I loved Evernote and was a paying subscriber right up until they changed their TOS to let their employees read all my notes to work on ad targeting. They backpedaled after a while but trust was lost, I cancelled immediately. I have no sympathy for their failure.
Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons
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Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons
#42I do miss the old Evernote. Many of the 'enhancements' over the last few years just get in the way of the main benifit of the tool.
Yup - it stopped being a functional note taking app. Which is the only reason I used it in the first place.
It used to just get out of the way and let me take notes in my browser with the comfort of knowing I could get them from anywhere later.
Now it's this horrible, janky app that tries to do too many things, shoves constant feature popups in my face, and isn't very good for taking notes.
I used it constantly 10 years ago. I don't use it at all today. I just loaded it up again to see if I'm missing anything -
It takes nearly 10 seconds to load on a developer machine on a gigabit internet connection.
It immediately asks for permission to send me popups
It tries to show me 7 different features on the home screen (notes/scratchpad/pinned notes/recently captured/notebooks/tags/shortcuts) instead of just fucking showing me my last note.
It takes multiple clicks to start a new note every time.
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Basically - it's now worse than a physical notepad in basically every way.
Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons
#43Looks like these folks raised a big round (for the first funding round no less) last month:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bending-spoons-raises-340-mil...
So fund-to-acquire?
Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons
#44I didn't realize you could acquire a company just by bending some spoons...
Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons
#45I learned three things watching EN snatch defeat from the jaws of victory: 1) There is almost never a case for a total ground up rewrite of your core product. Just don’t do it. 2) Don’t abandon the users who made you successful in the first place. They’re the ones who advocate for you and get your foot in the door. 3) real time google docs style collaborative editing is table stakes for this software category. Build…
Disagree on #3. Social & collaborative features are the bane of my existence. No I don't want to share all my scraps of information, no I don't want to let my friends know what I'm listening to, no, I don't want to publish product purchases I make to twitter.
I think a better #3 would be: decide whether your audience is individuals or businesses, then build for that.
Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons
#46evernote was one of the programs that trapped me, it took some effort to finally migrate my data (I'm now using md files/ obsidian for mobile frontend synced with syncthing)
I wish the UI/UX for Obsidian was better. It takes just long enough to search for a note that I want to edit that I end up just putting quick stuff in Google Keep due to its ease of use.
Really? Search is instant for me on Obsidian, with about 4000 notes spanning 11 years. Maybe you had some kind of indexing issue?
Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons
#47Result being that today I'll migrate everything out of Evernote and cancel my subscription.
That sucks.
Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons
#48evernote was one of the programs that trapped me, it took some effort to finally migrate my data (I'm now using md files/ obsidian for mobile frontend synced with syncthing)
I migrated to Joplin some time ago. Evernote was great but you could see them slowly trying to build that 'walled garden". I'd prefer flat MD files and a fairly decent GUI. Joplin has zero hold on me and this is a great thing.
Same, migrated to self-hosted Joplin recently.
I fired up EN at one point recently. Wanted to add a note in a certain category and it took me like 20 seconds to get to the point where I can type in the actual note text. It wasn't even connected to the internet and still the app was slow. 5-10 second pauses for something that should be done in a millisecond. Useless popups.
WTF were they thinking?
I mean, I know exactly what happened. Everyone who cared about having a good app has left the company by this point.
Anyways, I really like Joplin. Android app works fine. Desktop app works fine. It even has a TUI mode. Server side for self-hosting (webdav) was pretty straightforward to set up.
Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons
#49At long last, Evernote takes an Incredible Journey to be broken down for parts by its new owner. Can't get any more fucked up than it already has been, it went from being an important part of my daily workflow to a place of pain. The rewrite is part of why my last graphic novel ground to a halt, I was using EN to collaborate on scripts with my partner and it is just agony to use any more. I cancelled my subscription…
I tried a few alternatives and landed on Apple Notes. It's blinding fast, and while it's not exactly feature-rich, it does everything I need while being seamlessly synced to the cloud and my devices.
Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons
#50At long last, Evernote takes an Incredible Journey to be broken down for parts by its new owner. Can't get any more fucked up than it already has been, it went from being an important part of my daily workflow to a place of pain. The rewrite is part of why my last graphic novel ground to a halt, I was using EN to collaborate on scripts with my partner and it is just agony to use any more. I cancelled my subscription…
Would some of the open-source alternatives fit the bill? Something like SimpleNote?