I’ve been a subscription paying Evernote customer since 2011 and use the service literally everyday. I hope they make it and the service can continue. The features I love the most are the ability to clip websites of interest as research and tag them the way I like for search. I also find that some websites I clip disappear over time. So my clipped copy be ones my own personal “way back machine” copy.
Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel
241–250 of 354 posts
Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel
#242Lots of people here mentioned they are looking for Evernote replacements. Here is my experience with this: Joplin[1] seems to be the best in my view. It's cross-platform, has decent sync capabilities, plus a web clipper. I've been using this for a while and have liked it a lot so far. I used Quiver[2] for a while when I used to run macOS, but moved away from it because it was macOS specific. It also had some features…
I use DevonThink 3 [1].
It's got rich text and Markdown support.
It also supports PDF documents as first-class objects. You can drag PDFs right into Devon and they get as PDFs, meaning that when you click on a note, you view the PDF.
The PDF support is top notch. The viewer is built into the UI, and also lets you open in tabs and new windows. Lots of markup tools right in the viewer. PDFs are indexed, of course.
Its rich text supports attachments, just like Evernote, but they're much nicer. Drag a GIF and movie into a text note and it becomes a live player.
You can drag URLs right into a folder and they'll come up as web pages or PDFs, depending. Then if you want to actually store the page/PDF, you can tell it to.
Its folder structure is much nicer than Evernote's. You just create folders and nested folders. None of this notebook nonsense.
It's got built-in iCloud syncing as well as syncing via other options (Dropbox, WebDAV, more).
You can run it local mode. Devon divides its data into "databases" which you can open and close. Databases can be encrypted. So, for example, you could store important private information (things like tax forms, government forms, 2FA recovery codes, etc.) in an encrypted database on a USB drive somewhere.
It has some weird features I don't use, but which some people might like. For example, "RSS feed" is a note type. Adding the feeds automatically ingests the RSS feed's items as new notes.
One neat feature is the inbox system that tracks what's read and unread. So you can just dump new stuff into the inbox for later categorization/deletion.
The search is great.
I also like that it's not opinionated about layout. You can change the layout a lot — to show the note editor or just the list of notes, for example.
Has a nice iOS app, too.
Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel
#243The Evernote detractors camp has grown to epic proportions in the past year, which is warranted, but I strongly disagree with the contingent of detractors who claim that Evernote's downfall was having the audacity to raise their prices, or limit the scope of their free version. So many of the customer rants I read are focused on this aspect, and it misses the point. Good products are entitled to charge a price for their use.
The reason Evernote is dying is because it wasn't a good product. Nobody could fix the long-term tech debt they accumulated, which grew to become regular bugs in the product. And rampant feature bloat.
There are a slew of able replacements to Evernote now available. The landscape of note taking software in 2019 is a very different place than it had been when Evernote started. For them to beat back companies like Notion (and imho Amplenote) would have required heroics on par with what it took to build the company in the first place. Simply getting sync right is itself profoundly challenging for a company with their legacy [1]. It's years of infrastructure decisions, and a consistent dedication to an unpleasant development task. Newer competitors (incl free options like Google Docs/Keep) were ready and waiting to do better.
[1] I've spent the last couple years trying to build an Evernote replacement. Sync for us is very tough, but must be a pit of despair for companies liked Evernote who built their note content out of HTML
Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel
#244The thing is - what made Evernote great at some point - take a picture of anything and forget it doesn't work anymore. You can't trust Evernote to have searchable archive anymore. Instead it's a convoluted app with lot of useless features. They lost their focus.
This is still my workflow today on iPhone and macOS. Works as well as it ever has for me.
Oh, yeah. You are able to snap a picture of a receipt and search for the amount and it will highlight the part of the picture with the amount? It was my workflow at the very beginning of Evernote. This was soon pay walled - breaking search if you were relying on it - and even when you pay highlights weren't working anymore. If it's working fine now, I might come back.
Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel
#245I used it for a bit, but OneNote is the 800lb gorilla that really is a great app.
Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel
#246I never had a use for Evernote, but I was always bitter towards them after they bought and gutted Skitch. Skitch was amazing
Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel
#247The Evernote detractors camp has grown to epic proportions in the past year, which is warranted, but I strongly disagree with the contingent of detractors who claim that Evernote's downfall was having the audacity to raise their prices, or limit the scope of their free version. So many of the customer rants I read are focused on this aspect, and it misses the point. Good products are entitled to charge a price for th…
What confuses me about products like Evernote and other CRUD services is - it's just a notebook app. How is it truly worthy of the army of coders, or the millions or billions in valuation that similar CRUD acquires?
It feels like there is a tendency of projects like this to grow too far, too fast, until they fail - dollar signs in their eyes obscuring a reasonable vision of their scale and potential, which is far more modest than they realise.
But then again, the ones that remain reasonable don't get in the news I suppose.
Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel
#248Earlier 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.
Google Keep updated itself and deleted all my data, everywhere, just saying.
Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
What I hate about the rush to subscriptions is the addition of cloud elements where they are not needed. A great example of this is a little addition I've been using to Mail.app, called MailTags[1]. I've been using it for years, religiously upgrading as I go, because email is my primary communications mode and I had a great workflow built around it. Now it has gone subscription and is storing metadata related to mail…
I had similar problem with 1Password. They wanted to move their model to subscriptions, so I decided to take another look at password managers and migrated to KeePass which turned out to be even better alternative (requires some manual setup, but I don't mind).
I also used to use 1Password and migrated to KeePass. The problem is that password management isn't a good fit as a service with the subscription model. It's completely unsexy (nothing wrong with that) and therefore doesn't have the "can't do without this" emotional factor that connects people to, say, their phone data plan, their gym membership, or even their Netflix habit. Password management is something that you set up once and hopefully forget about completely.
Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel
#250I used it for a bit, but OneNote is the 800lb gorilla that really is a great app.
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