[HN Gopher] Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote's remaining staff ha...
___________________________________________________________________
Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote's remaining staff has been laid off
Its acquirer (Bending Spoons) has taken over operations. They've
also hiked subscriptions prices and told customers they intend to
use new revenues to pay for new features. How they intend to do
that without any staff is something I would like to know about. If
you're still using Evernote, probably a good time to stop.
Author : baron816
Score : 879 points
Date : 2023-07-06 01:17 UTC (21 hours ago)
| Douger wrote:
| For the last 5 days I have been actively trying to cancel my
| Evernote personal plan. The site would break every time I
| navigated to manage my subscription or try and reach support.
|
| I guess that's one way to reduce customer churn.
| thsksbd wrote:
| [dead]
| spookybones wrote:
| I believe you can inform your credit card provider and have
| them freeze payments for the company.
| [deleted]
| tbihl wrote:
| I canceled mine maybe a week ago. So hopefully it can be done
| for you, too!
|
| For anyone not jumping ship, you can reduce your price hike to
| only 78-ish total per year by clicking through the cancelation
| menus.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| What happens if you try to sign up for a new account? Similar
| level of malfunction, I assume.
|
| I am so sick of this reality. Endless dark patterns to get your
| money. Nearly impossible to get out. Why ever make a good
| product when you can just seek rent and fall into that perfect
| optimum of cheap-enough that cancelling is not worth the pain.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Assume away, but to play devil's advocate, how much testing
| do you think is done on the close account procedures vs add
| new account and accept money from that account? i'll bet it's
| not even close to being even
| kstrauser wrote:
| I don't accept that. If those procedures are failing, then
| someone should be getting 5xx alerts. Before they started
| failing, unit and integration tests should've been raising
| alarms.
|
| A site that remains persistently broken has a lot more
| wrong with it than just some software bugs.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Absolutely true, but cross reference: the new owning
| company is laying off Evernote's staff.
|
| So in this case, yes, there is a lot more wrong.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Just because a 5xx alert is sent doesn't mean that
| someone will do anything about it, even if they didn't
| just lay off the entire staff. I'm sure some PM triaged
| the 5xx notices and anything coming from close account
| just gets pushed to the bottom of the queue. Obviously, I
| have no knowledge if that's what actually happened. I'm
| just continuing the advocacy of the devil
| kstrauser wrote:
| While that's clearly true here, it's a giant red flag if
| a PM is ignoring... a giant red flag.
| csydas wrote:
| Why? It's extremely common that massive 5xx errors across
| a service are largely just ignored unless it reaches a
| certain threshold. This is what I've observed in
| virtually every single large project I've worked on or
| with, and it's already quite bad for non-subscription
| services. If it can be dismissed as "only single digit %
| of users are affected rarely", it doesn't get attention.
|
| I'm not saying this is a good thing, but it's so common
| with paid software offerings that it's no longer a red
| flag for me; I just assume that blocking issues that can
| be presented as only affecting a small number of users
| will not be addressed, especially if they're considered
| temporary issues. AWS and Azure certainly aren't paying
| out a ton when they have outages or system errors that
| for all intents and purposes render the services offered
| or machines running on their infrastructure whenever they
| have issues.+
|
| For me it's hard to escape the conclusion that many
| services are over-subscribing their Systems and Developer
| staff across too many things presented as a single
| service; identity management, compute services, storage
| services, payment processing, free tiers, and so much
| more under a single service. A systems error or login
| problem or the classic Google problem of a single flagged
| account irradiating everything it touches on the platform
| is all it takes to completely take down your operations.
|
| And the SLAs/TOS/EULA are quite complex on these
| platforms; it's hard for me to think that most persons
| can truly understand what they are agreeing to when
| signing up for these platforms, including the companies
| offering the platforms; in my own experience dealing with
| Storage-aaS vendors who provide S3 storage, it's very
| hard to get straight answers on outages or massive 5xx
| situations. (Embarrassingly, said Storage-aaS vendors'
| support teams have said in no ambiguous way that a 5xx
| error responses is a _client side error_ that needs to be
| investigated by the maintainer of the client accessing
| the S3 services...and I maintain it's incorrect for said
| vendors to use 503/500 as a response for "please slow
| down" when we have the 504 "Slow Down" response with S3,
| or the classic 429 HTTP response could be served instead,
| both of which are actionable for client applications)
|
| The services are too big and doing too much, and not
| always very well. And ignoring the "small" interruptions
| that basically prevent the users of the platforms from
| doing their work is the norm; if the issue doesn't hit at
| least double-digit percentages of users, my experience is
| that the platforms do not budge or move since it can be
| hand waved away. And the user recourse in such situations
| is basically non-existent; maybe you'll get some credit,
| maybe you won't, who knows? The platforms sure don't,
| despite the monstrous EULAs they ask you to agree to.
|
| I don't know what the answer is, but I really cannot
| consider many of the platforms, regardless of whether its
| for work or personal social purposes, as reliable. If a
| platform is going to present itself as a backbone of
| modern internet/computing, it's really trying to claim
| it's a utility, but it doesn't want to behave like a
| utility, it wants to get more spending from the users; as
| long as this is the case, where the user capture efforts
| take higher priority than maintaining the services and
| using plausibly deniable tactics to eschew that
| responsibility, I cannot get excited or interested in
| platforms; I will use them as the projects I work on
| require the platforms, but if it were up to me, I'd not
| put everything on platforms and diversify as much as
| possible.
|
| + You can [0] submit a request for credit, but I'm not
| sure how much credit is being issued this way; I will
| give AWS a small nod to the fact that at least for me,
| their SLA Guarantee page is "fairly" easy to read, but my
| issue is that it looks like they only will offer credit
| for a fairly small amount of specific situations, and
| it's unclear how many of these requests are honored. A
| very brief search for a few terms on how long/often AWS
| refunds occur returns mostly the official documentation
| pages without any statistics, and also a few posts from
| AWS forums with users asking; the first post on the few
| threads I checked though were mostly "here's what you
| could have done to avoid this" scenarios; maybe the users
| indeed were doing something quite wrong, but at the same
| time it's unnerving to not quickly find stories about the
| process working well and efficiently.
|
| 0 - https://aws.amazon.com/compute/sla/
| intelVISA wrote:
| Tests..? For a SaaS? Surely not?
| pyeri wrote:
| There have been stories of how convoluted and practically
| impossible the unsubscribe process from Amazon Prime is.
|
| At almost every step, the system sort of nags you with "Do
| you REALLY want to do this?" almost with a trolling attitude!
|
| If this is the case with proper big tech capitalist, think
| what will the scenario be with smaller pleb capitalists like
| Evernote in this grave recession.
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| Amazon got suspicious that a CC I was using is not mine and
| locked my account. But they continued to happily charge
| "not mine" credit card for Prime fees. And I couldn't login
| into locked account to cancel Prime. Took hours on the
| phone with clueless support to finally cancel that. Account
| is still locked.
| pyeri wrote:
| Instead of charging CC, AWS should have the prepaid
| balance approach that digital ocean and others have. The
| big guys can recharge however much they want but small
| scale users can also escape the headaches of incorrect
| charges to account.
|
| Also CC use is declining across the world as more people
| are realizing the problem of debt trap, they should come
| up with alternative methods like UPI and bank transfer.
| kelipso wrote:
| There's at most like three do you really want to dialogs to
| cancel prime. I do a month every so often and the
| cancellation works reliably. It's bad yeah but not anywhere
| as bad as the site just not allowing you to cancel.
| Lolaccount wrote:
| Yeah, I was surprised about the recent rulings ...
|
| I've found it easy to cancel ... and several times where
| I forgot to cancel, customer services happily, easily and
| promptly refunded the charge ...
|
| I'm no big tech Amazon fan ... but never had a problem.
| selcuka wrote:
| I can understand them making it more difficult to
| accidentally cancel your membership, because that's how
| they make money. An "are you sure" or "please don't go"
| message doesn't annoy me.
|
| Intentionally (?) breaking the site so that you can't
| cancel is another story.
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| Is it different in different jurisdictions? I get 1 month
| of Prime at a time and cancel all the time.
| goldpizza44 wrote:
| This is what virtual Credit Cards are for... Each site gets a
| separate number and I can expire them as needed.
| Unfortunately, if they get popular vendors will figure out a
| way to detect and refuse.
| albert_e wrote:
| BofA had a online tool (Flash based I think) to generate
| and manage virtual CC numbers linked to your real card.
|
| When Flash was sunset -- they gave a BS reasoning and
| shutdown this tool as well whithout making an effort to
| rebuild / replace.
|
| I am surprised there was no big backlash from customers
| given the increasing online fraud and privacy/security
| consciousness of banking users.
|
| Which (US) banks currently offer this virtual CC feature? I
| am a customer of three big banks/CC and none of them have
| this.
| alias301 wrote:
| Citi
| yomlica8 wrote:
| Capital One has this feature I believe, I've been to lazy
| to set it up.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| If they won't be able to extract money from your CC, they
| will sue you since the've already billed you for the
| service.
| altdataseller wrote:
| What if it's like a small amount like $25? I'm asking
| because I owe AWS that amount but I lost my credentials
| so I can't even login to pay anymore and I don't wanna
| jump through hoops just so I can pay THEM.
| rwmj wrote:
| I don't know why you're being downvoted - this could
| happen, especially if you're in the same jurisdiction as
| the company.
| KETHERCORTEX wrote:
| > Unfortunately, if they get popular vendors will figure
| out a way to detect and refuse.
|
| Most likely it's not going to happen. While the card is
| virtual, payments are done with real money. Risking to lose
| a customer with real money isn't something most businesses
| will do.
| nunez wrote:
| Privacy changed their issuer precisely because this
| happened.
| junon wrote:
| Yep, since Privacy changed I've had zero issues with
| cards on sites. I've used them for years without any
| issues, I can definitely recommend them.
| stevenhubertron wrote:
| I just canceled and it worked fine. Where are you getting
| stuck?
| meling wrote:
| Can't you just do a chargeback on the next subscription charge?
| If enough people do that, the card issuer will probably hit
| them with fines of some sort.
| bithaze wrote:
| I think, in general, you can always file a chargeback if
| you're prepared for the possibility of losing access to your
| account and data.
| nashashmi wrote:
| I am playing with the old versions of evernote from old
| version.com and it brings back so many memories and hopes of what
| the old web could one day become.
|
| I changed the evernote web back to the classic version, and that
| also made me reminisce about the old days when I used to be more
| productive.
|
| Those were the days.
| emodendroket wrote:
| > If you're still using Evernote, probably a good time to stop.
|
| I doubt many people do anymore, which is probably the reason it's
| being dismantled. Sic transit gloria mundi.
| mfld wrote:
| Let's assume they shrink from 300 to 30 employees. After some
| time they adjust internal processes, focus on the original goals
| and main use cases, weeding out unnecessary features, and having
| stable applications for Desktop, web & mobile. 30 people should
| be sufficient to maintain & support & maybe even improve it a bit
| for a long time given a healthy revenue stream from loyal
| customers.
|
| Not sure if something like this ever happened in the history of
| software. :)
| danielseltzer wrote:
| Evernote was critically valuable for me but has degraded steadily
| and sadly for years now.
|
| I began my Obsidian migration a few days ago and it's
| encouraging.
|
| I found the evernote2md project on Github
| (https://github.com/wormi4ok/evernote2md) the best way to get
| from ENEX->md files with good resource references. Joplin wasn't
| getting it done.
| jayflux wrote:
| Joplin felt like the OSS spiritual successor to Evernote for me.
| It's in markdown, has a mobile app and you can self-host.
| vzaliva wrote:
| Personal journey: I used to be a heavy user of Evernote, but
| encountered a bug that the developers were not keen on fixing
| promptly. It was then that I realized the importance of personal
| notes surviving beyond companies, apps, and formats. Quickly
| after, I switched to a collection of plain text files using org-
| mode markdown and have been happy ever since.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| I need to be able to sync my notes though, I use more than one
| device. I'd like for them to not be lost if a phone or laptop
| is stolen.
|
| Ideally, it'd just sync to webdav and I could use Nextcloud.
| But I've only ever found a few that did sync with it, and there
| were always all sorts of weird limitations or bugs in those.
| never_inline wrote:
| I have a private github repo for this. I don't have a commit
| discipline for any of this, just using github for storing
| some MBs of plain text.
|
| Having a log maybe useful some day, though.
| lb4r wrote:
| I've been doing the same for the past few years, but have yet
| to figure out a good way to sync things between my devices. Not
| that it bothers me too much, but sometimes I'd like to have
| that convenience.
| GivinStatic wrote:
| I'm syncing between my devices with Resilio sync
| vzaliva wrote:
| I use dropbox to sync.
| lb4r wrote:
| I've contemplated this, but in general I'm not a big fan of
| hosting personal files on the cloud if it can be avoided.
| Maybe if I use rclone and encrypt it...?
| pjerem wrote:
| What about Syncthing ? It's Dropbox like (you sync
| folders over different computers) but it's totally P2P
| (so no cloud).
| f311a wrote:
| I use cryptomator and store my notes on Github
| (encrypted)
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| If you are okay with rclone (and do have
| vps/server/whatever somewhere) then Syncthing is the
| thing to do that.
|
| https://docs.syncthing.net/
| OriginalPenguin wrote:
| Git? Syncthing?
| lb4r wrote:
| I do use Git for source control-purposes, but this is the
| first time I hear of Syncthing. Would that allow for
| completely automated and frictionless syncing?
| ledauphin wrote:
| it'll be very good. it won't resolve conflicts for you,
| though - just like Dropbox or Google Drive also wouldn't.
| It's last-write-wins, so you either need to keep your
| devices connected and syncing at all times, or you need
| to be careful when you edit the same files on different
| devices.
|
| I use Syncthing for all kinds of things and it's
| excellent, but it's not really a silver for bullet for
| mutable data like text files.
| lb4r wrote:
| I'll look into it, thanks for the suggestion! The risk
| de-synchronization poses can probably be mitigated with
| automated local backups.
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| BTW, just a second vote for Syncthing, here. It's
| basically my "move data around" Swiss Army knife.
|
| Need to get my Keepass database on my phone? Syncthing.
|
| Need to back up my reMarkable to my NAS? Syncthing.
|
| Need to replicate game saves between my PC and my
| Steamdeck because the game doesn't support Steam Cloud
| Sync (I'm looking at you, Subnautica)? Syncthing.
|
| I run Paperless as a document management system and use
| Genius Scan on my phone. I use Syncthing to automatically
| move scans from my phone to the Paperless inbox folder.
|
| And none of that data resides on a third party cloud.
| Just encrypted, peer-to-peer sync. It really is
| fantastic.
| willdr wrote:
| If I can ask, what is Paperless? Google is strangely
| unhelpful.
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| It's a self-hosted document management system:
|
| https://docs.paperless-ngx.com/
|
| Think: replacing paper file folders with a digital
| system. Supports OCR, a variety of metadata, tagging and
| categories, etc.
|
| My primary use case is taxes, but for any important legal
| or financial documents, I throw 'em in Paperless.
| allarm wrote:
| I can't recommend Paperless enough. I set up email
| forwarding to the Paperless domain and it automatically
| downloads the attached documents. The only problem I have
| now - I am using a somewhat older version and there's no
| direct migration path to the recent one.
| joinemm wrote:
| I have a small vps as one of my syncthing nodes, and
| every device syncs with that central server in addition
| to syncing with eachother. This removes the need to keep
| everything online at the same time as the vps is always
| online, receiving and propagating changes from any
| device.
| benoliver999 wrote:
| Yeah me too. I love syncthing but prefer using it with an
| always on 'server' like dropbox rather than just pure
| p2p.
|
| What I really like about it is that you don't have to
| sync everything everywhere. I have work folders I sync
| with just my work machines, and personal ones that go to
| my personal VPS.
| mplanchard wrote:
| I use Dropbox and symlink my notes to ~/org
| hu3 wrote:
| Try https://github.com/laurent22/joplin + cloud drive of your
| choice (I use One Drive).
|
| See my reply to your parent commenter.
| lb4r wrote:
| Thanks for the suggestion! By the looks of it, it seems to
| be a complete solution similar to Evernote, whereas I just
| need to figure out the 'syncing' part of things (I use
| Emacs for the rest).
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| A tad similar story with my experience.
|
| "Plain text is a powerful universal tool that is almost zero
| cost, work across platforms, are light enough to work remotely
| over poor connections, doesn't go out of date, and is quick to
| learn."
|
| https://brajeshwar.com/2022/plain-text/
| kunjank wrote:
| Did you export the Evernote into plain text?
| hu3 wrote:
| That's why I use https://github.com/laurent22/joplin
|
| It's markdown, open-source, free. With desktop and mobile
| support.
|
| Syncs notes to any cloud of your choice for free. (I use One
| Drive)
|
| Optionaly you can pay them to sync your data on their cloud. So
| they even have a compelling business model!
