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Comment by jonursenbach | Hacker News Reader

I've been meaning to move off of Evernote because their OSX client is just slow as all hell. Are there any alternatives, aside from something like Dropbox? Evernote's OCR implementation was/is really useful.

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Onenote comes to mind, and it does OCR on client side so is quite fast. Also does audio transcription which can be enabled (Disabled by default). Also has version control built in, so you can you can look at older versions and do manual merges (if required)

Disclaimer: Microsoft employee and Onenote user

Onenote is great but I think he wants something for OS X.

Word 2011 (OS X) offers OneNote-like functionality if you choose the Notebook view. Defaults to list, auto-headings, and it even lets you doodle in the margins. That's all I ever did in OneNote, so I'm not sure how feature complete Word 2011 is in comparison.

Happy OneNote user but I truly despise the API. All the other Office APIs are far more pleasant and functional.

I agree. I love OneNote but this is a tragic situation. I would be SO HAPPY if OneNote had a good API. I would dance on rooftops and howl at the moon.

I like OneNote. It has a nice web app and OCR (at least in the Windows client).

Try Devonthink.

http://www.devontechnologies.com

No affiliation, just love the software.

I agree. I've had multiple friends swear by Evernote and every time I tried, I'd get a few hours into it and find some annoying limitation. DevonThink gives me everything I need. They're a bit behind on having a good sync solution for iOS, but they've been actively working on it for a long time now and it should be coming soon.

I use DevonThink as well and love it... but I also don't need to sync between multiple devices. All of my dissertation sources, notes, files, etc are in DevonThink - love the tagging and search features, folder levels, etc. I'm able to quickly find, navigate, and even discover relations I didn't discover before. Also, multiple file types and I now have the PDF -> OCR stuff for older documents. I keep my footnotes/endnotes/bibliographic info in Zotero.

I've found Google Drive on Desktop/Android is pretty good. You get all the OT goodness with .gdoc and Quickoffice (from Google) is free for .docx editing.

... and it does OCR...

If speed is of importance, I would second the SimpleNote suggestions. You might also want to take a look at Notational Velocity and its fork, nvALT - the speed of launching, searching and creating notes is unbelievable, and both apps can sync with the SimpleNote service.

http://notational.net http://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/

I get scared to open Evernote on OSX because of the boot-time and beach balls. Seriously, it induces anxiety on the user; it's that bad.

While it has it's own problems, Google Docs.

About a year ago I tried it for receipts due to the OCR but at least half the scanned images got lost (some in transit, some after they had been viewed in evernote). Shame as I'd have have gone for at least one paid account if it had worked.

Not to sound like [something negative], but I really like pen and paper. I carry around a notebook and a few different pens because I like to draw, and because jotting notes down is kinda fun in its own way.

> I've been meaning to move off of Evernote because their OSX client is just slow as all hell

Not to mention that their inline search is broken and they refuse to fix it

hey, can you tell more on this? i've been suspicious of it...

Oh ... it just doesn't work right. If you type in two words, instead of giving you fewer results it gives you more results as it matches separate instances of the single words in the query ... pretty dumb actually.

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