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Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

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Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#311

Post by coffeeling »

criddell wrote: post #138
landonxjames wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not bad at all, even with my atrocious handwriting it manages to be around 85% accurate.

I'll have to check it out again. Last time I spent some time with it, the UI just never clicked for me. My main notetaking device is my iPad with a Pencil stylus and GoodNotes. It does a great job of interpreting my handwriting and then I can export a searchable PDF to Evernote, or I guess, OneNote. Is the metadata search in OneNote decent? For example, can I search for notes I created in Houston?

"Is the metadata search in OneNote decent? For example, can I search for notes I created in Houston?"

Don't think so. You can search note titles, bodies, section names, section group names, handwriting, OCRed text in attached images (OneNote can embed pdfs as attachments or insert a printout of the file as images, it doesn't have an inline pdf reader yet). It can't search inside attachments or inside cloud attachments.

The app has its own tagging system that lets you attach tags to eg. paragraphs and the desktop clients have tag search and custom tag creation. The desktop and mobile apps both also have search that treats "#word" and "word" as different things, so you can jury-rig a hashtagging system should you want to.

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#312

Post by coffeeling »

bwat49 wrote: post #310
adrianmsmith wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth noting that OneNote did always have synchronization issues until 1-2 years ago. There is plenty written about that on the web. Now it seems they've completely fixed them.

In my experience, onenote's synchronization still has serious performance issues if you have a huge number of notes. Try moving or deleting a large number of notes and watch it just completely lock up for 20 minutes. Also, initial sync on a new machine is ridiculously slow. As in I need to leave it for hours before it totally syncs everything.

2016 or the Win10 app? 2016 sync is a lot slower than modern sync (Win10, macOS, mobile)

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#313

Post by coffeeling »

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…

OneNote maybe?

Ctrl+E = search across all notebooks

Ctrl+F = search within currently selected note

You can also search within current notebook, section or section group but there's no keyboard shortcut for that.

Hierarchical organization's stronger than Evernote: https://i.imgur.com/X0qbxg3.png

The app has its own tagging system that lets you attach tags to eg. paragraphs and the desktop clients have tag search and custom tag creation. The desktop and mobile apps both also have search that treats "#word" and "word" as different things, so you can jury-rig a hashtagging system should you want to. The big difference is that both OneNote Tags and #hashtags have to live within the note body, they're not metadata properties of the note the way they are in Evernote.

UI for large notes shouldn't be worse than Evernote's.

Is on Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, web, though different clients have different featuresets.

Cost is the price of however much OneDrive storage you need for the notes.

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#314

Post by black-tea »

merlincorey wrote: post #211
black-tea wrote: post #77

Reading these comments reaffirms my position that I've had for years: I only trust plain text. For this reason alone org-mode is the only note taking system worth using. But it's also good for other reasons. You should try it.

Indeed, and org-mode is supported (mostly, anyway) by Github and Gitlab renderers, as well as to a lesser extent by Gittea. Since it is plain text, it is easily stored in revision control. Apparently, this is not the case with Evernote[0]. [0] https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/95214-evernote-to-supp...

Yeah, I'm so glad it has support on gitlab and github. It's a far superior format compared to markdown and does most of what RST can do as well. I would prefer it to markdown even if I didn't use emacs.

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#315

Post by ubermonkey »

bloopernova wrote: post #278
ubermonkey wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well, what is easy and intuitive and quick for you might not be for other folks, so there's that.

The immediate staleness of traditional Office docs is a downside, but the upside is that you have a copy you control. It falls down a little on collaboration, though.

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#316

Post by richjdsmith »

topoftheforts wrote: post #293
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…

> Notion covers most of the bases but its an electron app and its SLOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWW if you have a lot of notes in it. Takes 30 seconds for the mobile app to open and be useful for instance. Thats a dealbreaker for me. I need to be able to get a piece of knowledge on the go fast. If you can't give me what I want in less than a few seconds you go in the bin. So true. I've used Evernote for years and recently started u…

Same. Love the ideas happening in Notion, but until I can go from idea to having it in my phone in less time than it takes for me to find a pen and paper, I'll stick with other tools.

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#317

Post by eugmill »

koolhead17 wrote: post #306
jredwards wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time I find a new Evernote competitor, I try it out. I keep thinking that it must be easy to top Evernote, which I have various complaints about. I'm always back to Evernote within a week. Notion and Joplin were my most recent attempts.

What was the reason from switching back from notion?

Not the original poster but it takes ages to open, and I have maybe 3-4 notes in there. It's especially bad on android.

Also the offline support isn't great which is a dealbreaker in the subway where internet goes in and out.

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#318

Post by inapis »

drb91 wrote: post #213
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…

To be fair, no notes service is worth paying for—they all have ridiculous cost for providing a commodity service.

Depends on your use case. If you are just storing text string, simple notes, using it as a scratchpad or maybe a todo list, then yeah, it's hard to justify pricing.

But some note services are the backbone of some people's workflow. I personally require one and if Evernote shutdown, it will create massive disruption to my life.

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#319

Post by slantyyz »

saadullahsaeed wrote: post #244
slantyyz wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Sublime's file search is super fast. Works great for me.

My folder tree is fairly flat and folder/file-naming is self-explanatory, so when I have to use the dropbox client on mobile, finding stuff isn't too bad.

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#320

Post by dogma1138 »

coffeeling wrote: post #305
dogma1138 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OneNote is also more importantly completely free on all platforms including all of it's cloud features. Besides OneNote being much better for handwritten and typed note taking as well as "rich notes" one of the most best features it has is email to note which means that even if you have to take notes on a machine that doesn't have it or you can't log in into OneNote from it or if you want to take notes from someone e…

You can email to Evernote, and it's better than OneNote, if anything, since you can email to your Evernote from any account. OneNote needs the email account to be yours and associated with the notebook you want to send it to.

Evernote formatting from email is absolutely horrendous and the fact that it's restricted to specific emails is a huge bonus for OneNote, no spam.
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