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| Personally, I just use markdown text files+vimwiki on my
| laptop, along with Markor for Android, and Syncthing to get
| my notes where I need 'em, but in the end the principle is
| the same: Own Your Damn Data!
| eviks wrote:
| But that's not a reliable sync mechanism without a server
| or a better format like CRDT:(
| benoliver999 wrote:
| You just gave me an 'aha' moment here. I've been using the
| cli version of joplin basically as a text-file manager, but
| with a decent-ish mobile app. I've been struggling with
| keeping it updated etc and have been considering going back
| to just text files.
|
| I wasn't aware of markor and really like it, it seems to
| handle editing text files really well.
|
| Already use syncthing, so why bother with joplin at all?
| anta40 wrote:
| Hmm... another Electron-based app (already have VSCode,
| Postman, Beekepper Studio).
|
| But oh well, let's give it a try :D
| Zetobal wrote:
| Joplin will be unusable until they give up on obfuscating the
| md files.
| hu3 wrote:
| Sorry I don't understand. It allows to export to many
| formats, including markdown:
|
| https://i.imgur.com/dK6trmN.png
| charlietango592 wrote:
| AFAIK, Bending Spoons is a company that successfully launched a
| couple of mobile apps and they know how to make a living out of
| it.
|
| According to an engineer who works for them and who I know, it's
| a very demanding and stressing environment to work in. Probably
| they simply plan to throw more work at their existing employees.
|
| The plan was to buy Evernote and make it profitable. It wouldn't
| surprise me if they kill the project if it turns out not to be
| profitable.
| bighi wrote:
| I think they BUY mobile apps.
|
| Their modus operandi seems to be:
|
| 1) Buy successful mobile app.
|
| 2) Increase the prices to insane amounts.
|
| 3) Profit off of the people still using the overpriced app.
|
| 4) Use the profits to buy another mobile app.
| concinds wrote:
| It was only a matter of time.
|
| Great software in the early 2010s, when it had no good
| competitors. But with the software quality decline, dubious
| decisions by the last 2 CEOs, and intense competition, it was
| bound to die when interest rates rose.
|
| I recommend downloading a copy of your account data immediately.
|
| Notion has an easy Evernote importer. Obsidian import is much
| more convoluted, but can be done. Or you can probably download
| your notes as .enex and import them into the old Evernote client
| to use offline.
| manca wrote:
| I remember when Evernote launched and everyone was super hyped
| about it -- even some of the biggest VC names promoted them. Not
| to mention the funding they raised ($290M). It was literally iOS
| Notes on steroids. I even used it for awhile, but somehow it
| didn't stick.
|
| They hired bunch of great people and had some good backend tech
| -- sad to see this happen to them.
| jimt1234 wrote:
| Didn't Evernote precede Notes? My understanding is that
| Evernote was the first "notes" app, but I'm old; I could be
| making shit up in my head.
| dboreham wrote:
| Older than...Lotus Notes?
| jimt1234 wrote:
| Short story about Lotus Notes: Back in high school, a
| friend of mine started writing "code" for Lotus Notes;
| can't remember what the "code" was called, though -
| templates, plugins, something like that. Anyway, he started
| selling his stuff; first to accountants and small
| businesses (his dad was an accountant), then he started
| selling to local banks (in Modesto). His dad used to do all
| the sales, and my friend would go along to meetings and
| just sit there. Then, he sold the "code" through magazine
| ads. Finally, he somehow got connected to corporations in
| San Francisco and started making a ton of money (for a high
| school kid). Last I heard, just after we all graduated high
| school, he moved to San Francisco to start a full-time
| company. I have no idea what happened after that. Steve, I
| hope you did well. ... His situation taught me two things:
| (1) you could use computers for more than games. And (2) a
| "little guy" could start a company and actually make money
| with software.
| seltzered_ wrote:
| Yes, it preceded iOS Notes. Evernote started in 2004.
| staticman2 wrote:
| Evernote preceeded the Iphone, the product was originally a
| non cloud small business that I think was sold/ spun off into
| a venture capital funded company.
|
| Evernote is older than the Iphone.
|
| I just checked and I found a review of Evernote 1.0 from
| 2007, but I think the product predated that review. I found a
| web site saying the first Evernote Beta was released in 2004.
| I remember using Evernote in grad school in 2008.
| sinoue wrote:
| Wild that Bending Spoons doesn't even list Evernote as an app
| they own. https://bendingspoons.com/
| valjaer wrote:
| Honestly new features is something I would go away from, not pay
| for.
|
| Apps these days treat my device as something created so that they
| could update on it, not so I could use it. I would pay to "freeze
| the 2009 versions on my devices forever". Software that just
| works.
| uyfyxr8 wrote:
| Can someone tell me a better way to export Evernote content?
| 1letterunixname wrote:
| I used cloudhq to migrate out many years ago. Looks like
| they're still in business.
| gareve wrote:
| I was there when lifehack blogs will continuously talk about a
| newly released note taking app(Wunderlist, Evernote, OneNote,
| etc.)
|
| After trying several apps, including evernote, it felt they had
| too many features that made them too complex for my simple use
| case.
|
| After trying several methods, my stable workflow is: - Dropbox
| markdown file for year long notes. - Google Keep for (shared)
| checkbox lists & multimedia notes. - Unread emails + snoozing for
| TODO tasks.
| phito wrote:
| Markdown in Obsidian is all I need for notes. Everything else
| is bloat.
| phkahler wrote:
| All commercial software is _rented_. It 's already been created
| and the marginal cost is Zero. You are ostensibly paying for bug
| fixes and new development, which is at least partly true in many
| cases. SaaS at least admits a rental model.
|
| Free Software is rent-free, but development may be slow.
| 1letterunixname wrote:
| Wrong. You're conflating on-prem and SaaS commercial software
| together as "rented", when the former can be delivered as a
| perpetually working product whereas the latter isn't.
|
| FOSS isn't free to host, accessible to users of all experience
| levels, doesn't necessarily include support, and isn't
| guaranteed to have a license that isn't hostile to its intended
| use.
| KenArrari wrote:
| Is there an easy way to just export all my stuff?
| foobarbazetc wrote:
| RIP.
| poppafuze wrote:
| tomboy/gnote
| yayitswei wrote:
| Sad ending for a great product. I've been using Simplenote since
| 2015 and it's been refreshingly consistent.
| coolandsmartrr wrote:
| Sounds like I'd better migrate my Evernote to somewhere else.
|
| What's a good alternative that plays well with my existing
| Evernote data?
| scrollinondubs wrote:
| I moved to Notesnook about 6mos ago and have been pretty happy
| with it. The founder is active in Discord and shipping new
| features about every 2wks. It's E2E encrypted and open source so
| you can self-host if you want to. I used their Evernote importer
| to move all my notes and it worked about 95% accurately (only
| formatting that didn't transfer correctly was the checkboxes):
| https://importer.notesnook.com/
| SamBam wrote:
| I use Obsidian for note-taking, but Evernote for my "digital
| shoebox" of receipts, PDFs, photos of wine labels, insurance
| statements, etc. They are all quickly findable through a
| combination of OCR and tags.
|
| Does anyone have a good alternative for this use-case?
| staticman2 wrote:
| On phones Microsoft lens has free pdf OCR scanning. That and
| Onedrive would probably work. Instead of tags you just put
| keywords in the file names. I'm not sure how well it would
| handle photos of wine labels.
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| If you're willing to self-host, I've found Paperless to be
| quite good:
|
| https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| I've been using Stack for a few years and like it a lot.
| Downside is that it might go to the Google Graveyard someday.
| Partially mitigated because the app mirrors PDFs of all my
| uploads to Google Drive, but not sure how much metadata that
| includes.
| cweagans wrote:
| Apple notes. The ocr is pretty good.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Apple stores these unencrypted with government access by
| default, FYI. Opt into e2ee to disable that.
| allarm wrote:
| For single use Notes is ok. I've been struggling sharing
| notes with my wife. Some of the notes would never appear on
| the other device, and it's been like this for many years,
| regardless of the devices model and the OS version.
| chazeon wrote:
| I think now Apple's Notes app does this right now.
| evolve2k wrote:
| Evernote alternatives for your 'digital shoebox'/'paperless
| office'.
|
| JOPLIN:
|
| Browsing through alternativeto [1], seems that the obvious
| replacement for a hosted 'non-tech' offering is Joplin [2] - a
| free, open source direct evernote competitor which includes
| Evernote import feature and cloud syncing.
|
| PAPERLESS-NGX:
|
| For the whole paperless office, scan/store receipts and PDF
| paperwork, I've been seriously looking at Paperless-NGX [3].
| Downside is that you need to sort out self-hosting. Upside it's
| free and looks amazing for achieving a 'paperless office'.
|
| Found this on exporting from Evernote to Paperless-NGX [4], but
| its not definitive.
|
| Has anyone done this already? Would love your advice. Demand is
| out there for someone to write up a good guide on this.
|
| REFERENCES:
|
| [1] Alternatives to Evernote -
| https://alternativeto.net/software/evernote
|
| [2] Joplin Open Source Evernote Alternative -
| https://joplinapp.org
|
| [3] Paperless-NGX (Selfhosted paperless office) -
| https://docs.paperless-ngx.com
|
| [4] Discussion Evernote to Paperless-ngx -
| https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/120mmo1/evernot...
| staticman2 wrote:
| Joplin doesn't have OCR built in. There's third party Joplin
| plugins for OCR but I don't know how well they work.
| Zetobal wrote:
| If you are on Mac/iOS devonthink is good alternative for it.
| lucraft wrote:
| I've been an Evernote user since 2008 and a paying one for most
| of that. The other week I tried to go through some old notes.
| Half of them wouldn't load. Looking to leave now.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > How they intend to do that without any staff is something I
| would like to know about.
|
| Bending Spoons has a product and engineering team. They may have
| concluded that they don't need the staff from Evernote to take
| the product to the next level.
| pantulis wrote:
| Seems unrealistic to me. Evernote's backend platform sure has
| to be pretty substantial (and legacy!) and managing and
| operating these types of platforms does not seem Bending
| Spoons' forte.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| What is your source for this?
| jimt1234 wrote:
| Not sure of OP's source, but a friend of mine worked there for
| several years and can confirm. He got let go, too.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| Thanks. Sorry for your friend and to see a longstanding
| company devolve into this situation.
| fsckboy wrote:
| is it possible that staff had some type of vesting rights in an
| acquisition that layoffs would terminate? (Yeah, it's not a nice
| thing to do, but the buyer has the leverage and no loyalty to the
| past, and they they call the shots in terms of sweetening the
| deal.) if so, Bending Spoons may plan to keep investing in
| product development, but they want to do it at market rates, not
| bonus rates.
| zkid18 wrote:
| Subjectively, the app has improved its offline mode and cross-
| device sync since the company has been acquired.
| fredgrott wrote:
| I like to add, since I got slightly organized after getting my
| ADHD under control, you never ever price-silo your workflow as
| then its locked away to be leveraged against you.
|
| Personally, I use vscode with a combo of zettelkasten and kanban
| boards which works quite well even for those with ADHD!
| pcchristie wrote:
| I moved to Standard Notes a while ago. I like free things for
| basic things like notes, but was happy to pay for E2E Encryption
| to support what they were up to. I think I got a 5 year licence
| for $150 which was not outrageous. I just looked up their current
| prices - $80 a year which means I'll migrate back to Joplin soon.
| J_Shelby_J wrote:
| I guess their target market are people that really never want
| to worry about their notes being leaked, and are willing to pay
| a premium for that.
| LilBytes wrote:
| Yeah I'm on a grandfathered plan of $50USD which still seems
| steep.
|
| Unsure what I'll do next.
| snowpalmer wrote:
| For anyone that used Evernote as a "Document Storage" app instead
| of just purely notes, I found Notebooks,
| https://www.notebooksapp.com/, https://www.notebooksapp.com/ to
| be a good replacement.
|
| It works with files on your harddrive and your existing cloud
| storage (icloud / dropbox.) macOS/iOS only, but for someone who
| primarily is storing PDFs this was a much better fit than more
| alternates that are for taking notes.
| smarx007 wrote:
| My use of Evernote has been replaced with two apps a few years
| ago when they abandoned native apps:
|
| 1. https://obsidian.md/ for all the notes.
|
| 2. https://archivebox.io/ for almost all webpage clippings.
| ComplexSystems wrote:
| Can Obsidian record voice notes?
| midasz wrote:
| There's a plugin for that (trademark icon)
| https://help.obsidian.md/Plugins/Audio+recorder
| ubermonkey wrote:
| But Obsidian is Electron, right? Not a native app?
| coffeeling wrote:
| Yes, but comparatively lightweight for being one. The devs
| don't use large frameworks like React and write pretty
| barebones JS. It shows.
| smarx007 wrote:
| It is indeed Electron, but it has a much better linking story
| (don't even mention plugins [1]). Evernote being a native app
| was the last thing the held me as a paid customer with them.
| Also, the move to Electron was quite bumpy, they simply
| dropped half the features and it didn't recover until well
| over a year into the migration.
|
| [1]: https://blacksmithgu.github.io/obsidian-dataview/
| travelhead wrote:
| I invested $25,000 into buying secondary equity shares of
| Evernote about 1.5 years ago. In January, I got an exit check
| back for $120 bucks after the sale to Bending Spoon :/
| [deleted]
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| Let me guess: options were going to expire?
| travelhead wrote:
| No options. It's secondary equity from EquityZen.
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| Ah. Ouch.
| squirtlebonflow wrote:
| Why would you invest?
| mangosteenjuice wrote:
| How did you buy it?
| travelhead wrote:
| EquityZen
| jrm4 wrote:
| At the risk of I told you so, it was always a stupid idea.
|
| Any service like this that "requires the cloud," but is personal
| or individual and could be replaced by completely non-cloud
| software WILL go obsolete.
|
| Obsidian, et al understand this.
| emodendroket wrote:
| Services that rely on local storage are vulnerable to their own
| data loss scenarios as well as being much less convenient.
| system2 wrote:
| If you can use a basic hosting with backup features, you can
| simply use a $5 droplet to sync almost everything possibly
| you can think of. Or OneDrive / Google Drive if you are using
| Windows based applications with databases. It is really not
| that difficult to keep data safe and backed up.
| emodendroket wrote:
| I mean, yeah, if for some reason you think Google Drive is
| safer than Google's purpose-built notes application, that
| is an option.
| system2 wrote:
| As a backup option. Not their entire service. I tend to
| think heavily encrypted files could be safe there.
| Falkon1313 wrote:
| Or much more convenient, given that the data is local and
| almost always available without the vagaries of an internet
| connection and remote server (except if/when all the bad
| local data loss scenarios happen at once and you need to
| restore from your cloud backup).
| emodendroket wrote:
| Maybe your circumstances are different but I find myself
| without any device capable of getting online at practically
| no time in a typical day, and in the few scenarios I do,
| keeping them on one device wouldn't have helped.
| jrm4 wrote:
| It's so odd that comments like this actually still get made
| on Hacker News; this is SUCH a solved problem, and yet people
| still make it likely because it pays someones bills, despite
| being _trivially_ easy to solve.
|
| Anyway, syncthing, among others.
| tiku wrote:
| Had a nice interaction with evernote a few days ago. A hacker had
| logged in on my Evernote account, received an email about a
| login.
|
| What stunned me was that I had to confirm by mail, but the hacker
| from Taiwan didn't have to.
| dzonga wrote:
| one long plain text file is all you need.
|
| easy to back up and replicate if need be.
| woodardj wrote:
| There's lots of discussion here about the pros and cons of
| Evernote, and a slew of alternatives, but this HN post is the
| only result online since February (when there was lots of news
| about a Bending Spoons/Evernote layoff), what's the source for
| this July update?
| j-bos wrote:
| Agreed, no disprespect to OP, but where are the confirming
| sources or figures?
| cryptoz wrote:
| Evernote lost my note when I tapped on an email notification in
| Android in ~2011. Nevernote for me ever since. How. in. the.
| heck. do you call it Evernote if it loses your note when changing
| apps?!
| blitz_skull wrote:
| Posting as a lover of the tool, but reflect.app is my new love-
| affair with note-taking. Evernote has been far too bloated for
| far too long. Reflect is an amazingly well built product with an
| awesome team behind it.
| tombert wrote:
| I really hope that this endless wave of layoffs ends soon. I've
| been let go twice in the last year. Every tech place is going
| through layoffs and is pausing hiring.
|
| I wrote a browser plugin to automatically fill out a lot of the
| job application forms, so that I can apply to more jobs in a day,
| and I get maybe one interview for every three hundred
| applications. I watch endless tutorials on YouTube about the best
| way to interview, I spend hours doing problems on Hackerrank or
| Project Euler, just to be told that they were "impressed by my
| abilities but they don't think I would be a good fit at this
| time, but they'll keep my resume on file".
|
| The part that's even worse than rejection for me is idiotic and
| disingenuous email that I am expected to send to the hiring
| manager explaining that while it's disappointing that I didn't
| get the job, but it was such an honor to grovel and waste hours
| of my life to just be _considered_ for such a prestigious
| position.
|
| Actually, no, the worst part is the fact that I have to pretend
| to believe all these companies about their stupid mission
| statement, and how they're going to save the world. I can't be
| honest and say "I want a job because I want money in my bank
| account, and I'm hoping that if I perform labor for you that you
| will provide me that money", instead I have to make up some
| reason about how I think StylishlyMispelledCo is actually going
| to solve all the world's problems and that I want to be a part of
| the ground floor because I believe in <cause x>, and all the
| other companies working on <adjacent cause y> simply don't get
| it. Or I have to pretend that instead of hanging out with my wife
| or friends, I really want to hang out at a workplace that's more
| than just a workplace, but also a family.
|
| I'm being unfair to startups, every company is doing this shit
| now. You can't just do a task because you want a paycheck, you
| have to launder it through some bullshit sanctimony about saving
| the world. That's how it was at Apple and Walmart at least.
|
| It's demoralizing, but even worse, it's exhausting. I'm so
| frustrated with the world right now, and while I know that it
| certainly _will_ get better eventually, I am also deeply unhappy
| with my life right now.
|
| I hate the power imbalance that companies hold. I hate that these
| companies won't acknowledge that power imbalance, or the fact
| that deep down they're just greedy. I hate that I have to pay for
| my own healthcare out of pocket (or effectively out of pocket
| because the COBRA stuff I have is basically worthless). I hate
| that I got myself into this situation.
| WonderBuilder wrote:
| I have little to offer but my acknowledgement. The "song and
| dance" routine of getting and new job (especially in the tech
| industry at least) is dispiriting, embarrassing, exasperating,
| and disempowering. Even with an impressive amount of skill and
| dedication to the interview process, the method is
| indistinguishable from a particularly unrewarding lottery.
|
| I'm sorry, you're in this situation. Eventually, as you said,
| it will end...
| tombert wrote:
| I appreciate the kind words; I was feeling particularly upset
| this morning, I'm feeling a bit better now.
|
| I know I'll find a gig soon enough, and I have enough money
| saved to survive for quite awhile, but I guess just the dozen
| or so rejection emails I get every morning are getting to me.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| > Actually, no, the worst part is the fact that I have to
| pretend to believe all these companies about their stupid
| mission statement, and how they're going to save the world
|
| Maybe its really obvious you feel that way and you should find
| a company that has a product that resonates with you so you
| don't have to fake it.
