Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant
jasonkincaid.net
jasonkincaid.net
One year ago, my girlfriend was using Evernote (on my suggestion) to write her travel journal on our trip to Southeast Asia. I saw her note sync a bunch of times (the iOS app shows a little blue arrow when it's uploading). But one day she opened it and the note was gone. I contacted support but they couldn't do anything. (They offered her a year of free Premium service and "apologized for the inconvenience".)
Since then, I've stopped recommending it to people because I don't want to feel personally responsible if they lose notes too. I also have a tinge of doubt every time I record important information. My biggest worry is Evernote quietly losing a note, because once I record something in Evernote I typically push it from my internal memory.
On top of that, their iOS app is incredibly slow. When I want to quickly jot an idea down, it's very inconvenient.
I've started using SimpleNote lately, which is far faster, but I don't know to what extent I should trust it to keep my data safely.
Might be worth a look.
1. iOS: App has always been slow! Syncing takes time(should be seamless), animations hang up in between and there is sometimes seconds of gap between a tap and result. When you search, it takes lot of time (I have iPhone 4S and iPad 4th gen, same on both, so not a device issue!) A handy feature is document mode for taking pics but it chokes on multiple images. Many times, it crops images randomly and throws them out of order.
2. Windows: Features and apps are not well thought out. They have Skitch for screnshots but it sends screenshots ONLY to default notebook. I want to keep them in a different notebook but it won't let me customize. The editing is very hard and you can't paste HTML text reliably. Windows client has many good shortcuts for sure, but it also has unusual behaviour like tab not taking you to next relevant field (enter a note title, hit tab, suddenly you have selected the notebook!)
3. Web: Web clipper has improved in latest version but still has lot of issues like not syncing PDFs and images(happened twice to me, had to manually copy image). Going to PDF (Chrome) and then Saving it will not work. It will sync indefinitely. But right click the link and boom, it syncs!
While I appreciate the features, they are bulky in the sense that sometimes, they get in the way and don't let me take notes quickly. In fact, I have setup a different app(Drafts) on both iPad and iPhone to take notes in Markdown and then save to Evernote, saves me from lot of headache and data is never lost as it is at different places.
Edit: Formatting.
I know the Mac App Store and download versions are different (never install the MAS version, just add the download version to your puppet setup.). As the Windows and iOS versions are obviously different as well, I have this feeling there's a bunch of #ifdef hell in their builds that doesn't get tested well before releases.
Since notes are saved in Drafts as well, there is very low chance of losing them. Plus, Drafts has markdown support!
I am sure you'll find this setup better for notes!
Evernote is some of the very worst software that has ever survived more than a few months on my computer without being deleted. Horrible show-stopping crash/data loss bugs are the norm, and have been increasing steadily as they add feature after feature with apparently no quality control at all.
Fundamentally, the job Evernote does (for me, but I assume also for most users with thousands of notes) is too important to delegate to a halfassed vc-backed startup that flies its engineers economy and has never heard of an integration test.
But replacing it isn't yet possible. It syncs across all platforms I use, does OCR of everything in both Japanese and English, including handwriting and text in photos, works out of the box with all my paper document scanners... There's just nothing else on the market (or if there is, PLEASE TELL ME!!) that does all that.
So Evernote hasn't lost me as a customer, yet. They've seemingly made a spectacular effort to do so, but... Life without Evernote would still be, on balance, more painful than with it.
But life with it is indeed pretty fucking painful, too.
Still waiting for a native linux client though :-)
Sync issues and the unusably slow iOS client caused me to drop it for personal use a few months ago, now it's relegated to only work notes with the desktop client. For this really basic purpose it's alright, it has a few major annoyances and the interface has gotten much worse over the years but it'd be too much effort to migrate to something else and keep my tags/notebooks.
This is not a healthy relationship I have with Evernote Corporation. I committed to their product but they didn't commit to me.
Depending on how you do it IFTTT can help save notes to other services (you have to save the note in authorized notebook if I remember well) but it's still a PITA.
Globally having Evernote feed another system reliably seems to be really tricky, as nowadays having two cloud based system play nice with each other is usually a world of hurts.
