Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant • Hacker News Board

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#161

Post by nilliams » Sat, Jan 04, 2014, 2:32 PM UTC

jbrooksuk wrote: post #122

amboar wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may sound a little batty and is perhaps off-topic, but some time ago I bothered to do an unofficial upgrade of my galaxy s purely so I could install the Woolworths (Aus supermarket chain) Android app. It has the ability to create and store multiple shopping lists, and to sort lists by aisle for the store of your choice. Best feature for ninja strikes; get in and get out with maximum efficiency. I hate shopping.

Oh man, you've touched a nerve. Being in the UK, Woolworths has shut down :( I loved that chain. Pick-a-mix for the win. Tesco has an app which tells you the aisle and which side to look on as well. It's pretty cool, but last time I used it, it was quite clunky.

Before you book your Aus plane ticket, you may be saddened to know the UK and Aus Woolworths are completely unrelated [1] and very different beasts :(

The Aus/NZ ones are much more like supermarkets, I went to one in NZ and sadly found Pick-a-mix was not a focal point at all.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._W._Woolworth_Company

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#162

Post by benrapscallion » Sat, Jan 04, 2014, 2:35 PM UTC

tempestn wrote: post #67

I really hope Evernote's take-away from this is that they need to scale back development on all their auxiliary stuff - hello, food, whatever, as well as all but the most critical feature requests, and focus as much as possible on making the core experience bulletproof. I would _hate_ to have to give up Evernote, but like others here, am extremely apprehensive about the possibility of losing data. One stop-gap they m…

Not to mention the app UIs change every week. For example yesterday they added smileys to Skitch. It is utterly frustrating that every time I open the Evernote app or Skitch app to use it, the button I am looking for has disappeared and another button has taken its place.

Does any Evernote alternative have OCR? That's the only feature keeping me using it.

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#163

Post by jasonlotito » Sat, Jan 04, 2014, 2:37 PM UTC

ethnomusicolog wrote: post #98

bdwalter wrote: post #84

I have been a loyal Evernote premium payer since 2009, and using it even longer. For a long time I recommended it to friends but since have stopped. I have developed some concerns with it over the years. 1. Fear of data loss... it's probably the largest part of my mistrust of all these dang cloud services that want to control/own me or otherwise lock me into their service. I run a 99.999% uptime, extreme scale, SaaS…

I have never used evernote, so I can't say anything about your use case, but wrt point 2, you should give http://workflowy.com a try.

What is Workflowy? The page is just asking for me to signup without providing any details on what it is, and then there is a bunch of people saying how great it is.

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#164

Post by chris_wot » Sat, Jan 04, 2014, 2:40 PM UTC

panzi wrote: post #155

I don't quite understand: He does not want the Evernote staff to be able to read his notes, yet he uses Evernote? The notes are NOT encrypted by a key only the user knows! If that where the case the browser version and search could not work. Any Evernote admin can read your personal (sensitive) notes anyway.

Except that support people may not have database access. I certainly wouldn't be happy if it added unguarded content into the logs and they got me to email it to them!

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#165

Post by democracy » Sat, Jan 04, 2014, 2:46 PM UTC

Any enterprise that grows to a certain level becomes slow and lame it is a fact you have to accept. Until you are a fat account your bug reports do not matter. I do third level support for my financial client and some very nasty and obvious (and easy to fix!!) issues are coming from small people and are put to backlog and never even looked at until someone big outside or important inside comes across it. It is so disappointing and demotivating but I am tired of fighting it and they pay well for not fixing anything.

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#166

Post by eli » Sat, Jan 04, 2014, 2:54 PM UTC

medius wrote: post #90

farnsworth wrote: post #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 use nvALT ( http://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/ ). It's a Notational Velocity fork that syncs with SimpleNote. Since it saves the notes in text files, I have put them in a Dropbox folder. The notes directory is itself a git repo which is committed every hour with a cron job on my laptop. It's actually working out pretty well. I have double backup (Dropbox and Simplenote) with infinite versions through Git. If…

I don't think it's a good idea to store a .git folder in Dropbox. Dropbox doesn't know how to resolve conflicts deep in git internal files and will break your repository.

I love nvAlt though. Been using it for years and never had any data loss.

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#167

Post by keithpeter » Sat, Jan 04, 2014, 3:00 PM UTC

"Mac’s ‘helper’ — an official mini app that’s meant for jotting down notes without having to switch to the hulking beast that is the desktop application."

This set buzzers off in my (perhaps simple) mind. Is this feature creep? I'm a physical notebook and 'one big textfile' person myself.

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#168

Post by mosselman » Sat, Jan 04, 2014, 3:02 PM UTC

"To say this post pains me would be an understatement. More than any other technology, Evernote is part of me, having evolved from habit to instinct over several years and nearly seven thousand notes. "

This is the kind of stuff that makes me not want to read what you have to say. Come on, what you are saying is car ad bullshit.

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#169

Post by lmuszkie » Sat, Jan 04, 2014, 3:04 PM UTC

tempestn wrote: post #67

I really hope Evernote's take-away from this is that they need to scale back development on all their auxiliary stuff - hello, food, whatever, as well as all but the most critical feature requests, and focus as much as possible on making the core experience bulletproof. I would _hate_ to have to give up Evernote, but like others here, am extremely apprehensive about the possibility of losing data. One stop-gap they m…

Phil: "We have independent teams building all the different versions. They compete with each other to see who can make the best version. They steal each others idea and they leap frog each other. We don’t have consistency as a goal. There is no goal to make different versions of Evernote consistent with each other. Cause I think what happens if you make consistency a goal, you wind up achieving it though mediocracy. Like you achieve consistency by having everything equally crappy." " rel="nofollow">http://thisweekinstartups.com/thisweekin-startups/phil-libin...

When I heard Phil talk about this at SXSW (as part of his talk about making Evernote a 100-year startup, I believe), I thought it was neat. But I wonder if this strategy is undermining reliability.

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#170

Post by quinndupont » Sat, Jan 04, 2014, 3:06 PM UTC

I hear these comments (and all the HN ones), but my use-case changed a long time ago: Evernote is now (just) my digital "junk drawer". Not high praise really, but it performs this job well. Really important stuff never goes in there, but all the little bits that I would lose otherwise all end up in there, only loosely categorized in a couple of notebooks with a couple dozen tags.