[HN Gopher] Ask HN: What Happened to Evernote?
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Ask HN: What Happened to Evernote?
I have depended on Evernote for a long time without even realizing
how much of a daily utility it is. It has been so seamless that I
had forgotten I was rolling with the free version, until recently.
I noticed a few UI changes which seemed a little unintuitive and
some of my notes didn't seem to sync as reliably between my phone
and laptop. No biggie, I have gotten used to updates. Then this
week I was working through a new project on a customer's site
taking notes in Evernote as I normally do. I spent a good chunk of
time going through the project onsite and making a comprehensive
list of everything that would need to be done. I noticed the header
on my note was grey but assumed it was a UI change. I had 4G
reception on my phone and figured, even if something's not quite
right I can sync it up back at the office like I normally do as the
note would be on my phone. So I proceeded like normal. The whole
note is gone as if it never existed. Is this some sort of effort
to onboard me to the paid version? Have I inadvertently clicked a
"yes I accept that the free version is going to become unreliable"
button? I appreciate I am not a great customer - I have been using
a free version for years without even thinking about it. But thats
kind of the point, Evernote worked so well I never gave it a second
thought. Now I am not 100% sure on the safety of my notes... What
is other people's experience? Have I just been caught napping
because I mindlessly clicked an updated terms of use without
reading it (as I do)? If I go paid am I getting something as good
as what the old Evernote was like?
Author : cconcepts
Score : 174 points
Date : 2022-04-10 09:27 UTC (13 hours ago)
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I was a paying customer for years until I realized that I
| probably spent about 5 hours a month carefully curating notes,
| but spent almost no time reading them.
|
| Since then I have switched around using Google Keep, Apple Notes,
| and FastMail Notes for quick and dirty notes on things to do or
| things to maybe look at in the future.
|
| I consider myself to be a gentleman scientist, I am deeply
| interested in a small number of technologies. What I most enjoy
| doing now is organizing things I learn or little code experiments
| in online books that are easy to update, and eventually retire
| when I don't want to maintain them or they no longer seem
| relevant. Sort of like blogging with more structure.
|
| Sorry for being so off topic here, but it seems too easy to get
| into long term habits and not occasionally decide what is really
| worth spending time on. My carefully curated Evernote notes were
| a waste of time.
| happytoexplain wrote:
| On Windows, when creating a new note with the keyboard shortcut,
| Evernote started to silently fail to save the note. Once I
| noticed, I checked its log, and saw that every time there was a
| database-related error. I reinstalled and that fixed it, but I
| had to stop using Evernote. I back up my notes, but that doesn't
| help when the program is silently failing to save them in the
| first place. I used Evernote for _everything_ , and I will never
| know how much information I lost due to this bug. It was a data
| nightmare scenario.
|
| I also noticed one day that some of my notes that only had titles
| also had a body containing the same text. I backspaced through
| the superfluous body, and the note deleted itself. I reproduced
| this reliably. I think maybe those notes really only had bodies,
| but Evernote was duplicating the body text in the title textbox,
| or vice versa, tricking me into thinking it had both, so when I
| deleted the body, it considered the whole note empty. Luckily, I
| noticed what was happening before I could no longer remember
| which notes I had accidentally deleted.
|
| Other than the big bugs:
|
| Pasting without formatting never seems to work.
|
| Assigning a note to a notebook and tagging it is not keyboard-
| friendly, reducing efficiency dramatically.
|
| Filtering by notebook/tag takes way more clicks and screens than
| it needs to on mobile.
|
| Launching the app is incredibly slow, which means you can't use
| it for a quick look-up.
|
| The conflict rules seem overly simple, as I frequently get
| conflicts in a big note I have when I simply add a line
| _anywhere_ in it on two devices.
| bsutt wrote:
| Being able to forward an email to create a new note has always
| been their killer feature for me. The majority of my tasks begin
| with an email. Does anybody know if any of the Evernote
| alternatives support this yet?
| viraptor wrote:
| I've never used this, but Joplin seems to have a 3rd party
| solution for that: https://github.com/manolitto/joplin-mail-
| gateway
|
| Some assembly required of course.
| coffeeling wrote:
| Amplenote, OneNote, Mem, GoodNotes, Nimbus Note, Notejoy
| randomluck040 wrote:
| You might write your own Pipeline where you forward a mail,
| scrape the content and e.g. save it to a Markdown or plain text
| file to open it with your text editor of choice. I don't know
| of any piece of software unfortunately.
| klausjensen wrote:
| I still use Evernote for scanned documents (invoices, receipts,
| insurance papers etc etc), and have done so for ~10 years -
| because I can free-text search in scanned documents.
|
| During those years, Evernote has kept getting worse and worse,
| becomeing slower and more unreliable at doing cores things, while
| they slap features on it, that I do not want (collaboration, chat
| and other garbage).
|
| I want to migrate off at some point, but 10 years of scanned
| documents are tricky to migrate, and frankly I do not know of any
| good alternatives at this point.
| ungamedplayer wrote:
| Has this changed your mind about hosted third party services? I
| have seen a number of people bitten by this kind of vendor
| behaviour, but they swiftly go back to making the same mistake.
| nnoitra wrote:
| How safe is my data if I use Notes on Mac and then upload it
| to iCloud?
|
| The reasoning is that Apple is a trillion dollar company and
| they've no interest in screwing me over. I know it's naive
| but a consolation I guess. If not, what would be an
| alternative?
| joshspankit wrote:
| They _do_ have an interest in making sure you can't take
| your data with you if you leave which I would argue is a
| type of screwing you over.
| wiredfool wrote:
| For a long while, notes backend used IMAP.
|
| I lost a bunch of notes that I didn't realize were stored
| on an email account that went away.
| joshspankit wrote:
| It's certainly changed my mind.
|
| Now, part of my vetting process for new services is "can I
| not just get my data out, but also the metadata I care
| about?". That's done with the first few
| projects/documents/whatever, and then because of being bitten
| in the past, I know I must do the same export at least twice
| a year in order to know that the company has not silently
| restricted it.
| greggsy wrote:
| I just take photos of documents and tag them in the Photos app,
| which OCR's documents out of the box now.
| mszcz wrote:
| I've switched to SwiftScan with automatic upload to Dropbox. It
| does decent-ish OCR on documents so that you more or less can
| select text in scanned PDFs. I rarely search inside scanned
| docs, most of the search is by filename which I manually set a
| couple of times a week. For file search VoidTools Everything is
| great.
| sph wrote:
| Any other recommendation for an iOS scanner app that doesn't
| want me to subscribe to a mailing list and doesn't ask for
| monthly payment?
|
| Free or one time payment only.
| devaler wrote:
| I've used and liked Genius Scan for a long time. Roughly
| six or seven years.
| tekstar wrote:
| iOS notes!! hit the camera button from a note, scan
| multiple pages, turns it into a PDF
| kejaed wrote:
| Apples built in Notes app does pretty well these days.
| mszcz wrote:
| I'm on Android, sorry.
|
| SwiftScan has a one time payment option AFAIK, that's the
| one I used.
| sph wrote:
| No, I installed it and saw they offer a subscription.
| There is no one off payment, they offer a yearly VIP
| package for PS35.99.
| mszcz wrote:
| Huh. I've checked by purchase history on the Play Store
| and there's a 2016 May charge for SwiftScan Plus, no
| active subscriptions. I've got the iOS version on the
| iPad, fully unlocked, also no subscriptions.
|
| I guess they eliminated the one-time purchase option.
| Bastards. No way I'd pay PS36 for this _yearly_. Netflix
| doesn 't cost _that_ much more!
| artificial wrote:
| If you're looking for discovery scope out Memos. Been using
| it for years, happy customer. It indexes all images, I snap
| menus and receipts and search is instant plus everything is
| on device.
| emrah wrote:
| > I still use Evernote for scanned documents
|
| In my opinion, that is Evernote's one and only killer feature.
| olivermarks wrote:
| I have used Evernote practically since it's inception and had a
| similar doc loss to @cconcepts where I wrote a long piece on a
| plane which was synced with another user. It just disappeared and
| was a big loss as it was due the following day. I badgered
| Evernote support with my ZDNet blogger hat on but never got a
| satisfactory answer or the doc back.
|
| It's a terrific product but I no longer trust it for anything
| important. I also find the search is increasingly janky which is
| now a major problem. This is all a shame because it is still best
| of class to me
| 0des wrote:
| > my ZDNet blogger hat on
|
| No disrespect but surely this was a hail Mary and not
| immediately expected to actually work out.
| olivermarks wrote:
| The great advantage of having a ZDNet column was you
| immediately get responses to personal product issues in case
| you write them up for public consumption.
| 0des wrote:
| Is that what it means to you? That's an interesting angle I
| had not considered.
| olivermarks wrote:
| Absolutely. companies are terrified of bad publicity.
