Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 869 posts

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#181

Post by suzzer99 »

briHass wrote: post #147
bachmeier wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Evernote is a prime example of the pains of trying to convert free users to paying users for the same features I don't think so. They had plenty of paying customers. They claimed to be profitable for a long time (eg https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/evernote-rai... ). They had trouble with (i) implementing big price hikes, and (ii) a poor, bug-filled user experience. While that was going on, they were…

If you're on Windows, OneNote is almost impossible to compete with. Even though it's part of the Office suite, it's a free, stand-alone download. The phone apps are free, and you get 5GB of free storage. Then, for less than the cost of Evernote, you can get a O365 subscription and get the Office suite and 1TB of storage. Even though OneNote is basically a loss-leader, it's extremely powerful and flexible. It's been a…

Maybe I have simple needs, but iOS notes does everything I want.

1. Instantly synced between all computers and devices (yes I know I need to be in the Mac/iPhone ecosystem, but I happen to be in that anyway)

2. Create folders

3. Paste images

4. Fonts/bullets etc.

Apparently that's all I need. Anything else is a hindrance.

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#184

Post by fastball »

zwaps wrote: post #167
fastball wrote: post #73

Here is an (incomplete) list[1] of random note-taking apps that you can try if you are leaving Evernotes. Or you can try ours, which is based on Markdown (not open source) and a nested notecard format (not documents). Heavy emphasis on getting out of your way and just letting you write notes, though still with plenty of power if you need it. It has plenty of other cool features[2] and we're prepping for a pretty big…

I can't see on your features page whether you have a proprietary format and to which degree I can easily export my notes & data. Evernote being a cautionary tale, I think you understand why no one would or should move their notes to closed system. Being based on Markdown means notes are stored somewhere in the file system, like Obsidian?

The actual content of your notes (we call them cards) is Markdown and is stored as such, but the source-of-truth for the notes themselves is our servers (not in the file-system), as our priority is providing a seamless experience on all your devices (or anywhere with a web connection), so the app was actually originally built to be "online-only". It's become much more offline-friendly over the years (your entire card collection actually is stored on your system for offline use / search is entirely offline / etc) but offline is still not 100% there yet, which is what the upcoming 3.0 release will enable.

Within the app we provide comprehensive export options[1] (you can export as markdown or as the actual JSON representation of a card that we use under-the-hood).

We also have a public API[2] that allows you to do whatever you want with your cards at any time with an API key. Currently the docs for this are still only an OpenAPI spec (and not an entirely complete one at that), but again that is something we are improving with the 3.0 release / subsequent releases.

So I wouldn't really describe ours as a closed system in the sense that Evernote was. In the case that Supernotes is ever acquired / shutdown / other black swan event for users, you should just be able to dump your cards into something like Obsidian and it will work pretty well, as we almost entirely respect the CommonMark spec.

[1] https://docs.supernotes.app/en/articles/3068672-printing-exp...

[2] https://api.supernotes.app/docs/swagger

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#185

Post by tempestn »

Ah, that would explain it. I've run into three fairly major bugs in about as many weeks. It's like they're not doing regression testing at all, and rather than fixing bugs, they just keep rushing out new "features".

Problem is nothing else fits my workflow as well as Evernote does, but looks like I likely won't have a choice. Guess it's time to give Joplin a try.

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#186

Post by pjmlp »

killjoywashere wrote: post #162
briHass wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're on Windows, OneNote is almost impossible to compete with. Even though it's part of the Office suite, it's a free, stand-alone download. The phone apps are free, and you get 5GB of free storage. Then, for less than the cost of Evernote, you can get a O365 subscription and get the Office suite and 1TB of storage. Even though OneNote is basically a loss-leader, it's extremely powerful and flexible. It's been a…

I have tried to use oneNote a few times and it just doesn’t not compute to me. Some union of Notability + Paperpile would be perfect. I review proposals, peer review manuscripts, and read papers for my own research, all done with notes take with the handwritten scribble function over a PDF (which Evernote never got right). I have friends with OneNote and no matter what they explain, it does not make sense to me.

I was on your shoes around 2014 to 2018.

The client I was assigned to, used for everything on project management related documentation.

I couldn't understand how to approach it.

Then around 2019, in another project it suddenly made sense, after several approaches trying to make sense out of it.

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#187

Post by BaseballPhysics »

willdr wrote: post #177
BaseballPhysics wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BTW, just a second vote for Syncthing, here. It's basically my "move data around" Swiss Army knife. Need to get my Keepass database on my phone? Syncthing. Need to back up my reMarkable to my NAS? Syncthing. Need to replicate game saves between my PC and my Steamdeck because the game doesn't support Steam Cloud Sync (I'm looking at you, Subnautica)? Syncthing. I run Paperless as a document management system and use G…

If I can ask, what is Paperless? Google is strangely unhelpful.

It's a self-hosted document management system:

https://docs.paperless-ngx.com/

Think: replacing paper file folders with a digital system. Supports OCR, a variety of metadata, tagging and categories, etc.

My primary use case is taxes, but for any important legal or financial documents, I throw 'em in Paperless.

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#188

Post by Animats »

slg wrote: post #46
julianz wrote: post #7

I 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.

That announcement was in 2012.[1] Did they do it? I can't find any indication that they actually implemented it. Which was a good reason to get off Evernote a decade ago.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2012/06/21/tech/web/internet-data-everno...

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#189

Post by emodendroket »

Falkon1313 wrote: post #150
emodendroket wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Services that rely on local storage are vulnerable to their own data loss scenarios as well as being much less convenient.

Or much more convenient, given that the data is local and almost always available without the vagaries of an internet connection and remote server (except if/when all the bad local data loss scenarios happen at once and you need to restore from your cloud backup).

Maybe your circumstances are different but I find myself without any device capable of getting online at practically no time in a typical day, and in the few scenarios I do, keeping them on one device wouldn’t have helped.

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#190

Post by emodendroket »

system2 wrote: post #148
emodendroket wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Services that rely on local storage are vulnerable to their own data loss scenarios as well as being much less convenient.

If you can use a basic hosting with backup features, you can simply use a $5 droplet to sync almost everything possibly you can think of. Or OneDrive / Google Drive if you are using Windows based applications with databases. It is really not that difficult to keep data safe and backed up.

I mean, yeah, if for some reason you think Google Drive is safer than Google’s purpose-built notes application, that is an option.
Post reply on HN