Why Evernote failed to realize its potential • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#241

Post by ssmarine » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 7:15 PM UTC

gumby wrote: post #144

The web clipper is still the best I’ve seen (though also buggy, sigh). Do any of the EN alternatives have something like it? I’d be happy with Apple notes if I could restrict a search to a folder.

This is the single most important reason I still use Evernote. No other app could clip a page like Evernote. Tried OneNote but pages are blurry, not editable and just terrible. Those having issue with clipping try disabling uBlock or similar software. Sometimes it doesn't work I admit. But no other app can clip like Evernote. Maybe someone has other suggestions?? Also, this article is just what I have been thinking all along. I'm worried about Evernote. I like but but I wouldn't trust it with my life...

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#242

Post by petra » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 7:19 PM UTC

olivermarks wrote: post #177

vikingcaffiene wrote: post #157

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…

I use EN every day also. The search is not good, but I haven't found anything better, I have a lot of notes in different notebooks and it works ok for me in terms of speed and usability across mobile and desktop. I'm glad they didn't become some bloated app that tries to upsell you with useless new features all the time but worry they might not survive. I had a major problem with sync 3 years ago where I lost an impo…

Why is the search not good(my experience too) ? is there some technical reason ?

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#243

Post by Jedd » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 7:25 PM UTC

acct1771 wrote: post #117

Jedd wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think when I looked at it a while back my concern was how it would cope with one or more of my devices being off-network for days at a time (a regular occurrence). The other devices wouldn't be, and changes would only be done wherever I happened to be, but the cost of evaluating this solution was unfortunately higher than not making any changes. As I say, it's on my list. The suite seems to be quite robust - but gi…

Evaluating as well, is your concern that the files won't come down at all? Or that it'll be egregious when it's time? Solution?

Actually much more pedestrian than that, as I'm confident it works on cases more complex than me. It's simply that I've got a series of mechanisms that work acceptably, and it takes time and effort to run up a VM, set up an archive process, test a new suite & workflow over several weeks.

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#244

Post by saadullahsaeed » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 7:33 PM UTC

slantyyz wrote: post #184

vikingcaffiene wrote: post #157

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…

I was an early EN user from way back in the day when the UI metaphor was basically an infinite roll of paper. I abandoned EN around the time everyone else did for a Dropbox synced folder full of markdown files. I use Sublime Text as my client on the desktop. For my particular use case (I never really used the advanced EN features) it's worked well. I never really created notes on mobile, but I can read them using the…

I am curious how do you handle search? Is that even a use case for you?

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#245

Post by burtonator » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 7:37 PM UTC

OK.. this is the second time today I've dropped a reference to Polar. Not trying to spam HN I sware :)

Polar is sort off like Evernote but mostly (for now) focused on book annotation (PDF and web content).

https://getpolarized.io/

I'm trying to nail the work flow where you read a book on your computer and can easily annotate highlights as 'notes' and then those can become sort of like notes as in Evernote.

I think we're about 95% of the way towards having something killer and I'm still putting on the final touches.

Right now you can read and annotate amazingly well, create flashcards, highlights, and comments.

The remaining things I need to polish are to add support for annotating area highlights and to have better management of the annotations.

We have web and mobile is coming along too.

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#246

Post by redwards510 » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 7:39 PM UTC

happytoexplain wrote: post #71

I have over a thousand notes in Evernote. One day I noticed that one was missing shortly after I created it. Eventually I discovered that the convenient new-note shortcut was failing every time with a database corruption error - but the error only appeared in a system log I was unaware of. There was no indication to the user that the notes were failing. To this day I have no idea how many notes I lost due to this bug…

If you have a Synology NAS, DS Note is amazing. It's a full featured Evernote/OneNote clone that you self-host on your NAS. Mobile clients available. Easy import from Evernote backup, etc.

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#247

Post by _bxg1 » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 7:47 PM UTC

vikingcaffiene wrote: post #157

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…

I really liked Google Keep before I started concerning myself with privacy and boycotted all Google products. It struck the perfect balance between organization and the ability to easily jot things down; one thing I never liked about EN was that every note had to go in a notebook and had to have a title. That would always give me a mental block when I just wanted to write disorganized thoughts and then organize them later. I'm also a huge advocate of tags-over-categories.

That's super sketchy about the author.

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#248

Post by rb666 » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 7:47 PM UTC

NotionHQ is simply better, less bloated, and their free tier beats Evernote in functionality.

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#249

Post by jorvi » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 7:49 PM UTC

pborenstein wrote: post #234

rb808 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Drafts (iOS app) can do that. And it can save to Evernote as well. But between Pinboard & Drafts, I don't use Evernote any more.

I've tried Drafts (and pretty much every other app that supports Dropbox sync) and none felt as intuitive as Notebooks[1]. There is even a free iPhone version[2] you can try. Has support for Markdown and Webdav as well!

[1] https://itunes.apple.com/nl/app/notebooks-write-and-organize...

[2] https://itunes.apple.com/nl/app/notebooks-for-iphone/id78044...

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#250

Post by PhasmaFelis » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 7:53 PM UTC

I used to love Evernote, but for some time it felt like they were hyperfocused on adding features I had no use for (collaboration, business integration...) while making the stuff I did use slower and buggier. The last straw when I emptied the trash and it perma-deleted over 100 of my non-trash notes. From the comments here it sounds like that sort of shit wasn't all that uncommon.

Once I found out that OneNote had launched Mac and Android versions, I switched immediately, and found that OneNote just feels sleeker and more usable to me anyway. My one annoyance with it is that the Mac version of OneNote is fairly stripped-down, where EN had feature parity across all desktop platforms. But I'm using my MacBook less and less these days.