I was able to get the note back by driving back to my hotel, retrieving my laptop where the note was cached, and opening Evernote while offline to ensure it wouldn't sync and wipe out that copy. Pretty frustrating. I've learned some tough lessons about cloud services and free stuff.
However, this setup doesn't do pictures and audio notes, but I don't really need them very much.
I love nvAlt though. Been using it for years and never had any data loss.
Still risky though.
Nobody does that, they delete the doc, they don't erase the contents of it
They also have pretty snazzy Android and iOS apps for OneNote, although IIRC the mobile apps require an Office 365 subscription.
Out of everything that comes out of Redmond, OneNote is definitely one of the best consumer products.
And it's all free! Though obviously you could use paid Dropbox and Bitbucket/GitHub accounts as well.
Until fairly recently I used OmniFocus and Evernote, in conjunction with their mobile offerings, but I don't think I'll be looking back anytime soon.
That enables you to display the history of a file by handling the output of <git log $file> without confusing the user too much (it's linear, just like his changes), you get full reverts, syncing (push if you have internet), multi-device-support (clone). You'd even be independent from the actual repository host with the app itself, since git doesn't care about it's remote location.
It sounds like a pretty good idea just from thinking about it for a minute.
I did lose one Google doc once (a drawing). About a year or so later it turned up again, really odd.
One stop-gap they might be able to implement quickly would be a scale-up of their version control. They could throw money (storage space and bandwidth) at the problem, increasing the number and frequency of revisions stored. Certainly not as good as preventing loss in the first place, but reliable versioning would help minimize catastrophic loss in the meantime, and would still continue to be valuable once things are more stable.
When I heard Phil talk about this at SXSW (as part of his talk about making Evernote a 100-year startup, I believe), I thought it was neat. But I wonder if this strategy is undermining reliability.
I would definitely call this an anti-pattern for cross-platform software.
The other thing is that there is no true Evernote alternative. I have iOS and Windows devices but I travel and internet is flaky sometimes. There's nothing that will store all my images, screenshots(Skitch), handwritten notes (with OCR!) and use it natively across platforms!
Does any Evernote alternative have OCR? That's the only feature keeping me using it.
Their web clipper is great, the best around IMO (especially since Clipboard folded), however there's no way to exclude those clipped pages from search, so after using the clipper for a while, searching for just about any phrase is mostly irrelevant results. Ideally it'd be possible to filter by source or have default searches to exclude certain types of content.
Another example of this is that I have a well-curated and geotagged Travel Notebook (this was actually much harder than it should have been since their geocoder is picky and you can't really massage it). I'd love to be able to see these notes on a map, but the "Atlas" map view that Evernote provides doesn't let you filter by notebook (or anything really).
Evernote does a great job of making it fairly painless to capture notes and despite the author's problems, has generally worked well on syncing everything. It's never done a good job for triaging/filing/finding or organizing notes though, and it seems to simply get worse as you use it more (and with each redesign). Evernote seems to want to encourage you to put "everything" into it, but as you do, it becomes harder and harder to get what you need out of it. Honestly, I'm baffled at how the Evernote devs/designers use it.
This has been my main complaint with Evernote. When I first found the software it was merely a way to capture notes, URLs, etc. As it keeps expanding its feature set and trying to make the tools more useful it keeps getting worse and worse.
The iOS app is slow and clunky. I hate using it. It crashes all the time, especially when I'm trying to take snapshots of a document with many pages (and all previous snapshots simply disappear).
The desktop app is better, but they really could improve the writing experience. Pasting HTML blobs is impossible, and so is formatting my notes the way I want (I use TextExpander for sanity).
Evernote is great when it works, but they really need to fix their stability and bug problems.
"Update: Evernote CEO Phil Libin contacted me and we spoke about the issues described. He apologized, saying the post rings true and that there is a lot of work to be done both on the application and service fronts — and that he hopes my impression will be reversed a few months from now."
I've always found Evernote to be clunky, so I don't use it, and now I know it's buggy as hell and loses (by admission of their CEO) and I feel good about my decision to push people away from Evernote.