| dotBen wrote:
| I migrated from Evernote to Microsoft OneNote. If I was 10 years
| younger or still an engineer I would have experimented with a
| 'roll your own' FOSS option but these days I'm an exec and I just
| need my notes to be stable, dependable, easily accessible etc.
|
| OneNote is essentially free, it's Microsoft's gateway to get
| people to come back into their ecosystem and you obviously know
| it's going to be well maintained, high integrity of storage, etc.
| I know it will be still around and maintained in 10 years time
| when I still want to access my old notes.
|
| The mobile and iPad apps are nice, there's also a convenient
| Evernote to OneNote importer: https://www.onenote.com/import-
| evernote-to-onenote
|
| My take on Evernote is that they never managed to properly
| monetize it. I was a single user, not in a team, didn't need
| shared notes or chat functionality and there was no need for me
| to pay for it... until they decided to arbitrarily limit the
| number of devices you could use your account on which is just
| such a shitty approach because we all know there's no actual cost
| to servicing three devices vs two. In other words the only thing
| they could do to get me to pay for it was hobble my UX until I
| coughed up. Sorry, no thanks.
|
| Honestly, if you just want a solid 1:1 Evernote replacement that
| isn't markdown, self-hosted, etc just use MS OneNote. It's great.
| dkarl wrote:
| > My take on Evernote is that they never managed to properly
| monetize it. I was a single user, not in a team, didn't need
| shared notes or chat functionality and there was no need for me
| to pay for it... until they decided to arbitrarily limit the
| number of devices you could use your account on which is just
| such a shitty approach because we all know there's no actual
| cost to servicing three devices vs two. In other words the only
| thing they could do to get me to pay for it was hobble my UX
| until I coughed up. Sorry, no thanks
|
| Asking people to pay for a non-crippled experience makes sense
| to me. The behavior I want from a note-taking app is not
| conducive to any other way of monetizing my usage. For a long
| time Evernote wouldn't face up to that, and a result, they
| didn't value their product or their users. I used to take
| backups obsessively because every day I half-expected Evernote
| to shut down their servers, because they couldn't figure out
| how to turn it into a social network or a business
| collaboration platform. Now at least they seem to have settled
| down and accepted what their product is.
|
| I click on virtually every headline I see about note-taking
| apps because Evernote has done plenty over the years to
| alienate me. I'd love to switch. But I don't want to run the
| infrastructure myself, and I don't want to be anyone's free
| user. I'm keeping an eye on Joplin, but for now, Evernote is
| the best for my purposes.
| coffeeling wrote:
| I wouldn't say OneNote is a 1:1 replacement. The tagging system
| works differently and is more for callouts than note
| organization, while OneNote itself is much more folder-driven
| than Evernote's limited foldering ability (which it compensates
| for with stronger tag support).
| danielodievich wrote:
| I've been a onenote user from its inception, desktop only.
|
| I've never lost a note yet and have all of them since I started
| gosh whenever it shipped. It survived moving 4 companies
| offline until 5th forced me into syncing it to cloude one drive
| so that I can share it between 3 macs and 4 windows machines
| and vms.
|
| An incredible tool that I can't do without.
| prox wrote:
| Joplin is a solid alternative for me. You can also spin your
| own cloud or just buy a bit of space.
| dkarl wrote:
| I tried Joplin, but sync from desktop to mobile happens on a
| fixed interval instead of syncing automatically when you make
| changes. That was a blocker for me because a lot of basic use
| cases involve switching between devices:
|
| - Create a workout on my laptop, then walk to the back yard
| and follow it on my phone while taking additional notes.
|
| - Create a packing checklist for a trip on my desktop, then
| walk around the house with the list in my hand, checking off
| what I have already so I know what I need to buy.
|
| - Scan a tax form to my Taxes notebook on my phone and then
| go back to my laptop where I'm using Turbotax.
|
| Evernote has worked for these use cases for a long time.
| masterofmisc wrote:
| Thanks. Never heard of Joplin. Its OpenSource, uses E2E
| encryption and says that the notes are stored in an open
| format. Deffo need to do some research
| prox wrote:
| Hope you like it. I just do regular back ups through my own
| pipeline, it's really easy to link to files, pdfs, and so
| on.
| 0ldskool wrote:
| For mobile users, Joplin does not support widgets and never
| will. Its written in react-native and that does not support
| widgets. They have an open issue and basically responded with
| will not implement or support. I'm someone who needs widgets
| for my notes...
| muhehe wrote:
| What widgets do you have in mind?
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| I just use Google Keep.
|
| Tried Evernote back in the day and MS OneNote. Google does cloud
| sync so much better than anyone else though, even if it has less
| features.
| masterofmisc wrote:
| Microsoft has decided to Clone Notion and call it it Microsoft
| Loop. Apparently its going to be a flexible canvas with widgets.
| Not sure if its been released though.
|
| https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-loop
| spondyl wrote:
| The short history is that Evernote spent the early part of the
| 2010s expanding its portfolio into products that didn't really
| serve its core offering such as Evernote Food and Evernote Hello
| as well as other distractions. They should have used that time
| (and money!) to set themselves up for the future and now they're
| continually playing catch up.
|
| You can read about this era in detail here:
| https://nira.com/evernote-history/
|
| As we come towards the third quarter of the 2010s, Evernote was
| being shaped up a bit in terms of non-core products being
| dropped, on-prem infrastructure being migrated to the cloud and
| so on but this wasn't without great pains as well.
|
| Not to mention, a non-trivial number of staff appear to have left
| during that period too which creates a negative feedback loop
| where the upper tier of potential candidates may be dismissive of
| an employer like Evernote (if it looks questionable on your CV)
| which is arguably the type of talent you might need in a period
| like this where your competitors have true realtime collaborative
| elements that the market is expecting from you as well as table
| stakes.
|
| Now after this period, and this is just from my own observations
| so I don't have any particular stories to link, Ian Small tool
| over as CEO with a personal focus on continuing to modernise
| Evernote.
|
| Playlist:
| https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4I5cq2DfrSpehLO_71NC...
|
| I can't say how that has been received but I have a lot of
| respect for the "Behind the Scenes" series that occurred, showing
| Evernote's technical investments such as:
|
| * Sharding their databases
|
| * Standardising feature sets across mobile. Android might have
| had features for years that aren't on iOS and vice versa
|
| * Standardising their applications hence the move to Electron. In
| the context of them needing to move faster, it makes sense to
| focus on one codebase instead of five, regardless of how you
| might feel about Electron itself.
|
| While I don't know that Evernote can ever catch up, I have to say
| I have a lot of kudos for the risk that Ian took in showing us
| what they're struggling with.
|
| That said, I don't use Evernote so I can't exactly say I feel the
| pain of their customer base but as far as content that might
| attract new talent, I think transparency like that is pretty much
| the gold standard next to having a technical blog and so on.
| kmarc wrote:
| While I cannot comment on what changed in Evernote, eventually
| someone unhelpfully will ask you "WHAT? You didn't have
| backup?!", which is kind of a legit question.
|
| Until then, on Evernote's Tos [1] scroll down to "What Else Do I
| Need to Know?" and read point f) of section "YOU EXPRESSLY
| UNDERSTAND AND AGREE That".
|
| In summary, it says they are not in any way reaponsible for your
| data loss. Reading in-between the lines, it basically says, they
| will have outages, disruptions, or buggy updates and your
| responsibility is to defend yourself against these events.
|
| [1]: https://evernote.com/legal/terms-of-service
|
| I think you already assumed all these. I only elaborated on it
| because I saw this many times, even (especially?) with the
| largest providers like Gmail, AWS etc. And this will continue
| happening.
|
| I understand (and a bit scared for) that most of the people don't
| even know how unsafe their data is, however, on HN I would expect
| everyone is (paranoid enough to) back up their data.
|
| I hope you can recover your notes, and regardless of your success
| in doing so, please spend an afternoon looking up ToS's of the
| services you use.
|
| (disclaimer: I worked a bit in the backup sw industry, and yes I
| have multiple full offline copies of my emails and notes for the
| past 20+y)
| viraptor wrote:
| Ok, but to be realistic, this comes from legal. Of course they
| will try to minimise the responsibility, regardless of
| technical possibilities. Even rsync.net which basically does
| data storage says the same under "LIMITATION OF LIABILITY" in
| their ToS. Unless you're ready to pay for an SLA on your
| enterprise contact with a company - who would ever say "we're
| financially / legally responsible for your lost data"? I
| challenge you to find a single public counter example.
| kmarc wrote:
| That's the point though. You won't find any example, because
| none of these services would ever want guarantee of 100% data
| safety. That's why I encourage to think about what services
| we blindly trust without having safety measures (email,
| photo/document storage, note taking) and make sure that we
| understand the impact of losing the data and how we can
| prevent it.
|
| On the proactively constructive side (and although my system
| is not bulletproof either), everything I _create_ first is
| stored locally and then a copy is stored server side (note,
| sent email, photo etc). First safety measure is Syncthing (to
| replicate to other devices), second safety measure is backup
| (locally and remotely)
|
| Complicated? Yes. Necessary? After reading ToS's, yes.
