[HN Gopher] Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons
___________________________________________________________________
Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons
Author : taldo
Score : 224 points
Date : 2022-11-16 14:23 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (evernote.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (evernote.com)
| dotcoma wrote:
| Any idea of how much Bending Spoons paid for Evernote ?
| baron816 wrote:
| Ex Evernote employee here. Someone else posted this:
| https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bending-spoons-raises-340-mil...
|
| Employee shares are (apparently) being priced next to nothing.
| My understanding while working there was that if the company
| sold for $300m or less, we'd get nothing. So, $340m sounds
| about right. It's a fire sale.
| driverdan wrote:
| Seems unlikely they'd spend that whole round of funding on
| one app. I bet it was much, much less.
| floatinglotus wrote:
| Another lesson from Evernote: if your primary business is digital
| (ie software) don't make a corporate strategy of selling physical
| things (notebooks).
| ericd wrote:
| Can we all please go back to buying stable desktop software
| without continuous upgrade nags, now?
| izzydata wrote:
| But without software as a service how will companies expand
| indefinitely until they bust?
| awill wrote:
| They must be incredibly jealous of all the successful note taking
| apps (Notion, Ulysses, Bear, Craft). Evernote were first, and
| blew it. No other way to describe it.
|
| I dumped Evernote when they restricted their free accounts to 2
| devices. Ironically I'm now paying for Ulysses, money I might
| have give to Evernote had they not been so awful to early
| adopters.
| oblio wrote:
| > They must be incredibly jealous of all the successful note
| taking apps (Notion, Ulysses, Bear, Craft).
|
| One point of anecdata: I haven't heard of any of those.
|
| How do you define success?
|
| Keep in mind Evernote was created in 2000 and the web version
| was launched in 2008.
|
| I doubt any of the stuff in your list will be around in 14
| years.
| asah wrote:
| haven't heard of Notion ???
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| Bear was Apple's number one app for 2016 - it's Mac/iOS only.
| pqs wrote:
| Will Evernote be around in 14 years?
| [deleted]
| bayindirh wrote:
| Why not?
| awill wrote:
| Selling to Bending Spoons isn't a success story
| floatinglotus wrote:
| You haven't heard of any of these? How are you even on HN?
| J/k.
| grammers wrote:
| Ulysses is great, I'm glad I found them as well.
| bigtones wrote:
| I don't know that Evernote the company or it's management would
| be jealous - Evernote probably has more annual revenue than all
| of those app combined.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Actually, their experience is pretty pleasant and the product
| works very well after they have rebuilt their apps.
|
| They don't need to be jealous. Their relative utilitarian take
| on the matter is what makes them so unique and powerful in the
| market.
|
| Yes, I love markdown, and Evernote just provides a slightly
| more powerful, WYSIWYG version of it. I neither want
| "everything and the kitchen sink" vision of Notion, and desktop
| centric view of Obsidian.
|
| Ulysses and Bear are Apple first systems, and while I use Apple
| mobile devices, my ecosystem is much more varied, and Evernote
| accommodates all, with feature parity.
|
| They are good and understated. Hope that I won't need to move
| out after that acquisition.
| rurp wrote:
| > Their relative utilitarian take on the matter is what makes
| them so unique and powerful in the market.
|
| Man this was not my experience at all. Granted I dropped
| Evernote quite a while ago, but for years they kept adding a
| kitchen sink of features that I didn't care about, while
| regressing at the basics like syncing and merging text notes
| across multiple devices.
|
| They were maybe first company I experienced that blew up a
| really solid app I liked after raising a truck load of VC
| money and trying to take over the world.
| bayindirh wrote:
| I'm talking about their current iteration and roadmap so
| far. Previous iteration had its fair share of issues, I
| concur.
| codalan wrote:
| The previous issues were bad enough for me to drop
| Evernote as a paying customer.
|
| I would get notes that would not sync correctly, forcing
| me to resolve it by hand. Even after doing that, it would
| still have sync conflicts. This was core functionality
| that just didn't work.
|
| During this time, they were busy jamming in features I
| definitely didn't want or need. Every release would be a
| slower, buggier version of its previous incarnation.
|
| It was during this time frame that a lot of people jumped
| ship. The app was so bloated and buggy by that point that
| even OneNote seemed like a viable option.
|
| It didn't help that Evernote made it as difficult as
| possible to get your notes out of their system. It took
| several download attempts to successfully get my archive
| out of there. It might have also been due to the large
| number of people leaving their platform.
|
| The handwriting was on the wall when they started selling
| knick-knacks on their website. Things like Evernote
| branded Moleskine notepads and dress socks. It's like
| they completely abandoned their core competency and went
| off in some left-field marketing direction.
|
| It's a real shame, too, because Evernote was an amazing
| app when it first came out.
|
| I'm giving org-mode a spin these days on my desktop. Need
| to figure out if there's a way to sync/view it on my
| Android device, but I'm getting kind of tired of dealing
| with all the different, proprietary SaaS note taking
| services that go to shit after a few years. At least with
| Emacs and org-mode, that's one less thing to deal with.
| throwaway675309 wrote:
| A "Relative utilitarian take" is not how it would describe a
| product that tried to incorporate an entire chat app into it.
|
| They had a relatively good product around v5X series and I
| left because they just started to fragment and add more and
| more non-notetaking related things at the expense of the
| entire product stability and core functionality.
| bayindirh wrote:
| They tried to be "everything and the kitchen sink for the
| enterprise", and failed, not because of the features they
| added, but feature disparity between platforms, and some
| reliability problems. I was doing my Ph.D. when they
| debuted chat, and it was useful.
|
| Similarly, I miss their presentation mode for the notes. It
| was extremely useful, and the output was very pretty, too.
|
| However, after the CEO change and rebuild, they really
| found themselves. I'm a pro subscriber, and the value they
| add into my life is immeasurable.
| ace2358 wrote:
| Thanks for sharing your take. I dropped Evernote years and
| years ago. Like iPad 2 long ago. I feel like they were some
| of the early subscription services and probably copped a lot
| of my rage about it. I still hate subscription fees.
|
| I would prefer to pay for my storage (or host my own) and
| have apps use my cloud backend. Every app running cloud
| server to sync all sorts of things has become too much for
| me.
|
| I still rock 1Password 7 and use iCloud sync. I'd pay for the
| app but it's free. I pay for iCloud storage.
|
| Anyway I might give there new apps a look.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| Honestly, the goal with a free account should be to convert
| users into paying users or by making the platform more useful
| for paying users of the service.
|
| If you cancel an account that didn't pay them any money, what
| exactly did they lose?
|
| I pay for todoist because I love using it and the free account
| doesn't have a must-have feature (reminders). I could dump them
| and find something else, but I get plenty of value for the
| money I spend with them.
| ddbb33 wrote:
| Still upset when Evernote lost my lecture notes when I synced
| after turning off WiFi to save laptop battery (back in 2010)
| riffic wrote:
| roam, obsidian, logseq, etc so many new or really interesting
| players in this space.
| d--b wrote:
| Don't know... These guys already made a fortune. Maybe they
| just don't give a s** anymore.
| sedatk wrote:
| I'd stopped using Evernote involuntarily because their 2FA
| recovery scenario was broken and I got locked out of my account
| despite that I still had access to my email. I moved on. I
| checked it again years later, and they fixed it, but never went
| back. Such small omissions can create a whole chain of losses.
| boh wrote:
| It's impossible to not "blow it" in the environment Evernote
| operated in. The default model for software startups was to
| leverage yourself to the hilt so can achieve some fantasy
| growth expectation VCs had for you. The growth requirements
| overextended the realities of a note taking app and so the
| product gets bloated in a desperate grasping for growth of any
| kind and the user gets pinched for every fee that can be forced
| on them.
|
| Hopefully recent economic events will change the culture and
| more companies will actually factor in reality into their
| growth models.
| renewiltord wrote:
| What does leverage mean here?
| oblio wrote:
| Debt.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Right, that's the usual meaning, but it's quite unusual
| for software companies to be debt financed, isn't it?
| SaaS companies usually go the venture route AFAIK.
