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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)

#181

Post by chewz »

thecodrr wrote: post #56

Shameless plug but for the past 2 years we have slowly been working to replace Evernote with Notesnook [1]. Sounds weird to say "replace Evernote" when Evernote is absolute shit (no offense) but one of the main reasons we went this route is because Evernote did one thing right: It made personal note taking approachable & actually fun. Nowadays, a lot of the modern note taking apps (Notion, Slite etc.) are focused on…

Expensive, 5 fold the price I paid for Evernote last year (Evernote used to give very generous discounts). For Electron app on macOS. Which could vanish moments notice....

I don't feel tempted.

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

#182

Post by chewz »

rcarmo wrote: post #17

It failed because it turned the app into bloat and killed multi-device syncing. Most of the decisions made regarding product features were user-hostile not just to the free tier, but also to paying users who did not want the "features" they kept pushing out.

> It failed because it turned the app into bloat and killed multi-device syncing.

I disagree.

I have came back to paid plan last year and Evernote works really well on Mac (except slow startup, but that has also improved over last year), quite well on ChromeOS (in browser)... Evernote web capture extension is superior to everything else I have tried especially behind paywalls.

Evernote works so well, and it is quite polished and stable. So much that it had became base for my daily workflow which is mostly journaling with lots of attachments..

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

#183

Post by cudgy »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #169

Seems to me it has the same issues IoT does: too many walled gardens, not enough open interop and standards. At some point we'll just start recording our entire lives. Security, storage, indexing, access-from-anywhere, and autotagging will be the keys. Anyone working on that?

The CIA?

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

#184

Post by prometheus76 »

thecodrr wrote: post #173
prometheus76 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one feature I loved in Evernote (when I was using it as a paid customer a few years ago) was that I could upload a pdf and it would be indexed for search. I ended up using Evernote as an extensive pdf library with very rapid search of all my pdfs. Does notesnook offer anything like that?

> Does notesnook offer anything like that? No, and the main deterrent for this is our commitment to keeping everything E2E and client-side. Something like Tessaract or Paddle might work for OCR but I haven't looked too deeply into it.

I have been using ocrmypdf to do it on my own computer, but creating a searchable index of all my pdfs is either very time-consuming or requires me to pay for Adobe Acrobat Pro, neither of which has been very appealing. I've been trying to find a way to upload pdfs that already have OCR embedded (or as a separate text file) and have the OCR text indexed for search across all of my pdf collection.

Thanks for responding to my question. I wish you success in your efforts.

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

#185

Post by viig99 »

FabioFleitas wrote: post #87
productman1 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once companies hire Product Managers, it is usually downhill from there in 80% of cases. The problem is that the PMs are incentivized to deliver features, even if that is not the right thing to do. See: Postman.

This is not necessarily true. PMs are incentivized to use product as a means to grow the business. This usually does manifest itself as delivering product features - but it can manifest itself in other ways. Ultimately product managers are tasked with discovering how to grow the product areas they are owning. Great product managers will work closely with users to understand their needs to refine & grow the product. E…

You are defining an exceptional Product Manager not the norm.

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

#186

Post by pantulis »

nicwolff wrote: post #111
baby wrote: post #20

Honestly Apple Notes works really well. It doesn't have much features, but its simplicity should be the baseline of any note taking app

At this point it works really well as an Evernote replacement , including automatic OCR and search of scanned files – and it titles the note from the top of the OCR text, which Evernote never got working.

Syncing is not as great as Evernote, for all the CloudKit prowess. I tried to import my 22k-ish notes from .enex dumps and somehow it managed to display different note counts on all my devices.

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

#187

Post by lukewrites »

What got me hooked on Evernote was its web clipper. It did a great job of grabbing elements from webpages, retaining (or not!) their formatting. This made them easily searchable and nice to read, too. I used this to grab individual forum posts for things I cared about.

I would happily pay for a subscription because of the amount of legacy data I have in there, but $90/year seems silly, my usage dropped way off once they restricted the number of devices, and at this point there are OSS options that are about as good. I probably should hire someone of fiverr for $90 or less to export/import my data.

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

#188

Post by arcbyte »

SUPERSLEDZ wrote: post #45
arcbyte wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of notes do you take? I've used OneNote for like 12 years now I think and I love it. It's where my school notes are and every note I've taken in my career since then. My personal diaries and life notes. Everything is in it. I've been looking at Obsidian as well because I like the idea of self hosting but aside from that I've never seen a reason to leave. So back to my question, what kind of notes do you tak…

It's general notes. Some of them are TODOs, sometimes screenshots with notes, few with basic tables. Nothing extraordinary. I absolutely hate Onenote due to how it looks and forcing you to place a note on your note page to make a note :D

The note in note thing took some getting used to in the beginning. I didn't like it either.

I don't just type notes, though. I do LOTS of handwriting as well, and LOTS of diagramming. In that context the floating text/note boxes are really, really useful. I'll have a single note with a diagram in it and several explanations floating around. Or I'll have a vertically scrolling note alternating between text, pictures, and diagrams. The way I use OneNote has made the note in a note thing really useful.

But every now and then when I'm just typing some quick info out it gets in my way. I just have all the context of it being a useful feature to make me tolerate it.

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

#189

Post by tenpies »

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…

> Except of few ideological mistakes, I would say, quite a lot of time was wasted on doubtful technical decisions ...

Not just technical, but remember when they expanded into physical products that made no sense? I don't mean the handful of scanner implementations - those made sense even if they were made obsolete. The notebooks with "smart" scanning were okay at the time as well, even if they quickly became obsolete too

But I mean stuff like backpacks and socks.[1] That never made sense to me.

I kind of wish Apple had never made iPod Socks, because then we could have a very good indicator of sock-selling as a sign that things will not end well.

Other socks I have around: Snap, Yak, a handful of defunct delivery apps.

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[1] https://twitter.com/mlevchin/status/281668296628129792

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