The kind of response you're talking about is not enough. This kind of speed of response in addressing the issue must have been given when the OP filed the report, not only when he decided to go public with it.
Given that the technology required for evernote isn't advanced or cutting edge or experimental researchy stuff, I find the bug rate appalling.
That's because it's PR triage rather than actually addressing the issue. It shows they are listening and care about their image, which is good, but not much more.
They use a directory tree, with one directory per note. Each note has HTML file, all supporting files, an "enml" version of the HTML file (i.e. a HTML-like XML document), and XML documents containing character recognition data.
The local indexes are in lucene format. (Specifically clucene.)
You will also find a sqlite3 database with additional metadata.
If you store anything you care about in Evernote, I'd highly recommend backing this up. On OSX it will be in within one of these two directories, depending on which version you're running:
~/Library/Application Support/Evernote ~/Library/Containers/com.evernote.Evernote/Data/Library/Application Support/EvernoteI have this weird spread between org-mode and Evernote, mainly because Evernote is usable on my phone.
It truly is in the face of the "do one thing and do it well" mindset that many other companies subscribe to. It's a shame too, because I love Evernote. I truly do live in it... true to Phil's vision, my mind is thoroughly mapped out throughout my Evernote account.
And see Dropbox as an example of something which supports every major platform WITHOUT losing data losing bugs.
But even putting aside these syncing issues, it's a really terribly-designed piece of software There are so many issues with it, UI-wise, that is just bugs the hell out of me. (See note below for an example of a feature designed badly).
Still, Evernote fills a need I have that unfortunately there is no other solution for. And while it's taking a long time, it is gradually improving. So I'm still hoping that, one day, Evernote fulfils its destiny and becomes as amazing as it could be.
Note: Example of a badly deigned feature: tagging support is crazy-bad - you can tag things, and you can even organise tags into a tag hierarchy - except, no you can't, because it's only supported on some platforms. And the "support" for it is purely visual - selecting a "parent" tag doesn't auto-select the child tags, so it is basically no help. So let's go to solution 2, which is to tag things with a prefix, like "History\Middle Ages" and "History\US". But now, their generally awesome tag-completer will be annoying, since it will force you to type "History\" before getting to the point. So lets reverse tag it, like "US (History)". No, that wont' work, since you can search tags by prefix (e.g. search for anything with a tag starting with "History") but not by tag suffix. Even though, through the UI, you can do this, you can't do it with an actual search, so you can't select these tags.
And yes, the OS X client is quite slow and bulky. And I really don't appreciate not being able to resize the window to half of my screen (1440x900) size.
Hopefully there's an OS X client overhaul on its way?
Then I stopped using Evernote.
1. Fear of data loss... it's probably the largest part of my mistrust of all these dang cloud services that want to control/own me or otherwise lock me into their service. I run a 99.999% uptime, extreme scale, SaaS business across multiple active/active data centers, I know exactly what it takes. It’s incredibly hard to do, and I don't trust anyone at a rapid growth company to do it right. In the ever constant scheduling battle between features and doing it right, features frequently end up winning, especially in consumer focused SaaS business with meaningless SLA’s. My Evernote library is clearly much much more important to me than it will ever be to Evernote. No amount of marketing spin will ever lead me to believe otherwise. This really is my own hangup though. At some point I may just get over this. To their credit, I have only ever lost a few notes in the 4-5 years I have been using the service.
2. Tight lock-in (the cynic in me always says it’s clearly engineered this way) to the platform, frustrating process to export my notes to another tool. This is a problem across the industry. Everyone playing the lock-in/stickiness game. Portability is key. A simple text export of my notes would go a long way to make me happy. I really don’t want html exports of my text notes.
3. Security of their cloud service...frankly, I don't trust anyone and wish I could store my evernote data on my own; self managed; self encrypted; shared storage platform. 2 factor was a nice step in the right direction. Self managed encryption keys is when I will stop whining about it… I understand this makes a lot of things hard, and am willing to forgo some features to get this feature.
4. Lack of reasonable support for Linux. Evernote is now the single sole tool keeping me from dumping my Mac and moving to linux... Yup, note-taking is that important to me. I have tried nevernote, everpad and the like, but they are still pretty weak. I understand this isn’t Evernote’s problem and Linux is a very small market, but its a big deal to me.
