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Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

jasonkincaid.net

171–180 of 253 posts

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#171

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.

Umm there is a video demo and links?

https://workflowy.com/uses/wedding_planning/

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#172
post #109

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…

The cool thing about note-taking apps is that you can stuff tons of lists of little things in there over years, and it's all searchable. Evernote lets you put in photos, snippets of content from webpages and so on. Just copy & paste, and then it's available (and findable!) whenever you need it. Eventually you have a huge amount of content in there which is maximally relevant to you.

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#173
I'm going to keep using Evernote but I'll factor in some of the complaints and horror stories by a technique called "backing up" or "exporting" my notebooks.

Evernote solves a great problem awesomely and at the moment for my personal use case. For now I'd rather focus on optimizing other things.

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#174

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…

[deleted]

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#175

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…

It's not exactly a replacement, but I use fargo.io for taking notes. It saves to Dropbox with OPML files: http://fargo.io

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#176

I'm a premium Evernote member, but I've also had lots of problems. The iOS app is slow and clunky. I hate using it. It crashes all the time, especially when I'm trying to take snapshots of a document with many pages (and all previous snapshots simply disappear). The desktop app is better, but they really could improve the writing experience. Pasting HTML blobs is impossible, and so is formatting my notes the way I wa…

As an iOS developer this pains me to hear. It's not rocket science to make a stable highly dependable app. I don't use Evernote or know anything about how they do things, but I track all of our apps' crashes on a daily basis (lately almost none) and do extensively performance testing before release. Our QA staff is awesome and lets nothing get by them. I don't understand how other companies can't do this as well. Our apps are complex, have a complex mobile API on the server side and do ecommerce. So I really can't understand why this is so lame.

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#177

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…

The built-in Reminders app on the iPhone is great for list-crossing-offing.

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#178
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try Devonthink. http://www.devontechnologies.com No affiliation, just love the software.

I agree. I've had multiple friends swear by Evernote and every time I tried, I'd get a few hours into it and find some annoying limitation. DevonThink gives me everything I need. They're a bit behind on having a good sync solution for iOS, but they've been actively working on it for a long time now and it should be coming soon.

I use DevonThink as well and love it... but I also don't need to sync between multiple devices. All of my dissertation sources, notes, files, etc are in DevonThink - love the tagging and search features, folder levels, etc. I'm able to quickly find, navigate, and even discover relations I didn't discover before. Also, multiple file types and I now have the PDF -> OCR stuff for older documents. I keep my footnotes/endnotes/bibliographic info in Zotero.

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#179

If you store data in a format that's not future proof, using software that's not open source, then you don't really get to complain when your data disappears. Especially if you're not storing the files locally and making regular backups.

If you are paying for it you do get to complain.

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#180

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…

Self managed encryption keys is not "hard" any more than any other secure web service. I can't imagine why you think that this would have any effect on features other than from a cost benefit perspective.

Linux support is fine, if you're willing to accept HTML5 and JavaScript executing who knows what in your browser.

If evernote can't make a good text editor with HTML5 and JavaScript then it proves that apps in the browser is a dead end. Text editor is basically, the "cost of entry" and if an entire team focused on that single feature can't deliver it after years, well... I'm not really surprised given the state of JavaScript (collectively ruined by Mozilla's lack of resources and Google's ill will) and HTML5 (collectively ruined by nobody giving a shit about the language before their own interests).

Given the crumbling of infrastructure of the web, I'm kind of surprised anyone still uses the internet at all for anything more important than facebook and tabloid news. Maybe nobody does?

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