Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant • Hacker News Board

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#191

Post by reeses » Sat, Jan 04, 2014, 4:38 PM UTC

lmuszkie wrote: post #169

tempestn wrote: post #67

I really hope Evernote's take-away from this is that they need to scale back development on all their auxiliary stuff - hello, food, whatever, as well as all but the most critical feature requests, and focus as much as possible on making the core experience bulletproof. I would _hate_ to have to give up Evernote, but like others here, am extremely apprehensive about the possibility of losing data. One stop-gap they m…

Phil: "We have independent teams building all the different versions. They compete with each other to see who can make the best version. They steal each others idea and they leap frog each other. We don’t have consistency as a goal. There is no goal to make different versions of Evernote consistent with each other. Cause I think what happens if you make consistency a goal, you wind up achieving it though mediocracy.…

This is the worst idea ever but it explains a lot. I had not heard this before, and it's enough to make me hedge my bets and start trying to export notes into mmd files in nested directories (which one cannot do at present with stacks) and use Mavericks tagging.

I would definitely call this an anti-pattern for cross-platform software.

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#192

Post by TomDavey » Sat, Jan 04, 2014, 4:40 PM UTC

michaelsbradley wrote: post #12

protomyth wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm hoping someone does a cloud service for note syncing using a code control back-end. I would really love to be able to look at the changes and rollback a change or delete.

What I'm using: org-mode + MobileOrg[1] + Dropbox, and a few times a day checking my .org files into a Bitbucket private repo. And it's all free! Though obviously you could use paid Dropbox and Bitbucket/GitHub accounts as well. Until fairly recently I used OmniFocus and Evernote, in conjunction with their mobile offerings, but I don't think I'll be looking back anytime soon. [1] http://orgmode.org/ [&] http://mobile…

+1 for Orgmode. Its wealth of features is astonishing. And it just gets better and better; the community supporting it and driving ongoing development is fanatically committed. Bonus: it comes with a pretty good text editor. :)

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#193

Post by uladzislau » Sat, Jan 04, 2014, 4:40 PM UTC

Evernote team, please make a usable bookmarklet for iPhone/iPad. A lot of people are clipping pages on their mobile devices and currenly the user experience is awful.

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#194

Post by Joeri » Sat, Jan 04, 2014, 4:59 PM UTC

Pxtl wrote: post #181

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'd love to see a private controlled answer to these services - some kind of owncloud-box with apps for various mobile platforms. F/OSS server software so I'm confident in it, and then paid/closed everything-else. Then again, the challenge is that hackers love to hack, so we'll put up with kludgy mashed-up solutions instead of a nice one-stop-shop of convenience. Meanwhile, layman users are perfectly happy with the l…

I'd like to see a bittorrent sync style app for note taking. Any syncing design that necessitates a central server is flawed.

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#195

Post by TarpitCarnivore » Sat, Jan 04, 2014, 5:04 PM UTC

lhl wrote: post #62

I've been a paying customer almost from the start. Unfortunately, as Evernote has expanded, it's gotten less and less useful for me. Their web clipper is great, the best around IMO (especially since Clipboard folded), however there's no way to exclude those clipped pages from search, so after using the clipper for a while, searching for just about any phrase is mostly irrelevant results. Ideally it'd be possible to f…

>Unfortunately, as Evernote has expanded, it's gotten less and less useful for me.

This has been my main complaint with Evernote. When I first found the software it was merely a way to capture notes, URLs, etc. As it keeps expanding its feature set and trying to make the tools more useful it keeps getting worse and worse.

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#196

Post by TarpitCarnivore » Sat, Jan 04, 2014, 5:07 PM UTC

zvrba wrote: post #72

Approximately a year and half ago I when I was evaluating Evernote, everybody was speaking warmly of it. Now, a sudden bunch of people arises mentioning rather serious problems. Has something in Evernote drastically changed over time, or did it just got more users? (= more testing under unenvisioned circumstances)

I think the issue is that it got away from doing one thing really well: capturing ideas. Now it tries to be a catch all for everything. While the core idea still remains the inclusion of so many extra features has made it less and less enjoyable to use.

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#197

Post by natch » Sat, Jan 04, 2014, 5:16 PM UTC

Great tour of the problems, but I felt my sympathy with the writer deflate quite a bit when he said that (at one point) he hadn't updated in a while. As a software developer, it's irking to see people bitterly complaining about bugs that were fixed and made available as free updates a long time ago.

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#198

Post by Shank » Sat, Jan 04, 2014, 5:34 PM UTC

I filed a support ticket over behavior that appeared to be a bug. Specifically, disconnecting a bluetooth keyboard while connected to an Android device in the Evernote editor would delete all bullet indentation instantly.

They confirmed that this should not be happening, and said that they filed a ticket on the internal bug tracker. The bug still exists in the Android version to date, unfixed, even though the solution (overriding the event Android calls when it disconnects a bluetooth keyboard) is somewhat trivial to implement.

Their response: http://puu.sh/69msM.png My report: http://puu.sh/69mu1.png

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#199

Post by Shank » Sat, Jan 04, 2014, 5:40 PM UTC

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.

I actually had my entire workspace in Dropbox for the fear of losing data, and Dropbox handled git fine. As long as the files are small enough, Dropbox does a great job of getting the file up as fast as possible so that conflicts generally don't happen.

Still risky though.

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#200

Post by yayitswei » Sat, Jan 04, 2014, 5:42 PM UTC

I'm also a paying customer and have lost an important note recently. Spent weeks of back-and-forth with support (including the anxiety-inducing handover of my Activity Log) until they concluded that my note was lost for good, without even an apology.