5. A frankly lousy text editor. Seriously, I keep expecting this to get better, and it just never quite gets there. And don't get me started on tabs and indenting. I often edit notes in mac textedit and then copy them into evernote. Not because TextEdit is great, but because its predictable and just works. I'm not looking for advanced features here.
6. Strange as this may sound (I may be using the tool wrong), I really hate marking things off my list like at the grocery store. It takes so dang long to mark off a list while pushing a shopping cart and fumbling with a phone. I now print my list out and cross things off with a pen because its so way less frustrating... This may be an edge side use case, but still... the phone apps (both droid and iPhone) are not wonderful.
I fully subscribe to the belief that I am a weirdo, and these are really just my perceptions and random thoughts. I have remained an active, albeit reluctant user, and at this point plan to stay that way for at least a little bit longer. I always used to joke that if evernote, things, and dropbox ever merged, I would happily pay double. These days though, I am looking to support my own stand alone instances of these types of tools without being tied to 3rd party cloudy services so tightly.
I'm very glad to know that other loyal Evernote Premium users are also experiencing these pain points. The forums seem to be mostly inhabited by diehard evernote preachers and most everyone else has no idea what the service actually does (which is very understandable — evernote is a tool with a TON of intended use cases)
Anyways, I enjoyed your comments wanted to give my personal opinion & point of view for at least points 1 & 2.
1. You're right that scaling is very hard. If you want a closer look at it, we have a tech blog that even I can read and understand. https://blog.evernote.com/tech/ Perhaps the most reassuring thing I can say is that Evernote runs on Evernote. Err... maybe this is more clear, Evernote (the company) runs on Evernote (the service). We eat our own dog food as they say, which means I've lost count of how many water cooler conversations turn into "there's something weird that Evernote's doing on my computer..."
2. Our Mac and Windows apps let you export your notes into HTML (including resources). Both these apps run natively against local files so you could export if you were offline or if for some reason our service was down. We try to compete by making a great app and a great service. In fact, we don't make money unless we've done a good enough job for you to upgrade to Premium. It seems like your main concern is that your text-only notes export to HTML instead of plaintext, which is a fair point. One of the nice things HTML is that there are third party applications that can convert from HTML into a number of other formats, so we're relying on that if you want your notes in RTF or as a .txt or something else.
You should fix that. Skip RTF, DOC, whatever. Just plain text is fine. Everything else can handle it.
The world needs to wake up and realize plain text is the alpha and the omega of language. Do that right first and make sure it's the last thing to fail.
I hate shopping, but this has certainly relieved some of the pain for me.
Tesco has an app which tells you the aisle and which side to look on as well. It's pretty cool, but last time I used it, it was quite clunky.
The Aus/NZ ones are much more like supermarkets, I went to one in NZ and sadly found Pick-a-mix was not a focal point at all.
It's multiplatform, written in Pyhon, easily extensible and a truly fantastic piece of software that is well worth investigating.
Still better than the alternatives.
I'm surprised that no-one has mentioned google docs. It has been continuously improving over the years. The features are very hacker friendly:
- cross platform - proxima nova font (yum) - in doc scripting interface - external api interface - stores a version history - top drawer real-time collaboration - searchable set of drive files - very reliable
Definitely very hacker friendly. My only complaint is lack of a good offline mode across all platforms but when online it ticks my boxes.
That means both that either both of us are weirdos, or a substantial part of Evernote's user base are in line with these concerns.
Then again, the challenge is that hackers love to hack, so we'll put up with kludgy mashed-up solutions instead of a nice one-stop-shop of convenience. Meanwhile, layman users are perfectly happy with the lock-in of modern webapps.
Linux support is fine, if you're willing to accept HTML5 and JavaScript executing who knows what in your browser.
If evernote can't make a good text editor with HTML5 and JavaScript then it proves that apps in the browser is a dead end. Text editor is basically, the "cost of entry" and if an entire team focused on that single feature can't deliver it after years, well... I'm not really surprised given the state of JavaScript (collectively ruined by Mozilla's lack of resources and Google's ill will) and HTML5 (collectively ruined by nobody giving a shit about the language before their own interests).