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| Leverage is probably the wrong choice of word, but VC's
| growth expectations make your average loan shark's
| interest rates look downright reasonable.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Leverage is a fine choice of words. In financial terms,
| debt and equity are not that different. Particularly VC
| equity, which can have some debt-like qualities to it
| (liquidation preferences, etc.).
|
| Also, many startup investments use debt instruments like
| convertible notes instead of direct equity purchases.
| im_down_w_otp wrote:
| I assume it means something more like burn rate and product
| roadmap "debt" leverage than the normal technical financial
| meaning.
|
| It's easy to get yourself as a founder into a situation
| where you're trading fundamentals for next-round narrative,
| and a lot of times that's that can be the deathknell.
| smcleod wrote:
| Evernote was still decent enough before the ditched the native
| app for a dreadful Electron webframe.
| _jal wrote:
| Ugh. Note taking apps need to be instant.
|
| I care far less about the feature set than I do getting the
| whatever written down and out of my head.
|
| If you make we wait while you load a website's worth of js or
| phone home with surveillance data or whatever, I'm just going
| to delete you. I'd rather use a 1995-era Textedit or Notepad
| - they're instantly functional.
|
| Just to make sure I maintain my curmudgeon's rep, I'll add -
| advertise AI and I'm also gone. I have zero need for
| assistance from a tripping robot to type in my work life.
| pbowyer wrote:
| In some ways the Electron app is better because there's more
| formatting options (code blocks, finally!) but most ways not.
| On my systems it's so slow to startup, and I don't have that
| complaint about other Electron apps.
| smcleod wrote:
| Yeah I completely brought my quite powerful machine to a
| halt at the time, it would eat up resources like all
| Electron apps do - and I'd hate to think of the potential
| security exploits with a Electron / unsandboxed chrome that
| formats clipped websites and attachments etc... - not good.
| eastbound wrote:
| France here. I knew some Evernote developers and PO. They were
| blowing money and adding features like there's no tomorrow.
| When there was indeed no tomorrow at Evernote, they used their
| unemployment benefits from our state and worked in parallel,
| which was legally dodgy and ethically out of the line. They
| created a consultancy which almost exclusively works on state-
| derived funding, a bit like half of science projects in USA
| depend on Darpa, except it was education money which they used
| to invent some AI model to find at-risk pupils that every
| teacher could qualify anyway, but you know, AI+education makes
| a sexy startup. They only got public funding and customers who
| themselves were publicly funded.
|
| Such people are a dead weight on our society, sucking at
| education funds, not weighing the cost they have, and giving
| lessons to everyone.
|
| Those guys will never understand how to provide a service that
| customers are willing to pay for.
| nathanaldensr wrote:
| How the mighty have fallen.
|
| Who the heck are Bending Spoons?
| martopix wrote:
| The only reasonably modern app developer company in Italy, I
| believe, for the little I heard. Considering the technological
| desert that is Italy these days, not bad.
| graypegg wrote:
| Seemingly producers of a random set of mobile apps [0]
| including a video editor, a basic photo retouching app, and a
| fitness routine tracker.
|
| As an aside, their site is also aggravatingly self-absorbed, at
| least as it seems to me. Copy about how "we create our own
| cutting-edge technologies" and "Impossible. Maybe." just hurts
| to read when they're talking about a 30 day fitness app.
|
| [0] https://bendingspoons.com/products
| delusional wrote:
| They also call their employees "spooners" and talk about how
| they "they share one thing in common: a drive to become the
| best person they're capable of being."
|
| Statements like "Are you ready to come join us in the
| Spooniverse? We saved you a seat." also make it sound a
| little like it's a cult.
|
| With that being said, their goals seem admirable and they are
| scoring pretty well on some employee satisfaction inquiries,
| so it's perfectly possible that they are actually living up
| to their ambitions. A fitness app might not seem like a lot,
| but they may just be working their way up to something
| bigger.
| Manjuuu wrote:
| In some parts of Europe they still try to look cool
| behaving like if they were some hip company from Silicon
| Valley. Depressing stuff imho.
| brookst wrote:
| 30 days?!?!?
| vxNsr wrote:
| I just got the reference. Bending spoons, doing the
| impossible, like in the matrix. At least the name makes sense
| now.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Isn't spoon-bending a "hoaxy" magic trick?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoon_bending
| seti0Cha wrote:
| Yeah, maybe to young people that means "doing the
| impossible" but to me it means "tricking people into
| thinking you're doing something impossible" or "scam" for
| short.
| whoopdedo wrote:
| Even in the modern usage the principle is to recognize
| that it's all an illusion. No spoons are ever actually
| bent in The Matrix.
| offtotheraces wrote:
| This is going to be a disaster - Bending Spoons is not a good
| actor:
|
| "let's talk about Bending Spoons' business model. The basic
| concept is very simple:
|
| - Find a solid app that someone else built and buy it from them
| (see Splice (acquired from GoPro) and 30 Day Fitness)
|
| - Optimize the monetization of said app (by implementing from
| scratch or fine-tuning existing subscriptions), thereby driving
| higher lifetime value (LTV)
|
| - Take that higher LTV and use it to bid on expensive ad
| inventory (on Google, Facebook, Apple Search) where you can
| acquire more users (aka drive more downloads) - i.e. leverage
| performance marketing for growth
|
| - Convert those new downloads to paying users
|
| - Massively ramp revenues and cash flow by combining the new
| users + the better monetization
|
| - Use the new cash flow - plus the debt from those lovely Italian
| banks - to fund the next acquisition
|
| - Lather, rinse, repeat
|
| There is absolutely nothing wrong with this business model. What
| differentiates Bending Spoons, though, is how they do it.
|
| Remini - Bending Spoons' new app that the press is gushing over -
| is $10 a WEEK. And Splice, the app that started it all? That'll
| set you back a cool $5/week.
|
| Does anyone really think it's appropriate to pay $10 a week for a
| photo editing app?"
|
| https://open.substack.com/pub/impassionedmoderate/p/ryan-rey...
| paxys wrote:
| None of what you wrote makes them sound like a "bad actor". All
| of these are _good things_ for a failing business. Why shouldn
| 't a photo editing app be $10/week? If you don't think you are
| getting that much value out of it then don't subscribe. Yet
| there is probably a group of power users who will gladly pay
| that amount. Evernote needs to be catering to them, not the
| millions of users who will endlessly complain but never spend
| an actual dollar on their services.
| Karunamon wrote:
| I see this complaint a lot and it never really made any sense
| to me. If something is a scam it has to do with the delivery
| or the advertisement of the product. But the pricing? No. It
| is not possible for the price of something _by itself_ to
| render something a scam. If it costs too much it costs too
| much, this does not imply malfeasance on the part of the
| seller.
| Manjuuu wrote:
| > is $10 a WEEK.
|
| Paxys. You probably don't have a clear idea of what kind apps
| he was referring to. There are no power users in this case.
| tqi wrote:
| https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/plans.html
| Manjuuu wrote:
| Completely different type of applications, I remember an
| old thread on twitter about one useless wallpapers app
| being sold for that kind of money. And it was not the
| only one. It's a business model.
| paxys wrote:
| Not sure what "useless wallpaper" app you are talking
| about but I just took a look at
| https://bendingspoons.com/products and everything there
| seems pretty useful and well designed.
| Manjuuu wrote:
| That minuscule subset is well designed, yes, the rest
| decent BUT some of them with in my opinion predatory
| pricing in many cases, $9/wk to download some wallpaper
| or some sleep noises app. But yes, they are not the only
| ones doing it. If you are interested search on the
| appstore among the boatload of apps they have.