|
| > You can't just do a task because you want a paycheck
|
| You can but don't be expected to be paid high end tech salaries
| for it.
| tombert wrote:
| > Maybe its really obvious you feel that way and you should
| find a company that has a product that resonates with you so
| you don't have to fake it.
|
| Easier said than done. It's not for lack of trying. I apply
| to lots of companies where I actually think that the project
| is cool, but they don't respond back to me. At that point,
| what exactly am I supposed to do? Just completely exhaust all
| my savings until I find my dream job?
|
| I do really try my best to "get into" whatever the company is
| doing, but it's exceedingly difficult for me to do that, and
| it's even harder for me to fake enthusiasm.
|
| > You can but don't be expected to be paid high end tech
| salaries for it.
|
| That's fair, and maybe I should expect it, but it's still
| exhausting and I don't have to like it.
| it_citizen wrote:
| Is there a good free alternative which would sync between mac and
| iOS that doesn't require iCloud? My company is blocking iCloud.
| pps wrote:
| Craft (https://craft.do/) has a free version that supposedly
| works well now (after they removed the limit on how many blocks
| you can have). I'm using their pro version thanks to the SetApp
| (https://setapp.com/) subscription (highly recommended),
| available everywhere, mac, ios, web.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| Evernote was briefly interesting, but they managed non-Windows
| clients so poorly and kept playing feature-creep calvinball so
| badly that I gave up on them YEARS AND YEARS AGO.
|
| Basically, TIL that Evernote still exists. Sorta.
| timetraveller26 wrote:
| And to think that at one point Evernote was THE note taking app.
| So much wasted potential.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Yeah and now we only really have OneNote, the web version of
| which still really sucks. You can't even search a whole
| notebook, just a section. And it needs to reload every day.
| ycombinete wrote:
| OneNote 2016 was revolutionary for me. Since then I've found
| it less and less usable with each new update.
|
| I think the tension between having a good web app and a good
| desktop app with the same interface is difficult to resolve.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Yes the simplified version that MS made was also much much
| crappier. The tabs for the different notebook disappeared
| and much of the functionality too :'(
|
| The syncing with Sharepoint also works pretty crap. I
| preferred when the database was just stored locally and I
| could choose where to store it.
|
| I'd love to get a new application just like this that works
| like the old OneNote. Without a whole cloud backing it
| which locks in my information (e.g. Evernote, Notion etc).
| Just a file (or collection of files) I can store locally or
| even in a local git server or whatever. But with options
| for attachments and cross platform.
|
| I haven't really found anything good. Most of the things
| are not WYSIWYG but markdown with a double pane (one for
| the input and one for rendered) which I don't like - I'm
| not a dev so I don't really idolise markdown or have the
| muscle memory for it.
| ycombinete wrote:
| I've looked and it seems that one can still install the
| old 2016 OneNote. I still have a cd key out there
| somewhere. I'm going to give this a go.
|
| I still manage to save my modern OneNote files locally. I
| save them to my Dropbox for syncing.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| You can of course yes but it's not really being updated
| anymore.
|
| And I don't just use windows these days so it's not
| really an option for me.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| On the other hand, it should be possible for software to be
| done. I have never used Evernote, but I am not sure how much
| innovation is required in the note-taking space.
| Kadin wrote:
| Perhaps, but setting aside the philosophical point, Evernote
| was nowhere near "done".
|
| Their 'new' client software (Electron-based, of course) never
| even achieved feature parity with their 'legacy' client
| software. The mobile app wasn't exactly screamingly
| performant, to put it nicely. Really basic core use cases,
| like creating a note, typing in a title and some content,
| tagging it with a keyword, and saving it, required a lot more
| clicks than it seemed to me like it should. Hierarchical
| tags, while technically supported, seemed like a weird add-on
| that never got full support. And Penultimate -- their tablet-
| centric app that stored data in your Evernote account --
| hasn't been updated in several years; I'm actually impressed
| it continues to work.
|
| There's plenty of room where they could have built new
| features, if they'd wanted to. Off the top of my head, I'd
| have liked to see Markdown support instead of their quasi-
| HTML WYSIWYG editor (some versions of the thick client had a
| subset of Markdown-like syntax but others didn't).
| Penultimate would have been great if it had on-device OCR /
| handwriting recognition, or even just a way of tagging
| specific pages or page-regions with keywords.
|
| I think there's a lot of room in the notetaking space. I'm
| still waiting for an app that isn't a glorified text editor
| or a drawing program, but also doesn't lock your data into
| some unparsable binary format or obscure graph database
| behind the scenes. I want to take notes, using a pen, on a
| tablet, that might or might not be text, and then I want to
| annotate the shit out of those notes and keyword them and
| cross-reference them, and I want the whole thing to be
| searchable and I want the handwriting recognition to not
| suck, and I want all of this to be encrypted at rest and in
| transit, and I want native clients for all major desktop and
| mobile operating systems.
|
| So, yeah, I don't think notetaking is done quite yet.
| tempestn wrote:
| One could argue that their legacy apps were pretty close to
| done though. If they'd just maintained them rather than
| switching to the current garbage, they'd probably have a
| lot happier customers now.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Any note taking software that was "done" quickly becomes not
| done when users requirements change. Taking notes is no
| longer enough. I now want to talk to my phone and have it
| find the note that included the info I want. Not just basic
| text search, but it should understand the meaning of the
| notes.
| miked85 wrote:
| > _it should be possible for software to be done_
|
| Not if you ask product managers
| ktta wrote:
| Software is never done if the software it runs on is never
| done. Making that transition is not easy, and tech debt can
| accumulate to the point where you have to make substantial
| changes. In the meantime, UI standards/tastes change. Now
| you're at the right spot for a re-write
| smaudet wrote:
| Its usually driven actually mostly by hardware. Which is
| driven by games (and now apparently AI).
|
| Hardware gets better so UI gets more glittery, everyone
| tries to "stand out" by looking/working best, so the UI
| "taste" changes. Or hardware form factor changes, so
| everything needs re-written to support it, etc.
|
| Next hardware re-write will be some mix of AI/low power.
| None of the "green" energy stuff will deliver in time,
| nuclear won't happen in a way that is both safe and any-
| time-soon, and meanwhile power-hungry AIs will be battling
| for cpu cycles and watts with other devices.
|
| Your devices will be very low power and the majority of
| modern software will be laughably ill-equipped to handle
| that. Or it will run on giant mainframes that look nothing
| like x86 desktops or even server farms, more like
| specialized super computers.
| ilyt wrote:
| Well it was clearly too "done" coz they decided to rewrite
| everything in Electron
| fastball wrote:
| I think it was mostly THE note-taking app because it was
| effectively the first serious contender. In retrospect it was
| never a particularly inspired app.
| Animats wrote:
| It is perhaps worth noting that spoon bending is a scam from the
| 1970s.[1]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoon_bending
| NovaDudely wrote:
| I love the idea of of these guys being bought out by a bunch of
| people who managed to somehow make a fortune bending spoons
| (Not Uri Geller!).
|
| Like in 30 Rock how NBC is owned by the Shinehart Wig Company.
| TheChaplain wrote:
| Wow, they even doubled the price of the personal plan..
|
| I use it occasionally but to that amount it's not worth it. I
| need to figure out a way to export my data and then I'm out.
| arthurofbabylon wrote:
| For those looking for a focused alternative to Evernote, check
| out minimal.app - I built Minimal as the antithesis of Evernote:
| instead of clutter and feature bloat, Minimal offers focus and
| simplicity. I love Minimal and use it every day, simply because
| it is the most focused notes app I could find.
|
| Minimal's most innovative feature is the Note Lifetime, whereby
| notes "die" when they go unedited for so many days. (The Note
| Lifetime is customizable, and notes remain available in a deleted
| notes folder.) The effect is an always-clean collection of notes
| that truly reflects the present moment. Another effect is more
| action on the persistent, good ideas and less
| action/procrastination on the ideas that might be best let go of.
|
| Anyone interested in helping me improve the app, craft the
| roadmap, or simply get premium features for free can join the
| beta at minimal.app/#beta.
| ComplexSystems wrote:
| Can it record voice notes?
| layer8 wrote:
| I would consider dictation an OS feature nowadays.
| civilized wrote:
| My Evernote use peaked in 2013-2014, during a whirlwind
| postdoctoral fellowship. Man, I loved that thing. So simple and
| responsive. It was a real tool of thought, and I used it for
| everything. From then on, it got worse and worse every time I
| "upgraded", and I basically stopped using it since 2016 or so.
|
| Yesterday I "upgraded" at its urging, against my better judgment,
| and was greeted with a lovely surprise: no local notes anymore.
| Only cloud sync. The justification for this was basically "less
| capability is actually good for users", phrased in more or less
| that way. It seemed like the developers were blinking _torture_
| at me.
|
| Evernote was a big blackpill. My bitterest realization that
| technology doesn't necessarily progress, and many products are
| just trapped in a cycle of tragedy.
| atemerev wrote:
| I don't know where to store all my tons of scanned paper
| documents to be automatically OCRed, searchable, and accessible
| on all devices :( Do you know any other solutions?
| riffic wrote:
| obsidian is worth looking at imo
| blacklight wrote:
| I know some of the folks at Bending Spoons, and I'm quite
| confident that they'll manage to get something good out of
| Evernote - eventually. It's a team of smart folks that so far has
| managed to get all of their apps right.
|
| I don't think there was an easy/painless way out of this though.
| Evernote has been agonizing for years, it placed too many wrong
| bets, its developments had basically stalled for the past 3 years
| or so. It faced the dilemma of how to appeal its base of power
| users who wanted tons of powerful features (Feedly/RSS
| integration, search engine snippets, HTML scraping, IFTTT rules
| etc.) for free / affordable prices, while developing new features
| that could also appeal a wider userbase and justify a
| subscription, all while staying profitable in the process.
|
| It wasn't an easy problem to solve. Me and many others realized
| it a while ago, and simply moved on to other solutions - from
| Pocket to save links, to Instapaper to keep an organizing list of
| scraped content, to Notion for all kind of extra integrations, to
| open-source solutions like Miniflux, Wallabag or Nextcloud Notes,
| or even Obsidian.
|
| I wish the best of luck to the new Bending Spoon adventure. I'm
| sure that something good will come out of it, but it'll probably
| not be an app that I'll use anymore. Competition in this field
| today is much fiercer than it was a decade ago when Evernote was
| the undisputed king.
| ekianjo wrote:
| If you buy into a cloud service this risk should always be top of
| your list.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| Boss1: let's create a great note taking app
|
| Employee1: _creates a great note taking app_
|
| Customers: :) :) :)
|
| Boss2: let's milk more money, does anyone have a good idea?
|
| Bean Counter: let's add some useless crap, our customer base will
| quadruple
|
| Employee1: _ads useless crap_
|
| Customers: ? ? ?
|
| Boss3: let's milk more money, does anyone have a good idea?
|
| Bean Counter: let's fire Employee1, hire Employee2 for half the
| wage and rewrite everything in Electron
|
| Employee2: rewrites everything in Electron
|
| Customers: :( :( :(
| izacus wrote:
| You missed "Let's add subscription and tell the stupid users
| it'll actually be used to improve their experience!"
| bighi wrote:
| Evernote had subscription since the beginning
| prepend wrote:
| For the first few years I could ignore the subscription
| because I didn't want those features. Then they eventually
| made the subscription required for really basic things, so
| I left Evernote.
| yomlica8 wrote:
| Users hate increased prices, but what if we insinuate that
| they are stupid when we announce it to soften the blow?
| mukundesh wrote:
| Have been using notes on macOS, works great. I do worry that
| notes are stored in a proprietary format, would love to have a
| backup in markdown...
| johnwalkr wrote:
| It's my concern too, Apple only makes it easy to export as
| PDFs. There is a third party tool that can export to
| markdown[1].
|
| I wanted to point out as well that notes works really well in
| the browser these days. Good enough to use it on windows, not
| sure about android though.
|
| [1]http://falcon.star-lord.me/exporter/
| irrational wrote:
| Thanks. I just exported my notes and deleted my account. Between
| this and Reddit, tis the season to cancel accounts.
| _borj wrote:
| The hard thing for me is getting an good exporter from Evernote
| to some .md kind of file, plus images. I searched a lot and
| Notion was the only alternative but there's a big hassle between
| "connect to evernote > export each notebook individually > import
| to notion > export from notion to .md" and after that 30% of your
| notes is still missing.
| getlawgdon wrote:
| Ha. Interesting reading through the comments. I recently
| downgraded everything in Evernote after seeing that Evernote was
| reporting 3 different service tiers for my account in different
| places. I kept getting nagged to re-up. I finally did and in the
| process, with a HIGH degree of intention, selected the "monthly"
| slider fully planning to cancel my account while salvaging some
| of the notes.
|
| Lo and behold, unbelievably, Evernote somehow still charges me
| the annual rate. Absolute transaction dark pattern happening in
| there somewhere/somehow.
|
| This is after a long sequence of ineffective exchanges with
| support regarding my tier, and also a long period of being a
| customer (10 years?) and seeing basically zero feature
| development in line with long-running community requests.
|
| Net/net: I'm done with Evernote. Just ain't working for me.
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| I like to bring up my personal opinion and realization of owning
| an open format -- plain-text - content for your life-long textual
| contents.
|
| I was once an Evernote user since its early days and a premium
| subscriber for many years. I have used many notetaking apps and
| bought enough of them - iA Writer, ByWord, Bear, SimpleNote,
| nvAlt fork of Notational Velocity, etc.
|
| I have moved to a simpler notetaking and writing habit for my
| notes. I have chosen a simple plain-text life. The idea is to
| approach contents as data-first with tools on the top. I have
| grown to like the simple methods I use and the philosophies of
| managing the files and the directories/folders.
|
| I wrote about it sometime back -
| https://brajeshwar.com/2022/plain-text/
| kpw94 wrote:
| Have you tried Obsidian?
|
| 3 days ago one of the obsidian makers posted this:
| https://twitter.com/kepano/status/1675626836821409792
|
| Key quote:
|
| "These days I write using an app I help make called Obsidian,
| but it's a delusion to think it will last forever. The app will
| eventually become obsolete. It's the plain text files I create
| that are designed to last."
|
| Seems to align with your philosophy
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| I tried obsidian but didn't feel it was much better than
| opening a folder in VSCode, and as I am already used to
| VSCode, that is easier for me.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| The tagging features and the ability to just paste a
| picture in a markdown file are the things that bring me
| back to Obsidian instead of VSCode
| bennyp101 wrote:
| Have you tried https://www.dendron.so/ ? I think that was
| aiming to be a knowledgebase in vscode
| me_jumper wrote:
| Same. Have you tried https://foambubble.github.io/foam/ ?
| It does some of the things Obsidian does, but is a VS Code
| Plugin. I really like that combination.
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| I replied to him with with my idea and article
| https://twitter.com/brajeshwar/status/1675905574624702465
|
| From the article, "Right now, I use Obsidian to manage my
| notes. The beauty of this setup is that I can change tools
| anytime, while my notes remain free of any dependency."
| jve wrote:
| Since when twitter allows posting 2172 character long
| message? Apparently char limit is now 25k for subscribers...
| bayindirh wrote:
| Obsidian's problem is Sync + Publish costs way too much, esp.
| when compared with competitors.
|
| Notesnook provides almost everything Evernote provides, with
| encryption, better publishing and syncing.
|
| Notion provides more features, incl. publishing and syncing
| plus the kitchen sink and its factory, yet it doesn't have
| offline access.
|
| For sync + publish, I have to pay 1.5x what Dropbox wants for
| 2TB of storage, or what Trello wants for a year, etc.
|
| It makes no sense, at least for me.
|
| BTW, Evernote's .enex format is just well-defined XML. You
| can parse and convert it into anything you want. It's a
| modest superset of Markdown.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| >Obsidian's problem is Sync + Publish costs way too much,
| esp. when compared with competitors.
|
| You can sync for free using Syncthing or OneDrive, Google
| Drive, Dropbox free accounts.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Thanks! Does that work with the mobile app, too?
| DeathArrow wrote:
| Yes, it does.
| bosie wrote:
| On ios you can only do icloud though
| TooManyProjects wrote:
| I tried using iCloud to sync for a year and went back to
| Obsidian Sync. I'm not sure exactly what the culprit was,
| but frequently, I would find my ToDo note (which was used
| the most) would be stuck and fail to sync for days.
| Rebooting the stick machine would clear the issue. I was
| using two Macs and my iPhone at the time.
| RamblingCTO wrote:
| For me it's fixed by rebooting my mac actually. Had that
| yesterday for the first time. You can check who's not
| syncing by checking the "Files" app.
| bosie wrote:
| because it uses icloud drive. and that syncs poorly and
| on its own schedule. it would sometimes take a day or so
| to get a file from my mac studio to my macbook. it is
| crazy how bad icloud is.
| RDaneel0livaw wrote:
| my wife and I share stuff within icloud and we both HATE
| IT SO MUCH. It's truly mind boggling how bad it is, and
| continues to be, in 2023. Photos sometimes sync,
| sometimes they don't. Cool. Sometimes rebooting the phone
| makes them sync, other times not. Awesome. Sometimes
| shared notes get updated, other times they don't.
| Sometimes shared note invitations just never arrive at
| all, for no discernible reason. Sweet. It took us 4
| attempts to do a shared Home app invitation. The first 3
| times it just never showed up.
|
| We HATE HATE HATE icloud so much but our only other
| option is to switch everything to Android and I hate
| Google more than I hate Apple, so ....... we just stick
| with icloud and its absolute shittiness.
| coffeeling wrote:
| Switch to Microsoft? OneNote's entire file format is
| built to enable live collaboration. Their apps may be a
| bit clunky but they work.
| Zambyte wrote:
| It blows my mind that Apple can tell you how you're
| allowed to copy your plain text files from one of your
| computers to another one of your computers. If you look
| at the behavior sans the branding, it would not be hard
| to label it malware.