Given the crumbling of infrastructure of the web, I'm kind of surprised anyone still uses the internet at all for anything more important than facebook and tabloid news. Maybe nobody does?
However, given your level of expertise not finding a note-taking solution, seems ridiculous. Doesn't feel like a real problem. I never understood how a note-keeping application can attract that kind of money Evernote does, but then again there are many things I don't understand.
However, given today's tools, taking notes can be done using any level of encryption, privacy you need. Seriously, that's not a big problem for a tech savvy user.
ps. Caring about privacy (at that level) and using cloud services, other than Owncloud hosted in a server you alone have physical access is silly :-)
It is and it isn't. I have a private server on the Inter-tubes, and keep files in sync via version control software on multiple devices.
However, having a nice, slick system, with support for multiple platforms (especially for phones) is not a trivial amount of work.
I'd like to use Evernote, but I don't trust them with this kind of data.
I signed up recently after seeing repeated recommendations on HN however and its actually very good and I've started using it quite a bit already. I'm not sure that I could explain it sufficiently here so I'll just say try signing up and give it a go (it didn't ask me to even confirm my email address so getting started was pretty quick).
From: How to Plan your Wedding...without going insane
1. Sign up for WorkFlowy 2. Create a project list and 'zoom in.' 3. Create sections for the major components of your project 4. Fill out the details 5. Use #tags and @tags to filter your lists 6. Share your list with your collaborators 7. Mark things as complete as you finish them. 8. Complete your project
Puppet Labs?
There's a lot more to Portland than just Puppet, though we do use a ton of their product. We love those guys.
Please do let me know if you find something better.
All developers know that feeling when using an app: you're dealing with something a little half-assed. Evernote has always had that feel for me. Switching over to something else, preferably based on flat files using something like Markdown, is on my to-do list.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2043415
I'm not shilling for the Redmond entity but I always do find it hilarious that a very superior software product can hide in plain view and all the "think different" people can't even see it.
There is also the question of privacy. That's why my Org files are on my ownCloud and I have peace of mind forever.
As far as storing data I also have my "own cloud" and I also use Dropbox and SkyDrive. I like all of the above and I find Dropbox extremely convenient. However, I do have a concern that Dropbox is not as secure as SkyDrive.
If Evernote takes the same "features first" approach to reliability, redundancy etcetera, that would explain a lot.
Since 2008, I am making my yearly Evernote migration attempts. So far, Evernote is not any close to the paper notebook + smartphone camera duo. On every account excluding possibly search, it is inconvenient, complex, slow and less reliable.
If core HWR functions of Evernote will be available as an one-button app in my phone (like Camera), that will be a really strong value proposition to me.
Otherwise, the value of notes depends on being within immediate reach (ideal: on the wall, open on the table). Every additional tap, click or wait-one-second halves the value of it.
Navigating a complex unreliable app, paying for it and worrying about privacy/reliability/bugs altogether makes it less than helpful for me, hence a no-go.
The trend of putting just "bug fixes" or "performance improvements" into release notes drives me mad. Your users are not stupid. They know what bugs there the app has and will be happy to know if those specific bugs have been fixed.
"Performance improvements" is equally lame. It could mean that you cleaned up some code and now a function call is 0.05 seconds faster without any visible user benefit. Tell us how the app is faster.
HTML5 apps are sometimes sold on the promise of being able to update themselves without going through an app store review, but you would also lose the standard way of delivering release notes unless you build that functionality yourself.
The latter aspect is the most intriguing because if Evernote is in fact evolving and not designing, they are vulnerable to being out executed by someone with good design principles. I sometimes wish I could look inside their system and see how it is put together, and sometimes I worry about what I mind find there if I did.
Disclaimer: Microsoft employee and Onenote user
http://www.devontechnologies.com
No affiliation, just love the software.
http://notational.net http://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/
Not to mention that their inline search is broken and they refuse to fix it
Has something in Evernote drastically changed over time, or did it just got more users? (= more testing under unenvisioned circumstances)
The concept of Evernote is great and it initially appears well-executed (in fact, it is very well-engineered).
