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Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

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Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#81

Post by dangoor »

bad_user wrote: post #38

I'm a paid customer of Evernote, I must say that it works great and it has no reasonable replacement. I use it for all kinds of notes, like for example short tutorials on the command line, issuing commands that are hard to remember, TODO lists (both at work and for grocery shopping), meeting notes, listing pros and cons, everything. In meetings I like the ability to record audio, or to add pictures I take with my pho…

> My problems with it is that the data is not easy to port, I would have liked for example periodic Markdown backups to my Dropbox.

Because Evernote is so common, there are tools that understand Evernote's export format. You might be able to find a tool that can convert an evernote export file?

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#82

Post by acl777 »

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. It’s free on all platforms and handles your listed requirements.

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#83

Post by shorts_theory »

taude wrote: post #69

I haven't seen too many people mentioning the onslaught of Microsoft One Note in developing a great note-taking tool, that syncs well in the cloud, and integrates with several of their other tools like Word and Outlook. Personallly, as a early Evernote User, once One Note came out for Mac, I switched. And then getting a job somewhere where we used Windows PCs, just solidified it for me, and I never found the need to…

The moment I switched from Evernote to Onenote was the time EN screwed up the formatting of one of my very important ornate lists. To make things worse, through an unlucky combination of keystrokes I deleted everything I had in my note, only to find that version control was a Premium feature of Evernote.

I promptly used the free "Recommend to a friend" 1 month trial to recover my note and used the importer to move everything to OneNote and I haven't looked back since.

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#84

Post by dangoor »

huffmsa wrote: post #18
guiriduro wrote: post #16

I 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…

If you're in the Apple ecosystem, there's an app called Grocery[1]. It uses the built-in reminders database, but does lots of excellent grocery-specific things (remembering the order of items in the store, using geofencing to know which store you've arrived at, Apple Watch support for checking items off). And, since it's just Reminders under the hood, you can tell Siri "Add Foo to my grocery list", and it works.

[1]: https://itunes.apple.com/US/app/id1195676848?at=10l3Vy&ct=UU...

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#85

Post by notheruser »

I have doubts about the accuracy of this article. For one thing, products like Evernote Food probably didn't take much resources to build so aren't as big a deal as the article suggests. For another, the article doesn't mention the acquisition of Skitch and Penultimate, while chastising the company for a lack of vision. Those aquisitions might not have turned out well, but were more related to Evernote's core product than Evernote Market.

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#86

Post by shorts_theory »

zwaps wrote: post #8

For me real simple: Evernote works only on Chrome, at least the new version. And the Evernote team was quite smug about it. Since I do not use Chrome, i canceled my premium account.

FWIW OneNote has an ugly grayish tint to the notes UI in Firefox and only looks good in Chrome. This is a bug which affects Word Online too.

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#87

Post by arkitaip »

acl777 wrote: post #82
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. It’s free on all platforms and handles your listed requirements.

If OneNote had been made by a hot new startup if would have crushed the competition (easy to use! affordable! very flexible! just works!). Instead, it's too often glossed over because it's made by one of IT's behemoths and not considered to be sexy enough.

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#88

Post by ghaff »

dogma1138 wrote: post #7
TheChaplain wrote: post #2

The author is painting doomsday all over Evernote, but honestly I don't see it. They are like Dropbox, they do one thing and do it very good IMHO. I've been a subscriber for 2 years and use it daily on desktop and Android without complaints or data loss. If there is be a thing to complain about it's their api. It's rather quite annoying to work with and some of the language SDK's are outdated.

Since OneNote became available everywhere and for free I'm not even sure if Evernote still can be considered doing it well considering just how much better OneNote is for actual note taking.

Or even just a text editor for a lot of purposes. I'm probably near the perfect target audience for something like Evernote. (I do a lot of research, note taking, and writing.) But I never really got into a single master tool to do everything, especially a master tool that wouldn't allow me to simply output what was in it into a standardized format.

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#89

Post by adrianmsmith »

acl777 wrote: post #82
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. It’s free on all platforms and handles your listed requirements.

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.

Re: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential

#90

Post by badfrog »

black-tea wrote: post #79
mortdeus wrote: post #57

Also i know, at least for me, that when i find myself wanting to take notes most is whenever its a spur of the moment kind of idea that i dont want to lose. In that kind of scenario, i find that a small notebook and pencil is still superior to an app simply because i don't have to think too much about the process of getting myself into a position where i can actually record the idea. Its just too hard to get into the…

In emacs (where I do 100% of my work), I press a single key combination, make the note, then go right back to work.

What do you do about ideas you think of when you're not at a computer? Or when you're at a computer that doesn't have access to the network you usually store notes on?
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