| bosie wrote:
| not sure we have the same definition of 'malware'. the
| problem isn't copying/syncing the file from one computer
| to another, that works just fine. but obsidian can't read
| outside its own app folder IIRC.
|
| i sync files with dropbox to my ios devices all the time.
| Zambyte wrote:
| I define "malware" to mean software that intentionally
| subverts the desires of the owner of the computer
| (unintentional subversion is a bug or a
| miscommunication).
|
| Apple arbitrarily restricts you from using your
| applications (obsidian) to read and write your data in a
| way that you can sync, to no fault of its own, your own,
| or the syncing service.
|
| I strongly encourage you to try associating this kind of
| behavior with an unfamiliar organization as a mental
| exercise. How would you feel about that? Someone else
| restricting your access to your computer such that you
| cannot use your applications how you want, through no
| technical fault of their own? I bet that would see that
| as a problem you would want to fix right away.
| skydhash wrote:
| It's not like it's a dark pattern, hidden under multiple
| layers of disinformation and redirection. Apps have
| always been siloed on iOS and it has even got better as
| some apps can break out of the container model (PDF
| Viewer is a prime example). I bought an iPhone and an
| iPad knowing that. If it ever bugs me, I switch to
| Android (which, BTW, is moving to the container model).
| Which means Obsidian could have requested permissions for
| the folder to be placed somewhere else (Textastic can
| access random folders on the filesystem).
|
| Even though my phone and my tablet is capable of being a
| general purpose device, it was not the reason I bought
| them. They have a specific purpose and they are filling
| it well. I wouldn't buy a microwave and complain I can't
| make cakes with it.
| bosie wrote:
| Apple is upfront about it and I knew what I was getting
| (and not getting). To be honest, i can barely ever use
| any of my software the way i want it.
|
| Obsidian's sync service for example has dark patterns and
| is a lot closer to your definition of malware as they are
| hiding how their sync works (versioning, bugs they know
| but don't advertise, merge conflicts that destroys data
| etc).
|
| > I bet that would see that as a problem you would want
| to fix right away.
|
| No. But I also don't know what "fix" means in this
| context? Not use Obsidian? As using Android is not an
| option.
| eviks wrote:
| Sticking to plain text is like living in a cave - possible, but
| unpleasant. Why would you remove all the formatting and
| integration niceties of modern tech?
|
| > Every device, including ones long gone, and ones not invented
| yet, can read and edit plain text.
|
| So what? Every relevant device can also read and write a bunch
| of more useful formats
| RDaneel0livaw wrote:
| I absolutely love plain text notes. Maybe you could
| understand that just because you think something is
| unpleasant and ancient, the rest of the entire human race
| might not agree? Shocking I know.
|
| I can't stand any formatting whatsoever on my notes. I love
| plain text because it stays exactly as that: plain text. I
| don't want my dashes to be turned into spacers, I don't want
| my asterisks to be turned into lists, etc...
| eviks wrote:
| Not as shocking as you trying to speak for the whole human
| race, which evolved past no formatting while still living
| in the caves
| cturner wrote:
| Write-up of a similar system.
| http://songseed.org/post/20120101.aa.saga.html
| jwrallie wrote:
| I am having a better experience using plain text over a mosh
| connection than using apps that sync files over the network.
|
| The logic is that if I have internet connection available to
| sync, then I can also connect to my computer and use a tmux
| session with vim to edit my plain text notes. If I use the same
| tmux session in all devices, then the notes are always in sync.
| bottlepalm wrote:
| I've been using the same OneNote notebook for 20 years. It
| automatically syncs across all my mobile devices, the web and
| desktop. It supports all kinds of rich text and images.
|
| It's way simpler than setting up manual backup and syncing of a
| tons of text file.
| mechhacker wrote:
| Evernote lost me when they changed the UI and made it take 5
| taps/clicks to do what took 1 before. Was happy paying for it
| until then.
|
| Now apple notes has replaced it. I tried obsidian as well but
| like notes better
| 1letterunixname wrote:
| I tried Evernote when it came out ~2005, but it never got rid of
| its rough edges. There were some neat features but they were
| overshadowed by bugs and glaring gaps in functionality. Tried it
| again ~2010 to see if it improved, but it was still a no-go. ):
| It was always an over-hyped app.
|
| I'm currently migrating from Apple to Obsidian.
| brodock wrote:
| I've migrated away from Evernote when they converted their MacOS
| and iOS apps from native to "Electron based". Simple things you
| expect from a "note taking app" to handle, like, search through
| text files, or "selecting multiple notes" were severely limited
| due to the technology limitations.
|
| You could only select 50 items per time in the new "javascript"
| based desktop version, because that was too much state for react
| to handle.
|
| The other thing that they broke was the apple pencil support.
| Using it would result in several seconds of latency.
|
| I was a paying customer at this time, I've canceled my
| subscription entirely. I checked the app a few times after that
| to see if they managed to improve anything, the didn't. It only
| got worst.
|
| So, if you have a native app, you have a moat with it, don't ruin
| your only opportunity to stand out.
| pyrophane wrote:
| Not sure about the veracity of this, but it is in-line with how
| people said Bending Spoons operates at the time of the takeover:
| they buy up apps and then raise prices to try to squeeze more
| cash out of the existing subscriber base while also cutting costs
| by firing development staff.
|
| Seems like an almost inevitable end.
|
| Evernote was a great app once upon a time. I'm still not aware of
| anything that works quite like it. Unfortunately they decided to
| take too much outside money, which put pressure on them to grow
| revenue by finding new kinds of customers. They started adding
| "team" features that no one wanted (work chat?) while neglecting
| the core features everyone relied on. Prices went up.
|
| Nothing left to do but move on.
| jonathrg wrote:
| How can I download my notebooks on a free account? The internet
| says to use the desktop app, but I can't log in there without
| upgrading.
| thecodrr wrote:
| Even though Evernote is a competitor, it's still sad to see such
| a giant in the note-taking space go down so badly. Of course, I
| am still skeptical about this news and whether its actually true
| since no source has been linked.
|
| Aside:
|
| I work (and lead the development) on Notesnook, an end-to-end
| encrypted, open source alternative to Evernote. Since we are
| based in Pakistan, our pricing has been really competitive at
| just $4.49/mo (compared to $17.99/mo of Evernote). And best of
| all, we have one of the best Evernote Importers around:
| https://importer.notesnook.com/
|
| If you'd like to learn more about Notesnook:
| https://notesnook.com/
|
| Feel free to ask me any and all questions!
| yaiba wrote:
| Notesnook looks promising! Does it support note history /
| versioning?
| thecodrr wrote:
| Yes! Every edit session is saved separately and can easily be
| restored.
| yaiba wrote:
| Great, I'll give it a try :)
| yaiba wrote:
| Oh wait, why note history is local only? Can you make it
| synced as well?
| freefruit wrote:
| Does it have OCR for images?
| FreezerburnV wrote:
| As far as I can tell: No, and the roadmap doesn't include
| anything for adding it. I think it would actually be pretty
| much perfect for me if it did have OCR.
| freefruit wrote:
| Also, do you have a plugin so you can save an email directly as
| a note from desktop Outlook?
| theosp wrote:
| I got that one on JustDo.com ; it is more of a tasks/teams
| management tool. But might fit your usecase.
| nashashmi wrote:
| Notion is great at migrating stuff out of Evernote.
|
| I recently logged in and saw that upgrading to their new
| interface logged me out of all other devices unless I pay them.
|
| They are starting to nickel and dime instead of innovate.
|
| Evernote is dead.
| stevefan1999 wrote:
| In case if you want some Evernote alternatives, here's my
| shortlist:
|
| 1. Trilium Notes: https://github.com/zadam/trilium
|
| 2. AppFlowy: https://github.com/AppFlowy-IO/AppFlowy
|
| 3. Affine: https://github.com/toeverything/AFFiNE
|
| 4. Joplin: https://github.com/laurent22/joplin
|
| 5. Dendron: https://github.com/dendronhq/dendron (requires
| VSCode)
|
| As a programmer I liked Dendron the most but if you want it to be
| packed with absolute features, try Trilium Notes (but some
| considered it to be feature creep and bloated)
| RDaneel0livaw wrote:
| I've been using StandardNotes for years and been happy with
| them. Is there a reason I should look elsewhere at these or
| other alternatives? It's just interested I am not seeing this
| product mentioned anywhere here!
| sebmellen wrote:
| I am also surprised at how rarely Standard Notes is
| mentioned.
| RDaneel0livaw wrote:
| I really like it ... the ios app is great, it syncs super
| fast, I love how easy it is to switch between plain text,
| markdown, todo list, etc... It's perfect for my workflow, I
| just find it odd that nobody else was mentioning it.
|
| So here I am doing so! If you don't use it, check it out.
| ComplexSystems wrote:
| Can any of these record voice notes?
| coffeeling wrote:
| Dendron is no longer developed, and in any case is intended for
| a very different use case than Evernote.
|
| Amplenote might be a better drop-in replacement.
| benoliver999 wrote:
| I like and use joplin. Waiting for it to sync sucks (even
| though it's pretty quick) but I like that you can edit in vim
| on the desktop and a dedicated app on mobile.
|
| I use it for recipes, where it's easiest to write them on a
| laptop but better to read them on a phone/tablet.
| [deleted]
| Charlie_26 wrote:
| Do any permit a transfer-in from Evernote?
| eviks wrote:
| Joplin does
| fprotthetarball wrote:
| Joplin does, and it works rather well. I have been planning
| on migrating my notes since the acquisition, but wanted to
| see what their next move was.
|
| Joplin seems like the best at handling my mix of text notes,
| PDF files, and images at the moment. If it doesn't work out,
| though, at least I have my data in a more open form.
| cborenstein wrote:
| I'm biased but I'd add--
|
| - Obsidian: https://obsidian.md/
|
| - Logseq: https://logseq.com/
|
| - Reflect: https://reflect.app/
|
| - Stashpad: https://stashpad.com/
| rehevkor5 wrote:
| I'm wondering what happy mediums might exist between the
| note-taking world, the wiki world, and the collaborative
| office document world.
|
| Office-oriented tools like Nextcloud or Collabora seem to be
| oriented to classic Microsoft Word / Google Docs style
| documents... not as simple as Markdown or as web-friendly as
| a wiki page.
|
| The note taking tools everyone's talking about don't seem to
| support collaborative editing. If they're file-based without
| a server, then you either have to lock the file for editing,
| or you have to always remember to sync first to avoid
| conflicts. Syncthing can't really handle that scenario very
| well.
|
| Also, wikis usually aren't file-based... they require a
| database. Plus they don't seem to be as lovingly designed as
| the note-taking tools... they seem to have a very retro
| MediaWiki style.
|
| Does anyone know of a self-hosted solution that checks all
| those boxes? File-based (perhaps aided by database driven
| indexing) with real collaborative editing, more web-oriented
| than Word-oriented?
| teeray wrote:
| The new features will be feeding everyone's notes into an LLM and
| then screaming "AI!" at the top of their lungs to investors.
| shusaku wrote:
| You can already do this with Evernote in fact, it's called "AI
| cleanup". It's not that good now but I like the idea of having
| an AI format everything cleanly
| sneak wrote:
| Do you like the idea of OpenAI logging all of your private
| notes for all time (and receiving a copyright sublicense for
| them from Evernote)?
| shusaku wrote:
| Well I'm talking more generically when I said I like the
| idea. If you're uploading your notes to a cloud service
| like Evernote, you should already be thinking about
| acceptable privacy policies.
| cenriqueortiz wrote:
| I was a paid user for many, many years. I helped them when they
| opened the Austin office, and find folks. I liked Evernote. Like
| 2 years ago I canceled; bugs and the features/functionality
| didn't justify the cost when apps like Apple Notes (free) just do
| the trick well-enough. This remind me that I still have content
| in Evernote that I need to get out (when I tried the 1st time was
| kind of a pain to do that).
| rnoorda wrote:
| So many of these comments echo my sentiment around Evernote. I
| used it for years and was a huge fan, until they reduced
| functionality and increased prices. I got a new device, couldn't
| sync my devices, and realized there were many great alternatives.
| Exported to Joplin and haven't looked back.
| fencepost wrote:
| THIS APPEARS TO BE UNSOURCED.
|
| There's a TechCrunch article about layoffs of 129 people in
| February, a Wikipedia edit today (July 6) links to that implying
| that it's happened now instead of 4+ months ago and also states
| (unsourced) that the 129 is more than half the remaining staff
| (the article link was _retrieved_ today but is from Feb). The
| price increase referenced was announced in April 2023 and took
| effect in May so also not new.
|
| The Wikipedia article has now been updated to reflect the above.
|
| Edit: I see that OP has noted that it was heard directly from
| affected employees, with 98 gone and ~30 remaining
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36619945)
| notyourwork wrote:
| And for that reason I'm out. What a shame.
| [deleted]
| giantbanana wrote:
| [dead]
| dontbeabill wrote:
| [dead]
| whalesalad wrote:
| Wow, I thought people stopped using Evernote in like 2017
| amai wrote:
| Which alternative note taking apps offer a web clipper? I just
| found
|
| - Evernote
|
| - Onenote
|
| - Notion
|
| - Joplin
|
| Are there any other?
| yuppie_scum wrote:
| I just copy pasted all my notes into Obsidian, which doesn't
| constantly nag me to subscribe
| echelon wrote:
| I really love Obsidian, I still have some major blockers.
|
| The git plugin is dangerously broken. I've had pushes from
| different computers overwrite one another. It doesn't show
| merge conflicts - it's happy to plow forward. I've reduced my
| usage since that happened. This is a huge problem. I need to
| have confidence the backups and merges aren't destroying notes.
|
| There's no easy way to open multiple workspaces simultaneously.
| I want to start using Obsidian for work, but I'm not going to
| share or subset my private notebook. If I want to switch to the
| team workspace, I have to close my personal workspace. Only one
| can be open at a time, and that's awkward.
|
| If these two problems get fixed, Obsidian will become my end-
| all, be-all organizational software.
|
| I will pay a lot of money ($100/mo!) for this to work right.
|
| (Final minor nit: I'd like to include multimedia, but use Git
| LFS or another cloud storage system. I don't want them in git.)
| johnwalkr wrote:
| Could you perhaps change something in .git to fail in case of
| conflict?
|
| What do you mean by using git lfs but not wanting files in
| git? Generally you should be able to use git lfs with any
| note app that supports git as long as you are able to enable
| lfs on whatever server you are using and are able to edit
| .gitattributes. It's just git with a bit of logic to only
| download the needed revisions of binary files instead of the
| whole history. But as far as I can reason, there's no
| practical difference if you're not often editing the binary
| files which you add because there's usually only one copy/no
| patches for the binary files.
| jfim wrote:
| Out of curiosity, what's the rationale for using git? Is it
| to get a history of notes or just for sync? If it's the
| latter, I believe obsidian has a paid offering for that, or
| one can MacGyver it with syncthing.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| You don't even need to macguyver really. There may be some
| potential conflict issues, but you could probably put the
| obsidian vault directory inside of dropbox, apple cloud,
| etc (I'm doing this with apple cloud, but I really only use
| one device)
|
| Maybe a little bit of Macguyvering to add backups is a good
| idea
| Kadin wrote:
| > you could probably put the obsidian vault directory
| inside of dropbox
|
| I've done this and it seems to work fine.
|
| In theory I guess you could end up with sync conflicts if
| you are literally editing the same note on two devices at
| the same time, in which case Dropbox will create a
| "Conflicted Copy" which will pop up in Obsidian so you
| can resolve it manually.
|
| But in practice, because Obsidian saves pretty much
| constantly, and Dropbox syncs pretty much constantly, in
| a typical connected office use case you don't run into
| this much. If you work offline a lot, you might need to
| think about a more structured workflow (i.e. using Git).
| But for me it wasn't worth the hassle to commit/push
| every time I wanted to switch devices. Dropbox (and
| presumably the many Dropbox-like folder-sync tools)
| worked fine when I was testing it out.
| jdougan wrote:
| I'm doing this with Google drive over Autosync and mostly
| it is fine. Occasional merge conflicts where it generates
| an extra file that is the other version, but I just run
| winmerge. It helps if you are careful about syncing and
| don't use obsidian in both places simultaneously.
| tmaly wrote:
| I have obsidian on my iphone, ipad, and windows desktop all
| synced across devices to a single private github repo. You do
| not have to use the git plugin. I use Working Copy app on ios
| devices and the free github desktop on Windows 10.
|
| If you want multiple workspaces, you can create a separate
| vault that is backed by a different private github repo.
| browningstreet wrote:
| Vaults are workspaces and you can open multiple vaults
| simultaneously. You can also copy the .obsidian folder over
| so you don't have to rebuild from scratch. But you do have to
| maintain manually.
| guiambros wrote:
| Genuinely curious: what's the problem you're trying to solve
| with Git plugin that the official Obsidian Sync [1] doesn't
| solve natively (besides cost)?
|
| I've been using Obsidian Sync for a year, and it works
| flawlessly for my use case. Is syncs not only notes, but also
| configuration, plugins, allows creation of multiple vaults,
| works on mobile, fine-grained control over which folders to
| sync in each device, and even allow controlled sharing with
| collaborators. Oh, and full encryption with user-provided
| key, which is a must. All for $96/year.
|
| [1] https://obsidian.md/sync
| ledauphin wrote:
| great to hear that it works, but it is hilariously
| expensive for what it does.
|
| When the price comes down to $3/month, I'll start paying
| for it. Until then, I'll use Syncthing for free.
