I switched to Nimbus Note a few years back - no real regrets. Minor issue (vs. Evernote): it's not "smart" like Evernote and doesn't know how to suggest the right tags or categories for a note.
Ask HN: What Happened to Evernote?
271–280 of 282 posts
Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Evernote?
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
Markdown format in a SQLite database, and there’s a command line client to script it if you like. Joplin is excellent.
I'm sure Joplin is excellent and I hate to argue one against the other. The markdown files in themselves should be independent. I have used several full featured, rather excellent, note-taking software, where the export is not "open". Obsidian is the only reasonable system I have seen where the software is up to date and it doesn't do anything with the markdown files to lock them in. I speak of this as a single user…
I recently migrated from Evernote to Joplin. This was a concern for me, as well. However, I got past it. This isn't a case of "lock in". Even if Joplin loses mindshare and stops being actively maintained, I know that I'll always have a version available (even if only locally on my desktop, seeing as how I install it manually) that I can use to export to plain, raw Markdown files. And, with them, I can migrate to Obsidian or whatever comes into vogue.
Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Evernote?
#273Evernote missed the opportunity to be the first Google docs. It was perfectly lightweight to capture and organize information, often better than its peers on mobile. Didn’t seem to get ahead. OneNote is nice except it lacks offline support. Notion is even better with great collaboration but one fatal flaw, no real offline mode. Evernote was always instant on and with you for the most part, except where it started los…
> OneNote is nice except it lacks offline support. Huh? If you mean purely local, yeah, that's impossible outside the Office app on Windows. But apart from that, OneNote can't even operate without downloading a full local copy of a notebook you open. Any changes you do get applied to the local copy first and then synced to the master copy on OneDrive separately.
Sorry, typo.
OneNote works fine offline but is poor at collaboration and granular sharing and permissions.
Notion is poor at working offline but strong at collaboration and granular sharing/permissions.
Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Evernote?
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
> OneNote is nice except it lacks offline support. Huh? If you mean purely local, yeah, that's impossible outside the Office app on Windows. But apart from that, OneNote can't even operate without downloading a full local copy of a notebook you open. Any changes you do get applied to the local copy first and then synced to the master copy on OneDrive separately.
Sorry, typo. OneNote works fine offline but is poor at collaboration and granular sharing and permissions. Notion is poor at working offline but strong at collaboration and granular sharing/permissions.
Yeah, the notebook as the fundamental sharing unit can be troublesome. OneNote should technically have the ability to make individual sections shareable (a OneNote notebook is stored as a folder containing .one files (sections with their pages) and subfolders (section groups) on disc) since every section is its own file. You could in principle just permission that via OneDrive and I think they had plans to, but I haven't seen anything on that front.
Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Evernote?
#275I 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…
If you trust that Windows will support legacy versions of apps (true so far), and you are ok with a free but proprietary license (use freely in perpetuity as long as you can get a copy of the portable installer)...and you want to save plain text data via version control... maybe try my app: http://notes.paperbirch.app.
It's not for marking up documents or drawing, let's say that data-storage and recollection is the main use, it might help you.
BTW, the use of tags allows you to quickly "view the world" from a particular set of words, "work,project,todo" is a pretty specific domain and my app is designed to let you work within that domain or simply change tags to view the world from a new domain.
Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Evernote?
#276Earlier 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.
I haven't used the folder option, but but search seems to have worked well enough for me. I believe the client at least is open source. (That is, when updating on Arch-based Linux, it's going through a JavaScript-based build process. Should all be there somewhere.)
Their selling feature (to me) is the privacy focus, because end to end encryption is the default, and a very rare one among other note apps I've taken a look at.
Sync works well, and is one way I use the app, even when I have other things like org-mode in play on some devices. It is typically quite handy to just paste something on my Linux desktop, and copy-paste on my iPhone to send somewhere iOS-specific.
Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Evernote?
#277Maybe 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…
Evernote has only gotten worse since I started using it over 10 years ago That is the modern business model. First you build something so good it becomes indespensible then you squeeze money out of it until your customers hate you just enough to not stop using you.
I don't think so.
Yes, the "first" Evernote had great features, but it was all over the place. No clients had the same set of features, and web side was even worse.
When they ditched everything and rebuilt all clients from the same base, they've lost some of the cool features, but I find it much easier to use and rely on.