| paxys wrote:
| Okay well you should be able to link to a single one
| then.. I still can't find any examples of how this
| company is fraudulent.
| svnt wrote:
| They are the abuser that benefits from the lock-in. Evernote
| has gradually made it harder and harder to export (50 notes
| per try, not everything makes it out) and now they exit to
| these guys.
|
| It's the worst of the post-VC models. Seems like they have
| been positioning for this for a while.
| Manjuuu wrote:
| Came here to write something similar, you did it better.
|
| I will never accept that selling wallpaper apps or something
| with the same level of complexity for hundred of dollars every
| year is an acceptable business model.
| nneonneo wrote:
| The really key bit is right afterwards:
|
| "There is absolutely nothing wrong with this business model...
| What differentiates Bending Spoons, though, is how they do it.
|
| Remini - Bending Spoons' new app that the press is gushing over
| - is $10 a WEEK. And Splice, the app that started it all?
| That'll set you back a cool $5/week."
|
| In short, they buy apps, add aggressive and practically
| exploitative monetization, and ride the revenue stream until it
| dries up.
| boole1854 wrote:
| I must admit it's not entirely obvious why that business model
| makes them "not a good actor".
|
| And what's with the snark about Italian banks?
| Manjuuu wrote:
| > is $10 a WEEK.
| handoflixue wrote:
| The issue is that people are at least somewhat "locked in" to
| whatever apps they're already using, so sudden major price
| increases are a bit extortionate: Either you pay us a bunch
| of money, or lose access to your data/workflow.
|
| Prior to acquisition, one could reasonably expect Evernote
| not to announce sudden, shocking price changes, because they
| were trying to build a long-term brand. Now, suddenly, that's
| not the case.
|
| This is made worse when the app doesn't do a good job of
| letting you export your data in the first place.
| unixhero wrote:
| I for one released on simplenote.cpm for my noting needs
| techky wrote:
| I still hate that Evernote bought Skitch. Really wish the new
| team would revive it or sell it off to an interested dev.
| egypturnash wrote:
| At long last, Evernote takes an Incredible Journey to be broken
| down for parts by its new owner. Can't get any more fucked up
| than it already has been, it went from being an important part of
| my daily workflow to a place of pain. The rewrite is part of why
| my last graphic novel ground to a halt, I was using EN to
| collaborate on scripts with my partner and it is just _agony_ to
| use any more. I cancelled my subscription a few years back and
| really have not found anything to fill that hole. Every
| theoretical replacement is either a shitty sluggish web view,
| owned by a megacorporation I don 't want to get involved with, or
| both.
|
| Personally I think the best thing the new owners could do would
| be to dig up the pre-EN10 codebase, get it compiling again, and
| make that available. I would resubscribe in a heartbeat.
| staticman2 wrote:
| I don't understand why you wouldn't just use google docs or
| microsoft word to collaborate on a graphic novel? Evernote is
| not and was never a word processor.
|
| The creators of the street angel graphic novel series said all
| of their ideas are in a google drive folder.
| egypturnash wrote:
| I don't like web apps and don't want my life in Google. Also
| I had been a paid user of Evernote for a few years already
| when Google Docs came out, I had already learnt that "if
| you're not paying for it, you're the product".
|
| I'm not a fan of Microsoft, either. I've never had to swap
| Word documents around so that's not in my lie at all.
|
| Evernote was on my computer, and on my phone; it's where I'd
| note down an idea when I had it, and since it was there I may
| as well just expand on it in there. When I'm doing solo
| comics then most of my notes in EN were collections of vague
| outlines, dialogue fragments, and photographs of scribbly
| sketchbook pages; actual writing mostly happened in
| Illustrator. It was easy to expand that to have a script
| sitting there in EN, since we were both already used to using
| it. Plus since EN is about keeping _notebooks_ rather than
| files it 's pretty nice to just have one place that holds
| _all_ the various words and pictures related to getting from
| "some ideas we've kicked around" to "a script that I can turn
| into a bunch of Illustrator files on my hard drive".
|
| This is similar to how there are a lot of programmers who do
| _everything_ in Emacs. You 're already there all the time,
| and it may not be perfectly built for this, but you can do
| most of what you need in it, so why not?
|
| If you want to be totally anal about doing it The Traditional
| Industry Way then you can use a complex word processor
| template adapted from screenwriting templates and deal with
| rigid page counts. If you are not working as part of an
| assembly line with distinct separations between Writers and
| Editors and Pencillers and Inkers and Colorists and Letterers
| then your script can a pretty casual thing with simple
| formatting, and Evernote can handle that just fine. Or at
| least it could before v10 threw all performance in the toilet
| for that shitty Electron rewrite.
|
| Lately I have been vaguely fiddling with using Scrivener for
| roughing out scripts of short pieces, and really need to get
| my partner on this long-brewing GN still kinda trapped in
| Evernote to give it a shot. If we can get a decent sync
| pathway to bring the .scriv files between our disparate
| devices then maybe my dusty Evernote notebook exports will
| turn into a handful of Scrivener projects, along with the
| scattered notes in Joplin and Apple Notes that have happened
| since I finally said "fuck this abusive relationship with New
| Evernote".
| thefourthchime wrote:
| I tried a few alternatives and landed on Apple Notes. It's
| blinding fast, and while it's not exactly feature-rich, it does
| everything I need while being seamlessly synced to the cloud
| and my devices.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| I have a directory of .txts on my phone. There are nicer
| solutions but at least I 100% will never lose access to my
| notes since they're just files.
| alexjplant wrote:
| Everybody on HN seems to talk about what they use to "take
| notes". I personally use Trello as an organization tool for
| things such as my to-do list, checklists (packing for a trip
| this weekend, for instance), random thoughts and ideas, lists
| of music and movies people suggest, transcriptions of phone
| conversations, etc. Is this the same use case as when people
| talk about Evernote/Apple Notes/OneNote/org-mode, and if so
| am I a total weirdo for using a Kanban tool for this purpose?
| I've used it this way for almost a decade and the abstraction
| of boards of stacks of cards is very flexible and intuitive
| to me.
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| Apple Notes might do a lot of things or do them well, but
| seamless sync is not one of those.
| egypturnash wrote:
| I like a lot of things about it except for the part where I
| can't collaborate with my Windows-using collaborator.
|
| "Make them use it on iCloud.com" is a non-starter, I don't
| wanna inflict a shitty web-app on them after fleeing EN
| mostly because it turned into a shitty web-app crammed into
| an app container.
| ravenstine wrote:
| I use Apple Notes because I realized that, for my needs, all
| the structure and organization that so many other note taking
| apps/services provide really just make things more
| complicated and isn't beneficial. Notes is simple, has one
| level of folders, and supports labeling. I'll almost never
| look at 95% of my notes again, but in case I do, I can just
| search by keyword and usually I'll find it.
|
| My one gripe with Notes is that the search function really
| isn't all that great. Maybe I need to force it to reindex or
| something. I've found many cases where it doesn't find a note
| by a word that I _know_ it contains. I really don 't get why
| it seems that nearly all search functions are terrible in any
| given app. It would be nice if Apple improved the search for
| Notes, and it shouldn't be _that_ hard to do given that it 's
| just using SQLite under the hood.
| Kye wrote:
| The lack of export functionality without a Mac kept me from
| using it.
|
| edit: HN won't let me reply so...
|
| That sure is a lot of trouble just to grab a copy of my
| notes. This is something I do often enough that I don't
| want to have to go through _two_ MFA prompts, and then
| another when the process is done. Not acceptable.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Like most apple software, it only considers users who are
| totally bought into the ecosystem. I hardly know what you
| mean, "grab a copy of my notes", all my notes are copied
| to all my devices, as long as those devices run Apple
| Notes ;)
| packet_pusher wrote:
| You can bulk export all your Notes through
| appleid.apple.com. They can come down as text files, or a
| JSON, I believe. I just went through the process recently
| to migrate notes into Joplin.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| FYI, HN probably does let you reply (unless you've
| tripped the rate limit, but in that case it won't let you
| edit, either), it's just that in deep threads you need to
| either wait a bit or do it from the comment's page[1].
|
| [1] https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-
| undocumented/blob/m...