| staindk wrote:
| A backup of... what sounds like a newly-created note?
| throwmeariver1 wrote:
| I bet it wasn't even cold before it got wasted in a cache
| glitch.
| seanhunter wrote:
| > "WHAT? You didn't have backup?!", which is kind of a legit
| question.
|
| No it's not, and it's interesting that you recognise yourself
| that it's unhelpful and lead with it anyway with a disingenuous
| wording of "eventually someone unhelpfully will ask you".
|
| You're just blaming the victim for the failure of the provider.
| Yes the risk would have been mitigated had they had a backup,
| and of course that's a very good thing to do but that doesn't
| make evernote any less culpable nor does it make your question
| any more legit or any less unhelpful.
|
| In software/Saas somehow people think it's ok to blame the user
| for not doing things to work around the services provider
| providing buggy software or an inferior service. Referring to
| the TOS doesn't change this.
| bgribble wrote:
| It's definitely not as featureful as Evernote, but Simplenote is
| working well for me for my day to day note taking.
| mkl95 wrote:
| Evernote have been walking a slow death march for 5+ years.
| srvmshr wrote:
| It is quite unfortunate. Around 2013-2014, I started
| systematically saving everything to Evernote and even got a
| paid plan. There were two issues:
|
| 1. Their app was getting buggy to handle on mac/win. The
| migration was terrible and they had a custom container format
| for export which was pretty useless. It became like the Hotel
| California of software. You could bring your stuff in, but
| never leave due to the lock-in.
|
| I eventually migrated everything out of Evernote by saving
| printing emailing and started using plain Git on a local server
| for document save / version control.
|
| 2. There was no app for Linux. They made a lot of efforts on
| windows mac, and then ios/android but left native Linux support
| completely out of the picture. Evernote in 2015 had a hard time
| with Wine for emulation.
| pedro2 wrote:
| Latest version has a closed beta Linux version.
| lazzurs wrote:
| I'm a big fan of Joplin
|
| https://joplinapp.org/
|
| The sync works with a bunch of different cloud services and I've
| yet to have a problem with it.
| webwanderings wrote:
| How about their export file? What happens if/when this software
| disappears?
| jl6 wrote:
| Markdown format in a SQLite database, and there's a command
| line client to script it if you like. Joplin is excellent.
| webwanderings wrote:
| I'm sure Joplin is excellent and I hate to argue one
| against the other. The markdown files in themselves should
| be independent. I have used several full featured, rather
| excellent, note-taking software, where the export is not
| "open". Obsidian is the only reasonable system I have seen
| where the software is up to date and it doesn't do anything
| with the markdown files to lock them in. I speak of this as
| a single user experience. And no, I don't like the idea of
| Mac Notes and Windows OneNote either. I'm all for note-
| taking apps which keeps the data/files independent.
| jl6 wrote:
| Seconding Joplin, but noting that there is currently a bug in
| the iOS client that has broken Dropbox syncing. Hopefully will
| be fixed soon, because apart from that I can't recommend Joplin
| highly enough.
| dzikimarian wrote:
| More importantly - it can be fully self hosted.
| barbazoo wrote:
| I love it. I wish the search was better though. Yesterday I
| searched for something and could only find it using a
| combination of search terms, not with the individual search
| terms.
| kodah wrote:
| Evernote hasn't really advanced for me, especially as my needs
| have evolved. I ended up switching a while back because of that.
| I'm currently using Notion because those little built in
| databases are powerful, but what I really want is a mix of
| Obsidian and OneNote that can be easily extended and self-hosted.
| tronicdude wrote:
| https://github.com/akosbalasko/yarle This is an excellent
| evernote to md exporter.
| thesimp wrote:
| As a long time Evernote user I can say that the move from
| Evernote 6.x to the 10.x version has been a bit of a rough ride.
| I still use Evernote everyday because I did not find any other
| note taking tools that fit my workflow. And changing workflows
| ingrained over many years takes a lot of effort.
|
| Then again there are some very irritating things in the new
| Evernote 10.x versions of which I am constantly thinking: "are
| they using this feature themselves or am I the only one?".
|
| For example:
|
| * try to move a note to a different notebook. You would thing
| that the obvious thing to do would be to click on the current
| notebook name that is shown above the note and then it drops down
| a list. But no.... You have to hover over the current notebook
| name, then a _hidden_ button becomes visible, that you have to
| click and then you can move the note.
|
| * copy&pasting you tube links always shows a videoclip preview. I
| never want that, I copy and paste a link because I want to save a
| link thank you very much.
|
| *search through a stack of notebooks still does not work. You can
| only search through one notebook at a time or through every note.
| coffeeling wrote:
| Oh god, I just tried. That move note UI is awful, to say the
| least. Would it have hurt them to leave the button visible, at
| least?
| cianmm wrote:
| The weird UI for moving notes to a new notebook gets me every
| single time.
|
| I've been looking for a good Evernote replacement for YEARS,
| but rely heavily on their OCR stuff to file well over a decade
| of important documents that I need to be able to call up fast.
|
| I've replaced text notes with Bear for years, but for scanning
| I've still got to use Evernote. And that god damned move note
| UI.
| ergonaught wrote:
| The only answer anyone can give you here is that that sounds like
| an unfortunate glitch, and perhaps some really poor
| programming/planning in some area, but no, destroying your notes
| is not an effort to onboard you to the paid version.
|
| "What happened to them" is covered in other comments (same thing
| that's happened to everything that isn't dominated by a
| benevolent vision-possessing dictator of sorts to keep things
| focused and say no a lot).
| DangerousPie wrote:
| Maybe this is just me getting old, but I feel like Evernote has
| only gotten worse since I started using it over 10 years ago.
| Back then it was just a list of notes with some formatting and
| sync capabilities - perfect.
|
| These days they have added all these extra features which I don't
| need, and which have made the whole app slow and terribly clunky.
| When I use the iPad app it takes several seconds to load notes or
| search, and the UI keeps jumping around if it hasn't loaded
| completely yet. Terrible experience.
|
| The icing on the cake is that they changed the welcome page of
| the app to no longer show the list of notes - and if you want to
| edit the page to get that list back, you have to sign up to their
| premium subscription! And I'm already paying too, just not for
| the right level of subscription apparently.
|
| I have been meaning to find an alternative for months now, so if
| anyone has any suggestions please do let me know! The most
| important features to me are note syncing across iOS/Mac/Windows
| and the ability to import my notes from Evernote.
| rossmohax wrote:
| Seen it first with Nero Burning ROM
| temp8964 wrote:
| There are comments recommending popular apps like Notion,
| Joplin, Obsidian, etc. I find hard to trust those apps will
| last 10, 15, or 20 years. I have switched note-keeping apps a
| few times in the past and no longer want to do so. That's why I
| decide I will not use any of those apps.
|
| Now I use MediaWiki through docker (with Sqlite database) on my
| home server. It's lightening fast for my personal use, and
| comes with tons of powerful features (categories, subpages,
| templates, math syntax, etc.). Because MediaWiki is the same
| system running Wikipedia, I believe it is very likely will run
| 10, 20, or even more years. It is not the most convenient to
| use, but I don't use it for quick notes, for which I just use
| the default note app on my phone.
| bmarquez wrote:
| I've previously bounced between different open-source
| notetaking apps but the great thing about any note format
| based on Markdown (Standard Notes/Obsidian/Zim/etc), is that
| it's pretty easy to move from one platform to another if they
| stop being maintained.
|
| Although in the end I ended up with Microsoft OneNote (with
| Obsidian for special cases), Microsoft isn't going away and
| they don't have a habit of killing core products like Google
| does.
| temp8964 wrote:
| Yes. I almost settled on Microsoft OneNote. I just don't
| like several things of it. The writing and reading
| experience is not great. And I constantly find I really
| need one note to belong to multiple categories, but OneNote
| forces me to think where to save a note (which leaves me
| writing fewer notes).
| coffeeling wrote:
| A solution to that is to have a fleeting / unfiled notes
| area where you write notes and to have a separate
| maintenance process where you file them. OneNote also
| lets you link to notes internally, so you can have a
| dummy in one place and a link to the actual note in the
| dummy.
| [deleted]
| kvark wrote:
| The beauty of Obsidian (at least) is that it does _not_
| matter whether the company is still around. It's your files
| in a standard Markdown format.
| temp8964 wrote:
| I used to think so. Now I believe it's a misconception.
|
| Not all your notes can be just Markdown format. You will
| have image files. And then different apps handle image file
| location differently. Joplin turns attachment filenames to
| random strings.
|
| Also, Markdown format is insufficient. I will need
| categories and subcategories, etc. And then different apps
| handle those differently.
| thepra wrote:
| Nextcloud Notes might work for you
| causality0 wrote:
| _Evernote has only gotten worse since I started using it over
| 10 years ago_
|
| That is _the_ modern business model. First you build something
| so good it becomes indespensible then you squeeze money out of
| it until your customers hate you _just_ enough to not stop
| using you.