But, there are many serious problems that users inevitably start to hit after some time. Once these hits start to hurt, then you realise that reliable old software and file sharing fit your need better.
Personally, the lock-in hurt me a lot. I was using Evernote to store some data until I realised that I could not get it out of there without signficant difficulty. Account deactivated.
Problems I have with Evernote: Conflicing changes peppered throughout notes, but no ability to see what the differences are clearly so I can consolidate all in one. IOS is downright unusable to append to a note or delete anything from a note, and it's mostly just text in all my notes. Errors syncing with remote server on my windows Machine even after uninstall with revo uninstaller and reinstalling. Web based version pinned as a tab in firefox or Chrome sometimes takes a solid 45 seconds to respond on my 2013 Mac. I keep trying to find workarounds or platforms it works well on, but Evernote keeps adding extra features and crippling core functions and no platform seems spared.
I'd like a tool I can smoothly append to a list, seamless sync between platforms, use hyperlinks between notes, and something I can easily access past notes for research purposes. Lack of links in notes, amount of notes in EN, lack of robust search, are only things keeping me from using Simplenote fully.
Thought about Simplenote or clearly for lists, Devonthink for finding relevant notes, though Devonthink is Mac only. Maybe the ultimate solution is a personal wiki, I saw Clive Thompson of Wired mag researching that, so maybe there will be a informative article there soon.
Maybe this: http://zim-wiki.org (haven't used it myself yet though)
I am not sure, who took the course of codebase/feature sprawl. Retrospectively, that was a bad choice.
If only HWR was available separately from all that disorderly bunch.
1) when you reach a critical amount of notes in the system, the tool itself doesn't offer enough functionality to deal with this and I tend to stop looking for old notes. 2-3 times a year i go in and try to manage all of it, but I feel like a lot of new Evernote development is around creating shiny new toys for new customer bases but not actually iterating the core of the tool itself.
2) i hate the flat green Evernote homescreen on iOS that was introduced in recent versions. in fact, i almost never open it anymore. i enter data on the desktop and will open Evernote on iOS to access 2-3 notes, but searching across notes and folders is confusing.
{snark}
1) I think that Evernote feels like the ACT! or Goldmine contact managers of today... exciting (ahem) productivity apps of yesteryear that gets disrupted hard and suddenly by something out of left field. I can't wait.
2)But, ya know.. at least their physical goods marketplace is bringing them revenue
{/snark}
Maybe that's why it takes so long to fix some of these issues?
The app is definitely getting better, and Skitch has come along leaps and bounds in the last 3-6 months.
I've never had data loss, but I was very disappointed by my one interaction with Evernote support - a simple bug report, (you cannot select more than one line of text in a bullet list in the Android app), turned into a series of 6 or 7 email interactions asking me to do things that were unrelated to the problem and clearly weren't going to (and didn't) help. It was obvious that no human had bothered to even attempt to reproduce the issue or even read my bug report in any detail. I don't know if they've outsourced their bug report handling to some untrained / unskilled off shore group, but if not they were trying extremely hard to emulate that. I don't like to think about interacting with these people in the event that I have data loss or other kind of bug that actually matters.
I like the idea of a powerful tool to help organize your life and kind of outsource part of your brain. But i just can't trust them enough and considering their track-record - there is no reason to do so..
I also think its very sad that you seem to have to post online and "endangering" the company through a PR stunt to just get the attention of them. Seen the same thing with companies like T-Mobile where problems seemd unsolvable till a facebook shitstorm threatened to rise.
I'm a paying customer and depend heavily on the service, but I get really frustrated with the poor quality of the software and all of the engineering problems.
I get the sense that Evernote really doesn't care. They know that their audience is effectively locked in and that there aren't any alternatives that do exactly the same thing, so they just don't have an incentive to fix the bugs. I'm still a user, but I've personally stopped recommending Evernote and Skitch to friends.
It was so sluggish when scrolling that I couldn't use it.
I contacted support and received this:
"As a valued customer of Evernote, you will receive support within 1 business day."