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Same for me. It does about 90%+ of what I'd ever need, it
| has rock-solid sync across all my devices, I can share
| notes with my wife without her having to sign up for a
| service and download an app, etc.
|
| Not to mention that it avoids me onboarding to some
| unprofitable note taking tool that will languish until it
| gets stripped for parts.
|
| There was a midtwit meme about productivity hackers vs "I
| just use apple notes" guys like this too haha.
| ravenstine wrote:
| That's awesome that it syncs that well, though one of the
| reasons I use it is because I can specifically opt out of
| the syncing and keep everything offline. I use Notes to
| jot a lot of things down, and that can mean some very
| intimate/private thoughts, and I've come to distaste
| having those thoughts floating in the digital ether. Most
| note taking apps don't seem to allow you to work entirely
| offline, and if they do, they still phone home a lot and
| harass you to sign up for an account.
| podviaznikov wrote:
| small nit pick. Apple Notes have support for nested
| folders:) But agree with the rest.
| mehrzad wrote:
| If you put multiple images in an Apple Notes note, it's
| insanely slow and also it only exports as txt files so no
| images afaicr
| CharlesW wrote:
| TIL Apple Notes supports Evernote .enex import.
| https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205793
| https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/migrate-from-evernote-to-
| ap...
| kjs3 wrote:
| Could be worse. Wait till they start selling advertisers access
| to data-mine your notes.
| dhimes wrote:
| Would some of the open-source alternatives fit the bill?
| Something like SimpleNote?
| egypturnash wrote:
| I tried it and cannot recall why that one failed. It missed
| one of my requirements of
|
| * must be a native app, not a shitty web app
|
| * must be able to run on my Mac & iThings as well as my
| collaborator's Windows & Android phone
|
| * must be able to collaborate with other people
|
| * must be able to ingest a decade of Evernote gracefully
|
| * that includes attached images and PDFs, I make comics
|
| * must deal with actual rich text, markdown is nice for
| commenting on the internet but notes need more
| bitwize wrote:
| Org-mode, yo.
| selykg wrote:
| I've yet to find a reasonable mobile version of org-mode.
| Which is, frankly, a non-starter for me personally. 90% of
| the time I am probably referencing something from my notes
| when mobile, but I need those notes to:
|
| 1. Be accessible an up to date 2. Easily searchable, and to
| do so quickly 3. In the rare case that I need to take a
| note, it is best if I can do so easily and have those go
| back to my computer quickly and painlessly so I can do what
| needs doing to get that into the system better.
|
| Org-mode simply does not do this well in any of my
| experience with it. It's fine if all you're doing is taking
| notes on a computer, but as soon as you add a mobile device
| to the mix, it goes belly up for me.
| bitwize wrote:
| Orgzly doesn't fit the bill for you?
| koliber wrote:
| I was in the same spot in January of 2021. Did some exploring,
| and settled on Notion. I love it.
| Obscurity4340 wrote:
| Kye wrote:
| Good thing I moved off Evernote years ago. I use Simplenote since
| it seems to be in good hands with Automattic. They use it
| internally, so it's not likely to go away.
| dools wrote:
| Ever-ishNote
| jshaqaw wrote:
| Evernote is still the only product that meets my workflow needs.
| Hope they don't mess it up.
| etempleton wrote:
| on MacOS/iOS, Bear was the best note taking app I found. If you
| need cross platform capability and/or want free and open source I
| like Joplin a lot as well.
| akisd wrote:
| I have also tried to find an alternative to evernote and i
| settled to Joplin for now.
| brycethornton wrote:
| I used Evernote for a decade before switching to Apple Notes a
| couple years back. It took some getting used to but now it
| feels seamless. I'd highly recommend it if you don't need
| anything too fancy.
| rxyz wrote:
| Bear was amazing but I dropped it because there's a lot of good
| enough alternatives (I use Craft right now) with more features
| and wider support.
|
| Bear should have been ported to Android and
| Windows/Linux(browser version?) years ago.
| MrZongle2 wrote:
| I switched to Joplin a couple of years back and don't regret
| the move. Was able to import all my Evernote stuff as well,
| which was one deciding factor.
| dang wrote:
| Related ongoing thread:
|
| _Why Evernote failed to realize its potential (2021)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33626047 - Nov 2022 (143
| comments)
| nathias wrote:
| evernote was one of the programs that trapped me, it took some
| effort to finally migrate my data (I'm now using md files/
| obsidian for mobile frontend synced with syncthing)
| c0brac0bra wrote:
| I wish the UI/UX for Obsidian was better. It takes just long
| enough to search for a note that I want to edit that I end up
| just putting quick stuff in Google Keep due to its ease of use.
| D13Fd wrote:
| Really? Search is instant for me on Obsidian, with about 4000
| notes spanning 11 years. Maybe you had some kind of indexing
| issue?
| kennend3 wrote:
| I migrated to Joplin some time ago. Evernote was great but you
| could see them slowly trying to build that 'walled garden".
|
| I'd prefer flat MD files and a fairly decent GUI. Joplin has
| zero hold on me and this is a great thing.
| terlisimo wrote:
| Same, migrated to self-hosted Joplin recently.
|
| I fired up EN at one point recently. Wanted to add a note in
| a certain category and it took me like 20 seconds to get to
| the point where I can type in the actual note text. It wasn't
| even connected to the internet and still the app was slow.
| 5-10 second pauses for something that should be done in a
| millisecond. Useless popups.
|
| WTF were they thinking?
|
| I mean, I know exactly what happened. Everyone who _cared_
| about having a good app has left the company by this point.
|
| Anyways, I really like Joplin. Android app works fine.
| Desktop app works fine. It even has a TUI mode. Server side
| for self-hosting (webdav) was pretty straightforward to set
| up.
| ben1040 wrote:
| I had a great workflow going on with Evernote and my ScanSnap.
| I'd scan mail and paperwork right away, and it'd be full text
| searchable in Evernote. Maybe once a week or so I'd go through
| the latest uploads and tag them or put them in folders.
|
| It took me a while to figure out an alternative for this
| because so many of the note tools I had seen were focused on
| just written notes and not the PDF file use case.
|
| I tried self-hosting Paperless, but that seemed like a lot of
| work too. When we're talking about my document archive here
| it's a lot of important files and I don't want to be my own SRE
| just to save myself $100 or so a year.
|
| The best I have now is I upgraded my scanner to a new Fujitsu
| that OCRs and pushes the files into Dropbox, and paid Dropbox
| plans have full text search.
| netsharc wrote:
| I migrated to Joplin (with a Docker container on my NAS as the
| server), the Windows app has "Import from an ENEX (Evernote
| Export)" and I haven't noticed anything missing. I've noticed
| the few encrypted notes I had being migrated as garble though.
| TheCraiggers wrote:
| I'm curious; what are the benefits of using syncthing over the
| git plugin, if any?
|
| I understand if you already use syncthing for other stuff, but
| having the power of git for my notes is quite nice.
| nathias wrote:
| none, I just use it for other stuff too
| cianmm wrote:
| The final thing that has me trapped with Evernote is the very
| good OCR for both images and PDFs. The second I figure out a
| replacement for that which works great on Mac and iOS I am
| gone.
| skinnymuch wrote:
| I think there are different apps that do this. Devonthink
| does and imports Evernote however many say it's a bulky app
| that does a lot. I don't feel that way but I like Devonthink.
| gumby wrote:
| On ios this is now baked into Notes.app
|
| I use swiftscan because I've been using it a long time (same
| reason you use evernote) but the Notes scanner is pretty
| effective if Notes works for you.
