Live data from Hacker News

Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

jasonkincaid.net

1–10 of 253 posts

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#3
I remember the day a year and a half ago when I went out apartment hunting in a new town, looking at my notes on apartments in Evernote's Android app. It was a complex note, with lots of text in deep hierarchies of bullet points. At one point I tried to edit it, and after a few visual glitches, the text of the note disappeared. Then it synced, and there was no undo or history option in the app as far as I could tell.

I was able to get the note back by driving back to my hotel, retrieving my laptop where the note was cached, and opening Evernote while offline to ensure it wouldn't sync and wipe out that copy. Pretty frustrating. I've learned some tough lessons about cloud services and free stuff.

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#5

I've been meaning to move off of Evernote because their OSX client is just slow as all hell. Are there any alternatives, aside from something like Dropbox? Evernote's OCR implementation was/is really useful.

I've found Google Drive on Desktop/Android is pretty good. You get all the OT goodness with .gdoc and Quickoffice (from Google) is free for .docx editing.

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#6

I've been meaning to move off of Evernote because their OSX client is just slow as all hell. Are there any alternatives, aside from something like Dropbox? Evernote's OCR implementation was/is really useful.

Try Devonthink.

http://www.devontechnologies.com

No affiliation, just love the software.

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#7

I've been meaning to move off of Evernote because their OSX client is just slow as all hell. Are there any alternatives, aside from something like Dropbox? Evernote's OCR implementation was/is really useful.

I like OneNote. It has a nice web app and OCR (at least in the Windows client).

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#8

I remember the day a year and a half ago when I went out apartment hunting in a new town, looking at my notes on apartments in Evernote's Android app. It was a complex note, with lots of text in deep hierarchies of bullet points. At one point I tried to edit it, and after a few visual glitches, the text of the note disappeared. Then it synced, and there was no undo or history option in the app as far as I could tell.…

I'm hoping someone does a cloud service for note syncing using a code control back-end. I would really love to be able to look at the changes and rollback a change or delete.

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#9
Yeah. I lost substantial data in their web client.

All developers know that feeling when using an app: you're dealing with something a little half-assed. Evernote has always had that feel for me. Switching over to something else, preferably based on flat files using something like Markdown, is on my to-do list.

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#10
I don't mean to downplay this but seriously, make backups of all data that is important to you. Lots of things can go wrong everywhere and they do go wrong. Maybe it is a sucky app or maybe your own error -- if you have a backup, you don't need to worry.

I know this is no excuse for Evernote's app being at fault, but if something matters this much to you, you should not be trusting anyone or anything and the only way to stay safe is to have backups in multiple places. Might seem like a PITA but it is worth the effort.

Post reply on HN