I invested $25,000 into buying secondary equity shares of Evernote about 1.5 years ago. In January, I got an exit check back for $120 bucks after the sale to Bending Spoon :/
Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off
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Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off
#42And to think that at one point Evernote was THE note taking app. So much wasted potential.
On the other hand, it should be possible for software to be done. I have never used Evernote, but I am not sure how much innovation is required in the note-taking space.
Perhaps, but setting aside the philosophical point, Evernote was nowhere near "done".
Their 'new' client software (Electron-based, of course) never even achieved feature parity with their 'legacy' client software. The mobile app wasn't exactly screamingly performant, to put it nicely. Really basic core use cases, like creating a note, typing in a title and some content, tagging it with a keyword, and saving it, required a lot more clicks than it seemed to me like it should. Hierarchical tags, while technically supported, seemed like a weird add-on that never got full support. And Penultimate -- their tablet-centric app that stored data in your Evernote account -- hasn't been updated in several years; I'm actually impressed it continues to work.
There's plenty of room where they could have built new features, if they'd wanted to. Off the top of my head, I'd have liked to see Markdown support instead of their quasi-HTML WYSIWYG editor (some versions of the thick client had a subset of Markdown-like syntax but others didn't). Penultimate would have been great if it had on-device OCR / handwriting recognition, or even just a way of tagging specific pages or page-regions with keywords.
I think there's a lot of room in the notetaking space. I'm still waiting for an app that isn't a glorified text editor or a drawing program, but also doesn't lock your data into some unparsable binary format or obscure graph database behind the scenes. I want to take notes, using a pen, on a tablet, that might or might not be text, and then I want to annotate the shit out of those notes and keyword them and cross-reference them, and I want the whole thing to be searchable and I want the handwriting recognition to not suck, and I want all of this to be encrypted at rest and in transit, and I want native clients for all major desktop and mobile operating systems.
So, yeah, I don't think notetaking is done quite yet.
Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off
#43For the last 5 days I have been actively trying to cancel my Evernote personal plan. The site would break every time I navigated to manage my subscription or try and reach support. I guess that's one way to reduce customer churn.
I believe you can inform your credit card provider and have them freeze payments for the company.
Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Assume away, but to play devil's advocate, how much testing do you think is done on the close account procedures vs add new account and accept money from that account? i'll bet it's not even close to being even
I don’t accept that. If those procedures are failing, then someone should be getting 5xx alerts. Before they started failing, unit and integration tests should’ve been raising alarms. A site that remains persistently broken has a lot more wrong with it than just some software bugs.
Absolutely true, but cross reference: the new owning company is laying off Evernote's staff.
So in this case, yes, there is a lot more wrong.
Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off
#45I use Obsidian for note-taking, but Evernote for my "digital shoebox" of receipts, PDFs, photos of wine labels, insurance statements, etc. They are all quickly findable through a combination of OCR and tags. Does anyone have a good alternative for this use-case?
Apple notes. The ocr is pretty good.
Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off
#46I wonder how that 100 year guarantee is holding up? https://longnow.org/ideas/evernote-and-the-100-year-data-gua...
>Evernote CEO Phil Libin announced at the recent Le Web London conference that the company will soon set up a protected fund and include a legally binding guaratee that users’ data will be maintained for 100 years
That almost sounds like a threat to commit a crime in certain jurisdictions. A lot has changed regarding how we talk about data in the last decade.
Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off
#47Personal journey: I used to be a heavy user of Evernote, but encountered a bug that the developers were not keen on fixing promptly. It was then that I realized the importance of personal notes surviving beyond companies, apps, and formats. Quickly after, I switched to a collection of plain text files using org-mode markdown and have been happy ever since.
I've been doing the same for the past few years, but have yet to figure out a good way to sync things between my devices. Not that it bothers me too much, but sometimes I'd like to have that convenience.
Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
For anyone who may not be aware, Apple Notes can import Evernote .enex files. The process was mostly painless, and I’m glad to be rid of the Evernote dependency. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205793
While I happily sing and prance in Apple’s “Walled Garden” and have done so for over a decade, I feel uneasy about putting all of my notes in Notes with no easy export option.
You can AppleScript the contents out if you’re desperate, but there’s a SQLite database that you can pull the data from as well IIRC.
Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off
#49I invested $25,000 into buying secondary equity shares of Evernote about 1.5 years ago. In January, I got an exit check back for $120 bucks after the sale to Bending Spoon :/
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Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off
#50For the last 5 days I have been actively trying to cancel my Evernote personal plan. The site would break every time I navigated to manage my subscription or try and reach support. I guess that's one way to reduce customer churn.
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