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Evernote lost its CTO, CFO, CPO and HR head as it eyes another fundraise

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Re: Evernote lost its CTO, CFO, CPO and HR head as it eyes another fundraise

#151

Post by edanm »

I'm another one of the "long-time but unhappy Evernote users" club.

I've been using it for many years, and have a lot of stuff stored there. I don't know of a competitor that does everything I want, although it's entirely possible that I haven't searched enough, since switching costs are huge in this case.

That said, Evernote is pretty bad. I mean, the experience has gotten marginally better over the last few years, but there are so many random bugs, so many random differences in behaviour of the same features across different apps...

And I'm not talking about non-core features. I'm talking about things like tags, which is as central to Evernote as anything. Just as an example, there's an open bug that if you type in a dash "-" in a tag, it will auto-complete the tag. So if you have tags like "t- something" and "t- something else, writing "t-" will auto-complete one of them. Since many people use tags with a dash to structure their notes, this is incredibly annoying.

The bug has been open for 3 years.

Re: Evernote lost its CTO, CFO, CPO and HR head as it eyes another fundraise

#152

Post by jiggunjer »

doomrobo wrote: post #87
ardy42 wrote: post #85

I mostly use Evernote to save/tag interesting articles for later reference (it sure beats trying to re-find stuff via google). Any good cross-platform replacements for this use case? Especially ones that run as a desktop app and/or are self hosted? I want a solution I can stick with.

I use Zotero for the same purpose and it's been great so far: https://www.zotero.org/

How do you save websites on zotero, as pdf?

Re: Evernote lost its CTO, CFO, CPO and HR head as it eyes another fundraise

#153

Post by DrJaws »

edanm wrote: post #151

I'm another one of the "long-time but unhappy Evernote users" club. I've been using it for many years, and have a lot of stuff stored there. I don't know of a competitor that does everything I want, although it's entirely possible that I haven't searched enough, since switching costs are huge in this case. That said, Evernote is pretty bad. I mean, the experience has gotten marginally better over the last few years,…

I'm more annoyed that we cannot encrypt our full notes/account and they only offer selections of text from inside a single note.

Re: Evernote lost its CTO, CFO, CPO and HR head as it eyes another fundraise

#154

Post by icc97 »

irrational wrote: post #104
icc97 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still writing some notes in Evernote on my mobile, but on desktop I've just switched to markdown notes in a Dropbox folder. I have a vim plugin now that generates a html preview as I type. I think markdown is the most future proof technology for the moment because you can just use pandoc to convert it or most note systems will accept markdown as an input format. I'm not sure how tags would work in markdown, I gue…

What vim plugin do you use?

https://github.com/euclio/vim-markdown-composer

Requires a rust compile of the code in the plugin, but once that's working it works well.

Re: Evernote lost its CTO, CFO, CPO and HR head as it eyes another fundraise

#155

Post by icc97 »

irrational wrote: post #103
saidajigumi wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose the set of features I need covered include: - Web clipping. Evernotes browser plugins are pretty darn good here. - Notes with attachments (images, PDFs, etc.). Some of these are mixed-media notes, where text, images, and/or file attachments are mixed to create a comprehensive document about some topic. Others are "pure" attachments, e.g. "store this PDF where I can retrieve it by search". - Note taking. Thi…

So, you feel search in Evernote is good? Personally I've found it severely lacking. I can't tell you how many times I've searched for something that I know is there (and that I do find after manually looking for it), but search comes up empty.

Yeah I prefer ripgrep with a bunch of markdown files.

Re: Evernote lost its CTO, CFO, CPO and HR head as it eyes another fundraise

#156

Post by icc97 »

saidajigumi wrote: post #14
icc97 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still writing some notes in Evernote on my mobile, but on desktop I've just switched to markdown notes in a Dropbox folder. I have a vim plugin now that generates a html preview as I type. I think markdown is the most future proof technology for the moment because you can just use pandoc to convert it or most note systems will accept markdown as an input format. I'm not sure how tags would work in markdown, I gue…

I suppose the set of features I need covered include: - Web clipping. Evernotes browser plugins are pretty darn good here. - Notes with attachments (images, PDFs, etc.). Some of these are mixed-media notes, where text, images, and/or file attachments are mixed to create a comprehensive document about some topic. Others are "pure" attachments, e.g. "store this PDF where I can retrieve it by search". - Note taking. Thi…

> Note syncing, mobile and desktop. This gets a bit harder.