| cianmm wrote:
| Do you know if Notes performs the OCR on files that [are
| imported over from Evernote?](https://support.apple.com/en-
| us/HT205793) I have many hundreds (maybe low-thousands) of
| PDFs and images that I need to be able to access once in a
| blue moon, but when I need them Evernote's OCR makes it
| easy.
|
| I guess I could just try it out with a subsection of notes.
| cianmm wrote:
| I've imported a bunch of PDFs and various image formats
| and it doesn't seem to be scanning them. I'll check back
| later in case it's a feature it does in the background.
| gumby wrote:
| I think you have to scan directly from notes.
| Lendal wrote:
| On iPhone, Notes is excellent. In a browser on icloud.com
| it's terrible. I need it to work in a web browser because I
| do software development on Windows. Notes is not an option
| until the browser version works just as well as the mobile
| version. For now, I can use Notes for personal but not for
| work.
| nashashmi wrote:
| I used to love Google Notebook. And then they shut it down.
| Evernote offered to take in that google notebook data and
| integrate it into their system.
|
| Now evernote is being bought. I need to migrate my data out.
| Evernote was a great company early on. Not sure why they lost the
| race. But I think it has something to do with task managers, like
| trello, and heavy data collectors like database in notion.
| frans wrote:
| These are mostly negative reviews of Evernote. Yet, I do like the
| product and I am yet to find a replacement that offers these
| must-haves:
|
| * Multiple tags per note
|
| * OCR/search on attachments
|
| * Web clipping (full page and individual sections)
|
| * Mail to Evernote (with attachments)
|
| * Decent WYSIWYG
|
| * Good scanning support ("scannable" app)
|
| It did have its problems and did lose 3 or 4 notes due to syncing
| issues but today's web version is usable and the product seems
| stable now. I agree that the acquisition is probably not good
| news. So, if anyone knows of a replacement with these features,
| pls reply!
| gmoore wrote:
| I do miss the old Evernote. Many of the 'enhancements' over the
| last few years just get in the way of the main benifit of the
| tool.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| Yup - it stopped being a functional note taking app. Which is
| the only reason I used it in the first place.
|
| It used to just get out of the way and let me take notes in my
| browser with the comfort of knowing I could get them from
| anywhere later.
|
| Now it's this horrible, janky app that tries to do too many
| things, shoves constant feature popups in my face, and isn't
| very good for taking notes.
|
| I used it constantly 10 years ago. I don't use it at all today.
| I just loaded it up again to see if I'm missing anything -
|
| It takes nearly 10 seconds to load on a developer machine on a
| gigabit internet connection.
|
| It immediately asks for permission to send me popups
|
| It tries to show me 7 different features on the home screen
| (notes/scratchpad/pinned notes/recently
| captured/notebooks/tags/shortcuts) instead of just fucking
| showing me my last note.
|
| It takes multiple clicks to start a new note every time.
|
| ---
|
| Basically - it's now worse than a physical notepad in basically
| every way.
| tianqi wrote:
| Indeed. Thier every 'enhancements' makes me feel that they have
| absolutely no idea what their strengths are.
| chillfox wrote:
| Yep, if I could subscribe to the old Evernote then I would, but
| it's long gone.
| rvbissell wrote:
| As much as I love (and still pay for) Evernote, I've just now
| realized that I haven't added to my collection there over 6
| months. Without intending to, I seem to have largely switched to
| just saving websites with the "SingleFile" extension for Firefox.
| [deleted]
| isaacfrond wrote:
| I really liked Evernote. Yearly subscription instead of the
| monthly Netflix like prices that ever half baked app asks for
| these days. Integration amongst all my devices phone, table,
| various desktops. All nice. And no further dependency on
| Microsoft, Google or Meta.
|
| Product development stalled a long time ago though. I do hope
| this thing stays in the air, cause I got a lot of notes in there.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| I am honestly okay with development stalling, as I don't really
| have that many features I needed.
|
| Except one: speed. Evernote is dog slow, whereas Apple Notes is
| _fast_. This is what killed my reason for subscribing to
| Evernote. Though it has far fewer features, I can press CMD+N
| and start jotting down my ideas /things I have to remember.
|
| I have no objection to paying for good tools, but they are
| tools and must support me in what I am trying to accomplish.
| pqs wrote:
| Not stalled. They created Tasks, which I use every single day!
| aNoob7000 wrote:
| If tasks is their big accomplishment they are screwed. How
| about allowing you to change the default font on a note or a
| task?
|
| I've been using Evernote for a while now, and I just don't
| get the pace of their development. Their changes seem almost
| incremental and take forever.
| seti0Cha wrote:
| Recently their development pace really picked up.
| Unfortunately that was due to them replatforming as an
| electron app. Development speed improved, but the app
| itself felt sluggish and I had really started to hate it.
| chillfox wrote:
| Yeah, was my favorite app for a few years, I was even a paying
| subscriber, but then thy started pushing adds for some group
| chat thing and other random stuff. And the webapp became almost
| unusable after a redesign to this "modern" information sparse
| style where you have to hunt around and click an excessive
| amount of times to get simple things done.
|
| I ended up moving over to Obsidian, and while I am not entirely
| happy with it, it's at least better than what Evernote has
| become.
| dkarl wrote:
| I'm using Obsidian and Inkdrop now. I need to download
| Simplenote. I'm also putatively trying Joplin and Notion, but
| they seem to be losing out; I need to try harder with them
| for a bit and then drop them if they don't catch on.
|
| I'm being so picky because I used Evernote for _ten years_
| and could conceivably use my next choice even longer. I can
| 't believe I used Evernote for over a decade and used it to
| create thousands of notes. What a shame they destroyed it.
| brookst wrote:
| Same. It was ahead of its time and incredibly useful, then
| behind its time and useful, and now antiquated but still full
| of my important notes.
|
| Do I have a loyalty club membership at that one hotel I stayed
| in halfway around the world 15 years ago, when I had a
| different email address? Evernote is the only place I can find
| out.
|
| As soon as there's a dead simple migration path to OneNote,
| I'll have $50/year more spending money.
| damontal wrote:
| It's up 79$/year now for personal accounts.
| ghaff wrote:
| Though basically the same lock-in issue is what kept me from
| starting to put all my notes into OneNote years ago.
| Admittedly at this point, OneNote is presumably not going
| anywhere. But I still make the tradeoff to mostly keep notes
| in text files.
| benfrancom wrote:
| Reminds me of Derek Sivers how he keeps all his writing in
| plain text, always, everywhere. https://sive.rs/plaintext
|
| Edit: Apparently he posted this on HN 8 months ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30521545
| [deleted]
| fairity wrote:
| Yea, I'm in the same boat as you. The notes I have in there are
| really valuable.
|
| Curious, would you have been willing to become an investor in
| Evernote to avoid this acquisition? And if so, what order of
| magnitude? I'm curious why they didn't just do a crowdfunding
| campaign.
| rrreese wrote:
| I was using Evernote extensively back in 2008. It was a real
| tossup between Evernote and OneNote (which at the time wasn't
| cloud based and required syncing the files).
|
| Then Evernote proceeded to cease all feature development on the
| main app. They where releasing food apps while the main product
| grew stale. Instead of making Evernote incredibly powerful,
| they didn't touch it and people left any of the dozen
| competitors that exist today.
| dkarl wrote:
| I loved the integration among all my devices as well. I think
| that's table stakes for note-taking apps. So often I jot
| something down at my computer and then walk out the door with
| only my phone.
|
| However, their constant UI changes were maddening. The breaking
| point for me, which resulted in me now using several different
| competitors until I settle on one, was they decided that your
| cursor should start in the body for a new note instead of in
| the title field. I get that searching is supposed to replace
| every other single form of organization, but note titles are
| important in their interface, and actually really vital when
| searching! They got way out over their skis, discouraging you
| from adding titles when their own UI makes it a nightmare to
| have a lot of untitled notes. And it really was an effective
| nudge -- after the change I struggled to consistently add
| titles even though titles are important for my workflow. I
| struggled between having a mess of untitled notes or applying
| constant discipline to fight the nudge, and I finally gave up.