| dehrmann wrote:
| The challenge is every PM at the company thinks they can see
| a step function increase in engagement, retention, etc. if
| they just add the right features.
| lifeplusplus wrote:
| This! Can't get that promotion until your feature that
| somehow increases some kpi somewhere in short term.. this
| why lot of sites go through complete redesign when
| everything is already working
| temp8964 wrote:
| I stopped paying for Evernote two years ago. I guess the more
| individual customers leave, the more it makes the management
| depending on business users, so the less they care about
| individual customers.
| netsharc wrote:
| I had an idea for a website: crowd-maintained list of
| downgrades for products, e.g. "Product: Twitter, Feature:
| login nag-wall when you scroll down. First Noticed: $month
| 2021,; Feature: killed the open API, Date: ___", etc. I still
| have the idea, if anyone wants to implement it, feel free.
| causality0 wrote:
| Hell, it's fractal, all the way from major services to
| operating systems to the most minor app store apps.
| Products get better until someone decides they aren't
| growing fast enough and then they get worse until they die
| or someone sane realizes that your video file player
| doesn't need its own social network.
| maccard wrote:
| I bet you would get a much better conversion rate if you
| implemented a login wall on that service though!
| joshspankit wrote:
| This is what I call "cashing out the social capital".
|
| I don't know if I'd call it a business _model_ , but it's
| certainly something that many modern businesses do.
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| Ah, so that's what Blizzard/Bethesda have been doing. :D
| joshspankit wrote:
| Yes exactly
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| And EA
| amacbride wrote:
| and Dropbox
| causality0 wrote:
| I will never forgive Dropbox. I spent a decade
| evangelizing them as _the_ way to do cloud file storage
| to all the tech-illiterate people in my life and then
| Dropbox decided to limit free accounts to three devices.
| The sheer number of pissed-off and /or confused phone
| calls I got from all of those people was enough to make
| me wish eternal suffering upon the Dropbox executives.
| _the_inflator wrote:
| I think that Evernote went from an app to becoming a feature, a
| bit like Dropbox. This happened so some early startup apps
| 10-15 years ago.
|
| What once warranted an app is simply a feature somewhere in
| another app. MacOS comes with "Notes", which is perfectly
| sufficient for me.
| therealplato wrote:
| https://standardnotes.com syncs well. cant speak to importing.
| they have an interesting privacy/encryption approach and some
| (all?) open source https://github.com/standardnotes
| c0wb0yc0d3r wrote:
| I found it hard to tell if standard notes is fully open
| source, as well.
|
| My bigger gripes are that it doesn't support (markdown)
| formatting without a subscription, and I can't figure out how
| to put notes into folders.
| lenova wrote:
| Folders requires a subscription on Standard Notes as well.
|
| I only use the free version of Standard Notes, but I am a
| big fan of the product. Their syncing has been the most
| solid/problem-free I've seen amongst all of the notes apps
| I've tried over the years.
| lenova wrote:
| UpNote is my recommendation for an Evernote replacement:
|
| https://getupnote.com/
|
| Cross-platform, and it feels like what Evernote was back in the
| day: a simple note-taking app with a beautiful UI.
|
| I replaced Evernote with it a few months ago, and it's been a
| daily driver since. It was first recommended to me on
| /r/evernote, a subreddit that has basically been echoing the
| OP's concerns about Evernote for the last two years it looks
| like.
| ibluehh wrote:
| Notion
| sdoering wrote:
| Notion has a very nice feature set. I like to use it for my
| freelance side business.
|
| Currently it is sadly the best set of features within one
| tool for me (at least the subset I use). I would love to
| switch to an open source variant to self host. But till then
| I will probably stay with it.
|
| Still. I don't like the slowness (web and app). I don't like
| how it feels just off sometimes. And how the Android app just
| so-so works for me.
| randomluck040 wrote:
| What bugs me more than Notion not being open source is that
| the notes are nowhere on my device apparently but on their
| servers. I don't have anything locally. If something
| happens to Notion or I don't have access to the web, I'm
| done?
| conscion wrote:
| Notion has export function that allows exporting your
| entire workspace to Markdown, HTML, or PDF. I do it once
| a month so that. (It'd be really nice though if Notion
| had an automated solution to back up to Google Drive,
| etc.)
| randomluck040 wrote:
| Today I've learned! I knew about the export function but
| not that you could export the entire workspace. I'll take
| a look into that. I'm currently 50/50 between Notion and
| Obsidian, however a blog post regarding obsidian plugins
| makes me think twice...
| bellBivDinesh wrote:
| I use notion and I have to say regardless of what you want to
| use it for it will probably do much more than that for your
| use case once you understand how it works.
|
| My only quibble is the lack of offline functionality.
| robbedpeter wrote:
| Yes. We carry supercomputers in our pockets, it's nice
| being able to use them and not be subject to connection
| issues or server outages, or developer whim.
| nnoitra wrote:
| Notion is just way too convoluted.
| mszcz wrote:
| It's nice but it's slow. Would love to have a solution that
| combined Notion's capabilities with Sublime Text's speed and
| maybe JetBrains's ability to work with keyboard shortcuts.
| randomluck040 wrote:
| You might take a look at Obsidian. For me it's the best of
| two (or how many you like) worlds. You can sync your files
| via git or a cloud service of your liking. What bugs me is
| that it's not open source but what makes it great is a lot
| of open source developers contributing plugins and themes.
| fguerraz wrote:
| I know it's biased because it's an opinion from a
| competitor, but it's interesting nevertheless:
|
| https://blog.standardnotes.com/33536/how-not-to-build-a-
| secu...
| randomluck040 wrote:
| I'll give it a read, thank you!
| jitl wrote:
| Have you considered adding a capability for plugins to
| draw HTML into an <iframe sandbox>? I'm always pondering
| such features, but I'm wary of letting a plugin
| potentially block the CPU forever with custom <script>
| elements. I have a solution to plugin CPU blocking for
| pure API plugins (https://github.com/justjake/quickjs-
| emscripten) but not a way to meld it safely with HTML
| access.
| mszcz wrote:
| Oh, I did. It looked real nice but _I 'm_ not there yet.
| Sticking to Sublime Text for the time being but if I were
| to switch to something right now, I'd be Obsidian.
| mywaifuismeta wrote:
| Same thing. Incredibly slow and clunky for me as well. Seems
| like all tools go through this evolution because you know,
| somehow they have to get VC-sized returns instead of staying
| small and nimble.
|
| I stopped using tools with any kind of lock-in or custom
| format because I know they will eventually degrade into
| something unusable.
| grandchild wrote:
| I find it telling that notion managed to break the core web
| concept of the hyperlink by implementing their own version of
| the <a> tag.
|
| If I middle-click on a link to open it in a new tab, I paste-
| insert my clipboard content _into the link text_ instead (I'm
| on Linux). That's just horrible.
| jitl wrote:
| (I work at Notion)
|
| It's actually the browser's default behavior to do what
| you're describing! Inside a `contenteditable` element,
| links no longer behave as links -- they aren't clickable,
| and hovering over the link doesn't show a preview of the
| HREF attribute in the browsers I've tested. So in order for
| links to do link things, we have to fight the browser and
| re-implement these behaviors.
|
| Here's a codesandbox with no JS to demonstate this:
| https://codesandbox.io/embed/optimistic-resonance-
| jbyeef?fon...
|
| I created a task to track this bug internally. I think we
| can probably solve by calling preventDefault for the
| middle-click event if it bubbles up from inside a link.
| zerr wrote:
| Many products would have been better off by declaring them as
| feature complete and only continuing fixing bugs.
| Unfortunately, this happens rarely due to misalignment with
| employment incentives I believe.
| DesiLurker wrote:
| This is the reason I believe there should be a
| framework/mechanism for dying companies to open source their
| works. this way they can continue to live on forever or at
| least have a way to influence something better.
| thfuran wrote:
| That doesn't really do anything to address the incentives.
| DesiLurker wrote:
| No it doesn't but I am assuming current financial
| incentives of 90% of failed startups are already fine
| tuned enough. eventually one of those startups would get
| it right but what this gets us as a whole is to not
| reinvent the wheel (or at least take the good parts of
| the wheel) move to the next stage by building on top of
| existing infra. Big VCs or accelerators like YC should be
| creating 'commons' to house freely available works of
| failed startups to be used by next venture.
|
| the big idea is that after a few such iterations startups
| will focus on solving the core fundamental issues of the
| target market rather than build out a bunch of infra. IMO
| this would reduce capital cost for newer startups in the
| same field, that should impact the incentives but its
| subtle.
|
| also, who know if all the work is out in open maybe some
| new startup would get an idea to put things together in a
| entirely new way. just imagine if BeOS we opensourced
| when it went under instead of letting it rot in some
| server.