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| I use syncthing. A lot. Best thing ever.
|
| I used evernote a long while ago.
|
| How can i bridge the divide between all devices between
| those too ? In a way that is cross-device and helps with
| notes/tags etc ?
|
| I suspect you are keeping a specific folder of random
| files as your note taking location ?
| ledauphin wrote:
| yes, I use obsidian and I have several vaults, and each
| is its own directory that is synced independently using
| Syncthing to whichever devices need to be able to access
| each vault.
| kepano wrote:
| > hilariously expensive for what it does
|
| What Sync does is not only "sync", it also helps Obsidian
| remain profitable and 100% user supported. Subsidizing
| costs in pursuit of growth is what got Evernote here.
| firexcy wrote:
| The git plugin allows you to disable it on certain devices. I
| enable it only on my main computer and sync the vault among
| devices with syncthing, which I find much more reliable than
| wholly relying on git.
| elkos wrote:
| I'm personally using the Nextcloud Notes app, it covers my own
| needs pretty well and I have it installed on a couple of Android
| devices as well.
|
| I wonder what you would suggest is the most valuable feature of
| proprietary solutions?
| revskill wrote:
| We do have Notion (and alternatives), who needs Evernote now ?
| Evernote should have an exporting tool to import into Notion
| instead.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Notion is markdown formatted text only right?
|
| Big difference with a full wysiwyg notebook with attachments.
| Afaik notion only does images. Devs love markdown but regular
| users don't.
|
| But it's been years since I tried notion so perhaps this has
| changed.
| mbo wrote:
| > But it's been years since I tried notion so perhaps this
| has changed.
|
| It has changed dramatically.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Hmm I'll try it out but I don't know... I don't really like
| cloud hosted stuff for this because it's very hard to
| liberate the information if I need to change (which, for
| the provider, is also a feature of course :) )
| EchoReflection wrote:
| I've been "trapped" with evernote for a long time because I put
| more than a decade's worth of stuff into it, and their exporting
| tools are shit. Literally I "exported" whole notebooks and what I
| got was just the titles of notes and no content. Ugh. Guess time
| to just sit down and spend a few hours doing tedious, tedious
| tasks for a while. Notion and Obsidian are great though.
| manifest3r wrote:
| Have you tried Notions Evernote importer? There are also quite
| a few Evernote to X applications exporters on Github
| kunjank wrote:
| Do you have recommendations for exporter that preserves the
| notestack/notebooks?
| 727374 wrote:
| Sorry for the staff who've lost their jobs. I did a phone screen
| with one of their recruiters a couple years back. They told me
| they couldn't afford my (slightly above market rate) salary, but
| went on and on about how the company enjoyed a very "comfortable"
| work life balance. WLB is great, but I've never had a recruiter
| spend so much time on that and so little on the "exciting"
| product/role. That was a red flag to me at the time.
| tempestn wrote:
| Ah, that would explain it. I've run into three fairly major bugs
| in about as many weeks. It's like they're not doing regression
| testing at all, and rather than fixing bugs, they just keep
| rushing out new "features".
|
| Problem is nothing else fits my workflow as well as Evernote
| does, but looks like I likely won't have a choice. Guess it's
| time to give Joplin a try.
| pps wrote:
| > How they intend to do that without any staff is something I
| would like to know about
|
| There are great note-taking apps that only a few people work on.
| Tana, Obsidian, Bear, UpNote come to mind, but there are many
| more. So it's definitely not a problem. It sucks for the old
| Evernote staff, but it doesn't have to suck for users, it might
| even be what Evernote needs, since it's pretty ancient in its
| feature set compared to the competition.
| kypro wrote:
| > How they intend to do that without any staff is something I
| would like to know about.
|
| A company I worked for did the same thing. They got rid of
| basically all of the staff and just outsourced everything to cut
| costs. I'd assume that's the plan here.
| antfie wrote:
| I suppose I had better hurry up and finish building
| https://stickerdocs.com then. If you like the EN concept but want
| something privacy focussed and a honest company to support you on
| your journey, you might want to sign up.
| julianz wrote:
| I wonder how that 100 year guarantee is holding up?
|
| https://longnow.org/ideas/evernote-and-the-100-year-data-gua...
| jsiepkes wrote:
| I wonder if this eroding trust with startups and companies will
| become a real problem for them. I mean by now things like
| "lifetime subscription" have little meaning coming a commercial
| entity.
|
| Well, I'm off enjoying the last few weeks of my lifetime HBO
| cheap subscription.
| thathndude wrote:
| I've been delighted with my "lifetime" Plex pass, but I worry
| the day will soon come when I discover the end of the
| lifetime.
|
| Marco Arment has occasionally complained about lifetime, one-
| time Overcast premium subscriptions and how he'd really like
| to rug pull those. But, to his credit, has no present plans
| to do so. However, it's more because he doesn't want to deal
| with the backlash, rather than because the right thing to do
| is honor "lifetime."
| eddieroger wrote:
| > However, it's more because he doesn't want to deal with
| the backlash, rather than because the right thing to do is
| honor "lifetime."
|
| Yeah, it's that. He mentioned once that Apple had a rule
| where you can't remove functionality bought through in-app
| purchases, probably around the same time he was lamenting
| one-time subscriptions. He definitely would pull the rug
| (to use the phrase) if he could, and I wonder if he limits
| adding features to Overcast because of it.
| jhanschoo wrote:
| I see that the article says "will", but CEOs and their
| companies will square the circle every time they are drumming
| up publicity and impressing potential investors. If they have
| squared the circle it would be such a feat that there will be a
| press release talking about it in the past tense, not the
| progressive or the future.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| I'm reminded of a quote from Tommy Boy about guarantees.
|
| > Ted Nelson, Customer : But why do they put a guarantee on the
| box?
|
| >Tommy : Because they know all they sold ya was a guaranteed
| piece of shit. That's all it is, isn't it? Hey, if you want me
| to take a dump in a box and mark it guaranteed, I will. I got
| spare time. But for now, for your customer's sake, for your
| daughter's sake, ya might wanna think about buying a quality
| product from me
| stubybubs wrote:
| Tommy Boy quotes? A true scholar of the old school.
| slg wrote:
| >Evernote CEO Phil Libin announced at the recent Le Web London
| conference that the company will soon set up a protected fund
| and include a legally binding guaratee that users' data will be
| maintained for 100 years
|
| That almost sounds like a threat to commit a crime in certain
| jurisdictions. A lot has changed regarding how we talk about
| data in the last decade.
| xeromal wrote:
| Is it a threat to commit a crime if it was posted before the
| law existed?
| greggsy wrote:
| Exactly. Retrospective laws like that would face stiff
| opposition.
| barsonme wrote:
| Ex post facto laws should be prohibited in any civilized
| country.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| Crime against humanity didn't even exist as a concept
| (let alone a law) before Nuremberg, do you think the
| condamnation of the nazis there as "uncivilized"?
| unmole wrote:
| The retroactive criminalisation at Nuremberg absolutely
| _was_ controversial at the time. It only got pushed
| through because of US instance. It is literally an
| example of might making right.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Seems like an extreme counter example. In the spirit of
| the parent post I guess you could argue theft, murder
| etc. was already illegal?
|
| Also, it is morally different when you want to punish
| lawmakers.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > Seems like an extreme counter example.
|
| It is voluntarily ridiculously extreme, because the
| parent comment was itself ridiculously categorical.
|
| The thing is: most of the time, retro-active laws are
| dangerous tools that should be used rarely and with
| caution, but sometimes and when some people have been
| doing something that they knew was evil even though not
| technically illegal, it can make sense to punish them
| with laws designed after the fact.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Sure fair enough. That is the problem with many rules of
| thumb, where people interpret "all" and "always" to mean
| all and always.
|
| Especially evident in programming. E.g. "premature
| optimization is the root of all evil".
| sokoloff wrote:
| That's one line everyone remembers snipped from somewhat
| more nuanced context.
|
| Knuth said: "Programmers waste enormous amounts of time
| thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of
| noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts
| at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when
| debugging and maintenance are considered. We should
| forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the
| time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet
| we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical
| 3%."
| rightbyte wrote:
| Oh ... ye well Knuth makes my point. :)
| di456 wrote:
| Or with enough laws, every law can be applied selectively
| polynomial wrote:
| WWCD
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| Every privacy policy and terms of service document is an
| ex post facto "law" if it was changed even once.
| eru wrote:
| Public laws and private contracts are two different
| things.
|
| For one, you can typically opt out of the latter, but not
| the former.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| Copying my comment from a couple of days ago as that is
| simply not practically true:
|
| >All my university systems run on Microsoft. All my
| future employers' systems will probably run on Microsoft.
| All public transport in my country effectively requires
| an app which is tied to either Google or Apple operating
| systems to buy tickets. Schools require students as young
| as 6 years old to have an iPad or chromebook tied to
| Google or Apple.
|
| >There is no real choice in our modern society to "not
| give your personal data" to these megacorps.
|
| You'd have to be homeless, unemployed, unbanked and
| practically a hermit to even approach "opting out" from
| this private law. That's not a real choice.
| villgax wrote:
| The solution is to have goverments use Linux which many
| do, use libre office suites, sponsor projects that
| government project's outsourcing companies use. Web
| interfaces for all services without needing to signup for
| a third party EULA.
| bbarnett wrote:
| Sadly though, that still doesn't resolve other problems.
|
| How many people have gmail addresses? Use Google
| products, such as Google's VOIP service? How many cars,
| or home(now) come with such products built in?
|
| I guess what I'm getting at is, even if you do your best
| to purge yourself, and even if you try to purge the
| government, you're still left dealing with _people_ , and
| if you email them at gmail, then Google still gets the
| entire conversation.
|
| And if we somehow manage to create at "Don't store this"
| situation, will it be like when the Canadian government
| passed a law, forcing Google, Facebook, etc to pay for
| linking to stories? Just as Australia did?
|
| They're effectively dropped all Canadian news sources.
|
| So, would they "drop" users who have requested no data
| storage? That is, you cannot email anyone at gmail? It
| goes into a dead hole?
|
| I suspect that freemium, as a business model, is going to
| be completely incompatible with democracy.
| villgax wrote:
| Google just recently updated their ToS for purging
| accounts that aren't active thereby dropping accounts
| which were part of free tier.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| Yeah, it's typically easier to emigrate out of the reach
| of your law's country than to avoid the reach of these
| trillion-dollar-worth corporations.
| slg wrote:
| Holding data is on ongoing behavior. It isn't an ex post
| facto law to change how a company handles it in the
| future. Coca-Cola can't sell you a soda with cocaine in
| it just because it was legal when they started their
| business.
|
| What would make it an ex post facto law is if companies
| were punished for how they handled data before the law
| was created. It is perfectly reasonable to punish them if
| they continue that same behavior after the law was
| created.
| globalise83 wrote:
| An excellent comment.
| andai wrote:
| True. But for Coke, at least, I wish they'd
| "grandfathered" it in!
| thih9 wrote:
| No, it's not a threat to commit a crime (grandparent wrote
| "almost").
|
| Still, the problem remains; i.e. a new law is likely to
| require you to remove some content that you've been serving
| or to change the way you're handling the content.
| starfallg wrote:
| GDPR was not designed to target service providers providing a
| data service storing and processing data that the customer
| explicitly contracted for. That would be under data
| processing which has different rules.
|
| Unless the guarantee was for Evernote to hold this data for
| 100 years irrespective of what the customer wishes and for
| example after the customer has ended their contract for the
| service, this angle doesn't apply.
| closeparen wrote:
| Many companies are purging data associated with inactive
| accounts as part of data minimization. If the user
| specifically asked for indefinite retention before going
| inactive, that might be one thing, but as a general
| practice it could be risky.
| ano-ther wrote:
| > legally binding guaratee that users' data will be
| maintained for 100 years That almost sounds like a threat to
| commit a crime in certain jurisdictions.
|
| It's (or was) the promise for you to be able to access your
| data for so long, provided you agree. Not hoarding private
| data against your will.
| slg wrote:
| Seems like a lot of these replies are skipping over the
| "almost" in my comment. I was not being literal. I was
| pointing out that they simply assumed that all users would
| want this. There was no "provided you agree" disclaimer in
| their comments. If anything, the specifics of it being 100
| years actually implies that consent isn't even a
| consideration since we can assume that nearly all Evernote
| users will be dead in 100 years. It is a strange reminder
| that so few people were concerned about this sort of thing
| in 2012.
| ArnoVW wrote:
| In legal terms Evernote is not "data controller" but "data
| processor". They are not responsible for ensuring conformity
| with retention rules.
| sipos wrote:
| As far as GDPR is concerned, I think they are a controller
| if they are processing data to provide their service they
| run to customers. The control how that service works, and
| are not processing data on behalf of a controller
| explicitly under their written instructions. If they were a
| service used by a company like this, they would be a
| processor. The rertention period here is presumably until
| the user closes their account or deletes the data from it,
| possibly plus some period to allow for Evernote to delete
| it, and the basis is performance of the contract created by
| their terms of service, or consent. If so, they don't have
| to delete it until they are instructed to bny the user.
| They would have to probvide for a way gfor it to be deleted
| by the organisation they setup to retain it when setting
| that up though. That organisation would be a processor,
| unless an explicit relationship with the customer was
| created with them (which I would expect there would be as
| part of the user accepting using it), in which case I think
| it would also be a controller. Either way, they would be
| responsible for deleting the data when the customer wants
| it deleted because either they would be as a result of
| their relationship with the cuastomer if they were a
| controller, or because it would (have to be) be part of the
| terms of the processoring agreement with Evernote.
| soco wrote:
| A data processor has no say in how and for how long is the
| data stored. They implement exactly hat the data controller
| said, not more, not less. So in this case guaranteeing 100
| years is just nonsense. But... in our case it's Evernote
| itself who gathered all its own data from its own users
| according to its own rules, so I really struggle to
| understand why you won't see them as data controllers.
| some1else wrote:
| Better start burning down the libraries too then? Preserving
| customer data with their explicit consent isn't related to
| data retention rules in privacy laws.
| heywhatupboys wrote:
| So much shit here against GDPR which is basically:
|
| 1. if you want your data removed, companies HAVE to remove
| your data
|
| 2. if you don't want your data stored, companies CANNOT store
| your data
|
| and then a bunch of if-when-then-else-must-cannot-time-
| dependent-legal-stuff
| HPsquared wrote:
| The devil's in the details.
| IMTDb wrote:
| You conveniently forgot to define what really is "your
| data".
| ghaff wrote:
| If you send an email from gmail to me, you don't get to
| ask that it be deleted just because you decide to delete
| your own gmail account. (Well you can ask but it would be
| unreasonable to comply. Same, if arguably less strongly,
| for comments you've made on posts or in threads on social
| media.)
| heywhatupboys wrote:
| only companies are subject to GDPR
| dheera wrote:
| > legally binding guaratee that users'data will be maintained
| for 100 years
|
| This sounds mostly like a PR stunt to use the word "legally"
| to try to instill a false sense of confidence in users when
| in reality, "legally" doesn't mean much. Legally binding to
| what? The corporation? The corporation can run out of funds
| and die in 2 years, and then the contract isn't bound to
| anything.
|
| Legally binding for 100 years has NOTHING to do with staying
| alive for 100 years.
| Animats wrote:
| That announcement was in 2012.[1] Did they do it? I can't
| find any indication that they actually implemented it. Which
| was a good reason to get off Evernote a decade ago.
|
| [1] https://www.cnn.com/2012/06/21/tech/web/internet-data-
| everno...
| DeathArrow wrote:
| >I wonder how that 100 year guarantee is holding up?
|
| I wonder when did such a bold guarantee work in practice?
| andsoitis wrote:
| > a legally binding guaratee that users' data will be
| maintained for 100 years, even if the company itself is bought
| or ceases to be.
|
| If you ain't got the cash, your words don't matter
| SanjayMehta wrote:
| They lost the plot when they suddenly reduced the number of
| devices for the free tier.
|
| There was a time when iCloud wasn't reliable. When that improved,
| Notes became a simpler free alternative.
| parker_mountain wrote:
| Notes isn't as good as Evernote, not even close.
|
| However, it's "good enough" for most people, and free.
|
| One of the greatest bag fumbles in SV history imo.
| dhosek wrote:
| The increase in subscription pricing was the thing that got me
| to cancel my subscription. Hearing about the layoff of the
| staff makes me glad I did. Notes works just as well if not
| better than Evernote for my needs.
| CharlesW wrote:
| For anyone who may not be aware, Apple Notes can import
| Evernote .enex files. The process was mostly painless, and I'm
| glad to be rid of the Evernote dependency.
|
| https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205793
| scarface_74 wrote:
| While I happily sing and prance in Apple's "Walled Garden"
| and have done so for over a decade, I feel uneasy about
| putting all of my notes in Notes with no easy export option.
| cweagans wrote:
| You can AppleScript the contents out if you're desperate,
| but there's a SQLite database that you can pull the data
| from as well IIRC.
| Terretta wrote:
| You can use Exporter from App Store to export to markdown
| notes.
|
| https://itunes.apple.com/app/exporter/id1099120373?l=en%26m
| t...
| yabatopia wrote:
| They lost the plot when they started selling Evernote-branded
| socks (and other accessories). No bugs smashing, better search
| or faster/more reliable sync: flush with VC money, the smart
| guys at Evernote decided that Evernote-branded socks was what
| their users really wanted.
|
| I still have a few Evernote-branded Moleskine notebooks lying
| around. They came with a 3 month voucher for Evernote Premium,
| I think. Anyway, heavily discounted on Amazon, it was almost
| cheaper to combine the notebooks with vouchers than to
| subscribe online.
|
| And then you had all the different apps, like a recipe app. My
| God, all the apps. Complete waste of resources, complete lack
| of focus.
|
| When the VC money dried up, the penny dropped. Prices were
| hiked, new subscription tiers with artificial limitations were
| introduced, management changed, but by then the writing was on
| the wall and I switched to alternatives.
|
| Being one of the first 1000 Premium users, I still feel bad
| about the loss of my second/forever brain, though.
| SanjayMehta wrote:
| I can't wrap my head around socks as "merch." How madly
| visible.
|
| And an Evernote branded physical note has to be some kind of
| ironical statement. I'd hang on to that as a memento.
| Havoc wrote:
| I've concluded that markdown in git is the way to go. Trusting
| longterm Knowledge to stay put in some VC funded growth SaaS is
| insane
| frou_dh wrote:
| I find having to push, pull, and heaven-forbid even write a
| commit message for notes to be asinine. Sync should be
| automatic and instantaneous if one uses multiple devices.