|
| That was just the straw that broke the camel's back. There were
| so many other fiddly UI changes that constantly forced me to
| learn new habits. I would gladly pay $30 per month (not
| kidding) just to have a version of Evernote frozen in time. I
| remember loving it for years starting around 2012 or so, then a
| few years of horrible quality problems that I wouldn't want to
| revisit, and then it was fine except for constant annoying
| changes.
|
| I'll be paying my subscription until I settle on a replacement
| and figure out a workable export/import process to transition
| my notes to it (which I expect to be a struggle, based on the
| tools I've tried.)
| dpedu wrote:
| I used to work for a company that rented a portion of Evernote's
| HQ, in Redwood City. Nice office and location. Evernote
| eventually recovered and kicked us out. Just my personal piece of
| nostalgia.
| greenburger wrote:
| You're in luck that space might be available again. They moved
| out of that building several months ago[0].
|
| [0] https://walkingredwoodcity.com/?s=Evernote&submit=Search
| dpedu wrote:
| Wow, that's quite the downsizing! Evernote at one point
| occupied all 5 floors of that building and their new HQ looks
| like a single level over retail shops. I guess it makes sense
| with the move to remote work.
| whalesalad wrote:
| imagine being at the local tech happy hour and someone asks you
| where you work and you have to yell over the loud music "BENDING
| SPOONS, I'M A L3 SRE" ... "what?" ... "BENDING. SPOONS."
| gnrlst wrote:
| Bending Spoons is based in Milan so you would be at an
| aperitivo sipping a Negroni or spritz with not so loud music :)
| c-smile wrote:
| Yeah.
|
| > And enterprises of great pith and moment, > With this regard,
| their currents turn awry, > And lose the name of action.
|
| Hamlet, William Shakespeare
|
| I was employee #3 at original Evernote, when we were just
| implementing that brilliant idea.
|
| Here is the photo of pretty much precise moment when Evernote was
| born: https://notes.sciter.com/2017/09/11/motivation-and-a-bit-
| of-...
|
| What a memory, I really miss that atmosphere ...
| vibbix wrote:
| The GUI is giving me Windows XP Plus! pack throwbacks, thank
| you for sharing.
| egypturnash wrote:
| Hey, thanks for your hard work making a great tool that I used
| for most of a decade.
| [deleted]
| dahdum wrote:
| I loved Evernote and was a paying subscriber right up until they
| changed their TOS to let their employees read all my notes to
| work on ad targeting. They backpedaled after a while but trust
| was lost, I cancelled immediately. I have no sympathy for their
| failure.
| kar1181 wrote:
| Similar experience here, it was a series of changes, none of
| which made my experience better and a lot of dodgy privacy
| affecting TOS updates that caused me to can my paid account.
|
| They never really tried to re-engage me either, and have just
| continued on since then with a bare bones series of notes while
| I keep the critical stuff elsewhere.
|
| Shame evernote was the first killer 'cloud native' app for me,
| the thing I couldn't do without once I had it.
| lancesells wrote:
| I paid off and on through the years but for me it was when they
| started selling physical products and advertising them in the
| app. I can't remember what they were. T-shirts? Mousepads?
| okuntilnow wrote:
| And socks!
|
| https://www.aivanet.com/2013/09/evernote-gets-physical-
| why-a...
| codalan wrote:
| Moleskine notepads. But hey, it was more reliable and quicker
| to use than their software offering.
| j-bos wrote:
| Welp, guess it's time to finally cancel the subscription and move
| to Obsidian.
| xablau wrote:
| "At Bending Spoons, we create our own cutting-edge technologies
| and products."
|
| https://bendingspoons.com/
| awinder wrote:
| Looks like these folks raised a big round (for the first funding
| round no less) last month:
|
| https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bending-spoons-raises-340-mil...
|
| So fund-to-acquire?
| jbaczuk wrote:
| I didn't realize you could acquire a company just by bending some
| spoons...
| [deleted]
| skilled wrote:
| Is that an announcement or a marketing jargon dictionary? I had
| forgotten this app even exists, but I can see why.
| Nursie wrote:
| Evernote came preinstalled On my second android phone, I think a
| Galaxy Note 2. It could not be removed and demanded to be allowed
| to update itself constantly.
|
| I'll never know whether it was any good, because it annoyed me
| from the word go.
|
| If you're a cool, tech-crowd oriented tool, for god's sake don't
| let Samsung install you as a 'system' app...
| ergonaught wrote:
| Result being that today I'll migrate everything out of Evernote
| and cancel my subscription.
|
| That sucks.
| [deleted]
| rodolphoarruda wrote:
| EN (happy) customer since 2014 here. I just hope the acquiring
| company won't kill it.
| calabaza222 wrote:
| I use paper & pencil. Works fine :D
| criddell wrote:
| I guess Phil Libin's plan to make a company that could last 100
| years didn't quite work out.
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/how-evernotes-phil-libin-pla...
| idlewords wrote:
| _gets checkbook ready_
| SergeAx wrote:
| I am a many years paying user of Evernote. Startup time on
| Android became painfully slow several years ago. On Windows I
| just keep the app always open. Otherwise I don't see any benefit
| of switching to another app.
| mehrzad wrote:
| Interesting to see this now, I was thinking of switching to a new
| platform for tasks and notes because Evernote's free tier is
| quite limited and Apple Reminders often doesn't even show the
| correct reminder if there are multiple open. I was just reading
| about Evernote's profitability last night.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Apple notes is rock solid compared to reminders
|
| Reminders has been perpetually flakey, particularly around new
| OS releases and if your iPhone/Watch/iPad/Mac are in different
| states of latest vs non-latest OS.
| mehrzad wrote:
| Apple Notes unfortunately does not let you export notes with
| the images attached, not always relevant but it really hurt
| me once.
| gumby wrote:
| Ah, I drove past their office just last week and noticed all the
| lights were out and the parking lot was empty.
|
| At the time I assumed they'd actually gone under, but now I
| realise that that would have been the "there is no spoon"
| scenario.
| irrational wrote:
| I stopped using evernote when it kept having some sort of syncing
| issues and lost what I had written over and over again. Maybe
| they have fixed it, but I've lost any trust in them, so, I'm not
| willing to risk it.
| Manjuuu wrote:
| If you want to delete your account:
| https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/360056549574-Per...
| hirundo wrote:
| The only reason I've stuck with Evernote is because it scans all
| of my old paperwork and lets me search by the OCRed text. Without
| it, so many years of personal data would be locked in images I'd
| never have time to eyeball.
|
| Please someone release me from this foul daemon by suggesting an
| alternative with this key feature.
| bkishan wrote:
| If you port over those images to Apple photos, you can
| literally search the for the text right inside the photos app.
| It works pretty accurately for all printed text ime.
| kevinmgranger wrote:
| Is there some way to link to those photos via URL, or
| something like that?
