63 karma · joined December 8, 2011
Even worse, as soon as you're working for a customer who isn't technical, you'll land in a situation where he shows you a Native Client app and wants "something like that" on his website but running in Firefox or Safari or (even worse) Internet Explorer.
What's interesting is that many people forget that Evernote is also a powerful cloud plattform with a solid API. The ability to save all your notes in a standardized way in the Cloud and then install individual apps for filtering, processing, or managing them has huge potential.
I think we've only seen the beginning of where they'll go. In comparison to Dropbox mostly because Evernote as a whole is a bit more difficult to grasp.
First of all, if this is the only possible way for a tablet to look, why did all the other Microsoft tablets up to the iPad look vastly different?
Second, there're two famuos quotes:
"The obvious is always least understood."
and
"All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them." - Galileo Galilei
The problem here is that Apple invested a lot of time and thinking into designing a fantastic solution to a problem. But that doesn't mean that it is the only solution. Instead, people are now seeing the world from this point of view, and can't fathom that there is any other solution to this problem - just like before the iPad everybody thought that the Windows Tablet Design was the best solution.
Does the author really believe that the iPad design is the answer to all questions? The final? I bet there're better, more intriguing, more beautiful, and more usable designs that yet have to be discovered.
I think we've only seen the beginning of where they'll go. In comparison to Dropbox mostly because Evernote as a whole is a bit more difficult to grasp.
I've long wondered if there shouldn't be a better way of handling updating / correcting news items. Especially in newspapers, the wrong headline was largely visible on the front, while the corrected information comes one week later in a small box somewhere in the middle (if it comes).
I still remember that christmas morning in 89 or 90 when I got my first Nintendo. It was snowing outside, which made it feel even more cozy inside. My friend and me had been playing Super Mario Bros almost all morning and had forgotten time in between. Suddenly it was lunchtime and my grandma came for visit. She correctly observed that I hadn't even touched her present yet (I forgot what it was). It was still at the same position where I put it after opening it. Super Mario Bros had me so hooked that I'd forgotten about the rest. After that, Miyamoto's creations always followed me around, be it on the GameBoy, the SNES, or the N64. Godspeed Miyamoto, you shaped my youth and I thank you for it.
One thing that I sorely miss in Instapaper though is the ability to mark text fragments and save them as quotes (like in iBooks for example), and add notes to it. I'm reading all these texts, and I can't mark quotes or note my thoughts. I hate it. Does Read It Later offer such a feature?
However, a social network doesn't necessarily need 800Mio users to be relevant. Even a small social network with an avid and interested user base can succeed.
And this could be the main differentiator here: A user base consisting out of people that love fantastic design. If they and their design-loving friends are on there, and don't require the facebook-laggard-surplus, then Path can succeed.