Only after that point I bought a subscription, fully went into it, and currently building my knowledge base inside it, and collaborating on some stuff.
Simpler is not always worse. Yes, the old Evernote was a "road warrior's utopia", but the current incarnation works much better on a cross-platform perspective, and I'm a happy camper.
Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Evernote?
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
I will never forgive Dropbox. I spent a decade evangelizing them as the way to do cloud file storage to all the tech-illiterate people in my life and then Dropbox decided to limit free accounts to three devices. The sheer number of pissed-off and/or confused phone calls I got from all of those people was enough to make me wish eternal suffering upon the Dropbox executives.
That is basically the dictionary definition of cashing out social capital: be so good that people evangelize your brand, then start aggressively putting profit first once you reach a critical mass of public awareness.
I think they didn't cash-out on social capital. They grew, and became "enterprise first". The recipe is to limit free services and increase the price of paid service, so only big customers and serious users get attracted to you.
Trello did the same thing. They killed their single-user friendly features and moved to enterprise first, gouging serious solo users in the process.
I'm still subscribed to both, but I'm not as happy as before.
Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Evernote?
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is basically the dictionary definition of cashing out social capital: be so good that people evangelize your brand, then start aggressively putting profit first once you reach a critical mass of public awareness.
I think they didn't cash-out on social capital. They grew, and became "enterprise first". The recipe is to limit free services and increase the price of paid service, so only big customers and serious users get attracted to you. Trello did the same thing. They killed their single-user friendly features and moved to enterprise first, gouging serious solo users in the process. I'm still subscribed to both, but I'm not…
The 1:1 analogy is to investment capital: let's say someone started a successful company that got purchased and has now invested the $5mil USD they got paid (the capital) with an annual rate of return of 5% giving them $250k/year.
They could reasonably retire off just the return on investments.
However, if they start using the $5mil to buy houses and cars and whatnot, they are "cashing out the capital". As they spend more and more, the return on investment drops but everything looks great from the outside: they have lots of cash, a lot of "things", and so-on. However, look ahead a few years and they might be left with $500k invested giving them a return of $25,000/year and it's possible that they would no longer be able to retire off that putting them in to a possible tail spin of needing to spend the remaining capital just to pay the monthly bills.
I propose that this is what companies are doing with their "social capital" (which includes the public's impression of the brand and that brand's work on building up their customers). Creating a brand with integrity and values while working to solve a problem well builds social capital. All they have to do is "maintain the balance" (stay true to the values and mission that got them there) in order to keep getting the "return on investment" (continual influx of new paying customers). However, if they choose to start sacrificing values and quality for the short-term gains they can definitely do that. On a quarterly balance sheet it even looks like they are "rich": "We're spending less on dev time by ignoring bug reports and less on servicing free customers while also converting 10% of those old free customers to paying customers. The bottom line is way up!". But because they've sacrificed the values that attracted those customers in the first place new potential customers will start looking more critically, or will choose a competitor, or will even start their own competing service. It's only a matter of time before the company looks at the balance sheet and wonders why income is down. If they are really looking to ruin the company they might even point fingers like "we used to get $250k/yr, but now we're getting $25k and our competitor is getting $225. we must conclude that the market is saturated and we have to go on the offensive against that competitor.", when what they could do is simply accept that they have to start over to rebuild the social capital so they can have the same level of return again (or maybe even take the lesson and work harder to build more capital and have a bigger return in the future).
Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Evernote?
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find it telling that notion managed to break the core web concept of the hyperlink by implementing their own version of the tag. If I middle-click on a link to open it in a new tab, I paste-insert my clipboard content _into the link text_ instead (I'm on Linux). That's just horrible.
(I work at Notion) It's actually the browser's default behavior to do what you're describing! Inside a `contenteditable` element, links no longer behave as links -- they aren't clickable, and hovering over the link doesn't show a preview of the HREF attribute in the browsers I've tested. So in order for links to do link things, we have to fight the browser and re-implement these behaviors. Here's a codesandbox with n…
Oh hey, I didn't see your reply until just now, thanks for the explanation and trying to resolve it! I understand the technical issue now.
I still don't understand the UX. Am I assuming correctly that it's core to the concept of Notion to always be editable and not have an edit/view flip switch? Because I never used Notion to write anything, I just read things other people wrote. And so it's arguably weird to interact with a webpage that as it turns out is secretly an editor only masquerading as a webpage. Sly!