| marvin999 wrote:
| This is sad. Evernote was phenomenal and I really loved it, years
| ago.
| eimrine wrote:
| Especially when it was a C++ application, not C#.
| birdymcbird wrote:
| Why did they rewrite?
| ayberk wrote:
| probably for developers' sanity :)
| dkarl wrote:
| This was my impetus to finally close my account and delete my
| data.
|
| I was holding on to it because Notion's import sucks and would
| only import a few notes at a time, so I had to do a lot of
| different imports to get all the notes in all the notebooks, and
| I wouldn't be surprised if I still missed a few. (I have _lots_
| of notes -- virtually everything I wanted to remember and keep
| forever, I put in Evernote.)
|
| I'm a bit sad because Notion is a fundamentally different product
| and sucks on mobile. It has all the features I'm used to from
| Evernote, and notes with attached images imported well. I had a
| lot of notes with a scanned document attached and a brief
| explanation of what the document was, so that was vital for me.
|
| RIP Evernote. It was an amazing tool, and it served me well for
| over a decade.
| coffeeling wrote:
| Depending on what you value in Evernote, Notion may not be the
| best replacement.
| moxplod wrote:
| Personally, been using OneNote for over 10 years. Never jumped to
| any other hyped note-taking app.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Not that I doubt this, because it seemed inevitable to my
| outsider eyes, but do you have any proof of that?
|
| I'd recommend getting off of Evernote anyway due to trends.
| However, is there evidence that this is newly urgent?
| baron816 wrote:
| Heard directly from impacted employees. 30 to remain of ~300
| pre-acquisition. 98 laid off today. No press release, which is
| why I'm saying something, but you should be able to find people
| posting on LinkedIn about it.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Wow. Assuming that's all true, good luck, ex-Evernoters! I
| hadn't used your stuff in ages, but I'm sure lots of worked
| hard to make something nice.
| yuletide666 wrote:
| My main use case for evernote was for storing recipes for cooking
| -- the web capture archiving on mobile or desktop was quite nice.
|
| Whats a good alternative for this? Apple notes?
|
| Can obsidian actually do this?
|
| Sad to lose this.
|
| Also if anyone wants some veg cooking recipes I have 270 of them
| for a limited time
| disqard wrote:
| Looks exactly like the follow-up to an "Our Incredible Journey"
| post.
| prewett wrote:
| > How they intend to do that without any staff
|
| Contractors from cheaper cost of living countries, I expect.
| baron816 wrote:
| They laid off all the employees based out of Chile too.
| hackernewds wrote:
| intend to do what? acquirer probably has no intention of
| keeping the app running. just reaping whoever subscribes as
| profit, and having no opex
| bighi wrote:
| They probably intend to keep the app running. And nothing
| else.
| ElFitz wrote:
| Bending spoons is based in Italy. So probably, yes.
| agosta wrote:
| When I once updated Evernote in 2015 and it got worse, I just
| reverted and never updated again. I've been using the same
| version of Evernote for over 8 years for free and it's amazing.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Microsoft being allowed to leverage its enterprise word/ppt/xls
| trench and bundle OneNote/Teams without anti-trust regulators
| batting an eye is what kills these companies.
| jWhick wrote:
| feels like notion is gonna be the next evernote
| ElFitz wrote:
| Now I want to set up a Patreon or Go Fund Me to fund an open
| source web clipper by those who worked on Evernote's.
|
| I've never really found anything that worked that well.
| wj wrote:
| That was my favorite part of Evernote. However, I was recently
| cleaning up old notes that I had transferred to Obsidian and
| few of the pages I had clipped were ever read. It turns out I
| was just hoarding.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| There are ways to import data into other apps such as Logseq or
| Obsidian, so I'd search for an alternative now.
| tluyben2 wrote:
| Replaced it with Joplin a year ago. Very happy paying user.
| [deleted]
| fastball wrote:
| Here is an (incomplete) list[1] of random note-taking apps that
| you can try if you are leaving Evernotes.
|
| Or you can try ours, which is based on Markdown (not open source)
| and a nested notecard format (not documents). Heavy emphasis on
| getting out of your way and just letting you write notes, though
| still with plenty of power if you need it. It has plenty of other
| cool features[2] and we're prepping for a pretty big 3.0 release
| in the very near future which should be exciting.
|
| Yes, this is a very shameless plug. But in the spirit of Threads
| capitalizing on the upheaval at Twitter, I suppose I can do the
| same for Evernote.
|
| [1] https://supernotes.app/alternatives/
|
| [2] https://supernotes.app/features/
| zwaps wrote:
| I can't see on your features page whether you have a
| proprietary format and to which degree I can easily export my
| notes & data.
|
| Evernote being a cautionary tale, I think you understand why no
| one would or should move their notes to closed system.
|
| Being based on Markdown means notes are stored somewhere in the
| file system, like Obsidian?
| fastball wrote:
| The actual content of your notes (we call them cards) is
| Markdown and is stored as such, but the source-of-truth for
| the notes themselves is our servers (not in the file-system),
| as our priority is providing a seamless experience on all
| your devices (or anywhere with a web connection), so the app
| was actually originally built to be "online-only". It's
| become much more offline-friendly over the years (your entire
| card collection actually is stored on your system for offline
| use / search is entirely offline / etc) but offline is still
| not 100% there yet, which is what the upcoming 3.0 release
| will enable.
|
| Within the app we provide comprehensive export options[1]
| (you can export as markdown or as the actual JSON
| representation of a card that we use under-the-hood).
|
| We also have a public API[2] that allows you to do whatever
| you want with your cards at any time with an API key.
| Currently the docs for this are still only an OpenAPI spec
| (and not an entirely complete one at that), but again that is
| something we are improving with the 3.0 release / subsequent
| releases.
|
| So I wouldn't really describe ours as a closed system in the
| sense that Evernote was. In the case that Supernotes is ever
| acquired / shutdown / other black swan event for users, you
| should just be able to dump your cards into something like
| Obsidian and it will work pretty well, as we almost entirely
| respect the CommonMark spec.
|
| [1] https://docs.supernotes.app/en/articles/3068672-printing-
| exp...
|
| [2] https://api.supernotes.app/docs/swagger
| msoad wrote:
| I never stopped using the Notes app in my Apple computer and
| phones. I know it lacks a lot of features that typical HN
| reader thinks is a must-have but the fact that I don't have to
| worry about feature creep and crazy monetization schemes is a
| strong enough motives that keeps me on this ecosystem. Plain
| text FTW!
| fastball wrote:
| You also don't need to worry about running it on Windows or
| Android!
|
| But yes, if you are already locked in to the Apple ecosystem,
| free and pre-installed can be hard to compete with for a
| large set of users.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I see that as a feature, in that it removes the temptation
| to release a cross-platform Electron app that runs anywhere
| and feels awful everywhere.
| f311a wrote:
| Moving to plain-text and markdown a few years ago was my best
| decision. I encrypt all my notes and store them encrypted on
| GitHub. I don't want my private data to be handled by
| unprofessionals.
| swayson wrote:
| Obsidian.md for the win. I used to use evernote way back when
| they started, was cool software, then they started scaling and
| added worst search UI I have ever come across. That day, I
| deleted my account and went markdown with my own storage. Don't
| see the benefit of why your notes should be controlled by others.
| emodendroket wrote:
| I mostly use Google Keep, which works pretty well. Though the
| "clippings" feature saving Web articles is pretty cool and
| doesn't have much of an analogue with that product.
| freedomben wrote:
| Google keep us awesome! Very underrated. I use logseq most of
| the time but keep when I'm on mobile and I'll sync them
| later. There are scripts to hello transfer but doing it
| manually is pretty easy.
|
| But on it's own keep gives me everything I need, except for
| the local markdown file database.
| D13Fd wrote:
| Just wait until they shut it down.
| emodendroket wrote:
| I guess I'll just switch to a new notebook application
| again if that happens. Very few of these notes are useful
| for long.
| allarm wrote:
| I'm using my note taking system as a personal knowledge
| base. It's the most valuable chunk of information I have.
| etrautmann wrote:
| +1 for Obsidian. So much faster that Notion and does what I
| need, with amazing plugin ecosystem if you want specific
| features.
| xvilka wrote:
| It's not open source. If migrate from Evernote, at least it's
| better to migrate to FOSS. Sadly, most FOSS solutions lack
| mobile app support.
| nilespotter wrote:
| logseq is open source, but you gotta pay for (e2ee) sync.
| Joplin is open source and you can do e2ee with a joplin
| server or s3 backed. I didn't care for Obsidian. logseq for
| me.
| neop1x wrote:
| I am using LogSeq happily on Android and desktop, syncing
| with Syncthing. It works well enough.
| xvilka wrote:
| Paying for sync is absolutely fine as long as the client is
| open source. Thanks for the logseq recommendation, it looks
| very good from the first sight! I only wish they had NeoVim
| plugin like Obsidian has.
| Zambyte wrote:
| I have never used this, but for NeoVim it looks like you
| might be able to use this (or hack on it a bit to make it
| work with LogSeq a bit better)
| https://github.com/artempyanykh/marksman
| puszczyk wrote:
| I've only started playing with it recently, but they have
| CMD-d CMD-a shortcut to open a file in default editor.
| nilespotter wrote:
| Agreed, I pay for logseq sync. Down below someone
| mentioned doing it with sync thing, but paying is easier
| for me, and supports development to boot. There is a
| logseq plugin for vi-like keybindings, but predictably,
| it's just meh. Hope you enjoy logseq, it's amazing.
| vladiliescu wrote:
| Open source is not a cure-all you know. I prefer to pay for
| quality software than spend countless hours trying to compile
| a thing someone abandoned years ago.
| 1letterunixname wrote:
| It's essentially impossible to create a SaaS app that's
| fully FOSS. And what good would it do?
|
| Furthermore, FOSS is orthogonal to support and usability.
| It's a meaningless property on its own.
| N19PEDL2 wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36611355
| perryizgr8 wrote:
| The notes are all in markdown stored on your disk. IMO that
| is more important than the app source code being open. I can
| easily take my data and write another app.
| Krisjohn wrote:
| The data store is just a folder tree of .md text files. You
| don't even need Obsidian to view them, it just makes
| navigating the links a little easier.
| Groxx wrote:
| Yeah, ^ this is what convinced me to switch to it. It just
| produces reasonable, compliant markdown files, and displays
| them. Most markdown-folder apps handle its output just
| fine, it's just a better experience.
|
| I like open source a lot, but for my data I much prefer
| _interoperable_. I 've watched too many projects and
| companies die and take my stuff with them.
| BigBar wrote:
| I use Obsidian for quite a few things, but I view Obsidian and
| Evernote as different apps functionally.
|
| I can't email notes into Obsidian. Obsidian doesn't have a web
| clipper, note reminders, markup tools. I mean sure, I could
| cover some of that with plug-ins, but at a certain point things
| become inconvenient.
|
| For text-only notes Obsidian is great. For web clips, emailing
| notes in, multimedia, I just find EN much easier than trying to
| jam everything into a text editor.
| prepend wrote:
| > I can't email notes into Obsidian. Obsidian doesn't have a
| web clipper, note reminders, markup tools. I mean sure, I
| could cover some of that with plug-ins, but at a certain
| point things become inconvenient.
|
| I don't care about any of those features. I care about
| capturing and organizing ideas that are almost always text.
|
| It's cool you like EN but I think that market is much smaller
| and EN was just reaching for super edge cases to please a few
| users and trying to get "regular" users to pay as well.
| kepano wrote:
| Obsidian Web Clipper: https://stephanango.com/obsidian-web-
| clipper
| 29_29 wrote:
| Every time in the last 5 years that I drive by Evernote Building
| on the 101 - I was shocked it was still in business. With Apple
| Notes chipping away at its core, and stiff competition from
| Notion - how long could it survive?
| kunjank wrote:
| - What is the best way to export Evernote into plain text?
|
| - Is there a good way to export the notes so that it preserves
| stacks and notebook structures?
| emmjay_ wrote:
| A possible way to migrate from Evernote to several different
| apps: https://www.popsci.com/diy/evernote-alternative-export/
|
| (I have no affiliation with any of these).
| belthesar wrote:
| I feel like Evernote is a prime example of the pains of trying to
| convert free users to paying users for the same features,
| something we see in many VC funded software from its era. Once
| you give something away, it's damn near impossible to take it
| back, even if you plead your case as honestly as Evernote did.
|
| Evernote was great. Honestly, it was worth paying for. But they
| gave away the farm too early, and folks feeling like what they
| had was being taken away from them spurned a lack of trust.
| Obsidian made the smartest play by giving you the editor, keeping
| the files outside of a database so that they're portable (so they
| feel safe if they ever have to move away), and telling you that
| if you want to own the sync story that you can, but you can pay
| to have the cohesive experience on every device.
| iamjasonlevin wrote:
| [dead]
| kdazzle wrote:
| Remember Evernote had those physical notebooks where you could
| write in them with real pens and pay the subscription and then
| take a picture and upload them with OCR? That was the only
| thing I remember that you couldnt get for free.
| [deleted]
| LVB wrote:
| I've used https://getrocketbook.com somewhat recently.
| Supports Evernote and other cloud services too.
| prepend wrote:
| I think it's an example of trying to charge for things that are
| low value, and, more importantly, low cost.
|
| Storing text files in the cloud is super cheap. And having an
| app to easily edit those files is super cheap.
|
| It was free in the beginning because this is a "classic"
| software problem where it's cheap to develop and close to $0
| marginal dollars for a user.
|
| When Evernote started charging for dumb features and locking in
| my notes, I switched to one of many free, open source, or very
| cheap alternatives.
|
| I think Evernote's problem is that it should have just stayed a
| 1-2 person company. They ramped up costs, then pushed up
| prices, and customers mehhed out.
|
| The lesson here is to do something valuable or do something
| cheap. But don't do something not valuable and expensive.
|
| Sync is nice, but notes can be easily synced everywhere by
| layering on top of Dropbox or iCloud or whatever. I don't want
| custom Evernote sync and I especially don't want to pay as much
| as Dropbox for it. Id rather just pay for Dropbox and then toss
| in a bunch of files.
| seti0Cha wrote:
| I agree that many of the features they were adding were
| useless (to me), but I disagree that you can encompass what
| they do with the description of storing and editing files.
| Their value was in the removing any concern a user might have
| about where a note is, both in terms of which device, and
| where on the device. There are a bunch of ways to sync and
| edit files, but I don't want to spend time or brain power on
| that, I want to capture bits of information and then be able
| to find it again without thinking about it. What I was buying
| was simplicity, reliability, ubiquity, and speed. They
| screwed up because they didn't seem to realize that was their
| core value proposition.
| emodendroket wrote:
| I feel like something more subtle was at work too. Much of
| my Evernote uses were just clipping Web pages to save for
| later or organize and search later and at some point I no
| longer did that. Why not? Well, I can take a few guesses. I
| graduated from college, for one. But also, I started
| reading more things on mobile devices, which didn't nicely
| integrate with the clipping tool. Probably I now spend more
| time on social media sites than reading articles on random
| sites. Maybe it just got to be less trendy and exciting. I
| don't remember any particular change to Evernote that made
| me drift away from using it.
|
| When it comes to pure "notes" I find either Google Keep or
| Apple Notes are good enough and work with less effort on my
| part so that's where most of my scribbles go.
| gtirloni wrote:
| _> Storing text files in the cloud is super cheap. And having
| an app to easily edit those files is super cheap._
|
| Are Evernote files just plain "text files"?
| ghaff wrote:
| No. But I've pretty much always come back to storing text
| files, photos, and PDFs. It may not be as elegant a
| solution but it's completely portable. Never got into
| OneNote when I used to use Windows for the same reason.
| archsurface wrote:
| I've been burned by 3rd party formats - never again -
| plain text for me.
| mesoman wrote:
| You can export your notes as HTML, or better, .enex files.
| The latter are XML, with embedded stuff encoded with
| base64.
| prepend wrote:
| Part of their problem is that they aren't.
|
| But they should be just text files with pointers to non-
| text things.
|
| Creating a proprietary format just because is an
| unnecessary complexity and cost.
|
| I used Evernote for 5-10 years and had thousands of notes.
| I had maybe 10-20 photographs or diagrams mixed in, but
| mostly it was text.
|
| Not sure how common my use is, but they kept adding stuff I
| didn't want. And it's now a "free" feature in Apple notes,
| onenote and countless others.
|
| I think the difference is that Microsoft and Apple are just
| trying to find efficient ways to store data in their cloud
| storage. Evernote was trying to find ways to make customers
| pay for note taking.
| neilv wrote:
| > _I think Evernote's problem is that it should have just
| stayed a 1-2 person company._
|
| For the owners/shareholders of that particular 1-2 person
| company, do they wish it had stayed one, or are they glad it
| didn't?
| rcxdude wrote:
| Good question which can only be answered by them. But given
| the amount of money they raised compared to their likely
| acquisition price (bending spoons has only raise slightly
| more capital to buy all the apps they are buying than
| evernote did for its development), I don't think they've
| walked away with much financially.
| CoffeeOnWrite wrote:
| Yep. For the founders in particular though, who had the
| most influence early on in taking the VC path, odds are
| they took some money out along the way, perhaps quite a
| bit more than had they stayed small.
| rcxdude wrote:
| Is this typically possible? My understanding is that most
| VCs insist on being paid first in the case of an exit, at
| least to the point of getting back what they put in.
| Founders and employees are typically last in the line.
| CoffeeOnWrite wrote:
| Yes, during the rounds where VCs are stepping over
| themselves to invest, founders can negotiate terms that
| permit them (and their employees and early investors) to
| sell some of their stock as part of the deal, in a
| secondary sale (https://rizstanford.medium.com/secondary-
| sales-in-vc-backed-...).
| adra wrote:
| Sounds like perverse incentives? If your best coarse is
| to ruin your company and product to make a buck, you may
| as well be a telemarketing scammer or some other vulture
| of society that make bank off the mystery/rent seeking of
| others.
