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Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

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Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

#51
post #10
post #3

evernote was one of the programs that trapped me, it took some effort to finally migrate my data (I'm now using md files/ obsidian for mobile frontend synced with syncthing)

The final thing that has me trapped with Evernote is the very good OCR for both images and PDFs. The second I figure out a replacement for that which works great on Mac and iOS I am gone.

I think there are different apps that do this. Devonthink does and imports Evernote however many say it’s a bulky app that does a lot. I don’t feel that way but I like Devonthink.

Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

#52
post #26
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The final thing that has me trapped with Evernote is the very good OCR for both images and PDFs. The second I figure out a replacement for that which works great on Mac and iOS I am gone.

On ios this is now baked into Notes.app I use swiftscan because I've been using it a long time (same reason you use evernote) but the Notes scanner is pretty effective if Notes works for you.

On iPhone, Notes is excellent. In a browser on icloud.com it's terrible. I need it to work in a web browser because I do software development on Windows. Notes is not an option until the browser version works just as well as the mobile version. For now, I can use Notes for personal but not for work.

Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

#53

I learned three things watching EN snatch defeat from the jaws of victory: 1) There is almost never a case for a total ground up rewrite of your core product. Just don’t do it. 2) Don’t abandon the users who made you successful in the first place. They’re the ones who advocate for you and get your foot in the door. 3) real time google docs style collaborative editing is table stakes for this software category. Build…

Disagree on #3. Social & collaborative features are the bane of my existence. No I don't want to share all my scraps of information, no I don't want to let my friends know what I'm listening to, no, I don't want to publish product purchases I make to twitter. I think a better #3 would be: decide whether your audience is individuals or businesses, then build for that.

If you don’t want collaborative editing, don’t use it. I’m saying most users wanted it and started looking elsewhere when EN couldn’t deliver. It’s easier to add a lock on collaboration than to backfill later.

Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

#54
The only reason I've stuck with Evernote is because it scans all of my old paperwork and lets me search by the OCRed text. Without it, so many years of personal data would be locked in images I'd never have time to eyeball.

Please someone release me from this foul daemon by suggesting an alternative with this key feature.

Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

#55
post #50

At long last, Evernote takes an Incredible Journey to be broken down for parts by its new owner. Can't get any more fucked up than it already has been, it went from being an important part of my daily workflow to a place of pain. The rewrite is part of why my last graphic novel ground to a halt, I was using EN to collaborate on scripts with my partner and it is just agony to use any more. I cancelled my subscription…

Would some of the open-source alternatives fit the bill? Something like SimpleNote?

Org-mode, yo.

Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

#58

imagine being at the local tech happy hour and someone asks you where you work and you have to yell over the loud music "BENDING SPOONS, I'M A L3 SRE" ... "what?" ... "BENDING. SPOONS."

Bending Spoons is based in Milan so you would be at an aperitivo sipping a Negroni or spritz with not so loud music :)

Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

#59
post #41

I loved Evernote and was a paying subscriber right up until they changed their TOS to let their employees read all my notes to work on ad targeting. They backpedaled after a while but trust was lost, I cancelled immediately. I have no sympathy for their failure.

Similar experience here, it was a series of changes, none of which made my experience better and a lot of dodgy privacy affecting TOS updates that caused me to can my paid account.

They never really tried to re-engage me either, and have just continued on since then with a bare bones series of notes while I keep the critical stuff elsewhere.

Shame evernote was the first killer 'cloud native' app for me, the thing I couldn't do without once I had it.

Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

#60

At long last, Evernote takes an Incredible Journey to be broken down for parts by its new owner. Can't get any more fucked up than it already has been, it went from being an important part of my daily workflow to a place of pain. The rewrite is part of why my last graphic novel ground to a halt, I was using EN to collaborate on scripts with my partner and it is just agony to use any more. I cancelled my subscription…

I tried a few alternatives and landed on Apple Notes. It's blinding fast, and while it's not exactly feature-rich, it does everything I need while being seamlessly synced to the cloud and my devices.

I use Apple Notes because I realized that, for my needs, all the structure and organization that so many other note taking apps/services provide really just make things more complicated and isn't beneficial. Notes is simple, has one level of folders, and supports labeling. I'll almost never look at 95% of my notes again, but in case I do, I can just search by keyword and usually I'll find it.

My one gripe with Notes is that the search function really isn't all that great. Maybe I need to force it to reindex or something. I've found many cases where it doesn't find a note by a word that I know it contains. I really don't get why it seems that nearly all search functions are terrible in any given app. It would be nice if Apple improved the search for Notes, and it shouldn't be that hard to do given that it's just using SQLite under the hood.

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