Early and longtime EN user here. In addition to bloating the app with little features and collaboration tools —and the distraction of selling desk accessories and a food app— one of Evernote’s failures was in not helping users put the information they captured to better use. For example, if I was collecting code snippets, my IDE could hit the API and have access to them. There are many ways they could have similarly helped users better leverage the information and become more valuable in daily life.
Why Evernote failed to realize its potential
271–280 of 328 posts
Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential
#272For the history, here is photo of initial EverNote team:
https://notes.sciter.com/2017/09/11/motivation-and-a-bit-of-...
Yet, I think the article is incorrect about the role of Phil Libin.
First production ready version of EverNote contained all basic components and ideas. Phil was far from EN at that time.
Role of Phil and then CTO Dmitrii Stavisky was to transform initial startup alike environment to formal "enterprise" thing. And the result we see.
Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential
#273I 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'm a happy Org Mode user, but it lacks a complete, reliable and easy to use mobile interface. It is and probably will always be a desktop-centric application.
Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential
#274I haven't seen too many people mentioning the onslaught of Microsoft One Note in developing a great note-taking tool, that syncs well in the cloud, and integrates with several of their other tools like Word and Outlook. Personallly, as a early Evernote User, once One Note came out for Mac, I switched. And then getting a job somewhere where we used Windows PCs, just solidified it for me, and I never found the need to…
For sure. I had an Evernote subscription, but I used OneNote at work - and it's just better. Letting you place snippets and notes on the vertical AND horizontal plane makes sense for quick note taking. Anyway, I switched last year and the fact that OneNote had a convenient note importer for Evernote was icing on the cake. Evernote never seemed to evolve either. It was the same product 5 years ago, as it was last year…
The OneNote canvas based model doesn't really work for note taking for me.
Switching between mobile and desktop devices means the content doesn't fit on either because it the form factors are so different.
I think they special case the mobile product to act like a traditional text editor when there is a single text field. But it is a kludge on top of a broken model.
Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential
#275Evernote and most note-taking or knowledge repository solutions are pretty solved problems for those willing to do a bit of self-hosting. Personally, I host a Tiddlywiki server on a cheap VPS I own that runs other things. A cron job regularly backs up the entire TiddlyWiki to a git repo, and the contents of the repo to cloud storage. TiddlyWiki is responsive and works fine on mobile, and I am assured that all my data…
Your post echoes the infamous comment on Dropbox's announcement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 There is a difference between building something that works for you, a technical person, and something the general population will trust and pay for.
Well, Dropbox itself is struggling these days, because consumers are a fickle market (and because there is tons of competition in the space from Google Keep and others). My comment was specifically meant for technical people who are readers of this forum.
Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am curious how do you handle search? Is that even a use case for you?
You can simply use ripgrep to search. Either from a terminal, or from an editor it is integrated with. I favor the same approach. In my case, I use org-mode instead of markdown as it offers a few niceties when editing from Emacs. But irrespective of that, IMHO plain text overrules any other choice as it is future-proof and can be composed with your favorite tools. For example, a VCS like Git. I have many files in a f…
> You can simply use ripgrep to search
That assumes that the text in your notes uses the vocabulary you'd expect, and isn't misspelled. Neither of those are guaranteed if your notes are snippets of other documents (a common EN use-case) rather than text you wrote yourself. Especially not guaranteed if the snippets are images where their textual representation is the output of an OCR algorithm.
Is there something like ripgrep for fuzzy search?
Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who is "we"?
Me and the other guy. I am Victor Grishchenko, PhD. At the time, we had a CRDT based sync engine which we white-labelled to Yandex. We had been eager to work with Evernote cause all their sync issues have been very clear to us. These days, even Apple Notes syncs with CRDTs... at the time, it was cutting-edge. P.S. Please never let me feel that my response is more polite than necessary.
> These days, even Apple Notes syncs with CRDTs... at the time, it was cutting-edge.
This might be a way out for people with Evernote syncing issues. Apple Notes can import Evernote data.
Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was going to comment to recommend orgmode too. Like you said, the org files are plain text, they can be opened by practically anything, and can be saved practically anywhere. I use Orgzly on Android, which syncs manually to DropBox. A free dropbox 2GB space is going to store a lot of orgmode files! I edit mostly through Orgzly, although I do use the orgmode extension in Visual Studio Code to edit on my laptop. http…
I guess the real answer is "a folder of text files you sync." You don't have to use Orgmode or emacs at all to get a good chunk of the benefit here. True, you can't do rich text or media, but it turns out I almost never even WANT to do that. Anyway, I was doing sync'd text with a Mac tool called Notational Velocity for years before I got sucked into OrgMode (emacs' Deft mode is a workalike). Point any iOS or Android…
> True, you can't do rich text or media, but it turns out I almost never even WANT to do that.
And the times that you do, you can use Markdown and Pandoc to convert it. And mdfind/spotlight will index and search it just fine, as will any other search tool you wish to use.
I lament some of my coworkers inability to see the utility in text+markdown+pandoc or even just a plain old wiki like Dokuwiki. I've lost count of the number of times I've had to wait a day for someone to dig out an excel spreadsheet to email me an immediately-out-of-date copy.
While I will joke about how people would find it so much easier if they just did everything I said, I do wonder why so many people keep themselves permanently handicapped by their choice of information storage and sharing.
Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential
#279I 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'm a happy Org Mode user, but it lacks a complete, reliable and easy to use mobile interface. It is and probably will always be a desktop-centric application.
Orgzly is pretty good on android
Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm a happy Org Mode user, but it lacks a complete, reliable and easy to use mobile interface. It is and probably will always be a desktop-centric application.
Orgzly is pretty good on android
I wish I had an android to try it. The options for ios iOS are not good enough for me.
But even so, I hear it is limited in functionality.