I'm not familiar with Bending Spoons. Anyone able to give me a bit more context on what this will likely mean for the future of the product?
Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons
101–110 of 354 posts
Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't spoon-bending a "hoaxy" magic trick? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoon_bending
Yeah, maybe to young people that means "doing the impossible" but to me it means "tricking people into thinking you're doing something impossible" or "scam" for short.
Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Regarding #1, this is now an often touted recommendation, even by folks like Joel Spolsky whom I greatly admire, but I'm not sure it's the right lesson. For example, I know that Google (at least in the 00s) rewrote huge, major pieces of their infrastructure multiple times and did so successfully. While I agree that broadcasting out a message of "We're going to stop the world and add no new features until we do a grou…
> rewrote huge, major pieces of their infrastructure multiple times and did so successfully I think that's different from a user facing rewrite. I suspect while Google did its infrastructure rewrites, users didn't notice a difference. Additionally, Google probably had the resources to continue delivering features to users while the infrastructure was being developed. The problem with a front end rewrite is (a) things…
I guess my point is that there are right ways and wrong ways to do ground-up rewrites, and the fact that a lot of people do them the wrong way shouldn't mean the lesson should be to never do them.
Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons
#104I really liked Evernote. Yearly subscription instead of the monthly Netflix like prices that ever half baked app asks for these days. Integration amongst all my devices phone, table, various desktops. All nice. And no further dependency on Microsoft, Google or Meta. Product development stalled a long time ago though. I do hope this thing stays in the air, cause I got a lot of notes in there.
Yeah, was my favorite app for a few years, I was even a paying subscriber, but then thy started pushing adds for some group chat thing and other random stuff. And the webapp became almost unusable after a redesign to this "modern" information sparse style where you have to hunt around and click an excessive amount of times to get simple things done. I ended up moving over to Obsidian, and while I am not entirely happ…
I'm being so picky because I used Evernote for ten years and could conceivably use my next choice even longer. I can't believe I used Evernote for over a decade and used it to create thousands of notes. What a shame they destroyed it.
Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Unfortunately, it's hard to sell to individuals compared to businesses, and so that's where their focus went once they had VC money driving the ship.
Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Do you know if Notes performs the OCR on files that [are imported over from Evernote?]( https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205793 ) I have many hundreds (maybe low-thousands) of PDFs and images that I need to be able to access once in a blue moon, but when I need them Evernote's OCR makes it easy. I guess I could just try it out with a subsection of notes.
Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons
#107At 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…
Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
edit: HN won't let me reply so...
That sure is a lot of trouble just to grab a copy of my notes. This is something I do often enough that I don't want to have to go through two MFA prompts, and then another when the process is done. Not acceptable.
Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
> rewrote huge, major pieces of their infrastructure multiple times and did so successfully I think that's different from a user facing rewrite. I suspect while Google did its infrastructure rewrites, users didn't notice a difference. Additionally, Google probably had the resources to continue delivering features to users while the infrastructure was being developed. The problem with a front end rewrite is (a) things…
Google isn't the only example here. Heck, just look at the transition from Classic MacOS to OS X. I definitely think Apple would have been dead long ago if they said "A rewrite is too expensive/risky, let's just incrementally improve Classic MacOS". I guess my point is that there are right ways and wrong ways to do ground-up rewrites, and the fact that a lot of people do them the wrong way shouldn't mean the lesson s…
Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons
#110It seems like businesses like this should give fair warning to their users before transactions like this occur to make sure they don't have a better option than shutting down or selling out.
Evernote has tens of millions of paying users. It doesn't seem too far-fetched to believe that each user would fork over on average $50 (as an investment, presumably) to just freeze product development, fix bugs, and improve performance.
Put another way, I'm pretty sure Evernote could have raised hundreds of millions from their user base.
Why not try that approach? Are there regulatory issues that make it unfeasible?