8 days later, I replied to ask why I hadn't received anything more.
3 days after that, I received a stock reply saying I should reboot and install the latest client.
Of course I had installed the latest client already, and rebooted to see if that helped. I think the app is just slow.
So the app is unusable and customer support don't give you what you pay for. I had simply thought, 'doomed product, will avoid in future' but I thought I'd relay this here seeing as the subject has been broached.
Here's a side by side of iOS 6 + 7. They are both terrible imho[1]. The Android app is much more simply designed and much nicer to use[2].
[1] http://cdn1.digitalartsonline.co.uk/cmsdata/slideshow/346956...
[2] https://lh5.ggpht.com/lPMXIRwq4MI1RsWYP5zfTdRwM2czXpK6NhmCo0...
Before my eyes can locate the note's content -- the reason I'm looking at the app in the first place -- my brain has to notice and dismiss all of the unchanging but visually dominant UI elements grabbing for my attention.
In iOS6 screenshot, the only information is "3570 Notes". We can assume that Tom Negrino didn't need a prompt to remember his own name.
At least the screenshot of iOS7 version has a few snippets of user content. But, was the decision to make everything green made by someone who uses the product heavily? I doubt it.
They confirmed that this should not be happening, and said that they filed a ticket on the internal bug tracker. The bug still exists in the Android version to date, unfixed, even though the solution (overriding the event Android calls when it disconnects a bluetooth keyboard) is somewhat trivial to implement.
Their response: http://puu.sh/69msM.png My report: http://puu.sh/69mu1.png
I no longer trust that they will always have all of my notes, so I started to back them up to Dropbox via the HTML export. But I'm lazy, haven't done it for a while.
Perhaps this is an opportunity for a new company to do what Evernote is doing, better. Automatic backups to Dropbox, lighting fast no matter how many notes stored, reliable and instant syncing, etc.
However, I've found their Chrome Web Clipper to be remarkably bug-ridden and unreliable.
It's very annoying - as you can queue up a list of pages to clip, and you don't know if it's going to actually clip all of them. So you have to wait, and make sure each one is clipped.
See here for other people's reports on it as well:
http://discussion.evernote.com/topic/43399-clipper-hangs-on-...
If I knew of an cross-platform alternative, I'd seriously look into it.
Any good alternatives for web clipping or research?
I know this is no excuse for Evernote's app being at fault, but if something matters this much to you, you should not be trusting anyone or anything and the only way to stay safe is to have backups in multiple places. Might seem like a PITA but it is worth the effort.
A backup of a corrupt file wouldn't solve the problem.
Through absolutely no fault of his own, ended up losing an important part of his notes one day. They were completely gone due to a failed sync with no way to get them back from our end. I tried contacting support, but it wouldn't let me cuz he wasn't a paying member.
Never used it since out of principle.
We hear your concerns. I just wrote about my thoughts on the subject, and our plans for 2014, on our blog: http://blog.evernote.com/blog/2014/01/04/on-software-quality...
Thank you for caring enough to be on this thread,
- Phil Libin, CEO, Evernote
Spurred by this post (nicely done, btw) I went and gave a look at what was inside my old Evernote account. Nothing. Everything's gone except the myriad folders and tags I'd added to help keep everything organized. It's a ghost town now.
I guess I don't really care the stuff is gone since I'd given up on the app long, long ago. Still, I can't help wondering what I'm missing, if there was anything truly important that marched in line & jumped off a cliff along with millions of other users' data.
[1] Mid-2009 according to my Evernote Account Summary page.
Though I can't find a reasonable substitute on Android. Most apps in this category focus on getting notes easily or on some to-do/calendar side, and very few has a good set of features to organize and navigate through a vast db of notes. Springpad has the same notebook/tags system and pays a good deal of attention to the organization part, but alas it is a web app with no option for private local notes.
[later edit: as I reread the thread, I now see the discussion as less negative than I originally thought. Others are pointing out positives about Evernote. If Jason Kincaid (the OP) does manage to get Phil Libin to focus his company on improving the quality of the various clients, then I'd be quite happy. For the time being, I still with Evernote because it's the best solution I've found for what I do.]
