Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices • Hacker News Board

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#421

Post by ericax » Wed, Sep 30, 2015, 3:43 PM UTC

symstym wrote: post #126

Long ago I got tired of Evernote's bugs and creep of extraneous features and switched to Workflowy [1] for the majority of my general (plaintext) note-taking. I love Workflowy and can't imagine life without it. [1] https://workflowy.com/

We made something similar to Workflowy called Dynalist (https://dynalist.io/), there's a live demo you can try at https://dynalist.io/demo (no signup required).

We made this because Workflowy has a lot of things that we thought we could improve, and they're kinda slow in development, but that's another story.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#422

Post by WaltPurvis » Wed, Sep 30, 2015, 3:48 PM UTC

akulbe wrote: post #314

twhb wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sound like a cynic when I say this, but the root cause of failures like this is a principle fundamental to Evernote: data owned by an application, rather than data accessed by an application. If all your data exists in a file hierachy that you can browse, edit manually, and back up, then you have the safety of relying only on foundational systems for the survival of your data, and the power to use your data as you…

This is reason #1 why I like DEVONthink for the Mac. It uses exactly this model. I'm sure equivalents exist on the other platforms, but I'm not all that familiar. I have been an Evernote Premium user for a long time, and since the company seems to be having a rough time, I recently looked at getting all of my data out of Evernote. What a nightmare . I loved Evernote. I loved the fact that Phil Libin said he wanted it…

At risk of sounding like an Evernote apologist, I'm going to repeat a question I asked to another commenter elsewhere in this thread:

Why do you consider it a "nightmare" to get your data out of Evernote? You can select one, several, or all of the notes in a notebook and export them in either HTML or XML format, with all metadata (tags, etc.) and embedded media included. That seems pretty good to me, and it's certainly easy. If you wanted something more sophisticated, Evernote on the Mac has exceptionally complete support for AppleScript, so you can code up whatever kind of fancy extraction you need.

I'm not asking to be argumentative; I've always considered Evernote's support for extracting data to be pretty darn good, and clearly superior to many competitive apps/services, so I'm curious to know what additional functionality you would require before you'd say it's not a "nightmare" to extract your information.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#423

Post by ericax » Wed, Sep 30, 2015, 4:25 PM UTC

Justin_K wrote: post #248

Bullet lists - I literally left this app for One Note because Evernote COULD NOT properly handle bullet lists. The following is not my post but as of my time of leaving the app, you STILL couldn't properly manage a bullet list. There are dozens of posts asking for bullet lists to be fixed. I used 5% of the overall features - all I want is to take notes and have them indexed. There was so much bloat and I couldn't mak…

For indexed bullet list you should try Dynalist, demo here: https://dynalist.io/demo

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#424

Post by reitanqild » Wed, Sep 30, 2015, 4:28 PM UTC

veidr wrote: post #353

jansc wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use DEVONthink too for the same reason. The only thing DEVONthink lacks is cross-platform support. It's a pity that it's not available on Linux or Android.

To be fair, it lacks a lot more than that when compared to Evernote. Evernote is a bundle of great ideas, done horribly catastrophically badly. 1. Evernote has dual-language OCR of PDFs and images (and a few others crappy formats that normally shouldn't be used like .docx, .xlsx, etc). That's a great idea. DevonThink doesn't even have Japanese support (their licensed OCR only supports Western languages). 2. Uh... OK…

OneNote has 0CR from images. It works fairly well.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#425

Post by aggieben » Wed, Sep 30, 2015, 5:31 PM UTC

tempestn wrote: post #150

sandstrom wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the auxiliary stuff that they've dropped? (or will drop/reduce emphasis on) Genuinely curious. I've noted that they seem to have multiple apps in the AppStore doing similar things.

I don't know what they've dropped, but a few auxiliary features I personally don't use are Skitch, Hello, and Work Chat. I'm sure some people do use them (although I expect few compared to the core product). But everyone uses the editor, and there are significant bugs there that have literally gone unfixed for years. That said, some have been fixed in the past couple months, which is part of why I'm hopeful about thi…

I use Scannable _extensively_. Being able to search the text in handwritten documents and whiteboards - without losing the original document to some ridiculous OCR conversion - is absolutely gold. Plain text notes are somewhat less important for me, although I use them a lot too.