| lukifer wrote:
| "Exit to Community":
| https://www.colorado.edu/lab/medlab/exit-to-community
| DesiLurker wrote:
| I did not know about that but thanks for sharing. this is
| what I am talking about though I believe it will have
| more teeth if VC firms have some sort of an alliance that
| adopts this model. in-fact if they do that they can
| dictate the terms of s/w release in more palatable
| licenses than say GPLv3.
|
| overall I feel a lot more work is needed in establishing
| some sort of commons framework.
| lukifer wrote:
| > establishing some sort of commons framework
|
| I very much agree, and there are some compelling projects
| happening in that space as well:
|
| - https://commonsstack.org/
|
| - https://commonsengine.org/
|
| Getting VC firms on-board is a tough sell, though. Their
| model intrinsically involves getting a greater return
| than the up-front investment, usually through
| centralization, quasi-monopoly, and rent-seeking. The low
| hit-rate of breakthrough successes makes the perverse
| incentive all the stronger: VCs need unicorn cash-cows,
| to offset and subsidize the failures. At best, exit-to-
| community would be a mechanism to cut losses on
| investments with a small-but-loyal userbase, but without
| enough revenue to be truly profitable from the VC's
| perspective.
| robviren wrote:
| Syncthing and your favorite text editor has been great for me.
| Setup is fairly easy and you depend on no offical service other
| than people hosting a relay server which you could also host. A
| little more setup and DIY, but at least the experience will
| remain the same for a long time.
| stedguv wrote:
| Agree! Syncthing is fabulous and this is a good use for it.
| Though hese days, I use Nextcloud Files and Deck more often
| (I can run my own Nextcloud instance).
| criddell wrote:
| Evernote does a lot more than text. For me, the first killer
| feature was taking a picture of a whiteboard after a meeting.
| The photo metadata is indexed (date, time, location) and all
| the text in the photo is recognized as well. Evernote's text
| recognition works better for me than any other solution I've
| tried, although Apple is getting pretty good at that too.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| On that topic, anyone know of an automated way to convert
| whiteboard text _and diagrams_ into proper vectorized
| diagrams (ideally including anchoring the endpoints of
| lines and arrows)?
| avinoth wrote:
| I'm on the same boat, burnt by Evernote and trying to find the
| good alternative. Sticking with Obsidian for now with some
| apple notes in-between. But the former has too many features I
| don't need and later has this vendor lock-in.
|
| If I ever built a note taking app, I'll be using your tag line
| as a subtitle and a guiding principle :)
|
| "...just a list of notes with some formatting and sync
| capabilities"
| Arubis wrote:
| It sounds like you want
| [nvAlt](https://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/) pointed at
| a synced directory of text files.
| not1ofU wrote:
| Joplin - https://joplinapp.org/
| DangerousPie wrote:
| Thank you for the suggestion, I am giving that a try right
| now. A little rough around the edges but seems to work quite
| well so far!
| neilfrndes wrote:
| I use Joplin with Hetzners storage box service to keep my
| notes in sync.
| lgbrandon wrote:
| I use Joplin and a docker next cloud instance on my local
| home network and set Joplin to only sync on wifi. Works great
| to keep notes synced on phone and laptop!
| sofixa wrote:
| Obsidian. It's markdown based, so simple at the base, but you
| can go wild with plugins ( including latex, graph
| visualisations, dynamic queries across notes, etc.), and it
| supports metadata, tags, etc. if you want to. You can sync with
| anything supporting text files ( Git, Dropbox, Google Drive,
| etc) or pay a bit for their ens to end encrypted service that
| works great.
| tstrimple wrote:
| I just wish the Obsidian sync features were better. I often
| end up with two copies of the same note when switching
| between devices.
| lr1970 wrote:
| Would like to mention excalidraw plugin for obsidian. It
| works in both desktop version and obsidian mobile (with
| pencil support). One can quickly scribble a drawing (LaTeX
| formulas allowed in drawings) and embed it in an obsidian
| note. Syncing between desktop, laptop and iPad works great.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| Dendron, it's like Obsidian (markdown based notes in files on
| your filesystem) but as a VS Code plugin, so it's also
| compatible with Git and other VS Code filetype extensions.
|
| https://www.dendron.so/
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?q=dendron
| mech422 wrote:
| Another vote for Obsidian here. Its the first 'note taking'
| system I actually _use_ (even evernote wasn't as frictionless
| for me).
|
| Not an issue for me, but others might be concerned about its
| (lack of??) mobile support. I do all my work on desktops and
| sync thru git, so its not been a problem for me.
| hklgny wrote:
| Obsidian has a solid mobile app now
| 0ldskool wrote:
| do they have widget support? Specifically a list of
| starred/favorite notes?
| coffeeling wrote:
| Starred notes is a core plugin that lets you pin searches
| too.
|
| There are slightly more involved approaches as well:
|
| https://tfthacker.medium.com/dashboard-a-simple-
| organization...
| lr1970 wrote:
| yes, core obsidian support star notes and lists them in a
| star note tab.
| gnuj3 wrote:
| All the plugins from desktop version sync to mobile too.
| mstipetic wrote:
| I've stopped using it because I can't figure out how to
| make a nice home page with links to various notes and
| important links, it just dumps me in the latest random
| note. Is there a way to organize that, like in notion?
| mech422 wrote:
| I actually sync my instances so when it does the git
| pull, it puts me in the last note I was working on,
| regardless of what machine it was.
|
| I use the calendar, and tasks stuff to give me a
| daily/weekly view in the sidebar for quick nav. and a
| 'general' note for links to notes I want quick access to.
| coffeeling wrote:
| https://tfthacker.medium.com/dashboard-a-simple-
| organization...
| sofixa wrote:
| If you use any of the daily notes plugin, you can tell it
| to always open with the note for today, which is based on
| a template and can contain anything you want. iIRC by
| default it just opens the last note you were in.
| mstipetic wrote:
| So every daily note saved will have this saved over and
| over? Doesn't seem very elegant
| coffeeling wrote:
| Obsidian has a solid mobile app and a good sync service.
| It's not an issue.
| gnuj3 wrote:
| What do you mean by lack of mobile support? Mobile app had
| been working fine for me since its been released, at least
| for me. I only use it to access previously written stuff or
| quickly capture something to be properly edited later on my
| laptop though. So I'm not exactly power mobile user.
| mech422 wrote:
| I couldn't tell you...which is why I put question marks
| in :-)
|
| I just remember seeing comments about it being a bit
| behind some of the mobile support offered by other
| systems. I do everything on desktop, so I ignored it.
| This was a while ago though, sounds like they have a
| (new?) mobile app?
| gnuj3 wrote:
| I cant remember when it was released, I had access to
| TestFlight for a good while for being the supporter. But
| honestly, its great. I was amazed that plugins just sync
| between desktop and mobile.
| antiframe wrote:
| I wouldn't mind using it but their license keeps me away.
| uhuhoo wrote:
| What is it about their license that bothers you? It seems
| pretty fair to me... Free for personal use, pay for
| commercial, unless you are a nonprofit or a single employee
| company. Did I miss something?
|
| (I assume you mean EULA: https://obsidian.md/eula)
| galkk wrote:
| Some us based companies forbid to use obsidian due to
| this clause in license:
|
| This Agreement shall be governed by the laws of the
| Province of Ontario and the laws of Canada applicable in
| that Province. Any action or proceeding arising from or
| relating to this Agreement may only be brought in the
| courts located in Kitchener, Ontario and each party
| irrevocably submits to such exclusive jurisdiction and
| venue.
| antiframe wrote:
| I don't want to have to separate my notes between work
| and personal. Sometimes in my daily journal I will think
| about work things. That would requires me to pay $50 a
| year for an editor to edit Markdown files. That seems
| steep even if mostly I use it for personal use.
| quesera wrote:
| A solution springs to mind, but I fear it would be
| impolite to state it directly.
| abatilo wrote:
| I switched from Evernote to obsidian.md last year and am very
| happy with my purchase. You have to pay for the ability to sync
| between devices but I'm okay with that.
| gnuj3 wrote:
| You dont. I use iCloud to sync between my devices and its
| free. I donated to Obsidian team regardless because they
| created amazing piece of software but just pointing it out
| that you dont have to for it to work.
| unixhero wrote:
| I for one use simplenote.com
| kactus wrote:
| Evernote started going south for me in 2014. I switched to
| OneNote and things were great, but it's far more than I need.
|
| These days I just use Apple Notes and it's been flawless.
|
| Notion looks neat but I'm wary of startups now. I'd probably use
| SimpleNote if I switched.
|
| I also have a bunch of scattered markdown notes everywhere,
| wouldn't be too hard for me to just sync a folder and use
| something like Typora to make adding images easier.
