Are there any good self-hosted alternatives to Evernote/OneNote etc?
I replaced Evernote with Turtl and never looked back. https://turtlapp.com/
Why Evernote failed to realize its potential
191–200 of 328 posts
Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential
#192Honestly, who was sitting there in the middle of a CS class at Standford taking notes and found themselves so absolutely bored to a point of absurdity that they frustratingly sighed out loud, "man, if only there was a way more exciting way to go about doing this."; Which prompted the "ahah" lightbulb moment of the guy sitting just within earshot, one row over, who just so happened to be jotting down his own notes on…
I've yet to see a note app that didn't just serve up the same functionality of plaintext files and calendar events in a bloated, proprietary, and pricey package.
Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential
#193I use Evernote, and like it. (Mostly for to-do stuff, in a way I can tweak it in a way I like + sync with phone.)
For the other alternate solution is text notes (in Markdown), which I use a lot (when I don't need to sync stuff + want to enjoy distraction-free environment without Internet).
The only real annoyance of Evernote is that each time I click on an external link, it asks if I really want to leave Evernote (anxious attachment?).
Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential
#194I have over a thousand notes in Evernote. One day I noticed that one was missing shortly after I created it. Eventually I discovered that the convenient new-note shortcut was failing every time with a database corruption error - but the error only appeared in a system log I was unaware of. There was no indication to the user that the notes were failing. To this day I have no idea how many notes I lost due to this bug…
I've captured (in Evernote, ironically) a few Evernote alternatives. Haven't had time to look them over yet, so not sure how much they address each of your needs: - https://getpolarized.io/ : open source html and pdf document manager. Supports Anki flashcards, local storage, markup of pdfs, tracking reading progress, more - https://www.notion.so - paid/hosted service - https://joplin.cozic.net/ - seems like a decent…
I've been happily using Joplin for about a year now, after having been an Evernote paid user for years. It's definitely "good enough" for my needs, and it's open source so it's hackable (I added in a 'today's date' shortcut key just by hacking the production package - I didn't even bother to build it.) Everyone of course wants something different from a note taker, but I figured I'd chime in with an endorsement.
Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential
#195I switched to Bear Notes long ago. The hash tagging feature is pretty powerful and allows for really nice, complex structures for your notes (or simple, really it's up to you).
Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not bad at all, even with my atrocious handwriting it manages to be around 85% accurate.
I'll have to check it out again. Last time I spent some time with it, the UI just never clicked for me. My main notetaking device is my iPad with a Pencil stylus and GoodNotes. It does a great job of interpreting my handwriting and then I can export a searchable PDF to Evernote, or I guess, OneNote. Is the metadata search in OneNote decent? For example, can I search for notes I created in Houston?
The thing about Microsoft’s stuff is that it slowly but inexorably gets better over time. Like a watched pot, if you are waiting for a feature it will never arrive but if you walk away and come back a few years later it will be significantly better.
Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential
#197The author is painting doomsday all over Evernote, but honestly I don't see it. They are like Dropbox, they do one thing and do it very good IMHO. I've been a subscriber for 2 years and use it daily on desktop and Android without complaints or data loss. If there is be a thing to complain about it's their api. It's rather quite annoying to work with and some of the language SDK's are outdated.
I installed it recently but I don't use sync (main pro of it imo) and since it didn't have a dark theme I went on to try other local note taking programs. It seems to really be for mainly syncing, like dropbox but notes.
The dark theme has been a feature request for years, I believe the top voted one on their forum. It's been ignored completely, afaik no staff even commented on it. Pretty weird, I mean, why would you ask people to vote on feature requests if you're going to ignore them anyway.
Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential
#198The problem with Evernote (and most of desktop apps) is that, it requires a bunch of RAM and CPU usage to use it. (Can relate with Slack desktop app, or Github desktop app). Just like user/customer could blame your web app if it starts too slow. The same applies to desktop apps, too.
I don't know. I've it open all day, I'm editing plenty of notes because I'm preparing a seminar... it consumes 44.1 MB of memory right now, I just looked it up (running W10).
Slack, totally idle, oscilates between 225-250 MB for some reason - now this I agree is a resource hog.
What is your reference scale?
Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential
#199I tried using it years ago over the span of a couple months and found syncing to be absolutely atrocious. It'd delete pages of notes if they didn't exist on the other computer I was syncing to and then they were simply gone forever. Dropbox was getting huge around the same time. I started just saving my text notes in a dropbox folder. Never had any syncing errors, deleted Evernote, and never looked back. I'm sure the…
I'm in the same boat with the text files in a dropbox folder. I thought about just emailing myself notes to a notes-only account, but I'm not sure there much of an advantage there over Dropbox. Still, files in a folder checks all the boxes for me. Compatible with everything forever, can organize and reorganize as creatively as I want, lightweight, can search my notes and sort a bunch of different ways, and osx even supports tags.
Granted, this is a little clunkier on mobile, but for quick notes I use drafts which is the speediest note taking app I've found (opens directly to writing prompt, one button save or append to dropbox files).
Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential
#200I find it weird that no one is mentioning that this article is written by an EN competitor. I've been an EN user since 2010. Yes they have had some problems and I have even tried to jump ship (as recently as last fall when I gave DEVONThink a go). I keep coming back though. I've yet to find anything that touches it in terms of features and functionality. Only ones that come close are OneNote and Notion. OneNote is fi…
Every time I find a new Evernote competitor, I try it out. I keep thinking that it must be easy to top Evernote, which I have various complaints about. I'm always back to Evernote within a week. Notion and Joplin were my most recent attempts.
Could you please describe what you missed when you tried Notion and Joplin?