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Ask HN: What Happened to Evernote?

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Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Evernote?

#161

Post by antiframe »

uhuhoo wrote: post #149
antiframe wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't mind using it but their license keeps me away.

What is it about their license that bothers you? It seems pretty fair to me... Free for personal use, pay for commercial, unless you are a nonprofit or a single employee company. Did I miss something? (I assume you mean EULA: https://obsidian.md/eula )

I don't want to have to separate my notes between work and personal. Sometimes in my daily journal I will think about work things. That would requires me to pay $50 a year for an editor to edit Markdown files. That seems steep even if mostly I use it for personal use.

Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Evernote?

#162

Post by thomasjudge »

Brajeshwar wrote: post #144

I'm going to reproduce a comment verbatim that appeared on HackerNews from quite a while ago. I remembered and kept it for reference because Evernote was supposed to be a 100-year company (Phil Libin's words) and the decline of Evernote was that one reason why I decided to own my content even if I have to use various tooling on top of it. I moved to a text-based lifestyle spiced with some formatting with Markdown eve…

This is great

Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Evernote?

#163

Post by mszcz »

sph wrote: post #118
mszcz wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm on Android, sorry. SwiftScan has a one time payment option AFAIK, that's the one I used.

No, I installed it and saw they offer a subscription. There is no one off payment, they offer a yearly VIP package for £35.99.

Huh. I've checked by purchase history on the Play Store and there's a 2016 May charge for SwiftScan Plus, no active subscriptions. I've got the iOS version on the iPad, fully unlocked, also no subscriptions.

I guess they eliminated the one-time purchase option. Bastards. No way I'd pay £36 for this yearly. Netflix doesn't cost that much more!

Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Evernote?

#164

Post by temp8964 »

DangerousPie wrote: post #30

Maybe this is just me getting old, but I feel like Evernote has only gotten worse since I started using it over 10 years ago. Back then it was just a list of notes with some formatting and sync capabilities - perfect. These days they have added all these extra features which I don't need, and which have made the whole app slow and terribly clunky. When I use the iPad app it takes several seconds to load notes or sear…

There are comments recommending popular apps like Notion, Joplin, Obsidian, etc. I find hard to trust those apps will last 10, 15, or 20 years. I have switched note-keeping apps a few times in the past and no longer want to do so. That's why I decide I will not use any of those apps.

Now I use MediaWiki through docker (with Sqlite database) on my home server. It's lightening fast for my personal use, and comes with tons of powerful features (categories, subpages, templates, math syntax, etc.). Because MediaWiki is the same system running Wikipedia, I believe it is very likely will run 10, 20, or even more years. It is not the most convenient to use, but I don't use it for quick notes, for which I just use the default note app on my phone.

Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Evernote?

#165

Post by dotBen »

I migrated from Evernote to Microsoft OneNote. If I was 10 years younger or still an engineer I would have experimented with a 'roll your own' FOSS option but these days I'm an exec and I just need my notes to be stable, dependable, easily accessible etc.

OneNote is essentially free, it's Microsoft's gateway to get people to come back into their ecosystem and you obviously know it's going to be well maintained, high integrity of storage, etc. I know it will be still around and maintained in 10 years time when I still want to access my old notes.

The mobile and iPad apps are nice, there's also a convenient Evernote to OneNote importer: https://www.onenote.com/import-evernote-to-onenote

My take on Evernote is that they never managed to properly monetize it. I was a single user, not in a team, didn't need shared notes or chat functionality and there was no need for me to pay for it... until they decided to arbitrarily limit the number of devices you could use your account on which is just such a shitty approach because we all know there's no actual cost to servicing three devices vs two. In other words the only thing they could do to get me to pay for it was hobble my UX until I coughed up. Sorry, no thanks.

Honestly, if you just want a solid 1:1 Evernote replacement that isn't markdown, self-hosted, etc just use MS OneNote. It's great.

Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Evernote?

