Is that an announcement or a marketing jargon dictionary? I had forgotten this app even exists, but I can see why.
Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons
221–230 of 354 posts
Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons
#222They 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.
Evernote was still decent enough before the ditched the native app for a dreadful Electron webframe.
Ugh. Note taking apps need to be instant.
I care far less about the feature set than I do getting the whatever written down and out of my head.
If you make we wait while you load a website's worth of js or phone home with surveillance data or whatever, I'm just going to delete you. I'd rather use a 1995-era Textedit or Notepad - they're instantly functional.
Just to make sure I maintain my curmudgeon's rep, I'll add - advertise AI and I'm also gone. I have zero need for assistance from a tripping robot to type in my work life.
Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Their relative utilitarian take on the matter is what makes them so unique and powerful in the market. Man this was not my experience at all. Granted I dropped Evernote quite a while ago, but for years they kept adding a kitchen sink of features that I didn't care about, while regressing at the basics like syncing and merging text notes across multiple devices. They were maybe first company I experienced that blew…
I’m talking about their current iteration and roadmap so far. Previous iteration had its fair share of issues, I concur.
The previous issues were bad enough for me to drop Evernote as a paying customer.
I would get notes that would not sync correctly, forcing me to resolve it by hand. Even after doing that, it would still have sync conflicts. This was core functionality that just didn't work.
During this time, they were busy jamming in features I definitely didn't want or need. Every release would be a slower, buggier version of its previous incarnation.
It was during this time frame that a lot of people jumped ship. The app was so bloated and buggy by that point that even OneNote seemed like a viable option.
It didn't help that Evernote made it as difficult as possible to get your notes out of their system. It took several download attempts to successfully get my archive out of there. It might have also been due to the large number of people leaving their platform.
The handwriting was on the wall when they started selling knick-knacks on their website. Things like Evernote branded Moleskine notepads and dress socks. It's like they completely abandoned their core competency and went off in some left-field marketing direction.
It's a real shame, too, because Evernote was an amazing app when it first came out.
I'm giving org-mode a spin these days on my desktop. Need to figure out if there's a way to sync/view it on my Android device, but I'm getting kind of tired of dealing with all the different, proprietary SaaS note taking services that go to shit after a few years. At least with Emacs and org-mode, that's one less thing to deal with.
Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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"…
The main lesson of the CI/CD era is that pain is information and ignoring it until later just makes things worse.
"Let's replace the whole UI at once" and "Let's replace the whole app at once" are bandaid-ripping activities, and the point of ripping off a bandaid is to get it over with before your pain receptors have a chance to tell you what an asshole you are right now. I'm sure most people have at least one experience, of their own or of someone they know, where ripping off the bandaid took a chunk of skin with it, possibly creating a bigger wound than the bandage originally covered.
Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons
#225I loved Evernote and was a paying subscriber right up until they changed their TOS to let their employees read all my notes to work on ad targeting. They backpedaled after a while but trust was lost, I cancelled immediately. I have no sympathy for their failure.
I paid off and on through the years but for me it was when they started selling physical products and advertising them in the app. I can't remember what they were. T-shirts? Mousepads?
Moleskine notepads. But hey, it was more reliable and quicker to use than their software offering.
Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
On ios this is now baked into Notes.app I use swiftscan because I've been using it a long time (same reason you use evernote) but the Notes scanner is pretty effective if Notes works for you.
Do you know if Notes performs the OCR on files that [are imported over from Evernote?]( https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205793 ) I have many hundreds (maybe low-thousands) of PDFs and images that I need to be able to access once in a blue moon, but when I need them Evernote's OCR makes it easy. I guess I could just try it out with a subsection of notes.
I think you have to scan directly from notes.
Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons
#227I learned three things watching EN snatch defeat from the jaws of victory: 1) There is almost never a case for a total ground up rewrite of your core product. Just don’t do it. 2) Don’t abandon the users who made you successful in the first place. They’re the ones who advocate for you and get your foot in the door. 3) real time google docs style collaborative editing is table stakes for this software category. Build…
Google docs didn't exist when Evernote started. Their competitor was OneNote.
Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
Leverage is probably the wrong choice of word, but VC's growth expectations make your average loan shark's interest rates look downright reasonable.
Leverage is a fine choice of words. In financial terms, debt and equity are not that different. Particularly VC equity, which can have some debt-like qualities to it (liquidation preferences, etc.). Also, many startup investments use debt instruments like convertible notes instead of direct equity purchases.
Yep. If you have traditional debt and you miss your numbers, the banks will often have rights to get significant equity and force a change in leadership. If you have VC equity and you miss your numbers, you'll have been encouraged to be at a burn rate that forces you to raise a down round sooner rather than later, and at that point your existing VCs will get significant additional equity and perhaps even force a change in leadership due the terms of those agreements - and they might even be the sharks offering you that down round.
There's no free lunch, but taking investment can let you achieve great things and build incredible communities. Just make sure you talk with founder/banker/lawyer friends who have seen the dark side of things, and use their experiences as armor.
Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons
#229I still hate that Evernote bought Skitch. Really wish the new team would revive it or sell it off to an interested dev.
I'm good friends with one of the founders of Skitch. He effectively got less than nothing for that sale. It was an acqui-hire with vesting stock valued in the several $million, but when he couldn't handle working in the big corporate environment at Evernote, he had to leave, and lost his stock with zero remuneration. He couldn't even pay off the debts he'd incurred over the years building Skitch. Terrible outcome for him, as well as the product. So sad.
Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons
#230These are mostly negative reviews of Evernote. Yet, I do like the product and I am yet to find a replacement that offers these must-haves: * Multiple tags per note * OCR/search on attachments * Web clipping (full page and individual sections) * Mail to Evernote (with attachments) * Decent WYSIWYG * Good scanning support ("scannable" app) It did have its problems and did lose 3 or 4 notes due to syncing issues but tod…
I did some searching via [1] and it turns out amplenote comes closest to my requirements list.