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Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

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Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#201

Also i know, at least for me, that when i find myself wanting to take notes most is whenever its a spur of the moment kind of idea that i dont want to lose. In that kind of scenario, i find that a small notebook and pencil is still superior to an app simply because i don't have to think too much about the process of getting myself into a position where i can actually record the idea. Its just too hard to get into the…

After over 30 years of Franklin Planners, Apple Newtons, GTD, Sharp Wizards, Ecco (how I miss you), Field Notes, and a laundry list of others I have forgotten, I believe I have found the Holy Grail: a combination. Leuchtturm 1917 notebook for the bullet journal, Bear Notes on the Apple devices, vimwiki for heavy lifting on "real computers".

Most of my time is spent in the paper journal for day-to-day. I use the Bear Notes complication on the Apple Watch to take a quick transcribed note that will probably end up in the paper journal. I also use Bear for shopping lists and checklists that I keep on the phone. And then for project notes, lab notes, anything worthy of an outline, or anything I don't want to hand-write or fiddle with on a phone, I use vimwiki. (I'd use Bear, but I have a Windows desktop at work, and Bear is Apple-only.)

To put it another way, there are three tiers: 1. Hand-written, used most frequently day-to-day.

2. Digital Lite: Bear for quick notes, or reference when not at a desk. Don't particularly care about long-term persistence of these. If persisted, often goes in #1 ('do taxes next week').

3. Digital Industrial Strength: Long-term storage, and long form documents.

Trying to squeeze it all into one do-it-all tool became a fool's errand, IMO. Sometimes I need to just hammer a nail, sometimes I need to split wood; one hammer won't do both.

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The moment I switched from Evernote to Onenote was the time EN screwed up the formatting of one of my very important ornate lists. To make things worse, through an unlucky combination of keystrokes I deleted everything I had in my note, only to find that version control was a Premium feature of Evernote. I promptly used the free "Recommend to a friend" 1 month trial to recover my note and used the importer to move ev…

Look at this thread on the Evernote user forum. It's been running from 2013 to 2018 about how Evernote handles list formatting. https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/41948-why-is-formattin... If this just worked, if they could just make it so I can copy a bulleted list in Evernote and paste it somewhere else without the formatting going bananas, I would have stuck with it.

Precisely this. I use lists to structure my thoughts, and the fact that Evernote couldn't handle basic continuity for nested ordered lists turned me off of it completely.

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#203
post #14

I 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…

Is there a way to make notes on a phone and save to dropbox? Sounds good but I"ve never tried.

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me and the other guy. I am Victor Grishchenko, PhD. At the time, we had a CRDT based sync engine which we white-labelled to Yandex. We had been eager to work with Evernote cause all their sync issues have been very clear to us. These days, even Apple Notes syncs with CRDTs... at the time, it was cutting-edge. P.S. Please never let me feel that my response is more polite than necessary.

I'm intrigued by your P.S. Mind expanding on why?

Not OP but I think that may be a way of saying, in effect, if one person is being more polite than the other, then they might feel like they are being "more polite than necessary". So his P.S. is saying "please match my politeness level", or, possibly, "You are being impolite, compared to me. Fix that" in an oblique manner.

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no Mac version of OneNote. There is only a Mac version of a thin client for OneNote on OneDrive.

Is this not the full version? https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/microsoft-onenote/id78480155... It's not quite as feature complete if you're not using Office, but it's still pretty handy.

It cannot save or open local notebooks. That's beyond "not quite as feature complete." It's a thin client for a web app.

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#206

Also i know, at least for me, that when i find myself wanting to take notes most is whenever its a spur of the moment kind of idea that i dont want to lose. In that kind of scenario, i find that a small notebook and pencil is still superior to an app simply because i don't have to think too much about the process of getting myself into a position where i can actually record the idea. Its just too hard to get into the…

>navigate to the app, wait for it to load up, press the + button, type in the idea using your thumbs, write in a title, save it, shit the app just crashed, load the app back up, great my idea wasnt saved, guess ill try writing it again, damn it i wish these notifications would stop popping up and pinging me, uhhh crap what was the clever angle to my idea again? Damn it.

This is like the black-and-white scene in an infomercial in which a person dramatically fails to perform a simple, everyday task.

If using an app is truly that hard, use a different app.

I have an "email to self" app on my phone. One tap and it opens my email app with my personal email address pre-loaded. Then I write whatever in there, or use voice dictation, and hit send. Syncing, backups, distribution to all my devices - all taken care of already because it's email. Fancy stuff.

What it sucks for is any idea that is better explained or formulated with a drawing. For that I use paper. When I'm done, I take a picture with my phone, and then it gets synced to the cloud.

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#207
post #100

Does anyone have a solution for notes that include equations? I don’t want to spend the time on LaTeX for simple math notes for myself. Something that I could just type in “sum” and a summation sign would appear?

I use GitLab for almost everything. They've got pretty nice LaTex support (via KaTex I believe).

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#208
post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Search in Evernote can also use metadata. So if you jotted down something you wanted to remember while you were on vacation and now you can't recall what that was, you can search for all the notes you created in Ibiza.

Is that useful? You already get date created/modified in every OS. Shouldn't be hard to figure out when you were in ibiza and sort your notes folder by date.

It is for me. It saves me a step searching me email for flight or hotel info to get the dates.

If it is a note I made on vacation last week, then I would do what you are suggesting. If it was for a note I made on vacation in 2013 (or was it 2014), then the metadata makes things much easier.

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#209

Also i know, at least for me, that when i find myself wanting to take notes most is whenever its a spur of the moment kind of idea that i dont want to lose. In that kind of scenario, i find that a small notebook and pencil is still superior to an app simply because i don't have to think too much about the process of getting myself into a position where i can actually record the idea. Its just too hard to get into the…

I still use pen and paper for some note taking.

BTW, I should plug the Cross Jotzone journal:

https://www.cross.com/cr_en_us/ac281-2s

I wanted a way to keep a pen tucked into the journal. And I didn't want a spiral-bound cheap one. Most of the journals I've seen don't have a way to store a pen.

Semi-ironically, I use a BIC Atlantis pen with it, because I don't like most Cross pens...

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#210
post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi! I am the co-founder of FYI and author of the blog post. We are not an Evernote competitor. In fact we integrate with it and many other document apps.

Oh I see. You’re self-identifying “problems” that your product can solve.

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