#166

Post by jitl »

fguerraz wrote: post #100
randomluck040 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might take a look at Obsidian. For me it’s the best of two (or how many you like) worlds. You can sync your files via git or a cloud service of your liking. What bugs me is that it’s not open source but what makes it great is a lot of open source developers contributing plugins and themes.

I know it's biased because it's an opinion from a competitor, but it's interesting nevertheless: https://blog.standardnotes.com/33536/how-not-to-build-a-secu...

Have you considered adding a capability for plugins to draw HTML into an ? I'm always pondering such features, but I'm wary of letting a plugin potentially block the CPU forever with custom elements. I have a solution to plugin CPU blocking for pure API plugins (https://github.com/justjake/quickjs-emscripten) but not a way to meld it safely with HTML access.

Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Evernote?

#167

Post by jodrellblank »

sofixa wrote: post #113
DangerousPie wrote: post #30

Maybe this is just me getting old, but I feel like Evernote has only gotten worse since I started using it over 10 years ago. Back then it was just a list of notes with some formatting and sync capabilities - perfect. These days they have added all these extra features which I don't need, and which have made the whole app slow and terribly clunky. When I use the iPad app it takes several seconds to load notes or sear…

Obsidian. It's markdown based, so simple at the base, but you can go wild with plugins ( including latex, graph visualisations, dynamic queries across notes, etc.), and it supports metadata, tags, etc. if you want to. You can sync with anything supporting text files ( Git, Dropbox, Google Drive, etc) or pay a bit for their ens to end encrypted service that works great.

Dendron, it's like Obsidian (markdown based notes in files on your filesystem) but as a VS Code plugin, so it's also compatible with Git and other VS Code filetype extensions.

https://www.dendron.so/

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=dendron

Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Evernote?

#168

Post by seanhunter »

seanhunter wrote: post #97

Quite agree, and as a paid user myself I would strongly recommend you don't go paid. Evernote just keeps getting worse. They add things with negative utility (like the annoying new "home" screen that you have to click past to get to your actual notes while basic features like "search", and the app's speed are significantly worse than they were a few years back.

Another concrete example of this death by product management syndrome just occurred to me so (in the hope that someone from evernote is reading this) here goes.

The "Scannable" app used to be great. Really slick scanning of documents on mobile to evernote. A little while ago they added one of those "new user experience" things you have to click through before you use the app. Fair enough I suppose. Except I have to click through it every single time. This grates given I use the app about twice a week.

Then recently, scannable decided to forget my connection to evernote. Every single time I use it. So every time I use it I have to start by clicking through the new user experience and logging into evernote. It used to be I started scannable and in about 2 clicks a doc was in my evernote. Now there's this BS preamble every time.

Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Evernote?

#169

Post by lenova »

DangerousPie wrote: post #30

Maybe this is just me getting old, but I feel like Evernote has only gotten worse since I started using it over 10 years ago. Back then it was just a list of notes with some formatting and sync capabilities - perfect. These days they have added all these extra features which I don't need, and which have made the whole app slow and terribly clunky. When I use the iPad app it takes several seconds to load notes or sear…

UpNote is my recommendation for an Evernote replacement:

https://getupnote.com/

Cross-platform, and it feels like what Evernote was back in the day: a simple note-taking app with a beautiful UI.

I replaced Evernote with it a few months ago, and it's been a daily driver since. It was first recommended to me on /r/evernote, a subreddit that has basically been echoing the OP's concerns about Evernote for the last two years it looks like.

Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Evernote?

#170

Post by lenova »

c0wb0yc0d3r wrote: post #120
_gy5c wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://standardnotes.com syncs well. cant speak to importing. they have an interesting privacy/encryption approach and some (all?) open source https://github.com/standardnotes

I found it hard to tell if standard notes is fully open source, as well. My bigger gripes are that it doesn't support (markdown) formatting without a subscription, and I can't figure out how to put notes into folders.

Folders requires a subscription on Standard Notes as well.

I only use the free version of Standard Notes, but I am a big fan of the product. Their syncing has been the most solid/problem-free I've seen amongst all of the notes apps I've tried over the years.

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