| fluder wrote:
| https://fsnot.es for macOS/iOS ;-)
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| All those product managers gotta Make An Impact
|
| But also, if you want a good product to stay good, pay for it
| mario_kart_snes wrote:
| I switched from Evernote to Joplin
| fortran77 wrote:
| OneNote
| fredgrott wrote:
| Hmm, that is why i use Github as my note taking tool as I have
| learned from experience that having a local git and being able to
| back that up to a cloud git server trumps everything that a
| normal 3rd party service can claim to provide
| nfcampos wrote:
| https://reflect.app/
|
| Always open on 1/3 of my screen.
| nfriedly wrote:
| Personally, I'm using the next cloud notes app. It's somewhat
| limited - essentially just plain text with a bit of markdown
| support, but the upside is that my data is stored in plain text
| files that are easy to backup and/or export if I ever decide to
| switch to something else.
|
| I'm running it on an unRAID server with nightly backups, but you
| could just as easily run it from a raspberry pi.
|
| Before next cloud, I was using text files in Dropbox.
|
| My employer just started using notion. It seems fine so far, but
| I don't see myself switching away from next cloud any time soon.
| 0ldskool wrote:
| I basically have the same setup, using nextcloud notes. The
| notes aren't in plaintext, they are in markdown. Joplin can use
| nextcloud has a sync backend. There are also other note taking
| apps that can use nextcloud has the sync backend but in the end
| I wasn't happy with anything. Going to test drive Obsidian and
| dendron.so to see how they go.
| nfriedly wrote:
| I'm using https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=it.ni
| edermann.... on my phone. It's not super fancy, but it works
| well. I might try out Joplin sometime, but I'm pretty happy
| with what I've got.
| smcleod wrote:
| They replaced the good enough native apps with a horrible
| Electron piece of garbage. That was the final straw.
| criddell wrote:
| The new clients are terrible. I've been a paying user for close
| to a decade and am now actively looking for a replacement. I
| really, really dislike the Windows client. I thought the old
| one was quite good and did everything I wanted.
| muhehe wrote:
| I just tried to login to my 10y+ account to see what I left
| there. On mobile. It doesn't work and I have to use the app. O
| my, that's so slooow, it's painful.
| adamddev1 wrote:
| Does anyone know of a note-taker or just an Android text editor
| with good paragraph-by-paragraph RTL support? I really like
| Obsidian but the RTL support is not there, no luck w a plugin
| either. It's too bad RTL is so often poorly supported in these
| electony apps when all it takes is adding dir="auto" to the HTML
| tags.
|
| Edit: I just found iA Writer. It works great!
| eternityforest wrote:
| I am using Obsidian, synced with SyncThing, after trying all the
| FOSS alternatives out there.
|
| It's the first time I've actually been happy with a notes app. I
| wish it were open, and there's a few features I wish it had, but
| it's the best setup I have ever used.
| erikpukinskis wrote:
| I've tried to use Evernote a couple times, but within days it
| always lost data in syncing between devices.
|
| For me Evernote fails the "you had one job!" test.
|
| SimpleNote has been great to me. You can tell they're not going
| to mess with the core recipe either.
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| Another Simplenote user here! Tried many but kept coming back.
| I wish Simplenote had a feature where I could toggle a flag to
| make a note "read only" and toggle again to edit if needed.
| That'd be lovely.
| simne wrote:
| Unfortunately, evernote is interesting example of very strange
| behavior - when they become in troubles with slow backend written
| on C#, they switched to C++.
|
| To be honest, I cannot say anything about e-note client quality,
| I have not used it at all (I try to use opensource self-hosting
| alternatives), but such solutions on backend side, look very odd
| for me, and not look trustworthy.
|
| Returning to your case, at adequate services, should be
| possibility to backup your documents yourself, or service should
| have incremental backups.
|
| So, in such circumstances I will first figure out, if it is
| possible to make backup myself (and will do backup; and will plan
| backup frequency based on value of day work for me - for most
| valued - daily or even few times per day; for less valued -
| weekly). If self backup impossible, I will ask tech support to
| return to previous state on server side.
|
| For alternatives, as I know, e-note is best for its cost per
| client, I think anything else will be more expensive
| (unfortunately, self hosted FOSS solutions are more expensive,
| even considering, I trust them much more).
| didip wrote:
| I am forever surprised that Evernote is still functioning as a
| company.
|
| It is just a note taking tool, something that can easily be done
| with a git repo hosted on github.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| I was in the same boat. I switched to https://logseq.com/ +
| Google Drive. Markdown based so there's no issue with being
| locked in at least.
| mfru wrote:
| Second that, I switched from
|
| - Joplin (Nextcloud sync)
|
| - org-mode (Nextcloud sync)
|
| finally to Logseq (org format, not md) and Nextcloud sync. It
| feels like I found a solid note taking / life organising /
| knowledge management solution for me now.
|
| As soon as mobile is working as well I am set for a long time.
| nitin-pai wrote:
| I was a paid subscriber of Evernote for several years. Then, a
| couple of years ago, they removed features for paid users in what
| they called an 'upgrade'.
|
| I switched to Obsidian and am very happy. Obsidian Sync and
| Obsidian Publish are value for money; and Obsidian+Syncthing is a
| great option for backing up the notes in a local machine.
| tlb wrote:
| Evernote got slower and buggier every year, until I finally gave
| up.
|
| I switched to Joplin and I like it a lot. It's very fast. It uses
| markdown syntax with all the features like LaTeX equations. It
| stores your notes as regular files in the file system so you can
| export or grep or whatever. Syncing to the mobile app works OK.
| j45 wrote:
| Evernote missed the opportunity to be the first Google docs. It
| was perfectly lightweight to capture and organize information,
| often better than its peers on mobile. Didn't seem to get ahead.
|
| OneNote is nice except it lacks offline support.
|
| Notion is even better with great collaboration but one fatal
| flaw, no real offline mode.
|
| Evernote was always instant on and with you for the most part,
| except where it started losing notes on me.
| opan wrote:
| Don't trust proprietary software. Stuff like this will always be
| a possibility.
|
| Syncthing + your text editor of choice (vim in termux on android
| is actually pretty good, imo) is a reliable bet. Emacs with org-
| mode could be used in a similar way. I'm sure there are other
| combinations as well.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Stuff like this is always a possibility with free software too.
| I'm still bitter about KDE4.
| throwmeariver1 wrote:
| GNOME3 for me.
| pedro2 wrote:
| I periodically return to Evernote:
|
| * Linux support (closed beta)
|
| * tags! omg, I hate and love tags!
|
| If you wish to hop on Microsoft land, Microsoft Todo and Onenote
| seems an adequate combo.
|
| NOTE: blocking ads somehow blocked Onenote. Not sure which config
| I used, only that it was DNS, and wasn't able to replicate.
| michelb wrote:
| Since the move to Electron, Evernote has become a dumpster fire.
| It's considerably slower in _everything_ and no longer supports
| standard native affordances. I 've moved my 12k notes to Apple
| Notes and the difference is staggering.
| troad wrote:
| Out of the frying pan and into the fire, eh?
|
| Sure, Apple Notes may have native window resize, but can you
| tell if the app is syncing right now? When was the last sync?
| What happens in case of a versioning clash? Will it decide to
| work with patchy Internet on that upcoming train ride? Will it
| sync once you go back online? Will it decide to party with some
| random Exchange server you used for work once, and how will
| this affect your notes? Are your notes safe from random changes
| in formatting when Apple rolls out improvements to the Notes
| app?
|
| Don't get me wrong, I love my iPhone and have used Macs for
| decades, but I wouldn't trust Apple cloud services with
| anything even remotely important. I'm even a little sceptical
| about Mac Finder at this point, which is ten minutes away from
| becoming a cloud service itself.
| makecheck wrote:
| My main issue with Notes right now is that somewhere along
| the way we became OK with software having no Undo _at all_ ,
| combined with the power to instantly sync your typo
| everywhere so it is _truly gone forever_ , combined with UI
| that basically encourages accidents. So if I am perfect when
| typing with a tiny virtual keyboard, nothing goes wrong;
| otherwise, I could lose things in ways that are interpreted
| by the software as _me choosing to lose them_ , which is
| bogus.
| tyrfing wrote:
| It actually does have undo, something I know about from it
| frequently detecting waving my phone around as an attempt
| to undo.
| js2 wrote:
| Apple Notes supports undo which reverts all changes you've
| made in the current editing session for a note. A note can
| also be undeleted for 30 days.
| coffeeling wrote:
| Isn't their sync system CRDT-based? Would be really weird
| to not have undo with it.
| throwmeariver1 wrote:
| Never lost a note with apple notes lost a lot of notes with
| Evernote. anecdotal but I personally don't care about
| empirical data in regards of myself.
| swat535 wrote:
| If you are on Apple, have you tried Bear app?