|
| I have to hope that the original owners really wanted to
| make the best product possible and lost their heads with
| the power to create that they thought the investments
| would bring.
| CoffeeOnWrite wrote:
| Theoretically it aligns the incentives of the founders
| with those of the VCs putting new money into the round
| (eg the founders are OK with the company taking more
| risk, because they have diversified their personal net
| worth somewhat). Now, the incentives of the VCs putting
| new money into the round, there's certainly an argument
| that they don't always benefit society or deliver the
| best possible product...
| nirvdrum wrote:
| Either way, it's poisoning the well. It's a shame that many
| (most?) SaaS applications lack data portability. I get that
| part of it is it's easier to have a custom schema than
| adhere to an established file format (or creating a new
| open format). The cynic in me believes a lot of it is good
| old-fashioned lock-in or casual indifference to their
| customers' data.
|
| That's may even be fine for some bits of data. But, for
| anything I want access to long-term, I just can't trust
| SaaS start-ups anymore. Very few acquisitions end up with a
| favorable outcome for the customers. Sometimes the service
| gets unceremoniously shut down. In other cases the app gets
| folded in to some other product the parent company owns. In
| yet others the product suffers as the parent company tries
| to squeeze what it can from the existing consumer base.
|
| I have no real interest in trying to scrape my data out of
| a vault so I can recreate it elsewhere. Increasingly, I
| limit my choices to established players with a history of
| long-term product support (e.g., Apple or Microsoft, but
| not Google) or OSS. I'm sure in the short-term I'm missing
| out on new functionality that could increase my
| productivity, but I don't like the anxiety of knowing I
| could lose all my data in an instant and so I don't truly
| engage with such products. My primary concern is no longer
| than the company will go out of business but rather that
| they'll try to shoehorn a growth model that doesn't make
| sense for the core product so they can then sell and sail
| off into the sunset.
|
| Obsidian is an interesting case where's it's not an
| established company and it's not OSS, but they've made it
| possible for you to ensure long-term access to your data.
| If needed, there could be an OSS-equivalent of Obsidian to
| read those files. But, I'm happy to just pay them for a
| good product. If they were to have a big exit, that's great
| for them and I don't think I'd be impacted very much.
|
| The trend in software has been a move to walled gardens and
| there's been strong adoption there, so I don't think my
| mindset on the topic is a prevailing opinion. But, I have
| noticed family members and such have grown increasingly
| tired of service shutdowns from acquisitions. Expensive
| devices become bricks. Important data goes away. Etc.
| TheKarateKid wrote:
| > I think Evernote's problem is that it should have just
| stayed a 1-2 person company. They ramped up costs, then
| pushed up prices, and customers mehhed out.
|
| This is the problem with most VC funded startups. You have
| millions invested into an app that really is a glorified CRUD
| service that somehow ends up with a team of 500 engineers,
| and 3000 more employees. When it comes time to actually make
| a profit, these companies struggle because the value
| proposition simply isn't there for what they're offering.
|
| Take GrubHub and DoorDash for example. Is a delivery app that
| is basically a glorified basic ordering system really worth
| 30% of the transaction? No. But someone has to pay back the
| billions spent on useless corporate bloat and thousands of
| employees.
| jjav wrote:
| > This is the problem with most VC funded startups.
|
| At one level I shouldn't care. The VCs burn the money, the
| users make a bad choice to rely on something that will
| inevitably disappear when the profit-seeking crunch comes,
| not my problem.
|
| But it's unfortunately for all of us because all this human
| energy (from users, developers) that gets wasted over and
| over on doomed-to-fail proprietary solutions could be so
| much better spent on developing, using and promoting open
| source distributed solutions that can stand the test of
| time.
| emodendroket wrote:
| On the other hand they're paying us handsomely to tilt at
| these particular windmills.
| seanhunter wrote:
| I have to say changing to obsidian has been great.
|
| 1. there are opensource tools to convert from evernote to
| obsidian so it Just Works [tm] and you don't lose anything.
|
| 2. My docs are now in markdown in a normal filesystem so it's
| easy for me to back them up, sync them, have everything work on
| different OSs etc
|
| 3. I choose to pay for obsidian sync because I want to fund
| them but you don't have to
|
| 4. Community plugins are awesome. For example I just got done
| editing my "Linear Algebra Cheat sheet" which is full of Latex
| equations. It looks beautiful, if I want to jump into vim to
| edit I can but editing in obsidian works fine also.
| infinitemh wrote:
| I just started using Obsidian and I use the vim keybinds that
| Obsidian ships with. My only issue so far is I can't move the
| cursor back to the title from the body.
| pphysch wrote:
| I set up Obsidian+Syncthing on my desktop+mobile devices a
| couple years ago and have had zero technical issues, while
| Obsidian has significantly improved their product since, IME.
| It just works AND I own my data.
|
| It's a real gem among mountains of SaaS/VC nonsense.
| stevage wrote:
| For me, it's an example of a company building an app that did a
| thing well, but not a thing people would pay for. And then
| switching out the app for this monstrous platformy enterprisey
| catastrophe that I sure as hell never wanted, and being told to
| pay for it.
|
| Just an endless series of features that I never wanted.
| proamdev123 wrote:
| Evernote's files are `.enex` which is a variation of html.
|
| At least, they used to be. I haven't checked recently, but
| this was the case for many years. Don't know if they've
| changed anything recently.
| mesoman wrote:
| If you export it, you get XML, with embedded HTML in <CDATA
| TAGS, among other things. But the point is the same - it's
| not hard to parse. It also has base64 encoded images and
| pdf's. Don't know what else.
| deelly wrote:
| > to convert free users to paying users for the same features
|
| Not the same features, worse features. They intentionally
| abandoned Evernote Classic that was like 3 time faster, not
| clattered, practically without ads, and with more-more
| features. I will happily pay Evernote some reasonable price if
| my experience will be better, not worse..
| DeathArrow wrote:
| > and telling you that if you want to own the sync story that
| you can, but you can pay to have the cohesive experience on
| every device
|
| What stops you to sync for free using free Dropbox or OneDrive
| accounts?
| belthesar wrote:
| It sounds like that I didn't explain myself super well,
| because we agree. Using Dropbox or OneDrive to do sync is
| still owning the sync story yourself. You may not be writing
| the file syncing software, but you're not using Obsidian's
| purpose built sync system.
| arbitrary_name wrote:
| I cannot stand how difficult it is to create, use, and
| copy/paste tables. It means I'm forced to stick with OneNote.
| TheMiddleMan wrote:
| Don't you think having so many competitors offering free notes
| apps is a large part of it?
| D13Fd wrote:
| He gave the Obsidian example, which is a great one, so no.
| Obsidian shows you can still do well as a noted app company
| if you are selling the right thing (sync).
| DeathArrow wrote:
| But you can sync your Obsidian notes for free if you use
| free Dropbox or OneDrive accounts.
| nullandvoid wrote:
| This isn't trivial when you start syncing mobile (now you
| need an extra app, as onedrive doesn't support local), or
| onto a work device (where I don't want onedrive
| installed)
|
| There's work arounds (for example I forgot the name, but
| one plugin allows you to setup onedrive to share just one
| folder via logging in on each device), but the syncing
| story wasn't great. Quite a bit of extra setup across all
| devices, more points of failure etc.
|
| Hence the smart business model, of let us handle it for
| you for a small cost.
| ergonaught wrote:
| I was a paying customer for many years. Despite their
| continuous attempts to turn it into something I didn't need and
| eventually didn't want because they wouldn't leave it alone,
| they didn't manage to run me off until last year. That
| coincided with the acquisition but I honestly no longer recall
| if that was the final straw, as they'd been increasingly
| aggravating me for a while.
| mesoman wrote:
| I'm still a paying customer.
|
| But I don't trust them and haven't since they made it
| difficult to export all of your notes. And, they damaged tag-
| based organization by changing to only list notes that are at
| the bottom of the tag hierarchy - not those in the middle.
|
| And, they want to be the sole custodian my data, and I don't
| like a company with that attitude.
|
| Having been involved with system design including large
| servers for 50 years, I don't trust the cloud. Yeah, the huge
| cloud providers are staffed by really smart people and it is
| very unlikely you'll lose your data there (although I sure
| wouldn't trust Google - they're nuts with their product
| management).
|
| But a small staff Evernote, under pressure to please
| investors by somehow adding features that will let them
| compete in spaces already pretty full - no, I don't trust
| them to adequately _use_ the cloud to keep my data secure.
|
| I do frequent .enex backups of all my notes.
|
| I haven't switched yet, because it's a pain. But I sure do
| backups frequently.
|
| And if I see a good alternative (maybe in this thread), I'll
| jump on it.
|
| As long as I don't have to do the sysadmin all the time (I'd
| forget - busy with other things, or I'd make some dumb
| mistake); and as long as it isn't a giant pain to install and
| build. And as long as it has clients for MacOS (including
| Apple ARM processors), Android and iOS... then I'll look.
|
| Ideas sought.
|
| The last time I did this search (2020), I didn't find one I
| liked.
| janxgeist wrote:
| For me, it's an example of a company messing up the technical
| side.
|
| I was a happy customer in the beginning. Until I didn't have an
| important note that I had prepared for a meeting, because it
| didn't sync to my phone. A few weeks later, it happened again.
| I lost trust in the app.
|
| Then the Android App got worse and worse. It sometimes didn't
| sync at all. Notes would conflict all the time, and I'd lose
| work.
|
| For some reason, Evernote (both android app and windows client)
| just seemed to get worse every year.
| lifeonlars wrote:
| I paid for a subscription because I really liked what it did
| and I used it a lot. The Android app became so unresponsive
| that it was basically unusable. I stopped paying when I found
| myself making notes in email again to avoid opening the
| treacly app.
|
| It has since got better but I haven't gone back to paying for
| it, despite using it a lot, and now I'll probably slowly
| migrate away as they progressively break and disable the free
| version.
| tempestn wrote:
| Exactly. I would have happily paid them 10 bucks a month in
| inflation-adjusted 2012 dollars forever if they'd just
| maintained the apps and kept them up to date. Instead they
| focused on adding features few people wanted, and then
| completely rewrote the apps in Electron, resulting in a slow
| experience that was (and still is, years later) missing
| multiple core note-taking features, and is increasingly
| unreliable.
|
| I kept hoping, as theoretically Evernote is absolutely
| perfect for my needs, if it would just _work_. But clearly
| the writing is on the wall at this point and I need to find
| an alternative.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| Electron is the single biggest scourge to end users since
| Windows ME.
| skydhash wrote:
| Don't know about ME, but I have many native apps on my
| Mac, and it's jarring when switching to any electron app.
| It's always janky.
| seti0Cha wrote:
| That was what killed it for me. After they rewrote in
| Electron, using the app always felt sluggish, and despite
| the fact that it didn't actually interfere with any of my
| uses of it, I went from really liking their service to
| tolerating it as the lesser of several evils.
| emodendroket wrote:
| Is it really though? I feel like it's allowing many
| clients to exist that otherwise wouldn't ever get
| written.
| senttoschool wrote:
| Isn't Notion an Electron app or just a webapp?
| jon_adler wrote:
| Fastmail is an excellent example of a very reliable, slow
| changing product with a consistent price. I've been a
| subscriber for over 20 years, and I'm thrilled that it
| hardly ever changes in perceptible ways and just does it's
| job. In more recent years, they have started to introduce
| some changes but seem very careful about it.
| kerrsclyde wrote:
| Same here. I'm still using version 7 of their desktop
| software on OS X, now badged Legacy. It's fantastic, fast,
| multiple tabs (unlike the new Evernote app!!!), OCR, works
| well with images/PDF/Office Docs, I've never had a problem
| with syncing, I can format notes as I wish etc, etc.
|
| Over the past 10 days it has started displaying a daily
| upgrade message forcing me to the new tab-less Electron
| app. I'm resisting but I've no doubt it will stop syncing
| any day.
|
| Much of my daily workflow is focused around Evernote. It's
| going to a pain to move but I am going to. If they'd have
| just left things alone I would have been a paying customer
| probably until my dying day.
| srvmshr wrote:
| I would like to pick your brain about Notion for the reasoning
| you mentioned. Do you think Notion would be the next Evernote -
| in both the good and the bad way? Both the services are serving
| the same segment of the consumer market & both started out with
| generous offerings for free. I could be wrong how I see it but
| it would be nice to hear something interesting.
| randomdata wrote:
| Are they really in the same segment?
|
| Evernote's killer feature was its ability to "scan" paper
| documents with a smartphone and to be able to search on those
| documents in the future.
|
| Notion is just a Markdown editor.
| belthesar wrote:
| It's hard to say. In a lot of ways, they can address the same
| market, but from different directions. Evernote is a single-
| user focused app that extended to collaborative notetaking,
| Notion is a knowledge base app that can be used by
| individuals.
|
| The market is different, and Notion has always had a present
| limitation of how much a free account can get away with, even
| if it is generous. There's a pretty stark difference in
| saying "have the whole enchilada for free" at first and then
| "now we're limiting the devices you can sync to" or "now
| these other features you had are no longer free", vs. "your
| usage is always metered, and there is a generous free tier".
| I do imagine there is some sense in that if the free tier
| threshold was reduced that would cause some pain, but setting
| the expectation of "lunch is free, all you can eat" and then
| pivoting to "lunch is still mostly free but now you have to
| pay for desert" is going to make anyone mad that they have to
| pay for dessert now.
| puszczyk wrote:
| No the OP. I think Notion targets SMBs and maybe teams within
| enterprises.
|
| When they started the personal plan was paid (after first 1k
| blocks or so), then in 2020 they've lifted that
| restriction[0].
|
| [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23236786
| bachmeier wrote:
| > Evernote is a prime example of the pains of trying to convert
| free users to paying users for the same features
|
| I don't think so. They had plenty of paying customers. They
| claimed to be profitable for a long time (eg
| https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/evernote-
| rai...). They had trouble with (i) implementing big price
| hikes, and (ii) a poor, bug-filled user experience. While that
| was going on, they were facing increasing competition, yet they
| acting like a monopolist. OneNote, Google Docs, Dropbox Paper,
| Notion, and so on were providing a quality product at a better
| price. The lesson is one that many HN commenters would never
| accept. It's possible to set your price too high.
| briHass wrote:
| If you're on Windows, OneNote is almost impossible to compete
| with. Even though it's part of the Office suite, it's a free,
| stand-alone download. The phone apps are free, and you get
| 5GB of free storage. Then, for less than the cost of
| Evernote, you can get a O365 subscription and get the Office
| suite and 1TB of storage.
|
| Even though OneNote is basically a loss-leader, it's
| extremely powerful and flexible. It's been around longer than
| any other note-app, and it's still here as Evernote fades
| into oblivion.
| achow wrote:
| Exactly. I'm OneNote user for last 15 years or so. I got
| roped it in because it was free and good enough for my text
| notes (with image and PDF attachments).
|
| I transitioned to MacOS 10 years back.. and lo behold, free
| OneNote application available there too with free cloud
| storage (OneDrive) and cross device sync story (mobile,
| Windows). Works great.
| stOneskull wrote:
| true. you even get access and publisher.
| jeswin wrote:
| > Then, for less than the cost of Evernote, you can get a
| O365 subscription and get the Office suite and 1TB of
| storage.
|
| Take the slightly more expensive family pack, and 5 people
| can use it on 5 devices each. It's one of the too-good-to-
| be-true deals out there.
| julianz wrote:
| Even better, it's 6 people. You plus 5 family members.
| coffeeling wrote:
| I only wish Microsoft showed it some actual love. The app's
| been languishing for years, and most any new feature is in
| the vein of "you can embed TikToks now" or something only
| applicable to a classroom setting.
|
| That, and while I love that their apps are native, there
| are serious consistency issues with eg. how search behaves,
| and the resurrected Windows app still not using the modern
| sync backend mobile, web and macOS do.
| brynjolf wrote:
| It is a shame Microsoft had basically abandoned OneNote The
| android app still can't change fonts after 5 years of
| development. It is pure insanity how little MS cares about
| their best product They made it brilliant at the start and
| since then stated they won't update it anymore.
| coffeeling wrote:
| I seriously wish you couldn't change fonts in it. OneNote
| itself defaults to 11pt Calibri, but the web clipper
| outputs 12pt Verdana because fuck you. And if you change
| the font to Verdana, page title font changes from 20pt
| Calibri Light (IIRC) to like Verdana 20pt which is
| comically heavy.
|
| Plaintext based notes apps are a blessing in that regard:
| Since they only store the text, your pages actually look
| nice and consistent. I have a ton of web clippings in
| OneNote which are ugly as hell because of font
| inconsistencies.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| Maybe I have simple needs, but iOS notes does everything I
| want.
|
| 1. Instantly synced between all computers and devices (yes
| I know I need to be in the Mac/iPhone ecosystem, but I
| happen to be in that anyway)
|
| 2. Create folders
|
| 3. Paste images
|
| 4. Fonts/bullets etc.
|
| Apparently that's all I need. Anything else is a hindrance.
| wouldbecouldbe wrote:
| The main reason I love apple notes is it's speed and
| sync. Just works.
|
| I treed google keep and evernote. Syncing was always
| overwriting eachother. Starting slow.
| worthless-trash wrote:
| Never had that same problem with keep, its almost
| instantaneous updating for me.
| wouldbecouldbe wrote:
| I always have one big note where I add a lot. When using
| that in both desktop and phone kept overwriting my
| entries
| oshoma wrote:
| I love the design of Notes, and I used it a lot for the
| past few years to store work and personal notes, but I
| found the sync to be very unreliable. Notes on my iPhone
| keeps getting out of sync with Notes on my laptop. It
| happens every few weeks, and I have to log out and login
| again to fix it. Maddening.
|
| I switched recently to Obsidian and am really enjoying
| the speed, simplicity, extensibility, and being back in
| control of my files.
| gumby wrote:
| If they would just improve search it would be really
| great. There is no way to restrict search to a folder,
| for example.
| grujicd wrote:
| Few years ago I tried to switch to OneNote but it was very
| sluggish compared to Evernote. I'll give it another go.
