Why Evernote failed to realize its potential • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#221

Post by barkingcat » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 5:47 PM UTC

ambicapter wrote: post #204

fabiandesimone wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

the wording is quite weird, since people can't really control other people's feelings so how am I to know that I've made them feel a certain way?

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#222

Post by tracker1 » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 5:48 PM UTC

lscotte wrote: post #124

acl777 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OneNote. It’s free on all platforms and handles your listed requirements.

I like and use OneNote, but "all platforms" isn't quite correct - there is no native Linux client, so I have to use the browser version, which isn't nearly as good as native versions.

While MS doesn't do great on Linux support, given their web push, I can usually find a decent Electron alternative for desktop linux. Of course it's more overhead than native, but a lot of MS's own implementations for tools are now electron based.

https://github.com/patrikx3/onenote

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#223

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 5:57 PM UTC

filesystem wrote: post #214

hnhnshah wrote: post #164

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.

This is a very strange content to post on your product's blog. What marketing advantage are you seeing from your blog, which seems to only contain this takedown article of a quasi-competitor alongside mostly clickbait posts ("These 10 tips will change your life!").

[deleted]

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#224

Post by analogmemory » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 5:57 PM UTC

happytoexplain wrote: post #71

I 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 switched over to Notion. They even have a tool now to transfer all your notes from Evernote. Feels simple to use but has some really powerful features.

https://www.notion.so

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#225

Post by klank » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 5:58 PM UTC

roelvdven wrote: post #173

gritzko wrote: post #156

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.

Why is your response so polite?

It's interesting, because I didn't find anything in the OP's response to be particularly polite. Sure, it wasn't impolite either.

With the exception of that postscript though. If it's as passive aggressive as it sounds then I'd consider it rather impolite.

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#226

Post by WaltPurvis » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 6:13 PM UTC

V-2 wrote: post #198

revskill wrote: post #30

The 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?

On my Mac it's using 708MB of memory and the CPU, which should be The memory use also grows for no reason. I have caught it consuming 20GB+ after a day or two. There's obviously an egregious memory leak and that's been true for at least a year; I can only conclude that Evernote is a crap company that doesn't care at all about bugs, even critical ones.

I have taken to only running Evernote on my desktop when I absolutely have to, and I try to remember to quit it so it doesn't gobble CPU and RAM, but sometimes I forget.

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#227

Post by mattrp » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 6:19 PM UTC

I have thousands of Evernote notes and have been an Evernote user since 2009. I’ve often thought of switching to Apple notes but I stick with Evernote. If I could change things, I’d make searching better and I’d find a better ways to create utility from old notes.

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#228

Post by maxsilver » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 6:23 PM UTC

lunchables wrote: post #132

taude wrote: post #69

I haven't seen too many people mentioning the onslaught of Microsoft One Note in developing a great note-taking tool, that syncs well in the cloud, and integrates with several of their other tools like Word and Outlook. Personallly, as a early Evernote User, once One Note came out for Mac, I switched. And then getting a job somewhere where we used Windows PCs, just solidified it for me, and I never found the need to…

I use Onenote because it comes with Office on our work computers, but it's still an annoying mess. The notes are in some kind of weird text box inside the page, which can scroll in weird directions? I don't understand it, maybe it's user error, but it feels clunky. Sometimes I open Onenote after rebooting and it just decides to not find my Notebook? Also, how come if I type a title and then hit the down arrow (and ag…

> The notes are in some kind of weird text box inside the page, which can scroll in weird directions? I don't understand it

It's meant for drawing and rich media, so you can type notes and draw/paint in the same document. And for that particular use case, if you own a Surface Pen or such it is kind of nice to use.

But I suspect the majority of people in OneNote just need to type out notes. I agree with you, and I wish OneNote had some concept of a "typed-only" note, that did away with the weird textboxing-layouting stuff.

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#229

Post by ukyrgf » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 6:36 PM UTC

kirubakaran wrote: post #200

jredwards wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

My issue with Notion is just picky little things that make it not fun to use. It looks great, is intuitive to me, and seems pretty powerful, so I want to like it. But, I hate having to be emailed a log-in code. Everytime it happens I think "oh yeah, this is why I never use Notion". I don't like that the desktop and mobile apps are just wrappers for the webview. As a user I feel like I have no control over anything. At least with Evernote and OneNote, I can literally see my database on my computer. With Notion, I am always aware that this is data on somebody else's servers. I've also had subpages completely disappear if I move their parent note, and I gave up on support and just accepted the loss.

Joplin looks good. I am going to give it a shot.

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#230

Post by sballin » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 6:38 PM UTC

gumby wrote: post #144

The web clipper is still the best I’ve seen (though also buggy, sigh). Do any of the EN alternatives have something like it? I’d be happy with Apple notes if I could restrict a search to a folder.

If you have Alfred, you can sort of do this with an extension I made: https://github.com/sballin/alfred-search-notes-app

The default search looks for folder names too, so searching "[folder name]" will bring up all the notes in that folder, and "[folder name] [note name]" will bring up the specific note in that folder, as of the latest commit a few minutes ago :)