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| Or the FOSS FS Notes https://github.com/glushchenko/fsnotes
| (I don't use it as it doesn't fit my case but I bought it
| because the developer is really dedicated to work on it).
| Very similar to Bear.
| bprasanna wrote:
| Somehow the apps which are using Electron don't care about RAM.
| I always use Evernote in browser in a desktop, likewise Slack.
| Slack app in Mac is horrible.
| arapacana wrote:
| The future is Notion.so
|
| My entire information management pipeline has been overhauled: I
| know Notion can be a little culty, but it genuinely has improved
| my performance so drastically I think it is the best thing to
| happen to me since the internet itself.
| arapacana wrote:
| rip, I see how this reads as an ad but it was a genuine
| declaration. :<
| gentlesoulcarp wrote:
| What happened? They took VC money which forced them to "grow
| without bounds". This caused them to lose focus and expand their
| features in irrelevant ways while stretching their internal teams
| too much and not listening to their active customer base on
| features to prioritize (even though they had forums for this very
| purpose). Over time their tone-deaf stubbornness caused the
| accumulation of too much technical debt. Instead of doubling down
| on developing performant features that customers actually needed
| and wanted to use in their knowledge-bases systems, they dressed
| as Teletubbies (seriously, it was on their "Careers" page a few
| years back) and created a disjointed mess of alternate products
| that they did not integrate properly into their system (i.e.
| Penultimate does not integrate in any useful way). Then they had
| a brain drain and executive flight (new CEO etc.). Then they
| moved to Electron, lying to customers saying it was "Feature-
| Ready" (from the mouth of the CEO) when it was a dumpster fire of
| a regression, actually removing features and poorly implementing
| then existing ones. Now its a nagware-bloatware.
|
| Don't take VC money for knowledge-base companies. You need
| thoughtful development for these types of applications and a
| commitment to the very long term, which is incompatible with VC.
| Obsidian has fallen into this same trap.
| singularity2001 wrote:
| To me the core functionality of Evernote has been perfectly
| replaced by Apple Notes.
| 627467 wrote:
| Where I live I pay almost nothing for evernote (just over
| 1usd/year) so I don't complain about it much. I do try to keep
| synced copies of the notes in certain desktop devices just in
| case the service disappears one day. I also encrypt notes before
| pasting them in evernote of they are sensitive
| lordfolken wrote:
| bprasanna wrote:
| I have been using Evernote for 10 years. Initially i was on free
| plan, but the upload limit made me opt for Evernote premium. With
| premium i never faced an issue with adding a note, searching a
| note and adding images. I really like their easy integration with
| browsers and apps. Saving an article is a breeze. Likewise PDFs.
| As i could see so many complaints from others, there seems to be
| buggy areas in Evernote. Wish Evernote takes it as constructive
| feedback and make its product a reliable one. Because, being
| reliable for so many years means a lot.
| [deleted]
| srvmshr wrote:
| Why don't you try Notion.
|
| Seriously, it feels so much better IMHO, with atomic rollback and
| you can export your data out in a non-proprietary format (MD,
| HTML, PDF) if it comes to difficult choices someday.
| InCityDreams wrote:
| Big red buttons abound: "Try notion for free" that lead to
| "Sign up with....".
|
| I'm interested (especially as i tried evernote previously and
| found it to be 'not for me'), but where's the pricing page
| [supposed to be]?
| jitl wrote:
| (I work at Notion)
|
| Pricing is here: https://www.notion.so/pricing
|
| Our business plan is to charge for collaboration, so Notion
| is free with no writing limits for personal users. You can
| pay $4/mo for deeper version history, bigger file uploads,
| more guest editors, etc; and more per month to use Notion
| with a team.
|
| I'll send a note to the marketing design team with your
| feedback.
| jmchuster wrote:
| I highly dislike the recent changes in Evernote, so i just
| tried importing my notebook into Notion, and uh, it's kinda
| horrendous. The massive amount of margin (going from 850px of
| usable width to 600px is unconscionable), having to click three
| times to open a page, having to click another three times to
| see my list of pages (that used to be 0 clicks), how it handles
| newlines.
| benrapscallion wrote:
| No 2FA.
| 130e13a wrote:
| I tried getting into Notion a while ago (~ 6 months) and
| ultimately stopped using it, due to general UI responsiveness
| issues and their lack of a full offline mode.
|
| Really liked the product, though. I think they're working on
| offline support so i'm planning to check it out again when that
| is added.
|
| Edit: looked into this a bit more and they promised offline
| support "soon" as far back as 2018 so maybe it'd be a good idea
| not to be too enthusiastic about this...
| [deleted]
| Oxodao wrote:
| Yeah, I'm using Notion a lot but offline support is really a
| missing feature. Whenever I'm on a train and want to use it I
| just can't, it's a real issue, but it's still a good piece of
| software. Though I'd really like to find a self-hosted
| alternative that is just as good..
| smugma wrote:
| I used Evernote 5-6 years ago. It was a decent product but
| somehow I lost a note once. I deleted the app and never tried it
| again. A few months later my wife went through the same
| experience.
|
| I now use the iOS Notes app. It's good enough, including the
| sharing feature.
| tekstar wrote:
| Same, iOS Notes all the way.
|
| Adding this because I didn't know about it for awhile and maybe
| someone reading doesn't know - iOS notes includes a pretty good
| document scanner with the iphone camera. Open a new note and
| press the camera icon, you can scan multiple pages with the
| camera and it turns it into a reasonable PDF.
| jl6 wrote:
| I would like to know if iOS notes has reasonable
| export/interoperability features these days, because last time
| I looked it certainly didn't, unless you fancied doing PDF
| exports for every note manually.
| smugma wrote:
| You can export multiple notes at once (PDF or HTML) on macOS.
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| I'm going to reproduce a comment verbatim that appeared on
| HackerNews from quite a while ago. I remembered and kept it for
| reference because Evernote was supposed to be a 100-year company
| (Phil Libin's words) and the decline of Evernote was that one
| reason why I decided to own my content even if I have to use
| various tooling on top of it. I moved to a text-based lifestyle
| spiced with some formatting with Markdown ever since. Phil Libin,
| as an entrepreneur, founder is an awesome and kind person.
|
| ---
|
| Let's say you were just hired as the President of a furniture
| company. The owner says he knows it's good furniture but even
| despite huge investments they can't seem to sell any furniture.
| Your job is to turn things around.
|
| You start on the factory floor. The furniture is made by a
| combination of machines and human workers. Some people are
| employed to set up and configure the machines to make furniture
| parts. Around 150 people work on actually making furniture,
| either assembling it, doing quality tests, or setting up and
| operating the automated machinery. Things aren't perfect, but you
| aren't going to make any changes on your first day so you make
| some notes and move on.
|
| The furniture hasn't changed much over the years, it is still
| basically the same as it was when the furniture store opened. The
| furniture gets 'improved' from time to time, you see a step stool
| with an alarm clock, a small safe, and a web-cam built into it,
| but when you ask the foreman he tells you nobody has ever turned
| on the alarm clock or used the safe or connected the web-cam on
| any of the step stools. People seem to mainly use the stools so
| they can reach things that are up high.
|
| There is a problem where sometimes people slip when the stools
| are wet, so they worked out how to add a nonslip pad, but the
| product managers have decided that the next feature will be to
| add scents to the stools, so you can buy a stool that smells like
| cinnamon or one that smells like apples. They have a big
| advertising campaign already paid for and they already sent out
| the press release announcing "ScentedStools", so the machines
| need to be set up to start stamping out stools that smell like
| "Fresh Linen" by the end of the week. There are daily status
| meetings to update them on the progress. If the "Fresh Linen"
| stools aren't being produced by Thursday they are going to start
| having two status meetings per day.
|
| You hear it's someone named Jim's last day, so you set up an exit
| interview. Jim tells you that the bosses and people upstairs
| don't really know what is going on in the factory. Most days he
| just sits and reads the news, his "nontechnical" manager doesn't
| know anything about furniture or how Jim does his job so there's
| no way for the manager to know what is going on other than to ask
| Jim. Supervision primarily consists of making sure Jim is sitting
| at his desk and looking at his monitor.
|
| Since it is not a Startup thing to set Jim's specific hours for
| him to be at work, his manager has started scheduling 9AM
| meetings every day to force people to turn up. Every week or so
| Jim has to update some Product Managers upstairs about what is
| going on, and he just says they are making steady progress and
| comes up with some specific problem to explain why they aren't
| done, pretty much anything with jargon will work since nobody
| upstairs "could tell white oak from red oak". It takes about 5
| minutes to give his status update but he's expected to stay for
| the entire 1 hour meeting, so he brings his laptop so he can read
| that FurnitureNews website. He says he is quitting to take a much
| lower paying job because he is bored and doesn't respect his
| manager.
