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Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

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541–550 of 869 posts

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#541

This REALLY SUCKS. I’ve been using Evernote as a catch-all app for a bit now: scanning documents for paperless, archiving website snapshots, notes for various things (I love being able to make a note tied to a calendar event!), the super good OCR capabilities, task management (even if buggy…), etc. It does a lot for me, and it has great capabilities for bringing information/content into it. There is literally nothing…

I was a big (paid) Evernote user for a long time, and also don't particularly like Onenote. I switched to Notion (paid) and it's been pretty good - they had a patch a year or two ago where the mobile apps were a bit rough but they have improved a fair bit. I don't make big use of some of the more advanced features but the basics are solid and work well. Sharing a couple of notebooks with family members works fine. Exporting and importing from Evernote also worked quite well, a bit of formatting fixup was needed on really old notes.

(Note - the Notion Reddit forum is full of weird life optimization types who want a dashboard for their entire lives with aspirational quotes or something, and that doesn't match my use case even slightly. You don't have to do any of that stuff.)

Obsidian looks nice but the pricing for the sync feature, converted to my currency, is wildly out of whack. It wants to charge me the same amount per year as a family license for all of Office 365, so that's a non starter.

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#542
post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Dropbox doesn’t have a competitor that is free to use Google drive?

Google drive and Dropbox don’t really have the same functionality. Google really wants you to use a web browser; in my experience the filesystem integration has always been flaky. Whereas Dropbox directories that appear in the local filesystem are really solid.

I think you're right that they're not the same but, in the case of that particular example, they are.

https://support.google.com/drive/answer/10838124?hl=en-GB

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#543
post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is super-important. Sometimes the grass is greener on this side of the fence. VCs want to get you to grow rapidly because the only way to move the needle on their returns is to blow the roof off. However as a founder, this is proof you can have a great business and a great quality of life by keeping costs relatively low, the team relatively small, just cranking out code and having fun.

As a founder you probably don’t get wealthy either and a lot aren’t really satisfied with a $150k/yr total comp/benefits for their successful lifestyle business.

You can make A LOT more money than that as the owner of a small company. If a VC firm wants to invest, it's because the company has the potential to make an absolute killing.

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#544

I feel like Evernote is a prime example of the pains of trying to convert free users to paying users for the same features, something we see in many VC funded software from its era. Once you give something away, it's damn near impossible to take it back, even if you plead your case as honestly as Evernote did. Evernote was great. Honestly, it was worth paying for. But they gave away the farm too early, and folks feel…

I don't buy it.

To me, the real story is that Evernote sucked for a long time. They never evolved and what worked in 2008 stopped working a while ago. Notion and Obsidian and iCloud ate their lunch, and all apps these days are so well connected that you could even use Slack for reminders and self messages and get most of the note taking functionality that you would ever need.

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#545
post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you’re both right because the original poster left out competition. It’s one thing to take free back, it’s another thing to do it when people can easily replace your product without paying. Dropbox doesn’t have a competitor that is free to use. At least as far as I know. You can get your disk space in a lot of ways, some bundled with other products you may use making it appear “free” but even if you host your…

> Dropbox doesn’t have a competitor that is free to use Google drive?

Jottacloud

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#546

In case if you want some Evernote alternatives, here's my shortlist: 1. Trilium Notes: https://github.com/zadam/trilium 2. AppFlowy: https://github.com/AppFlowy-IO/AppFlowy 3. Affine: https://github.com/toeverything/AFFiNE 4. Joplin: https://github.com/laurent22/joplin 5. Dendron: https://github.com/dendronhq/dendron (requires VSCode) As a programmer I liked Dendron the most but if you want it to be packed with absol…

Am I the only one who just keeps a bunch of Sublime Text tabs open? Obsidian looks pretty good for the tagging functionality though

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm biased but I'd add-- - Obsidian: https://obsidian.md/ - Logseq: https://logseq.com/ - Reflect: https://reflect.app/ - Stashpad: https://stashpad.com/

I'm wondering what happy mediums might exist between the note-taking world, the wiki world, and the collaborative office document world. Office-oriented tools like Nextcloud or Collabora seem to be oriented to classic Microsoft Word / Google Docs style documents... not as simple as Markdown or as web-friendly as a wiki page. The note taking tools everyone's talking about don't seem to support collaborative editing. I…

Disclaimer, I'm on AFFiNE's team.

But I really think you can check us out as I think we can cover those boxes for you.

We offer real-time collaborative editing which also works offline. We deal with all those conflict issues for you.

And though we aren't file-based, we do offer various export options such as MD, HTML, PDF and images.

We expect to have the latest Docker version and real-time collaboration available towards the end of this month. In the mean time I'd invite you to try the client to see how it feels.

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what virtual Credit Cards are for... Each site gets a separate number and I can expire them as needed. Unfortunately, if they get popular vendors will figure out a way to detect and refuse.

BofA had a online tool (Flash based I think) to generate and manage virtual CC numbers linked to your real card. When Flash was sunset -- they gave a BS reasoning and shutdown this tool as well whithout making an effort to rebuild / replace. I am surprised there was no big backlash from customers given the increasing online fraud and privacy/security consciousness of banking users. Which (US) banks currently offer th…

I have not used it and it may not be exactly what you want. But I seem to remember hearing PayPal offers a virtual card that can be used online.

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#549
post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think Evernote’s problem is that it should have just stayed a 1-2 person company. For the owners/shareholders of that particular 1-2 person company, do they wish it had stayed one, or are they glad it didn't?

Either way, it's poisoning the well. It's a shame that many (most?) SaaS applications lack data portability. I get that part of it is it's easier to have a custom schema than adhere to an established file format (or creating a new open format). The cynic in me believes a lot of it is good old-fashioned lock-in or casual indifference to their customers' data. That's may even be fine for some bits of data. But, for any…

Apple is not a company I would trust with long term product support, at least at the pro end. It has dropped several products. I used to use Aperture, for instance, which was a great pro photography product, but it was dropped with no real exit route.

Obsidian: also worth looking at DEVONthink for similar reasons, but with the advantage that you have a choice of sync services including running your own. The database is open, but a risk point is that it uses RTFD for notes with graphics. That's not supported off the Apple platform, but there are similar risks with any method of storing notes with graphics.

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#550
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was on your shoes around 2014 to 2018. The client I was assigned to, used for everything on project management related documentation. I couldn't understand how to approach it. Then around 2019, in another project it suddenly made sense, after several approaches trying to make sense out of it.

I still can't figure out how to use note,I have tried different approach but having to jump different application and rewrite everything 2 or 3 times, just don't compute in my brain.

I don't use OneNote for long standing documentation (maybe one tab is a cheat sheet). I just make a tab for each ongoing work project/client/etc, and paste stuff in there. Text from emails as a todo list which I think write comments to, notes from a zoom call, screenshots of things I need to fix, that sort of thing. I go through and edit or add comments on what needs to be done then just delete it when it's finalised and I can stop thinking about it.

It's basically a cross between a messy desk and todo list. It works well enough for me. I've tried using stuff like Trello and that is a little too much friction for me, the way you can paste text and images together in OneNote and rearrange them visually just works for me. Sometimes it just feels right to have this item "off to the side" or that sort of thing.

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