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Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

jasonkincaid.net

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Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#211

Post by dlu »

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…

Hello! Evernote employee here, I first wanted to say thanks for posting. Its always good to hear from our users directly. I've been at Evernote for a while and it is still weird to see us show up on HN.

Anyways, I enjoyed your comments wanted to give my personal opinion & point of view for at least points 1 & 2.

1. You're right that scaling is very hard. If you want a closer look at it, we have a tech blog that even I can read and understand. https://blog.evernote.com/tech/ Perhaps the most reassuring thing I can say is that Evernote runs on Evernote. Err... maybe this is more clear, Evernote (the company) runs on Evernote (the service). We eat our own dog food as they say, which means I've lost count of how many water cooler conversations turn into "there's something weird that Evernote's doing on my computer..."

2. Our Mac and Windows apps let you export your notes into HTML (including resources). Both these apps run natively against local files so you could export if you were offline or if for some reason our service was down. We try to compete by making a great app and a great service. In fact, we don't make money unless we've done a good enough job for you to upgrade to Premium. It seems like your main concern is that your text-only notes export to HTML instead of plaintext, which is a fair point. One of the nice things HTML is that there are third party applications that can convert from HTML into a number of other formats, so we're relying on that if you want your notes in RTF or as a .txt or something else.

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#212

Post by niels_olson »

dlu wrote: post #211
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…

Hello! Evernote employee here, I first wanted to say thanks for posting. Its always good to hear from our users directly. I've been at Evernote for a while and it is still weird to see us show up on HN. Anyways, I enjoyed your comments wanted to give my personal opinion & point of view for at least points 1 & 2. 1. You're right that scaling is very hard. If you want a closer look at it, we have a tech blog that even…

> third party applications that can convert from HTML into a number of other formats, so we're relying on that

You should fix that. Skip RTF, DOC, whatever. Just plain text is fine. Everything else can handle it.

The world needs to wake up and realize plain text is the alpha and the omega of language. Do that right first and make sure it's the last thing to fail.

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#213

Post by niels_olson »

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 run a 99.999% uptime, extreme scale, SaaS business across multiple active/active data centers

Puppet Labs?

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#214

Post by duncanawoods »

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 tried Evernote a couple of times and always thought it was very weak especially when I couldn't even make a todo list. A good text editing experience is just just head-slappingly essential in a freaking note taking app.

I'm surprised that no-one has mentioned google docs. It has been continuously improving over the years. The features are very hacker friendly:

- cross platform - proxima nova font (yum) - in doc scripting interface - external api interface - stores a version history - top drawer real-time collaboration - searchable set of drive files - very reliable

Definitely very hacker friendly. My only complaint is lack of a good offline mode across all platforms but when online it ticks my boxes.

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#215

Post by nacs »

jasonlotito wrote: post #163
ethnomusicolog wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree, their pre-signup information is lacking. No screenshots, no pricing info, no "what the hell is it", just a signup form.

I signed up recently after seeing repeated recommendations on HN however and its actually very good and I've started using it quite a bit already. I'm not sure that I could explain it sufficiently here so I'll just say try signing up and give it a go (it didn't ask me to even confirm my email address so getting started was pretty quick).

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#217

Post by medius »

eli wrote: post #166
medius wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Since most of my changes to the notes happen on one device (my laptop), I have never had any conflicts. Using nvALT on different computers sharing the same notes folder through Dropbox does have some problems which the nvALT website recognizes as well.

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#218

Post by habosa »

Does anybody know a good way to export Evernote notes to a usable format (not HTML, ideally?)

I really want to move from Evernote to Google Drive, which serves 90% of my uses with a much, much better cloud service and interoperability. Unfortunately, most of my Evernote notes are mixed formatted text and images and I can't find a sane way to export them.

Ironically, even exporting to a .doc would work, since Google and many others are forced to offer MSOffice import capabilities.

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#219

Post by ansible »

atmosx wrote: post #109
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'm an evernote user too. I use it's very basic free account and I never had any problem. But I to edit notes rarely and don't depend on it. However, given your level of expertise not finding a note-taking solution, seems ridiculous. Doesn't feel like a real problem . I never understood how a note-keeping application can attract that kind of money Evernote does, but then again there are many things I don't understand…

Doesn't feel like a real problem.

It is and it isn't. I have a private server on the Inter-tubes, and keep files in sync via version control software on multiple devices.

However, having a nice, slick system, with support for multiple platforms (especially for phones) is not a trivial amount of work.

I'd like to use Evernote, but I don't trust them with this kind of data.

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#220

Post by marbletiles »

jasonlotito wrote: post #163
ethnomusicolog wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Essentially? An online outliner, with filtering by tags.
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