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Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

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Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#231
post #197
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Seems it got it for OSX, iOS and Android in december. Feature request is from 2013. Still running windows at home.

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#232

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…

Same, sometimes pen and paper is just better for my needs. I keep flirting with digital pens. The idea is awesome, you write with a pen on paper and it's automatically digitized and backed up. (There's special markings on the paper to help the digitizer). In practice there's been some glitches, but in the worst case it's still paper and ink.

I tried a Livescribe Echo pen for awhile. It always felt kinda bulky in the hand, and there were some glitches. It also had audio recording, and probably the best feature was you could point at your writing and it would fast-fwd/rewind the audio to the moment in time that you wrote that word. Great for filling in gaps when taking notes. Livescribe tried to integrate with Evernote at some point. Seemed like a great idea, but either Evernote or Livescribe failed terribly on that integration. Lost functionality from the stand alone Livescribe app, and never gained the functionality of Evernote. Ultimately my pen fell prey to a failed OLED problem that many of those pens had.

Recently trying again with a Neo Smartpen. The first one had a firmware bug and after a few days it couldn't re-charge anymore. Customer service replaced it, and replacement seems fine. This pen feels much more like a regular pen. Power on/off is triggered by removing/replacing the pen cap, so I barely even notice it's not a normal pen. Digitizing quality has been solid. Not as many features as the Livescribe had, but the transcribing quality (OCR) is much better. (Of course, I'm comparing a brand-new Neo to a previous-gen Livescribe. Could be cool to check out the new version of Livescribe, too)

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#233
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.

no need to be on a quest to bring others down, he's building a company while you sit on your arse trying to take entrepreneurs down

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#234
post #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.

Drafts (iOS app) can do that. And it can save to Evernote as well.

But between Pinboard & Drafts, I don't use Evernote any more.

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#235
Evernote had (has?) five different client implementations:

1. Windows desktop

2. Mac desktop

3. iPhone

4. Android

5. Web

5 and 1/2. Mobile web

While I haven't worked there, I feel this must have created a huge burden on development. Any client feature has to be re-implemented 5 times! This must have made it very difficult to keep up with competitors that supported just 2-3 platforms.

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#237
post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 absolut…

Intrigued, I checked again. It's at 21.5 MB now. I wonder to what extent is the difference caused by platform implementation (Mac vs. Win), and to what extent by the content (admittedly my notes aren't media-heavy).

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#238
post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#239

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 like Foucault has risen from the dead, this thread.

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#240

I 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.

I was never an evernote power user, but I find Notion to be much more intuitive and preferable with two exceptions: Evernote's inline audio tool is really excellent. Being able to capture snippets lightning fast inline is crucial to my workflow as a musician. And Notion is slow on startup. Hopefully they become profitable enough to decide a native mac client is worthwhile.

In general, Notion has the same feel to me that Slack did when it first came out: Just the right balance of cutesy, thoughtful detail in the UX, but in a way that doesn't feel superfluous because the underlying abstractions are also very well considered.

Choosing the emoji icons for pages, being able to /page to make a new linked page inline, @referencing pages, the interchangeable table and calendar views... none of it is particularly novel, but they're the best I've ever used at making it feel effortless to compose.

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