| killjoywashere wrote:
| I have tried to use oneNote a few times and it just doesn't
| not compute to me. Some union of Notability + Paperpile
| would be perfect. I review proposals, peer review
| manuscripts, and read papers for my own research, all done
| with notes take with the handwritten scribble function over
| a PDF (which Evernote never got right).
|
| I have friends with OneNote and no matter what they
| explain, it does not make sense to me.
| pjmlp wrote:
| I was on your shoes around 2014 to 2018.
|
| The client I was assigned to, used for everything on
| project management related documentation.
|
| I couldn't understand how to approach it.
|
| Then around 2019, in another project it suddenly made
| sense, after several approaches trying to make sense out
| of it.
| Foobar8568 wrote:
| I still can't figure out how to use note,I have tried
| different approach but having to jump different
| application and rewrite everything 2 or 3 times, just
| don't compute in my brain.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Basically how I came around using it, was instead of
| having txt files, office files and a bunch of screenshots
| scattered around on the filesystem under the respective
| project directory, I started organizing such content
| inside Notes itself.
| trallnag wrote:
| So you store all your documents within OneNote?
| pjmlp wrote:
| No, only those related to project delivery, that are kind
| of note taking stuff.
|
| Documentation to be shared across the team is in
| Confluence or similar wiki platform.
|
| Documents to be shared with the customer are in Office
| formats.
| sokoloff wrote:
| In systems like that, I often find myself in the
| frustrating situation of "I know I saw a sentence with
| <phrase> in it; which of the three systems should I
| search in? If I don't find it, is it because the phrase
| was slightly different, or is there a fourth or fifth
| system I need to search?"
|
| It's maddening and is my several times per week
| experience.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Taking notes is a feature, not a product
|
| And given how the "process cyclists" of Notion will move to
| anything that has more bells and whistles, while the rest
| of the 99% will use what's available for free and syncs
| online, it's a hard place to compete
|
| ("process cyclists": will pay a lot for every small but
| hyperoptimized accessory)
| lifeonlars wrote:
| You're contradicting yourself. Taking notes is a feature
| for many, but a product for people whose working style
| involves taking lots and lots of notes.
|
| Call them "process cyclists" if you want, there is a
| bimodal distribution for how much people use notes apps,
| and the people near the high mode are prepared to pay
| monthly for something good, and tend to be extremely
| loyal.
| weare138 wrote:
| But this also seems to be another case of tech companies trying
| to have it's cake and eat it too like the recent reddit
| debacle. The freemium model comes with trade-offs and
| businesses can't have it both ways. 'Free' users should be
| viewed as free marketing and advertising for generating paid
| users not as lost potential revenue.
|
| No business using the freemium model should expect to magically
| convert the free users to paid users and still retain the
| popularity generated by the free users. You would think as many
| times as tech companies have that shot themselves in the foot
| like this our industry might stop attempting to do this. When
| does this actually work?
| proamdev123 wrote:
| It works when the free tier is usable, but highly limited.
| Then it effectively becomes a free trial, albeit with no time
| restriction.
|
| For example, if Evernote had limited the free tier to 99
| notes and syncing with 2 devices. That's usable enough for a
| user to get a feel for whether they like it or not, but
| without an expectation that the free tier could support all
| their needs for note generation and storage.
|
| The problem comes when the free tier is so restraint-free
| that people begin to use it as a daily driver without ever
| expecting to upgrade to a paid tier. At that point, the
| company has boxed themselves into a situation with users who
| generate costs but no corresponding revenues. Trying to
| convert _those_ users into paying customers is difficult or
| impossible, in my opinion.
| ilyt wrote:
| > I feel like Evernote is a prime example of the pains of
| trying to convert free users to paying users for the same
| features, something we see in many VC funded software from its
| era. Once you give something away, it's damn near impossible to
| take it back, even if you plead your case as honestly as
| Evernote did.
|
| But they were doing seeming fine ? It's not some new VC funded
| corp that failed after 5 years
| ramraj07 wrote:
| Sounds like Dropbox has made the transition just fine. If
| you're gonna ask me to pay a tenner a month you better give me
| what I think is the dollars worth of value. Dropbox did.
| Evernote did not. At least not for the vast majority of people
| who barely take some notes on some rare days.
| devjab wrote:
| I think you're both right because the original poster left
| out competition. It's one thing to take free back, it's
| another thing to do it when people can easily replace your
| product without paying.
|
| Dropbox doesn't have a competitor that is free to use. At
| least as far as I know. You can get your disk space in a lot
| of ways, some bundled with other products you may use making
| it appear "free" but even if you host your own cloud storage
| you're going to pay something for it.
|
| Even if Evernote is better than notes on your iPhone, is it
| $10 a month better? Probably not.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| > Dropbox doesn't have a competitor that is free to use
|
| Google drive?
| devjab wrote:
| How is Google drive more free to use than Dropbox? As
| soon as you need any sort of storage it'll cost you
| money.
|
| You can also get some free MBs from Microsoft, Proton and
| so on, and, Dropbox also has a free tier.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Google Drive's yearly cost for 2TB is almost equal to
| monthly payment for Dropbox for the same capacity.
|
| However, Dropbox have some underrated yet very powerful
| features like Apps and automations. I buy books from
| plethora of places, and new versions of the products I
| have are uploaded automatically. I just receive a
| notification. Same for some fonts and design assets I
| have. SendOwl leverages this capability for anyone,
| easily.
|
| Auto organization, a clunky but reliable native Linux
| application, LANSync, etc. are all good things to have,
| and they have solved the syncing problem.
|
| Also, Google Drive is a ticking time bomb, because if you
| accidentally put a file Google doesn't like, you have the
| risk to lose all your Google access at the middle of the
| night.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| >Google Drive's yearly cost for 2TB is almost equal to
| monthly payment for Dropbox for the same capacity.
|
| Dropbox costs EUR10 / user / month while Google Drive
| costs $12 / user / month.
| bayindirh wrote:
| For me, the prices are as follows: -
| Dropbox: $119.88 per year for 2TB, plus $39.99 per year
| for one year version history. - Google Drive:
| ~$11.3 per year for 2TB, ~$57 per year for 5TB.
|
| Not in the U.S., btw.
| bosie wrote:
| Those are crazy low prices for gdrive. central europe i
| get EUR 10/m for 2TB
| gumby wrote:
| Google drive and Dropbox don't really have the same
| functionality. Google really wants you to use a web
| browser; in my experience the filesystem integration has
| always been flaky. Whereas Dropbox directories that
| appear in the local filesystem are really solid.
| TheLoafOfBread wrote:
| It is only matter of time before Google will kill it.
| nunodonato wrote:
| where's the linux client?
| cj wrote:
| > Dropbox doesn't have a competitor that is free to use.
|
| Maybe not completely free, but iCloud desktop sync is
| pretty much a native MacOS clone of Dropbox. Especially for
| its core feature of cross-device syncing. Perhaps less so
| for sharing, although MacOS has been slowly adding those
| features to the point where I no longer get much value out
| of dropbox at all.
|
| Still paying though, mostly out of laziness to migrate
| (which is literally as simple as dragging the files into a
| folder on my desktop, honestly I'm not sure why I haven't
| done this yet)
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| Dropbox never took away anything they gave for free though.
| In the beginning they handed out extra space like candies,
| and the accounts that got it at the time still have it.
| fluidcruft wrote:
| I dropped Dropbox with extreme prejudice (was a paying
| customer) when they decided to dictate which Linux
| filesystems I may use. Will never use them ever again.
| Randomly demanding I drop everything and re-engineer my
| stack is an invitation for me to re-engineer them out of my
| life.
| gumby wrote:
| > when they decided to dictate which Linux filesystems I
| may use
|
| That's an odd framing. How about "when they didn't
| support the filesystem I use"?
|
| If some software is only available on Windows I doubt
| anyone would say that the vendor is trying to "dictate
| what OS I use".
| fluidcruft wrote:
| The framing is not odd at all. Your framing makes it
| sound as if this was some requirement that had been known
| since the beginning rather than the typical "Good news!
| For our own corporate reasons we have decided to make
| your life better by jumping to the top of your todo list
| and breaking your things!" Thanks, I hate it.
|
| To be clear it is trivial to thwart the check, but shared
| library shims can't fix the real problem which is
| pointless corporate contempt. Particularly if I'm paying
| for it.
| acdha wrote:
| Like everyone else, they have to decide what they support
| - their core product pretty heavily depends on known file
| system semantics - and they gave advanced notice
| specifically so you didn't have to "drop everything" if
| you for some reason cannot have a partition using a
| supported file system.
|
| Put another way, do you think the combined users of file
| systems which aren't supported ext4, xfs, btrfs, or zfs
| are willing to pay more or would quietly accept the
| possibility of data loss? I doubt the former is true and
| have absolute certainty that if there was a bug using an
| unsupported file system that would result in angry,
| hyperbolic blog posts saying Dropbox is unsafe and will
| lose your data.
| fluidcruft wrote:
| Oh are those all supported now? They've clearly
| backtracked massively. When I bounced they were insisting
| on ext4 _only_. Glad I didn 't bother rebuild all my
| machines to ext4 only for them to change their damn
| minds. They gave us less than three months notice. I'm
| not playing chicken for three months paying their
| professional tier in the hopes they change their mind.
| Freaking circus.
| tanjtanjtanj wrote:
| They took away my "free" <huge amount of space for 2011>
| many years back. I mainly got the space hosting events at
| my university and other free work I performed for the
| company around that time as well as many, many referrals.
| apple4ever wrote:
| They did though. You used to have unlimited devices syncing
| for free, then they took that away and made it 3 unless
| paid.
|
| It's why I ended up switching to OneDrive. (Which I ended
| up paying for later.)
| PhoenixReborn wrote:
| Also Obsidian is a small team (< 5 people IIRC?) and they don't
| have to monetize as aggressively to make back the money that
| VCs have funded them with.
| ryanjamurphy wrote:
| The count depends on if you include the cat:
| https://obsidian.md/about
| SUPPORTEDLIAR wrote:
| [flagged]
| itsjloh wrote:
| Have Obsidian taken on any VC funding?
| coffeeling wrote:
| They've intentionally avoided taking on any.
| greggsy wrote:
| They created a very robust platform based on a cross-platform
| framework (electron) with a healthy stable of open source add
| ons, and held off n a major release for some time. They
| really only need to water and feed it from there.
| bakuninsbart wrote:
| I think this is the key issue here. There are a _lot_ of VC
| funded start ups that have a good product and a solid market
| fit, but they were never supposed to become 500+ employee
| companies.
|
| If you have a product that works and makes a good profit, and
| you can maintain it with 10 people and extend it with 5 more,
| sometimes that just is the company.
|
| In this context I think it is important to note that
| Ycombinator was founded in 2005. For the majority of its
| existence, and the general hype of tech startups, money was
| incredibly cheap. Now that the gears are switching, a lot of
| the advice given to startup founders does not work as well
| anymore.
| seanhunter wrote:
| This is super-important. Sometimes the grass is greener on
| _this_ side of the fence.
|
| VCs want to get you to grow rapidly because the only way to
| move the needle on their returns is to blow the roof off.
| However as a founder, this is proof you can have a great
| business and _a great quality of life_ by keeping costs
| relatively low, the team relatively small, just cranking
| out code and having fun.
| ghaff wrote:
| As a founder you probably don't get wealthy either and a
| lot aren't really satisfied with a $150k/yr total
| comp/benefits for their successful lifestyle business.
| crystalgurl wrote:
| It was pretty nice to exit my startup for hundreds of
| millions of dollars. Yeah, I don't think I'd like to
| settle for $150k. YMMV, but I suppose a lot of folks are
| taking a calculated risk and swinging for the fences.
|
| More power to em, if you prefer software be a certain way
| write it yourself.
| ndiddy wrote:
| Agreed, sure I fucked over my customers after my startup
| was bought by Google, but I didn't really care because I
| was able to afford three yachts. I didn't even bother
| writing the shutdown message myself, I paid some dude on
| Fiverr to do it. Maybe 150k is fine if you're willing to
| settle for an above-ground pool in some shithole state in
| the Midwest, but if you want to spend your time where the
| true work happens, and collaborate with other innovators
| and founders in the only place that matters (bay area)
| you have to set your sights a bit higher.
| coldpie wrote:
| Imagine not being "satisfied" with a ~85th percentile
| wage[1]. Anyone who earns more than $150k/yr should be
| forced to spend 6 months every 5 years working a minimum
| wage retail job. They can keep earning their normal
| salary in escrow until they're done with their "get some
| damn perspective" temp job.
|
| [1] https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-household-
| income-percen...
| sib wrote:
| I think most of the founders on HN are far above the 85th
| percentile in intelligence (let's not get into the
| philosophical arguments about it), so why would they be
| satisfied with that?
| [deleted]
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Because, being over 85th percentile in intelligence, they
| would be more likely than average to realize that the
| marginal impact of income on experienced utility declines
| sharply the higher you go on the income distribution.
| (Especially if they've experienced life at a variety of
| income levels, including some near the 85th percentile.)
| sib wrote:
| Marginal impact decreases, but the absolute impact is
| still positive... And the marginal impact is still quite
| high at the 85th percentile of income because the income
| distribution is very skewed (the absolute dollar
| difference from 85th percentile to 99th percentile, where
| most HN / YC founders probably are on the intelligence
| scale, is probably _much_ greater than the absolute
| dollar difference from 15th to 29th percentile, as an
| example).
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Imagine not being "satisfied" with a ~85th percentile
| wage.
|
| In aggregates: Household income > individual income >
| wage/salary; you've confused the first with the last.
|
| $150K is beyond 90th percentile individual income. [0] I
| can't find wage/salary percentiles separately, but its
| probably even further beyond 90th percentile there.
|
| https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-individual-income-
| perce...
| ghaff wrote:
| I assume someone running a very successful lifestyle
| business of this sort 1) Probably had a pretty good
| chance of making nothing at all or even lost money and 2)
| Could make more money with benefits etc. if they just
| took a job at a big company.
|
| So, yes, they've done pretty well but they took a risk
| and still probably didn't come close to maximizing comp
| even they had a rather good outcome.
|
| And I just threw out the $150k number because it's a very
| good outcome. Could just as easily be something a lot
| lower including negative.
| seti0Cha wrote:
| While I do agree it would be good for those who haven't
| experienced poverty to get a taste of it, it's not
| realistic to expect people to feel satisfied simply
| because they are more fortunate than some other group.
| Success is always perceived relative to your surroundings
| and the possibilities available.
| [deleted]
| mesoman wrote:
| As a co-founder, I'd say you can get wealthy or at least
| comfortable.
|
| But, we started with two people. At some point we needed
| funding. That put us on a track of angel investors, VC's,
| and a cycle acquisition, buyback, funding, acquisition,
| buyback, etc.
|
| As the techie guy, I found that tiring and distracting.
| When we changed from software as a product to SAAS, it
| got a lot less fun. When we grew to 2000 employees
| (mostly non-tech), the company was a pain.
|
| So after 20 years (to the day), we sold it and moved on.
| Kaibeezy wrote:
| _If you have a product that works and makes a good profit,
| and you can maintain it with 10 people and extend it with 5
| more, sometimes that just is the company._
|
| Amen. I call this business model "tiny unicorn". Been
| riding mine 25 years now.
| coldpie wrote:
| > If you have a product that works and makes a good profit,
| and you can maintain it with 10 people and extend it with 5
| more, sometimes that just is the company.
|
| C'mon now. With that attitude, how are you ever going to
| get imploded on top of the Titanic, or buy a social media
| company so you can smash it against the wall like a toddler
| with a toy truck? You want to live a comfortable, happy
| life, with happy employees and customers? No way! This is
| capitalism, baby! Fuck your customers and your employees,
| it's your right to throw them into a vat of acid so you can
| blow millions of their dollars to spend 30 minutes in the
| stratosphere wearing a cowboy hat! If you don't do it,
| someone else will!
| clarkb286 wrote:
| Yeah! I feel like I'm reading a script of an episode of
| the TV show, "Silicon Valley"! (ANY episode, lol!) * Pied
| Piper FOREVER! *
| charlie0 wrote:
| I'd like to agree with you, but the issue then becomes this
| smaller company is competing with a much larger company,
| which then has a larger marketing budget. The smaller
| company's offering becomes just another set of features the
| larger company offers.
|
| It's not fair because the larger company continues to get
| VC funding which allows it to subsidize features or even
| give them away for free. Remember, all these companies are
| effectively racing to become monopolies and part of that
| process is "price dumping" to kill of smaller competitors.
| Again, this sucks, but those are the incentives VCs
| provides and companies have to oblige or get swallowed up
| by bigger fish.
| ronyfadel wrote:
| > How they intend to do that without any staff is something I
| would like to know about.
|
| They will probably use their Italian in-house dev teams instead?
| markus_zhang wrote:
| I feel like any product that competes with free ones and does not
| have a technical wall is going to fail eventually.
| FreezerburnV wrote:
| This REALLY SUCKS. I've been using Evernote as a catch-all app
| for a bit now: scanning documents for paperless, archiving
| website snapshots, notes for various things (I love being able to
| make a note tied to a calendar event!), the super good OCR
| capabilities, task management (even if buggy...), etc. It does a
| lot for me, and it has great capabilities for bringing
| information/content into it. There is literally nothing else out
| there that has the unique set of capabilities I actively use in
| the same package. (And no, Joplin is not "just as good")
| Unbundling to multiple places that don't have the same
| capabilities (not to mention not having their supposed upcoming
| AI search I was really looking forward to) is going to be an
| absolute downgrade for me and make it harder to manage my life.
|
| If someone knows of something that can fill the void of Evernote
| so I don't have to like, use Apple Notes with Reminders (which
| while you can access them on Windows via the browser, it's a
| mediocre experience at best) and like raindrop.io for website
| archival all at the same time.
|
| And I'm not moving to OneNote which while it might have most of
| that stuff, I hate using it.
| n8henrie wrote:
| Timely thread about Joplin, an open-source alternative:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36611355
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