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

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

#551

Post by hnick »

slg wrote: post #211
barsonme wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ex post facto laws should be prohibited in any civilized country.

Holding data is on ongoing behavior. It isn't an ex post facto law to change how a company handles it in the future. Coca-Cola can't sell you a soda with cocaine in it just because it was legal when they started their business. What would make it an ex post facto law is if companies were punished for how they handled data before the law was created. It is perfectly reasonable to punish them if they continue that same…

I think it would greatly complicate things if cold-storage backups count as holding data.

Some poor kid would have to go and load all the tapes and redact it.

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

#552

Post by tengwar2 »

achow wrote: post #170
briHass wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're on Windows, OneNote is almost impossible to compete with. Even though it's part of the Office suite, it's a free, stand-alone download. The phone apps are free, and you get 5GB of free storage. Then, for less than the cost of Evernote, you can get a O365 subscription and get the Office suite and 1TB of storage. Even though OneNote is basically a loss-leader, it's extremely powerful and flexible. It's been a…

Exactly. I'm OneNote user for last 15 years or so. I got roped it in because it was free and good enough for my text notes (with image and PDF attachments). I transitioned to MacOS 10 years back.. and lo behold, free OneNote application available there too with free cloud storage (OneDrive) and cross device sync story (mobile, Windows). Works great.

No way of avoiding cloud storage though, which is a problem for confidential information. That's why I dropped it when I moved to Mac, and the Windows version later moved to the same restriction. It's a pity: I happily paid for OneNote in the early days, and in some respects I have not found anything as good.

Oh, and one peculiar restriction: I found that there was no way to import the .one files I had brought over from Windows, even though there was at least one third party system which could do it.

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

#553

Post by ShortCipher5 »

nirvdrum wrote: post #486
neilv wrote: 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…

I think that's a good point.

A common tactic now is to have this idea of lock-in. That if you don't continue to use said service you loose everything. This forces you into that subscription and makes it extremely hard to transfer and move.

I have seen many apps that lock data export behind enterprise subscriptions - that have no pricing and only "contact us".

I do think there are times it may make sense to have some unique file format (maybe your app does something special and needs that format) but there should always be a way to get that data into something more standard. Whether that's a text file, a CSV file or something else.

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

#554

Post by wpietri »

belthesar wrote: post #79

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 agree freemium plans have hazards like that. But as somebody who never converted, it was because Evernote always felt kinda shaky for me. I was willing to pay for great, reliable software. But them asking for money for adequate but buggy software was a hard sell for me.

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

#555

Post by wpietri »

cborenstein wrote: post #416
stevefan1999 wrote: post #252

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…

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

I've been using Logseq for a few months and am loving it. Its model is pretty different from Evernote, and in ways I think are superior. The heart of is the daily journal, and you can tag each lump (which they call a block) with hashtags. You can also create pages, of course, but I find myself doing that less and less.

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

#556

Post by mesoman »

RDaneel0livaw wrote: post #492
sebmellen wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am also surprised at how rarely Standard Notes is mentioned.

I really like it ... the ios app is great, it syncs super fast, I love how easy it is to switch between plain text, markdown, todo list, etc... It's perfect for my workflow, I just find it odd that nobody else was mentioning it. So here I am doing so! If you don't use it, check it out.

It looks really, really interesting. But when you say it syncs super fast... is syncing initiated manually, or do you mean that changes on one device appear on another device quickly?

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

#557

Post by mesoman »

Charlie_26 wrote: post #256
stevefan1999 wrote: post #252

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…

Do any permit a transfer-in from Evernote?

Standard Notes claims to, with a caveat that there may be a format it can't handle due to Evernote adding features.

A transfer-in from Evernote, either natively or through some third party utility, is a must. I'm not interested in writing something to parse .enex and put it into some other format (although .enex looks pretty easy to parse - it's xml with embedded BASE64 for some things like images).

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

#558

Post by guiambros »

kepano wrote: post #461
ledauphin wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

great to hear that it works, but it is hilariously expensive for what it does. When the price comes down to $3/month, I'll start paying for it. Until then, I'll use Syncthing for free.

> hilariously expensive for what it does What Sync does is not only "sync", it also helps Obsidian remain profitable and 100% user supported. Subsidizing costs in pursuit of growth is what got Evernote here.

> * it also helps Obsidian remain profitable and 100% user supported...*

100x this.

More than paying for a feature, subscribing to Obsidian Sync is a great way of sponsoring the project, and hoping that these folks are successfully enough to make a living and continue to pay their talented engineers for as long as possible, without going down the rabbit hole of VC funding and stock market.

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

#559

Post by ElFitz »

wj wrote: post #330
ElFitz wrote: post #121

Now I want to set up a Patreon or Go Fund Me to fund an open source web clipper by those who worked on Evernote’s. I’ve never really found anything that worked that well.

That was my favorite part of Evernote. However, I was recently cleaning up old notes that I had transferred to Obsidian and few of the pages I had clipped were ever read. It turns out I was just hoarding.

That’s where I think coupling a web clipper with audio transcription, CLIP, & an LLM, can provide a lot of value.

Have everything automatically classified, tagged, semantically searchable, and linked.

This way when I, for example, write down a new idea about LLMs, everything related is automatically surfaced, including those Langchain and LlamaIndex tutorials, and the notes I’d left about them.

Same thing when I look things up.

And I think this "autopilot" aspect will drastically simplify the usage of tools like Obsidian & Roam.

It won’t replace careful curation, but I am convinced it can be better than what most have (ie Notes, bookmarks, sticky notes, etc)

Perhaps that’s what the guys over at Quivr[0] are trying to do, but I haven’t gotten the chance to try it out yet.

It’s such an obvious use case.

[0]: https://www.quivr.app/

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

#560

Post by mesoman »

bosie wrote: post #531
Zambyte wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I define "malware" to mean software that intentionally subverts the desires of the owner of the computer (unintentional subversion is a bug or a miscommunication). Apple arbitrarily restricts you from using your applications (obsidian) to read and write your data in a way that you can sync, to no fault of its own, your own, or the syncing service. I strongly encourage you to try associating this kind of behavior with…

Apple is upfront about it and I knew what I was getting (and not getting). To be honest, i can barely ever use any of my software the way i want it. Obsidian's sync service for example has dark patterns and is a lot closer to your definition of malware as they are hiding how their sync works (versioning, bugs they know but don't advertise, merge conflicts that destroys data etc). > I bet that would see that as a prob…

Apple may be upfront, but a couple of years ago they pretty much suddenly destroyed Progressive Web Apps by disallowing a whole bunch of modern, open standard browser capabilities, all in the name of preventing tracking.

A lot of developers were just crushed by that. Imagine having hundreds of thousands of dollars into developing an app when Apple just destroys the ability to do it.

When a big corporation has monopoly power (and Apple is very close to that - only one equally evil competitor in mobile space), they do bad things, often thinking they are doing good.

[caveat - there is so far an unofficial way to get around their "we will blow away your saved browser data" that was discussed by one of the webkit developers on the webkit blog. But since it isn't an official Apple doc - do we trust it?]

I was one developer who was burned. I was developing, as a volunteer, a web app for a very large volunteer organization. Boom... now it may not be possible, or if I use the work-around, it may be possible until it suddenly changes.

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