Then Journler was discontinued, and I realized there was no way to export the notes without losing all kinds of metadata.
I briefly considered Evernote, but this time I didn't want the same thing to happen. So instead, I settled for Notational Velocity (NVAlt, specifically), which uses plain text files. The files reside in a dropbox folder, and I use SimpleNote on my iPad and some other app on my Nexus. I can also use a whole bunch of other text-editing tools if they have dropbox support.
While my solution only works for plain text, it's served me well and I'll never be locked into some (buggy) tool again.
My fear with the desktop app is that a Evernote is killing it. It's a great app, though. Never let me down, not once. Never crashes, never lost a note. And it has more features, more flexibility in formatting, and the ability to have deep nesting of what Evernote calls notebooks. But the UI look & feel is very outdated.
Check it out. It's called Info Select from miclog.com.
It's not fancy, but you control your data.
Seriously sloppy stuff. They need to improve or I need to find something better.
"This strategy is tolerable for a social network or messaging app (Facebook got away with atrociously buggy apps for years)."
But the truth is it wouldn't be tolerable for Facebook to lose photos or posts. The experience can be buggy, sure, but users should and would never tolerate data loss like this.
I suspect the only reason Evernote is surviving this is because relatively few people use audio notes and, so far, text notes work fine-ish. I wouldn't expect that to last.
Oh and most importantly, you host the data yourself - no verbose plaintext logs containing your sensitive data and no support calls. Org can also encrypt your Org files on-the-fly:
http://orgmode.org/ http://orgmode.org/manual/Attachments.html
Then one day there was an Evernote glitch and all my precious notes, were safe right there in the backup I had taken, because always backup yourself too, no matter how much you trust any app.
Seriously, all apps have glitches. I've been using Evernote for 2+ years and haven't seen any spectacular failure. But even if there was one, I'd still have my backups and I could restore my notes in a couple of hours.
I really want to move from Evernote to Google Drive, which serves 90% of my uses with a much, much better cloud service and interoperability. Unfortunately, most of my Evernote notes are mixed formatted text and images and I can't find a sane way to export them.
Ironically, even exporting to a .doc would work, since Google and many others are forced to offer MSOffice import capabilities.
I'll continue to use Evernote in the way that I have been and do periodic evernote exports of my data to, say, Dropbox. And cross my fingers that this bad press will kick Evernote into working on the reliability of their excellent features and products.
A lot of what I use(d) Evernote for was shell snippets and other bits of code, and having it mangle my quotes into other characters, and randomly insert newlines was a bit of a nightmare.
Thanks to this thread I've found nvALT and I'm really loving it so far.
Sadly, both Evernote and iCloud follow this "strategy". If you've never experience the joy of watching iCloud blow away every contact in your address book during a sync, consider yourself lucky.
Evernote solves a great problem awesomely and at the moment for my personal use case. For now I'd rather focus on optimizing other things.
But I had trouble logging into the Mac client using my email address (prior to 2 factor author being implemented) and it didn't work. I raised a support request and got this reply
Unfortunately this feature has been disabled and you must sign in with your username instead of the email.
That seems weird and annoying to me.
I have three issues:
1) The mac client is slow / laggy
2) Security
3) Formatting - please don't add smart quotes to my SQL snippets!
If someone made a product that syncs like Evernote, had a browser plugin as good as evernote's and used client side encryption - I'd certainly give it a go.
What are some good Evernote alternatives?
So I ditched it after that huge security incident by using cloudHQ to migrate to something else:
This set buzzers off in my (perhaps simple) mind. Is this feature creep? I'm a physical notebook and 'one big textfile' person myself.
is there a good alternative to skitch yet?
Buggy sure, will they become the leviathan force if they fix the bugs, most likely.
Any good alternatives to Evernote?
I'm open to switching to an Evernote alternative, provided this alternative has an Android app. Android apps are becoming as easy to install on BlackBerry 10 as native BlackBerry apps.
Curious, what are the Evernote alternatives?
This is the kind of stuff that makes me not want to read what you have to say. Come on, what you are saying is car ad bullshit.