY obvious things which would be hugely benficial for adoption;

- LaTex support built in

- Markdown (either in every note, or allowing you to add 'markdown' boxes, if just for writing code)

And a stretch goal;

- Better PDF/attachment integration. In a perfect world there would be a Dropbox extension which creates an "Evernote" folder in your Dropbox and any attachments are automatically stored in a notebook-hierarchy file-system within that folder. This would autoupdate to reflect what's going on in Evernote.

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This also means that all the information you collect is readily available in unencrypted form to any agency that might want to bulk-process it. You're essentially storing your information on postcards. That said, it might be a fair compromise for many of us.

Evernote has another problem: their Mac app was never "smooth enough". There was always something off about it, when compared to apps like Yojimbo. And these things really matter for apps that you use a lot.

Re: Markdown support

This is my biggest gripe with Evernote. I've used Evernote and OneNote and settled on OneNote because the text formatting and editing in Evernote desktop client and mobile client needs serious work. I've created notes in the desktop that the mobile client said it couldn't open[1]. That's a showstopper. Not to mention the weird quirky text editing in the mobile client.

[1] To be fair, this was over a year ago on iOS, but I have no reason to go back at this point.

Re: PDF / attachment handling, you may be interested in what Paperpile (http://paperpile.com) does with PDFs: we create a subfolder in your Google Drive space which automatically stays synced with your reference library, so PDFs and supplementary files are accessible from anywhere.

It's tuned more specifically towards academic work than Evernote, but the Drive sync is quite simple and robust.

(Disclaimer: I co-develop Paperpile, a web-based reference manager)

I don't even.... this is amazing. I've been toying with the idea of making something like this, but could never have produced anything as good. I don't know when I was last this excited about a piece of software. When the paperpile option appeared next to PDFs via the Chrome extension - goosebumps! Thank you, this solves a massive problem I have and have had for a while, and despite trying all kinds of managers have never found anything which really combines organization with raw PDF access in a distributed manner.

I'm working on integrating Evernote into my everyday life, and finally just purchased the level of Dropbox I need for backup. I have 5 devices that I use semi-regularly to all the time and it is fantastic to be able to shift between all 5 devices seamlessly.

You could just use regular WebDAV[1] (boring I know) and not have to worry about syncing gigabytes of redundant data onto every device you own.

Yes -- he would only have to worry about setting up and maintaining a WebDAV server. Plus, he would have to do without integration with tons of his favorites apps in desktop and mobile (like Dropbox has).

You can save to your WebDAV using the standard file picker. Surely an app that exports to Dropbox also gives you a "Save As" dialog.

Except for every iOS app that integrates with Dropbox.

Very true, iOS doesn't give users control of their data. To me that's more of a reason to not use iOS rather than a reason not to use WebDAV.

"You shouldn't use Dropbox because WebDAV is better."

"Sure, but that doesn't work with my iPhone."

"You shouldn't use an iPhone either."

"WebDAV should be enough for everybody"

But then it won't work offline

You can also avoid syncing too much data with a little organization, by specifying which folders should be synced to which devices.

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