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Why Evernote failed to realize its potential (2021)

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Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential (2021)

#151

Post by c-smile »

mjburgess wrote: post #131
c-smile wrote: post #29

Except of few ideological mistakes, I would say, quite a lot of time was wasted on doubtful technical decisions ... One year was wasted on trying to make it as WPF application, .NET all that ... 5, if not more, years were wasted on making it work as Electron'ish like application (CEF was integrated). Evernote is a typical companion application - the thing that sits in tray and pops up as quickly as possible when need…

> Premature Optimization Is the Root of All Evil Means don't drop down to asm to save a few cycles. It doesnt mean "dont fill your 10fps GUI app with crap". Today, it more or less should be killed-off as a phrase. There isn't anyone optimizing anything, let alone "prematurely"

It could be interpreted that way too.

But usually managers interpret it this way: let's mold it now from that pile of shit and firewood and think about concrete foundation later. VC driven development they say.

It makes sense in some cases of course. But not in cases when concrete foundation is the cornerstone feature of the application. That kind of application shall serve users during whole their lifetime. And so application core shall not rely on particular OS and its features.

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential (2021)

#152

Post by bsnnkv »

badtension wrote: post #148
bsnnkv wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kindle-only right now as it's the biggest piece of the pie and what I use personally, but let me look into the KOreader highlights storage format and see if I can hook you and the other KOreader users with something.

Can you summarize how it works? You highlight something on kindle and it gets sent to your online db for storage?

You make your highlights on a physical Kindle or Kindle app as usual, and then go to https://read.amazon.com, select the book that you want to import the highlights for and right click to import them.

There are other services available that will take your oauth login details for your Amazon account and spin up something like Selenium on their end to scrape all of https://read.amazon.com after logging in on your behalf, which is a bit more like what you're describing (it's not instant, but scheduled), but in my experience this sacrifices a lot of flexibility (deciding which books you want to import highlights for) and reduces the quality of the content in your data store over time. The other downside of this approach is that you need to reauthorize the service every couple of weeks or so.

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential (2021)

#153

Post by pradn »

mjburgess wrote: post #131
c-smile wrote: post #29

Except of few ideological mistakes, I would say, quite a lot of time was wasted on doubtful technical decisions ... One year was wasted on trying to make it as WPF application, .NET all that ... 5, if not more, years were wasted on making it work as Electron'ish like application (CEF was integrated). Evernote is a typical companion application - the thing that sits in tray and pops up as quickly as possible when need…

> Premature Optimization Is the Root of All Evil Means don't drop down to asm to save a few cycles. It doesnt mean "dont fill your 10fps GUI app with crap". Today, it more or less should be killed-off as a phrase. There isn't anyone optimizing anything, let alone "prematurely"

> There isn't anyone optimizing anything, let alone "prematurely"

Yes, but in a slightly different way than one might think at initial read of this. Most of the performance choices for a user-facing application have been made by the time the language and UI framework are decided. And these are just chosen out of inertia, to conform to a company standard or to use what you already know.

There's little one can do to make a WPF or CEF application super responsive.

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential (2021)

#154

Post by mcherm »

diveandfight wrote: post #145

Not seeing many mentions of Simplenote. Does anyone else find it sufficient (syncing, web-app, tags, search, *no-payment)?

Yes. It provides exactly what I need: text notes, reliably saved to the cloud, which are searchable. Being free ($) is a nice bonus but not required; being not-free (open source) a minor negative.

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential (2021)

#155

Post by speedgoose »

mc32 wrote: post #100

When people start going from EverNote to OneNote, that's an indication you've one-upped Microsoft in terms of un-usablity. Not to say all MS products are bad (Office is good) but the well-berated Teams is an example of a monstrosity that should be more usable.

Some people enjoy OneNote, it may not be bad.

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential (2021)

#156

Post by badtension »

bsnnkv wrote: post #152
badtension wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you summarize how it works? You highlight something on kindle and it gets sent to your online db for storage?

You make your highlights on a physical Kindle or Kindle app as usual, and then go to https://read.amazon.com , select the book that you want to import the highlights for and right click to import them. There are other services available that will take your oauth login details for your Amazon account and spin up something like Selenium on their end to scrape all of https://read.amazon.com after logging in on your beha…

Ah I see, initially I thought it was something like a plug-in for kindle and it just does this automatically but I guess they don't allow such things.

Thank you, I am currently struggling to navigate in the world of RSS feeds, bookmarks, notes, reminders and everything else. I will check your app out if you don't mind.

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential (2021)

#157

Post by pradn »

Baeocystin wrote: post #101

I am grateful for whichever Googler who has managed to keep Keep up, running, unworsened and uncancelled over the years. Sometimes a product is enough as it is, and man does the modern software world have a problem with recognizing that.

Keep is my favorite Google product. It opens instantly on iOS, makes it dead easy to create notes, and has a good search feature. It's easy to access on the web since I'm always logged into my Google account anyway. I find iCloud's web presence a bit finicky b/c I have to usually log in again every time.

A wishlist for Keep: * An API. I'd love to use Keep as a durable data store for all my notes. I want o be able to dump snippets collected from a Chrome extension or a PDF reader in there. Their current API provides just a few enterprise access knobs, and not the full data-plane API I'm asking for. * A better search in the sidebar companion app they have for Gmail, Calendar, etc. For some reason, search in the Keep sidebar doesn't return the same results as with the main Keep web or iOS apps.

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential (2021)

#158

Post by D13Fd »

SUPERSLEDZ wrote: post #27

Still looking for viable replacement: * Joplin had some issues I've checked year ago. * Apple notes while I have iPhone there's no Windows app. * OneNote is just trully horrendous app. * Obsidian just can't convince myself. I'm forcing myself to use it work, while it works, it's not something I enjoy doing. * Notion is odd, everything is a block and sometimes formatting is just meh... * Google keep is just simple not…

Ulysses is great but similar to Obsidian (and I like Obsidian better personally).

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential (2021)

#159

Post by bityard »

SUPERSLEDZ wrote: post #27

Still looking for viable replacement: * Joplin had some issues I've checked year ago. * Apple notes while I have iPhone there's no Windows app. * OneNote is just trully horrendous app. * Obsidian just can't convince myself. I'm forcing myself to use it work, while it works, it's not something I enjoy doing. * Notion is odd, everything is a block and sometimes formatting is just meh... * Google keep is just simple not…

For the people who like self-hosting web apps and a minimal wiki-like interface, I wrote Silicon: https://github.com/cu/silicon

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential (2021)

#160

Post by mjburgess »

pradn wrote: post #153
mjburgess wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Premature Optimization Is the Root of All Evil Means don't drop down to asm to save a few cycles. It doesnt mean "dont fill your 10fps GUI app with crap". Today, it more or less should be killed-off as a phrase. There isn't anyone optimizing anything, let alone "prematurely"

> There isn't anyone optimizing anything, let alone "prematurely" Yes, but in a slightly different way than one might think at initial read of this. Most of the performance choices for a user-facing application have been made by the time the language and UI framework are decided. And these are just chosen out of inertia, to conform to a company standard or to use what you already know. There's little one can do to ma…

I'd be interested in seeing if there's a YT video out there of a WPF expert doing just that.

It might be a matter of hacking-in a caching layer or something, but it feels like probably more things are possible than people think.

A framework is just code, and you can pick-and-choose.

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