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Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

nytimes.com

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Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#231

Post by xseparator »

bobthepanda wrote: post #203
colechristensen wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They transitioned that to a paid feature because they had to keep the lights on. Small groups of engineers can do amazing things but in most companies amazing things worth doing run out and staff keeps growing. Salaries need to be paid and diminishing returns start. I have been thinking about the economics of being done with a piece of commercial software. Shut down feature additions, lower the price in regular incre…

The real problem is that everything is focused on becoming a thousands-strong workforce and a valuation of billions. IMO lot of software could be small or medium sized businesses making a small but steady profit. But the whole VC/startup culture has made this fundamentally unsexy.

So much THIS. Thank you for saying it.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#232

Post by [deleted] »

shakkhar wrote: post #220
e40 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Google Keep because I had sync issues with Remember The Milk on Android and wasn't about to continue paying them, but Keep is trash. It's a typical side project from a Googler. It's exactly what it was like when they rolled it out. Maybe a tiny feature here or there was added (I haven't noticed any), but it's a static service that is barely usable.

I use Google Keep every day. These are my requirements from my note taking app: - simple plain text note-taking; - available on android, iOS and web; - available offline and syncs (more or less) reliably; - full text search. I do not want more features on my note-taking app. I do not want it to go on steroid. Google Keep is not trash. It is perfect for the intended audience. You are just not part of that audience.

[deleted]

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#233

Post by eppsilon »

barking wrote: post #95
fjp wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$ curl [nytimes article link] > article.html Then open it. I wish this worked for the WSJ too, but it appears they're smart enough not to send the full article text in the initial request unless you're logged in

Thanks never heard of curl before today (!), I think it's something i need to install (i'm on windows)

IIRC curl works in PowerShell as an alias for Invoke-WebRequest

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#234

Post by awa »

larrywright wrote: post #184
Stratoscope wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OneNote does have a web clipper: https://www.onenote.com/clipper

It’s nearly useless. It embeds a screenshot of the page into a note. I don’t think anyone who works on OneNote has used a real web clipper before. Certainly not one as good as Evernote’s is.

There's an actual "Article" mode which cleans up the text and puts text in onenote (and not screenshot).

Disclaimer: Ex-MSFT/onenote engineer.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#235

Post by timlloyd »

jimmaswell wrote: post #163

Tangentially, what I want in a note/todo app is that the first screen will be a list of categories, like "car" and "shower". Under "car" would be a note I made that says "bring new SD card for dash cam". I'd look in "car" before heading out to the car, and see that note and remember to bring the SD card out to it. I'd habitually check all of these before doing anything, so I didn't keep forgetting things I needed to…

Check out an iOS app called Ikiru.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#236

Post by vbezhenar »

shakkhar wrote: post #220
e40 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Google Keep because I had sync issues with Remember The Milk on Android and wasn't about to continue paying them, but Keep is trash. It's a typical side project from a Googler. It's exactly what it was like when they rolled it out. Maybe a tiny feature here or there was added (I haven't noticed any), but it's a static service that is barely usable.

I use Google Keep every day. These are my requirements from my note taking app: - simple plain text note-taking; - available on android, iOS and web; - available offline and syncs (more or less) reliably; - full text search. I do not want more features on my note-taking app. I do not want it to go on steroid. Google Keep is not trash. It is perfect for the intended audience. You are just not part of that audience.

I've heard about Google Keep first time. And that means that Google will shut down Keep soon, it happened few times already. Prepare to move your data.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#237

Post by avip »

ljm wrote: post #210
bobthepanda wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real problem is that everything is focused on becoming a thousands-strong workforce and a valuation of billions. IMO lot of software could be small or medium sized businesses making a small but steady profit. But the whole VC/startup culture has made this fundamentally unsexy.

It’s the issue of hypergrowth or ‘blitzscaling’. Plenty of companies will deliver just as much, if not more, with a 30 person strong team, as they would with 600, or 10,000. But a thirty person strong team isn’t going to get a multi-million cash injection unless they plug it all into a swanky office and an ever-growing wage bill. I greatly admire Basecamp and it’s founders, DHH and Jason Fried, for completely bucking…

Whatsapp, possibly the exception that makes the rule, had $1.5B valuation and $50M vc influx with a tiny team.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#238

Post by PhasmaFelis »

Who is the target user for Evernote these days? I started looking for a replacement after it perma-deleted a hundred or so active notes because I emptied my recycle bin, and once I realized that OneNote was, for my needs, superior in basically every way, I never went back.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#239

Post by subsection1h »

komali2 wrote: post #123
SirensOfTitan wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard great things about Notion. Nothing beats emacs/org-mode + beorg on iOS for me though. beorg even has scheme-based scripting, although I haven't tried it out yet.

The orgmode hype I still don't get. I code full time in emacs and still don't get it. Maybe because all the use case blog posts I've found can be reduced to "you must discover a user flow for yourself." I can't even tell whether I should have more than one .org file.

Do you take a lot of notes? If so, what do you use to take notes? Some people don't take a lot of notes, and Org mode might not be useful to them.

My personal wiki includes several thousand .org files that are interlinked using hierarchical tagging. No other note-taking tool I've evaluated has all of the features and efficiency of Emacs and Org mode.

For example, Evernote doesn't allow users to enter tabular data and make calculations on that data, which Org mode supports. The suggested solution for Evernote is to attach a spreadsheet file. That's what I did with the various note-taking solutions I used back in the 90s. Now all of my small sets of tabular data are included in the same files as my notes.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#240

Post by muro »

ghaff wrote: post #152
muro wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Subscription is great for the company "selling", might be fine for other companies paying it, but I absolutely despise it as an end-user/private customer and will do everything I can to find an alternative (e.g. with a single-purchase license).

I don't have anything against a subscription if: - I use it regularly. (Which means I'll probably be upgrading to new versions anyway.) - The price is reasonable for the value - I can export my data in a form that's still useful/accessible once I cancel my subscription. The problem is that all those conditions are frequently not met.

And even if they are at the beginning, they can randomly be removed later. E.g. Adobe Lightroom, which I pay a subscription for, had the option of moving to a fully paid version (which was able to open data from the subscription). However now it's no longer possible and when (not if) I stop paying, I won't be able to migrate my catalog (=edits) anywhere, short of exporting all photos as tiffs.
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