The dropbox text editor works 'ok'. It's not great, but it's clean enough that I can edit my markdown notes and they'll be synced with dropbox.

Re: Evernote lost its CTO, CFO, CPO and HR head as it eyes another fundraise

#157

Post by nagarjun »

It's sad because it's a genuinely good but rusty product. I've tried all other note taking applications - OneNote, Notion, Bear etc. and each has their own problems. I don't like OneNote's strict "notebook" organizational structure. Notion also forces you to put notes into notebooks, the interface is annoyingly slow, mobile app is just a web app that's packaged for your device, no Chrome extension, no handwriting support etc. etc. but it has a TON of amazing formatting features that I would love to see in Evernote. Bear, Google Keep etc. in my opinion are just toys.

To me, Evernote would be just perfect if it could combine the handwriting flexibility of OneNote with the advanced formatting features of Notion. Also, is it really that hard for the Evernote team to add templates?

Re: Evernote lost its CTO, CFO, CPO and HR head as it eyes another fundraise

#158

Post by koliber »

daveFNbuck wrote: post #136
coldcode wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$1 per download isn't enough to pay the bills. That's not much more than a 99¢ game. It means people don't actually value the product enough to pay for it.

I used to be a regular user. I never paid because they never gave me a reason to, not because I didn't value it. I'm not going to go out of my way to figure out how to give them money when I'm already getting everything I need for free.

Agreed.

The closest they've come was when they started limiting app access to the account to two devices. I almost pulled the trigger. If they lower it to one device, I will strongly consider paying.

There is one big thorn in my side though. It is their synchronization. Way too often I end up with two conflicting notes. They get sent to different places and they are not linked together. Before starting to pay, I will give on the of the Evernote alternatives a try, solely because their synch sucks. I understand that synch is a difficult feature, but at least try to make the post-conflict user experience more pleasant. Cross-link the conflicting notes at least.

Another problem for me is their text handling of lists. Eery so often, after I paste something in, bullet points appear or disappear. Things get merged in and are impossible to de-indent. It feels lie Microsoft Word from 1998.

Re: Evernote lost its CTO, CFO, CPO and HR head as it eyes another fundraise

#159

Post by joch »

the6threplicant wrote: post #142
joch wrote: post #141

I have been using Evernote for over 10 years now. The core note taking experience has never been close to good, but two things have made me stick by it through the years (powered through the nagging for business subscription) 1. Web clipper, which I use as a bookmark replacement, as well as for keeping copies of articles. Great for searching and knowing that I will always have a copy if a site suddenly disappears. 2.…

My biggest gripe with the clipper when used on pdf's is the lack of any metadata searching in the pdf for a title suggestion. I hate that I have to type in the title of the pdf as the title is usually "PDF - www.example.com".

I agree, but I'm ok with adding a title manually.

Speaking of missing features, what I do miss though is the automatic title naming based on current calendar events. It was a perfect way of tracking meeting notes, but that feature has been removed.

Re: Evernote lost its CTO, CFO, CPO and HR head as it eyes another fundraise

#160

Post by rb666 »

nagarjun wrote: post #157

It's sad because it's a genuinely good but rusty product. I've tried all other note taking applications - OneNote, Notion, Bear etc. and each has their own problems. I don't like OneNote's strict "notebook" organizational structure. Notion also forces you to put notes into notebooks, the interface is annoyingly slow, mobile app is just a web app that's packaged for your device, no Chrome extension, no handwriting sup…

Thanks, you made me switch to Notion. I've been hating Evernote since the start, the limit on 3 devices and the excruciating way it handles fonts, yuck. Notion looks perfect for me so far!
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