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| Pretty sure OneNote does this, I don't know how the bulk move
| experience would be though.
| abathur wrote:
| Yeah... same boat. Photographed my notebooks and put them in.
| Sigh.
| steve1977 wrote:
| On macOS, Devonthink
| mblevin wrote:
| The End of an Error for the world's most disappointing note-
| taking app.
|
| I think part of the struggle here is that no two people can agree
| on what ailed them.
|
| From lack of innovation for years, to an incomprehensibly bad
| rich text editor interface that broke all established
| conventions, to 0-60 from "zero monetization" to "monetize every
| time you even think about clicking a button", to a ground-up
| rewrite that put it on part with it's counterparts from 2012,
| etc.
|
| It's almost like it's failure was overdetermined.
|
| Fascinating case study in a journey from ubiquity to obscurity.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| > The End of an Error
|
| not sure if that is autocorrect, or a joke, or autocorrect
| making a pun from "end of an era" with "error" given the
| sentiment.
|
| either way, it's funny!
| [deleted]
| pyrophane wrote:
| I'm not familiar with Bending Spoons. Anyone able to give me a
| bit more context on what this will likely mean for the future of
| the product?
| squarefoot wrote:
| They became sorta famous over here for developing the Covid19
| contact tracing app "Immuni" that was then adopted by the
| Italian Ministry of Health. Being a government project, they
| probably got a life-changing amount of money because of that. I
| can't comment on the quality of the app as i never used it.
|
| https://github.com/immuni-app
| CastFX wrote:
| Actually this is wrong. They did not receive any funds from
| the Government. There is an article in Italian with the words
| of one of the founders.
|
| https://www.corriere.it/tecnologia/20_aprile_22/luca-
| ferrari...
| fairity wrote:
| Can someone educate me on the difficulties in raising money from
| your user base?
|
| It seems like businesses like this should give fair warning to
| their users before transactions like this occur to make sure they
| don't have a better option than shutting down or selling out.
|
| Evernote has tens of millions of paying users. It doesn't seem
| too far-fetched to believe that each user would fork over on
| average $50 (as an investment, presumably) to just freeze product
| development, fix bugs, and improve performance.
|
| Put another way, I'm pretty sure Evernote could have raised
| hundreds of millions from their user base.
|
| Why not try that approach? Are there regulatory issues that make
| it unfeasible?
| kjs3 wrote:
| Paying recurring for an app should make this problem non-
| existent. If $5/mo or whatever doesn't allow you to deliver a
| stable, performant product, then you need to reconsider your
| pricing or your business model. Evernote isn't a startup and
| they should have this figured out by now. And _do not_ do a
| release that amounts to "look at this whizzy, non-core feature
| we've been working hard to add (see: chat) which means we
| didn't get around to fixing all the boring issues with the core
| product you're paying for"; that's just insulting. The only
| thing I imagine worse, if I'm already paying you money for the
| product, is for you come to me with "Oh...you want it to work?
| Fix the bugs and the performance? That'll be a $50
| 'investment'.". That guarantees I'm going to look elsewhere
| real fast, because fixing bugs and improving performance isn't
| a one-time thing and you'll be back to extract more from me at
| some random time in the future where your business decisions
| don't cover the next shortfall.
| fairity wrote:
| I'm imagining that $50 raised from 10 million people ($500m
| raised) would allow for an outright recap of the entire
| company, including bringing in new management that serves the
| users' best interests.
|
| I agree it isn't ideal, but as a user, it's far better than
| allowing Evernote to get sold to someone whose goal is to
| raise prices and squeeze profits. Many Evernote users like me
| are in a situation where the switchover cost is several
| orders of magnitude larger than $50. So, the dynamics might
| look more like 1% of the user base investing $5000 each.
| notfried wrote:
| ICOs are technically a way, and scams aside which wouldn't
| apply to Evernote if they would have used it, there is still a
| fair amount of legal ambiguity in doing it. There has been many
| voices pushing for creating a regulatory framework to allow
| doing what you are asking for.
| vxNsr wrote:
| Bending spoon's website is 100% bloat so that doesn't bode well
| for a revitalized Evernote.
| jef_leppard wrote:
| I learned three things watching EN snatch defeat from the jaws of
| victory:
|
| 1) There is almost never a case for a total ground up rewrite of
| your core product. Just don't do it.
|
| 2) Don't abandon the users who made you successful in the first
| place. They're the ones who advocate for you and get your foot in
| the door.
|
| 3) real time google docs style collaborative editing is table
| stakes for this software category. Build your V1 with it in mind.
| Otherwise you'll have to do a rewrite later. See 1.
| matchagaucho wrote:
| #2 and #3 seem in conflict with each other.
|
| I adopted Evernote for its ability to synchronize my checklists
| and notes across all devices. Collaborating with others was not
| an initial feature IIRC (?)
| etempleton wrote:
| The thing I learned was that maybe a small successful app or
| service can just be a small successful app or service and not
| have to grow indefinitely. At some point it seemed like
| Evernote became obsessed with growing the revenue / business
| and not making a better product.
| bighi wrote:
| I think number 1 could be done, but not like Evernote did.
|
| It's been what? 3 years since they released their javascript
| app, and they still didn't rewrite some important old features.
| Just last week we got back the option to start writing a note
| in the title instead of the body.
|
| 3 years!
|
| I could write an entire Evernote competitor from scratch in 3
| years, as a single developer (as a javascript app, not as
| multiple native apps).
|
| And they STILL don't have reliable note-synching.
|
| It took them too long, and their app is too crappy. But a GOOD
| rewrite would have worked just fine.
| pqs wrote:
| Why is it so hard to implement apparently simple features?
| This is surprising to me.
| underwater wrote:
| A rewrite is not the same as a writing a similar app from
| scratch.
|
| You need to worry about deciding what functionality to
| preserve, what to change, and what to throw away. Most
| rebuilds either fail because they skip this step and the
| result is inadequate for the job, or they do this step and
| get bogged down in the minutiae of locking down requirements,
| digging into edge cases, and stakeholder management.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Regarding #1, this is now an often touted recommendation, even
| by folks like Joel Spolsky whom I greatly admire, but I'm not
| sure it's the right lesson. For example, I know that Google (at
| least in the 00s) rewrote huge, major pieces of their
| infrastructure multiple times and did so successfully. While I
| agree that broadcasting out a message of "We're going to stop
| the world and add no new features until we do a ground-up
| rewrite" is a bad idea, perhaps other lessons could be:
|
| 1. Don't write code that's such a spaghetti mess in the first
| place that you feel the need to throw your hands up and say
| "nothing can be done except a rewrite".
|
| 2. If you do need to do a major rewrite, make sure you have the
| ability to staff two teams - one doing the rewrite and another
| maintaining and adding new features to the existing product.
|
| 3. Kinda related to number one, but if you have well-organized
| code to begin with I find it's much easier to do a major
| rewrite in "sections" (though there are obviously difficulties
| with this approach).
| bighi wrote:
| 4. If you're going to do the rewrite, don't take many years
| working on it, just to release a broken product missing lots
| of core features.
|
| 5. If you're releasing a broken product missing core
| features, don't take many YEARS after release to un-brake
| your product and build some of the missing features again.
| asdajksah2123 wrote:
| > rewrote huge, major pieces of their infrastructure multiple
| times and did so successfully
|
| I think that's different from a user facing rewrite. I
| suspect while Google did its infrastructure rewrites, users
| didn't notice a difference. Additionally, Google probably had
| the resources to continue delivering features to users while
| the infrastructure was being developed.
|
| The problem with a front end rewrite is (a) things might
| break and users will notice, and (b) it's hard to deliver new
| features to users while the front end app itself is being
| rewritten.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Google isn't the only example here. Heck, just look at the
| transition from Classic MacOS to OS X. I definitely think
| Apple would have been dead long ago if they said "A rewrite
| is too expensive/risky, let's just incrementally improve
| Classic MacOS".
|
| I guess my point is that there are right ways and wrong
| ways to do ground-up rewrites, and the fact that a lot of
| people do them the wrong way shouldn't mean the lesson
| should be to never do them.
| Kye wrote:
| Replacing one mature operating system with another, which
| itself was based on one even more mature, and adding
| stuff is not quite a rewrite. That was more like how
| Microsoft moved NT into its consumer OS. It was a bit of
| a mess but had a clear payoff once everything was updated
| or obsoleted. NT and BSD were both battle-hardened long
| before anyone thought to put them in consumer systems.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| Spolskys point back then was that you couldn't stop the
| world, do nothing for two years and then come back with your
| rewritten product.
|
| It was not that you couldn't rewrite part of the product here
| and there over time, and end up with something that is only
| the same as the original product in the way the greek ship
| was.
