As much as I love (and still pay for) Evernote, I've just now realized that I haven't added to my collection there over 6 months. Without intending to, I seem to have largely switched to just saving websites with the "SingleFile" extension for Firefox.
Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons
211–220 of 354 posts
Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons
#212Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons
#213This is going to be a disaster - Bending Spoons is not a good actor: “let’s talk about Bending Spoons’ business model. The basic concept is very simple: - Find a solid app that someone else built and buy it from them (see Splice (acquired from GoPro) and 30 Day Fitness) - Optimize the monetization of said app (by implementing from scratch or fine-tuning existing subscriptions), thereby driving higher lifetime value (…
I must admit it's not entirely obvious why that business model makes them "not a good actor". And what's with the snark about Italian banks?
The issue is that people are at least somewhat "locked in" to whatever apps they're already using, so sudden major price increases are a bit extortionate: Either you pay us a bunch of money, or lose access to your data/workflow.
Prior to acquisition, one could reasonably expect Evernote not to announce sudden, shocking price changes, because they were trying to build a long-term brand. Now, suddenly, that's not the case.
This is made worse when the app doesn't do a good job of letting you export your data in the first place.
Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure what "useless wallpaper" app you are talking about but I just took a look at https://bendingspoons.com/products and everything there seems pretty useful and well designed.
That minuscule subset is well designed, yes, the rest decent BUT some of them with in my opinion predatory pricing in many cases, $9/wk to download some wallpaper or some sleep noises app. But yes, they are not the only ones doing it. If you are interested search on the appstore among the boatload of apps they have.
Okay well you should be able to link to a single one then.. I still can't find any examples of how this company is fraudulent.
Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons
#215They must be incredibly jealous of all the successful note taking apps (Notion, Ulysses, Bear, Craft). Evernote were first, and blew it. No other way to describe it. I dumped Evernote when they restricted their free accounts to 2 devices. Ironically I'm now paying for Ulysses, money I might have give to Evernote had they not been so awful to early adopters.
> They must be incredibly jealous of all the successful note taking apps (Notion, Ulysses, Bear, Craft). One point of anecdata: I haven't heard of any of those. How do you define success? Keep in mind Evernote was created in 2000 and the web version was launched in 2008. I doubt any of the stuff in your list will be around in 14 years.
You haven’t heard of any of these? How are you even on HN? J/k.
Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons
#216At long last, Evernote takes an Incredible Journey to be broken down for parts by its new owner. Can't get any more fucked up than it already has been, it went from being an important part of my daily workflow to a place of pain. The rewrite is part of why my last graphic novel ground to a halt, I was using EN to collaborate on scripts with my partner and it is just agony to use any more. I cancelled my subscription…
I don't understand why you wouldn't just use google docs or microsoft word to collaborate on a graphic novel? Evernote is not and was never a word processor. The creators of the street angel graphic novel series said all of their ideas are in a google drive folder.
I don't like web apps and don't want my life in Google. Also I had been a paid user of Evernote for a few years already when Google Docs came out, I had already learnt that "if you're not paying for it, you're the product".
I'm not a fan of Microsoft, either. I've never had to swap Word documents around so that's not in my lie at all.
Evernote was on my computer, and on my phone; it's where I'd note down an idea when I had it, and since it was there I may as well just expand on it in there. When I'm doing solo comics then most of my notes in EN were collections of vague outlines, dialogue fragments, and photographs of scribbly sketchbook pages; actual writing mostly happened in Illustrator. It was easy to expand that to have a script sitting there in EN, since we were both already used to using it. Plus since EN is about keeping notebooks rather than files it's pretty nice to just have one place that holds all the various words and pictures related to getting from "some ideas we've kicked around" to "a script that I can turn into a bunch of Illustrator files on my hard drive".
This is similar to how there are a lot of programmers who do everything in Emacs. You're already there all the time, and it may not be perfectly built for this, but you can do most of what you need in it, so why not?
If you want to be totally anal about doing it The Traditional Industry Way then you can use a complex word processor template adapted from screenwriting templates and deal with rigid page counts. If you are not working as part of an assembly line with distinct separations between Writers and Editors and Pencillers and Inkers and Colorists and Letterers then your script can a pretty casual thing with simple formatting, and Evernote can handle that just fine. Or at least it could before v10 threw all performance in the toilet for that shitty Electron rewrite.
Lately I have been vaguely fiddling with using Scrivener for roughing out scripts of short pieces, and really need to get my partner on this long-brewing GN still kinda trapped in Evernote to give it a shot. If we can get a decent sync pathway to bring the .scriv files between our disparate devices then maybe my dusty Evernote notebook exports will turn into a handful of Scrivener projects, along with the scattered notes in Joplin and Apple Notes that have happened since I finally said "fuck this abusive relationship with New Evernote".
Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
Evernote was still decent enough before the ditched the native app for a dreadful Electron webframe.
In some ways the Electron app is better because there's more formatting options (code blocks, finally!) but most ways not. On my systems it's so slow to startup, and I don't have that complaint about other Electron apps.
Yeah I completely brought my quite powerful machine to a halt at the time, it would eat up resources like all Electron apps do - and I'd hate to think of the potential security exploits with a Electron / unsandboxed chrome that formats clipped websites and attachments etc... - not good.
Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons
#218Another lesson from Evernote: if your primary business is digital (ie software) don’t make a corporate strategy of selling physical things (notebooks).
Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons
#219Evernote is still the only product that meets my workflow needs. Hope they don’t mess it up.
Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 1) There is almost never a case for a total ground up rewrite of your core product. Just don’t do it. I've espoused this before, but I've come around to moderating my take on this. "Almost never" is an exaggeration. I agree that they "almost never" work, but that's not the same as there being no case (there's a difference between "should not have done" and "should have done differently". After many years of seeing…
> you think it needs a scratch rewrite rather than a refactor, you're unlikely to have learnt enough within that gap of time to make the rewrite significantly better than a refactor. Relentless Refactoring replaces the ship piece by piece while it's under way. If you are effective at it, you can effectively (both definitions) rewrite the entire app with few people being any the wiser. If you are not good at decomposi…
I enjoy Relentess Refactoring as much as the next guy, but one dimension here is that it is much easier to do in a headless app (or in the backend) than in an app with a major UI. At some point there must be a complete switch from the old UI to the new UI, and that step is extremely complex. It also invites a big rewrite, in an almost irresistible way - "since we'll change the UI, let's just do it from the ground up".