I used Evernote for all of college but it just became clunkier over time and some workflows were just not optimized.
I recently gave Notion a try ... wow. It's everything I ever wanted.
Why Evernote failed to realize its potential
281–290 of 328 posts
Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential
#282Evernote is very frustrating and yet I can't fully move over to something else. It feels like they are swinging between being indifferent to paying customers and outright hostile. I particularly dislike that they display ads in the product when I am paying for it.
I have been a paying user since 2010 and I have got 3901 notes in Evernote.
Last year I started using Zoho Notebook and I have been quite happy with it for note taking, but I am still stuck with Evernote for the webclip function.
Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
On my Mac it's using 708MB of memory and the CPU, which should be The memory use also grows for no reason. I have caught it consuming 20GB+ after a day or two. There's obviously an egregious memory leak and that's been true for at least a year; I can only conclude that Evernote is a crap company that doesn't care at all about bugs, even critical ones. I have taken to only running Evernote on my desktop when I absolut…
Intrigued, I checked again. It's at 21.5 MB now. I wonder to what extent is the difference caused by platform implementation (Mac vs. Win), and to what extent by the content (admittedly my notes aren't media-heavy).
I just checked again. After 4 hours of sitting idle in the background with its window minimized, Evernote is now using 901MB of memory, up almost 200MB. And it's not really "idle": it was using 34.1% CPU when I just checked. For what???
I do have a lot of notes, like 20,000, and many of them are HTML pages, but I don't have any huge graphics or videos or anything. Even if I did, I can't imagine why it would need so much RAM to just display a list of note titles, or why it would constantly be using between 5 and 40% of a CPU, or why the RAM usage would constantly creep up. It's just really terrible software. It galls me that I'm paying $7.99/month for this crap, and I would instantly pay that much or more for an alternative that worked properly.
Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential
#284I don't think Evernote need(s/ed) a team version, but I do think its not sufficiently better to current alternatives for note-taking and bookmarking. I use Pocket for tagged bookmarks and OneNote when I want more context. Where there is a gap in the market, tying notation to memory and productivity, would be some kind of notation context and intelligent reminder (e.g these web tabs, that note, this tag) tied to some…
I saw a guy pitching a location based notes app years ago one morning on CNBC. I believe it was called "Acorns" (not the investment app). I was super hyped for it. Would mean the wife could just jot a note about grocery items at any point during the week and I'd get an alert whenever I got to the grocery store. Brilliant. No "don't forget milk" texts, which I forget because it's not on my actual list. But it never la…
Oh man Astrid on Android used to do that and it was THE BEST. I lost that when I shifted to iOS years ago and I still miss it now and then.
Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh that's great, thanks. I looked at the docs but didn't find anything.
Does Overleaf support what you're looking for?[1] [1] https://www.overleaf.com/learn/latex/Mathematical_expression...
Thanks! Funnily enough I found it just hours before I saw this article posted on HN
Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential
#286I liked using Evernote for myself, but we subscribed to the team version or whatever they call it, and didn't enjoy it. "I put that in Evernote. Did you see it?" Turns out you have to add it to the right notebook. Then you have to explicitly share it with your team members. THE WHOLE POINT IS SHARING. It should be default. It's too much work to do the one thing I want to use this for.
Once you’ve shared an entire notebook then anything added to it should be visible to other people with access to that notebook? I don’t use the team version, I just share a couple notebooks for collaborative projects (writing a comic, planning a cross country move) and it’s pretty seamless. Aside from “oops it defaulted to the wrong notebook and now I have to acknowledge that this note will (now/no longer) be shared with N people if I move it to the right one, why can’t I tell it to stop reminding me of this”
Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential
#287Still using Evernote. Haven’t had the sync problems some describe. Still storing everything I put in it. Still isn’t trying to cram my rich tech notes into Markdown, still isn’t a web view pretending to be a native app.
I’m not using it for the original grandiose attempts to Remember Everything. It’s just my notebooks. It’s great to have all my notes for a project in one shareable place. And I’m still paying for it, like I’ve been doing for most of its lifespan.
Every now and then I look into the competition and nothing feels worth the hassle of trying to switch. I’ll do it if Evernote collapses as a company or if I end up working somewhere I’m forced to use a different collaborative note platform and end up liking it more. I got too many other things to worry about to hassle with it until then.
Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential
#288Still using Evernote. Haven’t had the sync problems some describe. Still storing everything I put in it. Still isn’t trying to cram my rich tech notes into Markdown, still isn’t a web view pretending to be a native app. I’m not using it for the original grandiose attempts to Remember Everything. It’s just my notebooks. It’s great to have all my notes for a project in one shareable place. And I’m still paying for it,…
How are you OK storing your notes in a cloud system where your notes are viewable by third parties? How do you get past Evernote not supporting end to end encryption? This has been the dealbreaker for me since the beginning.
Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, no notes service is worth paying for—they all have ridiculous cost for providing a commodity service.
thats the thing: a NOTES service is useless. EN is not just a notes service. In fact thats probably its least useful feature. EN is a knowledge database. Its a place to stick stuff you might want to use later. As I've said before, its too bad that no one that works at EN understands this.
> EN is a knowledge database.
Isn't that just a fancy way of searching notes? Seems like full text search and/or a wiki linking interface is most of that functionality.
It's a hard problem; I don't mean to demean the work of the people on the product. But notes apps have been more or less the same for 30-40 years now barring features like OCR that I'd never use: the main difference is that you pay to sync them somewhere.
Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential
#290I’ve been using Evernote since it came out and have about 19,000 notes in it. They’ve been slow going at adding new features or at least making it super stable and it’s starting to feel dated.
I’d like to see: ability to put tags to sections of other notes, ability to put links to notebooks within a note, collapsible/expandable text blocks, recurring reminders, Apple Pencil support for iPad where you can freehand draw instead of having to import from Notability/Goodnotes, quicker access to text colors on mobile and desktop.
I’ve tried all the competitors and keep reluctantly coming back to EN. Notability was the one I liked the best, but it is super slow and it can’t be used offline on mobile. Evernote has gotten a lot better on iOS in the last year and I’m still paying to use it until something better comes along, which I don’t anticipate will be long. I hope they step it up.