| lucideer wrote:
| > _1) There is almost never a case for a total ground up
| rewrite of your core product. Just don't do it._
|
| I've espoused this before, but I've come around to moderating
| my take on this.
|
| "Almost never" is an exaggeration. I agree that they "almost
| never" work, but that's not the same as there being no case
| (there's a difference between "should not have done" and
| "should have done differently".
|
| After many years of seeing both play out (rewrites and decided-
| not-to-rewrites) I'd edit this adage to: "there is almost never
| a case to rewrite _yourself_ " (for the individual) or "there
| is almost never a case to get the same team to rewrite" (for
| management).
|
| I'm not saying that engineers can't learn from their own
| mistakes but if you wrote the software & you think it needs a
| scratch rewrite rather than a refactor, you're unlikely to have
| learnt enough within that gap of time to make the rewrite
| significantly better than a refactor.
|
| The other reason for failure outside of the original architect
| repeating their same mistakes 2nd time around is outsourcing
| the rewrite. Wholesale outsourcing is an unbelievably
| inefficient & failure-prone way to build in-house software.
| ska wrote:
| > unlikely to have learnt enough
|
| There is an important caveat here - sometimes the original is
| rough not because you didn't know how to do it better, but
| because you were emphasizing speed and flexibility e.g. very
| early stage startup and you don't really understand the
| product here.
|
| [see also, ship the prototype problem]
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| My moderated version: you are almost never going to do better
| at meeting the same goals with a full rewrite. Even when
| there is a good case for it, it is unlikely to work out.
| hinkley wrote:
| > you think it needs a scratch rewrite rather than a
| refactor, you're unlikely to have learnt enough within that
| gap of time to make the rewrite significantly better than a
| refactor.
|
| Relentless Refactoring replaces the ship piece by piece while
| it's under way. If you are effective at it, you can
| effectively (both definitions) rewrite the entire app with
| few people being any the wiser.
|
| If you are not good at decomposing a problem into digestible,
| coherent steps, then you are also lousy at Relentless
| Refactoring. If you can't decompose the problem, your top-
| down rewrite is statistically guaranteed to fail. Someone
| somewhere will get lucky, accidentally beating 1:4 odds over
| and over for 50 failure points, but that person will probably
| not be you.
|
| The people who can Relentlessly Refactor don't need to ask
| for a top-down rewrite. They just get down to doing it.
| Therefore most of the people who ask for one are incapable of
| taking advantage of such permission.
|
| Ultimately, the only people who ask for a top-down rewrite
| are the people who don't deserve it. They believe in do-overs
| instead of doing the hard work of removing obstacles. They
| believe in the Second System (without the attendant
| Syndrome), not in observing and adapting to new information
| as it becomes available. They have, in essence, trained
| themselves to continue to misbehave in the face of new
| wisdom. They will repeat that behavior during the rewrite.
| danrocks wrote:
| I enjoy Relentess Refactoring as much as the next guy, but
| one dimension here is that it is much easier to do in a
| headless app (or in the backend) than in an app with a
| major UI. At some point there must be a complete switch
| from the old UI to the new UI, and that step is extremely
| complex. It also invites a big rewrite, in an almost
| irresistible way - "since we'll change the UI, let's just
| do it from the ground up".
| hinkley wrote:
| The main lesson of the CI/CD era is that pain is
| information and ignoring it until later just makes things
| worse.
|
| "Let's replace the whole UI at once" and "Let's replace
| the whole app at once" are bandaid-ripping activities,
| and the point of ripping off a bandaid is to get it over
| with before your pain receptors have a chance to tell you
| what an asshole you are right now. I'm sure most people
| have at least one experience, of their own or of someone
| they know, where ripping off the bandaid took a chunk of
| skin with it, possibly creating a bigger wound than the
| bandage originally covered.
| seti0Cha wrote:
| Disagree on #3. Social & collaborative features are the bane of
| my existence. No I don't want to share all my scraps of
| information, no I don't want to let my friends know what I'm
| listening to, no, I don't want to publish product purchases I
| make to twitter.
|
| I think a better #3 would be: decide whether your audience is
| individuals or businesses, then build for that.
| SergeAx wrote:
| I have this minset too, but I have one use case for sharing
| EN notes: when I write articles or short posts which needed
| to be approved or get an editor touch. I may use Google Docs
| for it, but there are too many downsides with them compared
| to EN.
| dkarl wrote:
| I agree and disagree. I agree with you because I think they
| ruined a perfectly good product by trying to turn it into a
| "collaboration tool" that they could sell big corporate
| contracts for. On the other hand, I think collaborative
| editing could have been integrated seamlessly into the
| product without ruining or even changing the single-player
| experience.
| jef_leppard wrote:
| If you don't want collaborative editing, don't use it. I'm
| saying most users wanted it and started looking elsewhere
| when EN couldn't deliver. It's easier to add a lock on
| collaboration than to backfill later.
| hosh wrote:
| The problem is that the effort to do collaborative editing
| creates a lot of other problems.
|
| I want to be able to just start typing, on my phone.
| Instead, I have to wait for it to sync. If I am in a place
| with bad reception, that will take a while. It lags and
| freezes, all in order to support collaboration that I do
| not want.
|
| I want to add pictures. I want to add links to other notes.
| I pay for a subscription to get bullet proof cloud backup.
| Sometimes I want to share notes. I don't want to
| collaboratively edit my personal notes with my private
| thoughts and journal entries.
|
| Evernote stopped focusing on that.
|
| I might switch over to Muse. It was designed to be local
| first and uses cdrt for sync.
| bighi wrote:
| Most EVERNOTE users wanted it? I sincerely doubt that even
| 20% of Evernote users want that.
|
| People that want a collaborative Docs app already have
| Google Docs. Evernote is mostly a "digital cabinet". It's
| where notes and documents go to die (in a good way).
| [deleted]
| criddell wrote:
| I think collaborative editing was a mistake. According to
| Libin circa 2010, Evernote was supposed to be your second
| brain. Letting other people edit my notes doesn't fit the
| second brain model (IMHO). I wish Evernote had stayed small
| and tightly focused on a personal product.
|
| Unfortunately, it's hard to sell to individuals compared to
| businesses, and so that's where their focus went once they
| had VC money driving the ship.
| seti0Cha wrote:
| In addition to what other posters said, there are
| opportunity and maintenance costs. Building features for
| use-cases other than mine puts me in the position of
| wondering whether my use-case is part of the long term
| vision for the product. I want a note taking app that
| strives to improve at capturing quick notes. A document
| collaboration tool that happens to work pretty well for
| capturing quick notes is less likely to satisfy me long
| term.
| btown wrote:
| "Collaborative editing" is table stakes for a modern note
| editor because _even in a single user scenario_ you will have
| the same user editing the same note from multiple devices
| with different levels of connectivity. The product needs a
| reputation that it will not lose its user 's edits, nor will
| it make annoying branch-style merge conflicts. To do this
| right you _have_ to treat the other device as an almost-
| adversarial actor. Unless you want "glitchy" to be in the
| first sentence people use to describe you.
| tqi wrote:
| Was there any other company doing real time collaboration in
| 2008 (when Evernote launched)? IIRC that predates even Google
| docs, so I wouldn't consider that snatching defeat from the
| jaws of victory.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Google docs didn't exist when Evernote started. Their
| competitor was OneNote.
| gertrunde wrote:
| I was a bit like "Bending Spoons? Who?", so I followed the link
| to their website and looked at the products page...
|
| Then vast amounts of scrolling down that giant page of marketing
| fluff looking for anything resembling useful information. Then
| the tab got closed as "Meh. Not for me then."
|
| Why must they make these pages pretend to be some sort of glossy
| coffee table magazine?
| balls187 wrote:
| There was clearly no rhyme or reason to their portfolio.
|
| Basically the app store version of a private equity firm.
| Manjuuu wrote:
| I suppose that's what their target audience wants to see.
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