I don't care one whit about chat.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#426

Post by aggieben » Wed, Sep 30, 2015, 5:37 PM UTC

ecobiker wrote: post #101

jcrawfordor wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft has OneNote, which might be a good cautionary tale in this area. OneNote was once the king of note taking, like back in 2003, and it's still a great product. But Microsoft focused too much on the Business market, I think, dropping OneNote from the Office Home packages, and that kind of killed it outside of the corp world.

OneNote is now completely free and available on iOS as well (where it has a full 5-star rating). As much I love Evernote, it's going to be an uphill battle for them. (And not to mention the handwriting experience and integration with the Surface Pen - which are killer features for students)

I used to love OneNote's writing experience - but it sucked hard at syncing data between devices. That was what Evernote absolutely nailed from the get go. They synced data seamlessly before anyone else, and ultimately that ended up being more important to me than the UX. Now, in 2015, I feel like Evernote has scratched the UX itch enough for me that I have no reason to go back to OneNote for the forseeable future. Penultimate provides a decent UX for writing even if not as sophisticated as OneNote, Scannable is brilliant for pulling things in via the camera, and the core note-taking app is perfectly adequate, IMO.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#427

Post by pyre » Wed, Sep 30, 2015, 5:45 PM UTC

LaurentVB wrote: post #268

pyre wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> root cause of failures like this is a principle fundamental to Evernote: data owned by an application, rather than data accessed by an application Not really. It's not like MS Word reading your .doc find can't corrupt it leaving you hanging if you don't have a backup. Catastrophic data loss isn't cured by the "data accessed by an application" model.

At least you can backup files. Applications, not so much... I'd add that data should be stored in a standard open format, so that an application failure won't prevent you to 1. keep your data (because backups) and 2. use your data (because open format)

It's better because you can back things up, but people tend to have a bad track record on backing things up unless it's part of their job description.

> an application failure won't prevent you to 1. keep your data (because backups)

My point is that you don't inherently get backups just by having control of the data file. It requires extra action on your part. If you don't backup, an application failure can easily destroy your only copy.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#428

Post by jason_slack » Wed, Sep 30, 2015, 5:56 PM UTC

slaxman wrote: post #273

jason_slack wrote: post #106

I was an Evernote Premium customer and enjoyed multi-device syncing and private notebooks. I had my own account, paid for out of my own pocket for a year. The company I worked for also decided to used Evernote and I could see our "Team" notebooks, right along with my stuff. When the company stopped using it, not only did I lose the "Team" notebooks, it took all of my personal data with it. I lost everything. Support…

Out of curiousity, What made you choose Evernote over Google Drive? Doesn't Google Drive offer the same features? I haven't used Evernote and use Google docs to store my notes instead.

honestly it was mostly presentation. Evernote has an interface that made it easy for me to take notes, update, attach pictures, store all of those notes in a notebook.

GD feels just like a filesystem to me. At that time. Now I actually use GD for this.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#429

Post by jason_slack » Wed, Sep 30, 2015, 6:00 PM UTC

jzwinck wrote: post #127

jason_slack wrote: post #106

I was an Evernote Premium customer and enjoyed multi-device syncing and private notebooks. I had my own account, paid for out of my own pocket for a year. The company I worked for also decided to used Evernote and I could see our "Team" notebooks, right along with my stuff. When the company stopped using it, not only did I lose the "Team" notebooks, it took all of my personal data with it. I lost everything. Support…

Does this imply they do not have backups? Or did they offer some other explanation?

The reasoning I lost the data was actually a permissions issue, I think. I was an individual person, paying a Premium subscription and when the company I worked for signed up something happened to where they owned my notebooks. The company stopped using it, there went my stuff too.

Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

#430

Post by lawlitta » Wed, Sep 30, 2015, 6:26 PM UTC

jason_slack wrote: post #106

I was an Evernote Premium customer and enjoyed multi-device syncing and private notebooks. I had my own account, paid for out of my own pocket for a year. The company I worked for also decided to used Evernote and I could see our "Team" notebooks, right along with my stuff. When the company stopped using it, not only did I lose the "Team" notebooks, it took all of my personal data with it. I lost everything. Support…

Hi Jason -

I work at Evernote and would like to look at your support ticket with our management team to figure out what happened. Will you please let me know your ticket number?

Thanks in advance. Please know that we're here to help.