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Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

usefyi.com

211–220 of 328 posts

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#211

Reading these comments reaffirms my position that I've had for years: I only trust plain text. For this reason alone org-mode is the only note taking system worth using. But it's also good for other reasons. You should try it.

Indeed, and org-mode is supported (mostly, anyway) by Github and Gitlab renderers, as well as to a lesser extent by Gittea.

Since it is plain text, it is easily stored in revision control.

Apparently, this is not the case with Evernote[0].

[0] https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/95214-evernote-to-supp...

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#212
I travel a couple of dozen times a year for both business and personal reasons, and I've found Evernote to be a good tool for handing travel related documentation.

For each trip, I create a new notebook, and anything relating to that trip goes into that notebook. Screencaps/PDFs of my hotel and flight reservations, boarding passes, etc. If I'm on a business trip, I scan my receipts with ScanBot and sync the scans over to Evernote, where I move them into the proper notebook for that trip.

Being able to add in my travel documents on my computer, receipts through my iPhone, and retrieve the receipts back on my desktop is exactly what I need, and so far Evernote has been the best tool for the job. 2,604 notes and counting!

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#213

I find it weird that no one is mentioning that this article is written by an EN competitor. I've been an EN user since 2010. Yes they have had some problems and I have even tried to jump ship (as recently as last fall when I gave DEVONThink a go). I keep coming back though. I've yet to find anything that touches it in terms of features and functionality. Only ones that come close are OneNote and Notion. OneNote is fi…

To be fair, no notes service is worth paying for—they all have ridiculous cost for providing a commodity service.

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#214

I find it weird that no one is mentioning that this article is written by an EN competitor. I've been an EN user since 2010. Yes they have had some problems and I have even tried to jump ship (as recently as last fall when I gave DEVONThink a go). I keep coming back though. I've yet to find anything that touches it in terms of features and functionality. Only ones that come close are OneNote and Notion. OneNote is fi…

Hi! I am the co-founder of FYI and author of the blog post. We are not an Evernote competitor. In fact we integrate with it and many other document apps.

This is a very strange content to post on your product's blog. What marketing advantage are you seeing from your blog, which seems to only contain this takedown article of a quasi-competitor alongside mostly clickbait posts ("These 10 tips will change your life!").

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#215

I used Evernote for a bit years ago, but only for scratch notes I didn't care to lose. Mainly because I saw there didn't appear to be any way to export/backup my data from Evernote in a format that was not some proprietary storage mechanism that only works in Evernote. I figured the end-game was always to lure people with freemium and then dramatically increase the prices later, holding your data hostage. And it appe…

how would you prefer to export your data if not in a plaintext xml file?

would you prefer it export to markdown and lose information? (evernote's markup doesn't cleanly convert into markdown)

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#216
post #42

Due to some weird bug in Evernote, I lost about 10% of all my notes. Some of them critical. This happened about a year ago, and I never found out the actual cause. I think it was some kind of bug triggered by the combination of syncing from/to the mobile app and the desktop app. But I completely stopped trusting Evernote after this and stopped using it.

I also lost some data. I used to keep a personal journal in some random website, but when they closed that I copied it as a single huge block of text, encrypted. One day, it cropped 80% of it. Gone forever.

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#217
post #68

Am I the only one just using the stock MacOs Notes and Reminders? Does the trick for me. Never lost a thing. Does pictures and text and has basic grouping. Mac only of course.

You know, weirdly enough I actually lost about two months of daily notes from the macOS Notes app once.

Something went wrong, and a bunch of notes disappeared from the app. I determined where its database was stored, and set about replacing it with an earlier backup. But that didn't work and I'm still not sure why.

So now I use text files in a directory. Hard to go wrong with that.

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#218
post #69

I haven't seen too many people mentioning the onslaught of Microsoft One Note in developing a great note-taking tool, that syncs well in the cloud, and integrates with several of their other tools like Word and Outlook. Personallly, as a early Evernote User, once One Note came out for Mac, I switched. And then getting a job somewhere where we used Windows PCs, just solidified it for me, and I never found the need to…

At work we have Office and I decided to give One Note a try. The note taking itself is awesome, but I kept running into an issue where copying and pasting would copy images of what I had highlighted instead of just the text of the notes... After Googling for 3 days I gave up and I'm back to pen and paper.

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#219
post #203
post #14

I tried using it years ago over the span of a couple months and found syncing to be absolutely atrocious. It'd delete pages of notes if they didn't exist on the other computer I was syncing to and then they were simply gone forever. Dropbox was getting huge around the same time. I started just saving my text notes in a dropbox folder. Never had any syncing errors, deleted Evernote, and never looked back. I'm sure the…

Is there a way to make notes on a phone and save to dropbox? Sounds good but I"ve never tried.

I think the dropbox UI does give that option, at least to edit existing text files... I tend to use google's keep myself these days though.

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#220

Also i know, at least for me, that when i find myself wanting to take notes most is whenever its a spur of the moment kind of idea that i dont want to lose. In that kind of scenario, i find that a small notebook and pencil is still superior to an app simply because i don't have to think too much about the process of getting myself into a position where i can actually record the idea. Its just too hard to get into the…

I hate glue-bound notebooks, because the page I'm writing on pillows up a bit. It's a personal tic for me, but I want the page to lie perfectly flat so it doesn't give while I'm writing.

I finally found the perfect notebook. It's ring-bound, and you can add or remove pages from it easily. The paper is very smooth and heavy enough that you can use both sides without bleed-through. Even with a fountain pen.

So this is my shill post for the Aqua Drops notebook. It's awesome:

https://www.jetpens.com/Lihit-Lab-Aqua-Drops-Twist-Ring-Note...

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