And so it begins...
Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices
251–260 of 459 posts
Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
OneNote is now completely free and available on iOS as well (where it has a full 5-star rating). As much I love Evernote, it's going to be an uphill battle for them. (And not to mention the handwriting experience and integration with the Surface Pen - which are killer features for students)
Nice thing is that the desktop app can sync/save copies locally and does private backups, but you can also save/sync and store data in OneDrive, private server, or corporate internet via a samaba share (Free version only syncs to OneDrive, but IIRC does local backup in desktop app). Architecturally it's a very impressive product and makes some pretty creative uses of the windows folder hierarchy to get it's job done.…
What is inking support?
Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
I made the switch to Simplenote, and I've had a great experience so far. The main "sacrifice" is that you can only store plain next. It was created by Automattic, Matt Mullenweg's company.
I made the switch to Simplenote I have a problem committing to a program/site that says: it’s all completely free How can they stay in business? Is their business nothing more than data mining my files? Is that something I want to allow? Is that a long term strategy for viability?
Automattic make money from Simperium and they provide Simplenote as a freebie to showcase the technology I guess.
Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices
#254If anyone is looking for a possible alternative for notetaking that is not OneNote, I like nvAlt: http://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/
I have exported from evernote and moved to nvAlt and gone back again...
It takes a little work to set it up to sync to mobile but it is doable with dropbox.
It does not have the same 'notebook' concept that evernote does, but that might not matter to you.
Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices
#255I was an Evernote Premium customer and enjoyed multi-device syncing and private notebooks. I had my own account, paid for out of my own pocket for a year. The company I worked for also decided to used Evernote and I could see our "Team" notebooks, right along with my stuff. When the company stopped using it, not only did I lose the "Team" notebooks, it took all of my personal data with it. I lost everything. Support…
I sound like a cynic when I say this, but the root cause of failures like this is a principle fundamental to Evernote: data owned by an application, rather than data accessed by an application. If all your data exists in a file hierachy that you can browse, edit manually, and back up, then you have the safety of relying only on foundational systems for the survival of your data, and the power to use your data as you…
Although you can't browse it, you can instruct Evernote to keep a local copy of all your data, allowing you to keep incremental backups. You can find (and change, if you want) the database folder under Tools/Options, General.
I do agree with your other points, although there are significant limitations to using the filesystem for storage in an application like Evernote. Perhaps a good compromise would be to use a publicly available database engine like postgres (although I'm sure they derive advantages from their proprietary format beyond the mere fact that it's proprietary).
Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personally skitch is far more important to me than Evernote itself. If they killed off that app I'd be gone in a heartbeat.
Skitch has potential but I've always felt the integration was terrible and unfinished. It doesn't feel native at all.
I use Skitch daily... but I don't sync it to Evernote, usually just to screenshot, annotate and dump the marked up image into Slack or an email, I don't use it for anything I want to persist. Other than the sync aspect in the interface I hardly notice it's an Evernote product at all. I could get by with Preview.app and Grab, but Skitch's obnoxious default pink arrows and widely stroked text are perfect for calling out visual errors on projects.
Likewise, I use Evernote Scannable every so often without connecting to Evernote because it's a really good scanner app. Exports and emails images without any fuss.
I'd be perfectly happy if both apps were spun [back] off into their own entities too. Evernote as a note taking company doesn't do anything for me, but they do have other nice products.
Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
I sound like a cynic when I say this, but the root cause of failures like this is a principle fundamental to Evernote: data owned by an application, rather than data accessed by an application. If all your data exists in a file hierachy that you can browse, edit manually, and back up, then you have the safety of relying only on foundational systems for the survival of your data, and the power to use your data as you…
This is a great point. There's an analagous situation in finance: would you rather have a single mutual fund own all your investment money, or do you want a brokerage account with some active management? The latter is definitely more complicated but gives the user more control, accountability, visibility, etc. While it makes sense for a Whole Product to want to hide this complexity and liquidity from the user, any lo…
Actually I'd say a large percentage of people would be very well served by a globally diversified index fund for all their equity holdings...
And perhaps the analogy is still useful. I'm ok with that situation because I understand and accept the logic of indexing. If the fund I owned changed their prospectus and decided to start active management, or significantly increased their management fee, or whatever, I could pull my money out and invest it elsewhere. Similarly in software there are definite advantages to having a dedicated steward for a given type of data, but it's much better if there is some way to take your data back should you decide to put it elsewhere.
With Evernote, it is possible to export all your notes in a variety of formats, including XML, which can then be imported into other note taking applications if you wish. So to me, the bare fact that the application controls the data isn't necessarily an issue. What was becoming an issue was the fact that they didn't appear to treat it with sufficient respect. I hope we'll see that start to change now.
Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'd have moved by now if I could find something that was both highly cross-platform (Mac/Win/iOS) and lighter (Markdown pretty please). I've compromised on OneNote, which isn't lightweight, but has become impressively cross-platform.
I personally have been using git more and more for my note taking. I use RStudio and RMarkdown for my notes and it has been great and easily spread to all my personal devices.
Hmm, that's an interesting solution. You could always combine this with a private github repo and get easy-to-browse note-taking. It does seem like having to manually sync would be annoying though, is it really better than solutions like GDocs?
Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
I made the switch to Simplenote I have a problem committing to a program/site that says: it’s all completely free How can they stay in business? Is their business nothing more than data mining my files? Is that something I want to allow? Is that a long term strategy for viability?
Automattic make money from Simperium and they provide Simplenote as a freebie to showcase the technology I guess.
That is very helpful. Now their business model makes sense.
I wonder why they don't even mention Simperium on their home page? It's not even mentioned under Help. It's a secret?
They even have a a perfect opportunity to mention it. E.g. in Simplenote Help they say:
Q: How does syncing work?
A: All notes are synced between your device
...
they automatically and wirelessly show up
in the other locations
Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices
#260I was an Evernote Premium customer and enjoyed multi-device syncing and private notebooks. I had my own account, paid for out of my own pocket for a year. The company I worked for also decided to used Evernote and I could see our "Team" notebooks, right along with my stuff. When the company stopped using it, not only did I lose the "Team" notebooks, it took all of my personal data with it. I lost everything. Support…
I sound like a cynic when I say this, but the root cause of failures like this is a principle fundamental to Evernote: data owned by an application, rather than data accessed by an application. If all your data exists in a file hierachy that you can browse, edit manually, and back up, then you have the safety of relying only on foundational systems for the survival of your data, and the power to use your data as you…
Thus... I use https://github.com/Jermolene/TiddlyWiki5 for the most vital information. It's more tedious, local (a simple file) and run in a browser.