|
| Next you go upstairs to the office space and find 300 people
| having meetings with each other about annual plans and
| prioritization, writing mission statements and meeting to discuss
| mission statements. The 300 people upstairs are constantly in
| motion and complaining about how over worked they are. They each
| have 5, 6 or even 7 (sometimes more!) 1-hour meetings every day,
| but you only see them meet with each other, nobody has any
| meetings with anyone from outside the company, nobody has
| meetings with possible customers, and only very rarely do you see
| anyone from the factory floor in these meetings, and then it is
| almost always just to give a status update. None of these folks
| really understand furniture very well, they can't really tell
| good furniture from bad furniture, they literally don't know the
| difference between solid oak and cardboard, they don't know how
| long it takes or how much money it costs to build a chair. After
| a few days of meetings you haven't met anyone who cares about
| furniture at all, they all seem to want to work at the furniture
| factory because it pays well, or they like the prestige of being
| 'in furniture'. Mostly they talk about how overworked they are
| and make the case for hiring a few more people. If they could
| hire another person for their team they wouldn't be so far
| behind. You aren't sure what they are getting behind in, are they
| talking about meetings they can't attend because it conflicts
| with another meeting that is more important somehow? Do they need
| more time to work on power point slides for the next days
| meetings? Some of the office folks have degrees in furniture
| science, but none of them have ever successfully built or
| designed any furniture outside of little school projects.
|
| Then you go out behind the factory and see a massive mountain of
| furniture stacked up to the sky. The factory workers have been
| building furniture every day for years. People all agree that it
| is good furniture, maybe the best there is. Nobody ever buys any
| of it. It's not sold in any stores. No hotels buy it. No
| businesses buy it. Lots of people are lined up as far as you can
| see to pick furniture out of the pile for free.
|
| How do you fix this company?
| thomasjudge wrote:
| This is great
| jodrellblank wrote:
| You're the President of a big and busy company which is
| prestigious to work for, creates well regarded furniture and
| gets huge investments. The people who can't tell good furniture
| from bad furniture are kept away from the factory. What is
| there to fix, except Jim, who is pait to "tell white oak from
| red oak" but uses his self-proclaimed skills for sneering and
| gatekeeping and lowering morale and certainly isn't using them
| to improve anything. Let him go. If he doesn't want a
| comfortable position with 5 minutes work per day, there's
| someone in the factory who does.
| elcapitan wrote:
| I was equally hooked on Evernote as a main driver both for work
| and personal notes for many years, but switched to Joplin in
| 2020, and never looked back. It's also much better for
| development-related notes, as it supports markdown and syntax
| highlighting for code snippets. The only downside to me is the
| crazy large binary, but I can live with that.
| stblack wrote:
| I've resorted to downloading and using the legacy version of
| Evernote. I find this version is more stable.
|
| https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/360052560314-Ins...
| (Windows/Mac)
|
| I've archived this install package in case the URL dies.
|
| Edit: This is version 7.14.1
| masterofmisc wrote:
| I am a paying customer and thats exactly what I have done too.
| hwers wrote:
| Feels like both the comments in here are paid for by Notion
| somehow.
| hoppyhoppy2 wrote:
| From the HN commenting guidelines:
|
| > _Please don 't post insinuations about astroturfing,
| shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It
| degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried
| about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the
| data._
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html*
| oblio wrote:
| Yeah, that kind of died the day this was published:
|
| https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/corporate-
| market...
|
| Gitlab said out loud what we were all thinking: companies
| have automation in place to follow big communities such as HN
| and notify their developer evangelists and marketing teams
| and have them reply and create "buzz". Aka, shills :-)
| viraptor wrote:
| There's a difference between people paid to post positive
| things about a project whenever it's mentioned and people
| paid to communicate about a project. One is shilling, the
| other is... communicating about a project. There's a
| difference and saying they're the same thing is quite
| cynic.
| hwers wrote:
| They should probably be transparent about it in latter
| case though (which they aren't always)
| cookie_monsta wrote:
| Do you think that people should be banned from commenting
| on things they work on? Seems counterproductive to me.
| oblio wrote:
| No. But they should be transparent about it. Which they
| have an incentive to not be, since at this point we're
| talking about real money.
| [deleted]
| srvmshr wrote:
| I am an independent developer based currently in Japan. I work
| in business intelligence with a gratis role in a national
| environmental conservation organization. I have no affiliation
| to Notion. I have used their product for last two years and
| generally enjoy the productivity boost. I used to be a premium
| Evernote customer a few years ago.
|
| Hope that clears the matter with you. Please understand that
| regular HN contributors do not generally engage being paid
| shill or voting ring members. Some of us happily choose the
| dignity here over the chaos in paid social media.
| mas-ev wrote:
| It's weird to suggest something like that when Notion has a
| rapidly growing user base.
|
| It's a great app and has a lot of things going right for it.
| They are building a platform for others to also share their
| customized pages/databases. Tons of templates and resources to
| learn how to effectively use the tool.
|
| You can try to draw comparisons but I think they and Figma are
| very innovative products growing in similar ways.
| oblio wrote:
| HN is the target of a ton of marketing groups. They have alerts
| set up for keywords.
| mmanciop wrote:
| Oh yes. And OKRs on engagement.
| [deleted]
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| Notion has a strangely huge and fanatic fan base so it's not
| surprising
|
| It's like a cult
| molszanski wrote:
| There are a few cults :D
|
| - Notion Nation
|
| - Roam Legion
|
| - Zettelkasten Zealots
|
| - Bear Bros
|
| PS. Add more ;)
| smileybarry wrote:
| - Markdown Militants
|
| - OneNote Outlanders
|
| - MSBuild Masochists
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| It's even worse than I thought
| morituri wrote:
| Obsidian Ocelots?
| molszanski wrote:
| Since Obsidian is a glass stone, it can be something
| related to mining?
| motoboi wrote:
| Obsidian Dwarf Gang Member
| WJW wrote:
| Also the:
|
| - Evernote Evangelists
|
| - Orgmode Promotion Society
|
| - Plaintext Patriots
|
| - Joplin Javelins
|
| - Obsidian Organisation
|
| etc etc etc
| neonnoodle wrote:
| > - Orgmode Promotion Society
|
| Special OPS reporting for duty :-)
| molszanski wrote:
| Orgmod Orthodoxer! :)
| molszanski wrote:
| > Plaintext Promotion Society
|
| I think this was the best of them all :D
| LightG wrote:
| Tesla Taliban
| viraptor wrote:
| Orgmode reveling group, for some recursion...
| savolai wrote:
| There are two cults:
|
| * those who appreciate effortless UX that doesn't ask users
| to dedicate their lives to learning arcane systems i.e. CLI
| UIs but allow focusing on life outside computers. Notion is
| indeed a step forward for the industry for them.
|
| * those who appreciate the responsiveness of CLI and don't
| mind the learning curve since the investment for them is
| worth the price. For them, Notion probably doesn't give
| sufficient control over their workflows and data.
|
| These are justifiable value choices. Calling each other cults
| only erodes the discussion into name calling. So please
| don't.
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| You're just rambling... I can't even tell what you are
| trying to say. Slow down
| langsoul-com wrote:
| Eh, it's just a good product. As soon as it becomes shit,
| expect everyone to jump on the next product.
|
| Just like people who used to like evernote, but not any more.
| Angostura wrote:
| Because the implication is that people as saying it is a
| good product, not because it's a good product, but because
| they are part of a cult
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| I never said anything about the product being good or bad.
| Why do you need to make that comment after all I said was
| it has a big fan base?
| politelemon wrote:
| What gives you that Notion?
| seanhunter wrote:
| Quite agree, and as a paid user myself I would strongly recommend
| you don't go paid.
|
| Evernote just keeps getting worse. They add things with negative
| utility (like the annoying new "home" screen that you have to
| click past to get to your actual notes while basic features like
| "search", and the app's speed are significantly worse than they
| were a few years back.
| seanhunter wrote:
| Another concrete example of this death by product management
| syndrome just occurred to me so (in the hope that someone from
| evernote is reading this) here goes.
|
| The "Scannable" app used to be great. Really slick scanning of
| documents on mobile to evernote. A little while ago they added
| one of those "new user experience" things you have to click
| through before you use the app. Fair enough I suppose. Except I
| have to click through it every single time. This grates given I
| use the app about twice a week.
|
| Then recently, scannable decided to forget my connection to
| evernote. Every single time I use it. So every time I use it I
| have to start by clicking through the new user experience and
| logging into evernote. It used to be I started scannable and in
| about 2 clicks a doc was in my evernote. Now there's this BS
| preamble every time.
| goopthink wrote:
| SimpleNote from Automattic is simple, markdown based, local and
| cloud synced. It doesn't get too many updates because it's pretty
| feature complete for what it does.
| ilamont wrote:
| Old wunderlist user, migrated to MS todo which as expected has
| gotten worse over time, particularly the buggy macOS app but is
| good enough on the web and iOS.
|
| IIRC the original developer offered to buy it back from Microsoft
| but Microsoft refused.
| sandgiant wrote:
| I switched to DEVONthink Pro when Evernote switched to Electron
| and started removing features (e.g. related notes). I capture a
| lot of images of documents and need the OCR capabilities and
| search. They also have a fairly extensive AppleScript support so
| you can automate almost everything. Very happy with the move so
| far.
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