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Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

jasonkincaid.net

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Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#231

Post by possiblerobot »

triplesec wrote: post #130
possiblerobot wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've made that switch recently, after losing some stuff in Evernote for what I decided was the last time. I briefly messed around with SimpleNote, which was immediately doing weird stuff with tags (duplicating, not accepting changes). Then, I replicated my Evernote structure with folders and txt files in Dropbox. It works perfectly. And, there's a bunch of clients that edit txt files right in Dropbox, like Byword (OS…

Nice hack. Beware of the well-publicised security/privacy issues in Dropbox, however.

Totally. I've got an encrypted sparsedisk image for anything that needs to be truly secure. That's definitely a caveat though, because its contents can only be edited from my Mac. On the other hand, I didn't trust Evernote that much either.

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#232

Post by devcpp »

michaelcullina wrote: post #229

I use OneNote on my Nokia 925 Windows Phone, my Surface Pro, my laptop, and my workstation. All the data is synced in SkyDrive. I've got a lot of data. Global search is instantaneous. The application is extremely reliable. I save cut and paste snippets from the web. Stack Overflow answers with my personal annotations; anything. Images and sound files are extremely easy. I can record a meeting and take a few notes (by…

Well, I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that anything Microsoft produces is out of question. The reason for that is that whenever I use one of their products, it progressively turns into a locked proprietary program and getting out of it becomes impossible. That's fine if the product remains unbeatable in quality but it's rarely the case to say the least. I try to not have that happen again and FOSS never lets me down on that.

There is also the question of privacy. That's why my Org files are on my ownCloud and I have peace of mind forever.

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#233

Post by mdesq »

madisonmay wrote: post #76
GraffitiTim wrote: post #55

I've been an avid Evernote user since the beginning (one of the first few thousand users). I use it to record all sorts of ideas, thoughts, notes, reminders, research, and references. One year ago, my girlfriend was using Evernote (on my suggestion) to write her travel journal on our trip to Southeast Asia. I saw her note sync a bunch of times (the iOS app shows a little blue arrow when it's uploading). But one day s…

I tried Evernote as well, and it always felt bulky. I've since migrated to Fetchnotes ( http://www.fetchnotes.com )

The Fetchnotes site is so slow I migrated away from it before it even loaded. I went back to see what SaaS app could possibly have such a slow website and components were trickling in one at a time.

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#234

Post by vinceguidry »

niels_olson wrote: post #212
dlu wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hello! Evernote employee here, I first wanted to say thanks for posting. Its always good to hear from our users directly. I've been at Evernote for a while and it is still weird to see us show up on HN. Anyways, I enjoyed your comments wanted to give my personal opinion & point of view for at least points 1 & 2. 1. You're right that scaling is very hard. If you want a closer look at it, we have a tech blog that even…

> third party applications that can convert from HTML into a number of other formats, so we're relying on that You should fix that. Skip RTF, DOC, whatever. Just plain text is fine. Everything else can handle it. The world needs to wake up and realize plain text is the alpha and the omega of language. Do that right first and make sure it's the last thing to fail.

A brief foray into the world of character encodings should teach you that there's really no such thing as plain text.

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#235

Post by bdwalter »

niels_olson wrote: post #213
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 run a 99.999% uptime, extreme scale, SaaS business across multiple active/active data centers Puppet Labs?

No, I work for iovation. We do large scale realtime fraud prevention for many of the largest banks and internet businesses through a shared network of device reputation.

There's a lot more to Portland than just Puppet, though we do use a ton of their product. We love those guys.

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#236

Post by zmmmmm »

Disturbing to see the number of reports of data loss. I am using Evernote heavily for my PhD research. I haven't found another tool that works as well as Evernote for this.

I've never had data loss, but I was very disappointed by my one interaction with Evernote support - a simple bug report, (you cannot select more than one line of text in a bullet list in the Android app), turned into a series of 6 or 7 email interactions asking me to do things that were unrelated to the problem and clearly weren't going to (and didn't) help. It was obvious that no human had bothered to even attempt to reproduce the issue or even read my bug report in any detail. I don't know if they've outsourced their bug report handling to some untrained / unskilled off shore group, but if not they were trying extremely hard to emulate that. I don't like to think about interacting with these people in the event that I have data loss or other kind of bug that actually matters.

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#237

Post by zmmmmm »

temuze wrote: post #47

While this post must be pretty distressing for the Evernote team, their response time is pretty impressive! Within a couple hours of this post being published, Phil Libin has already contacted him. See the edit at the end of the post: "Update: Evernote CEO Phil Libin contacted me and we spoke about the issues described. He apologized, saying the post rings true and that there is a lot of work to be done both on the a…

> their response time is pretty impressive

That's because it's PR triage rather than actually addressing the issue. It shows they are listening and care about their image, which is good, but not much more.

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#238

Post by michaelcullina »

devcpp wrote: post #232
michaelcullina wrote: post #229

I use OneNote on my Nokia 925 Windows Phone, my Surface Pro, my laptop, and my workstation. All the data is synced in SkyDrive. I've got a lot of data. Global search is instantaneous. The application is extremely reliable. I save cut and paste snippets from the web. Stack Overflow answers with my personal annotations; anything. Images and sound files are extremely easy. I can record a meeting and take a few notes (by…

Well, I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that anything Microsoft produces is out of question. The reason for that is that whenever I use one of their products, it progressively turns into a locked proprietary program and getting out of it becomes impossible. That's fine if the product remains unbeatable in quality but it's rarely the case to say the least. I try to not have that happen again and FOSS neve…

Well, I understand what you are saying and I agree that you are one of many, but I disagree with your analysis. I use mostly Microsoft technology and most of what I use is open source, from .NET to C# to NuGet to many, many frameworks. I am very oriented toward open source and very comfortable in the .NET world. It's very similar situation to a Mac user.

As far as storing data I also have my "own cloud" and I also use Dropbox and SkyDrive. I like all of the above and I find Dropbox extremely convenient. However, I do have a concern that Dropbox is not as secure as SkyDrive.

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#239

Post by michaelcullina »

Paul12345534 wrote: post #150
awa wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Onenote comes to mind, and it does OCR on client side so is quite fast. Also does audio transcription which can be enabled (Disabled by default). Also has version control built in, so you can you can look at older versions and do manual merges (if required) Disclaimer: Microsoft employee and Onenote user

Happy OneNote user but I truly despise the API. All the other Office APIs are far more pleasant and functional.

I agree. I love OneNote but this is a tragic situation. I would be SO HAPPY if OneNote had a good API. I would dance on rooftops and howl at the moon.

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#240

Post by engelhorn »

veidr wrote: post #100

As a paying user for years, I've had Evernote lose data many times -- sometimes important, irreplaceable data that I hadn't yet had time to back up elsewhere. Evernote is some of the very worst software that has ever survived more than a few months on my computer without being deleted. Horrible show-stopping crash/data loss bugs are the norm, and have been increasing steadily as they add feature after feature with ap…

I use DEVONthink Pro Office from www.devontechnologies.com to collect, tag and organize snapshots of web pages (either as webarchive, pdf or instapaperized pdfs), referenced OmniOutliner documents containing more complex notes, ocr'ed screenshots and other research stuff. It is more a conventional or even traditional app than a cloud based service. Imported that .enex file when I left Evernote.
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