
Why Evernote failed to realize its potential - speter
https://usefyi.com/evernote-history
======
vikingcaffiene
I find it weird that no one is mentioning that this article is written by an
EN competitor.

I've been an EN user since 2010. Yes they have had some problems and I have
even tried to jump ship (as recently as last fall when I gave DEVONThink a
go). I keep coming back though. I've yet to find anything that touches it in
terms of features and functionality. Only ones that come close are OneNote and
Notion. OneNote is fine but I don't like they way it handles organizing data.
I prefer a nested hierarchy which I can get with tags in EN. Notion covers
most of the bases but its an electron app and its _SLOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWW_ if you
have a lot of notes in it. Takes 30 seconds for the mobile app to open and be
useful for instance. Thats a dealbreaker for me. I need to be able to get a
piece of knowledge on the go fast. If you can't give me what I want in less
than a few seconds you go in the bin.

EN has the advantage of being available on Mac and Windows (and Linux w/
Wine), allows you to capture from literally anywhere and has a fantastic and
fast search. You can encrypt notes. You can schedule notes. You can make
todo's. Capture emails. Scan documents (and then find them with OCR). It's got
a very usable api to integrate it into any part of your workflow they don't
cover. I dunno, I've tried em all and EN is still the best IMO.

ps. I've been using org mode lately too. That _might_ be what finally gets me
off EN but the mobile experience just isn't there yet. Beorg (iOS) is great
but still pretty short on features. Especially capture and search.

~~~
jredwards
Every time I find a new Evernote competitor, I try it out. I keep thinking
that it must be easy to top Evernote, which I have various complaints about.

I'm always back to Evernote within a week.

Notion and Joplin were my most recent attempts.

~~~
kirubakaran
Could you please describe what you missed when you tried Notion and Joplin?

~~~
ukyrgf
My issue with Notion is just picky little things that make it not fun to use.
It looks great, is intuitive to me, and seems pretty powerful, so I want to
like it. But, I hate having to be emailed a log-in code. Everytime it happens
I think "oh yeah, this is why I never use Notion". I don't like that the
desktop and mobile apps are just wrappers for the webview. As a user I feel
like I have no control over anything. At least with Evernote and OneNote, I
can literally see my database on my computer. With Notion, I am always aware
that this is data on somebody else's servers. I've also had subpages
completely disappear if I move their parent note, and I gave up on support and
just accepted the loss.

Joplin looks good. I am going to give it a shot.

------
sgt
Due to some weird bug in Evernote, I lost about 10% of all my notes. Some of
them critical. This happened about a year ago, and I never found out the
actual cause. I think it was some kind of bug triggered by the combination of
syncing from/to the mobile app and the desktop app. But I completely stopped
trusting Evernote after this and stopped using it.

~~~
vernie
I've always had a terrible experience using Evernote across multiple devices.
Editing a note on mobile seemed like a surefire way to get a merge conflict. I
believe I also experienced a mysterious disappearance of a large chunk of my
notes.

I just opened for Evernote for the first time in years and it looks like all
my notes are now duplicated for some reason. Awesome.

------
fiblye
I tried using it years ago over the span of a couple months and found syncing
to be absolutely atrocious. It'd delete pages of notes if they didn't exist on
the other computer I was syncing to and then they were simply gone forever.

Dropbox was getting huge around the same time. I started just saving my text
notes in a dropbox folder. Never had any syncing errors, deleted Evernote, and
never looked back. I'm sure they've improved since then, but it's hard to go
back after such a sour first impression.

~~~
rb808
Is there a way to make notes on a phone and save to dropbox? Sounds good but
I"ve never tried.

~~~
pborenstein
Drafts (iOS app) can do that. And it can save to Evernote as well.

But between Pinboard & Drafts, I don't use Evernote any more.

~~~
jorvi
I've tried Drafts (and pretty much every other app that supports Dropbox sync)
and none felt as intuitive as Notebooks[1]. There is even a free iPhone
version[2] you can try. Has support for Markdown and Webdav as well!

[1] [https://itunes.apple.com/nl/app/notebooks-write-and-
organize...](https://itunes.apple.com/nl/app/notebooks-write-and-
organize/id780438662?mt=8)

[2] [https://itunes.apple.com/nl/app/notebooks-for-
iphone/id78044...](https://itunes.apple.com/nl/app/notebooks-for-
iphone/id780442075?mt=8)

------
mortdeus
Also i know, at least for me, that when i find myself wanting to take notes
most is whenever its a spur of the moment kind of idea that i dont want to
lose.

In that kind of scenario, i find that a small notebook and pencil is still
superior to an app simply because i don't have to think too much about the
process of getting myself into a position where i can actually record the
idea.

Its just too hard to get into the habit of remembering you have a note taking
app on your phone that you can use whenever the good idea has just hit you.

You are too excited about the idea and trying your hardest to recall all the
key details and keep them freshly in mind to be able to navigate to the app,
wait for it to load up, press the + button, type in the idea using your
thumbs, write in a title, save it, shit the app just crashed, load the app
back up, great my idea wasnt saved, guess ill try writing it again, damn it i
wish these notifications would stop popping up and pinging me, uhhh crap what
was the clever angle to my idea again? Damn it.

Plus if im pulling out my phone, why not just use the voice controlled virtual
assistant to record my ideas?

Not only does it have speech to text recognition but its actually quicker and
more reliable than pulling out your notepad, flipping to an empty page, and
hoping your writing utensil doesnt break/run out of ink.

~~~
oftenwrong
>navigate to the app, wait for it to load up, press the + button, type in the
idea using your thumbs, write in a title, save it, shit the app just crashed,
load the app back up, great my idea wasnt saved, guess ill try writing it
again, damn it i wish these notifications would stop popping up and pinging
me, uhhh crap what was the clever angle to my idea again? Damn it.

This is like the black-and-white scene in an infomercial in which a person
dramatically fails to perform a simple, everyday task.

If using an app is truly that hard, use a different app.

I have an "email to self" app on my phone. One tap and it opens my email app
with my personal email address pre-loaded. Then I write whatever in there, or
use voice dictation, and hit send. Syncing, backups, distribution to all my
devices - all taken care of already because it's email. Fancy stuff.

What it sucks for is any idea that is better explained or formulated with a
drawing. For that I use paper. When I'm done, I take a picture with my phone,
and then it gets synced to the cloud.

~~~
usrusr
Also sticking to email for notes. It's the one account that I expect to
migrate between providers when need arises,whereas something specific to notes
I would likely just abandon. Advanced features like sync between devices is
already set up and it's searchable, I have encryption when I want it, the UI
is familiar.

For even more transient notes I have a widget on my phone's main screen that
is just a single, persistent multiline text field without even something as
complicated as a save button. It will typically show the number of a hotel
room I stayed in months ago or something like that.

------
gritzko
We contacted Evernote in 2012, 13, 14 begging them to try CRDT based
synchronisation.

First, it might have fixed their sync glitches. Second, that would make the
client a full copy of the data, very much like a git repo. You can't lose data
that way. Third, that would be a step towards collaborative features.

We got brushed off. We used personal connections as well as official channels.
In 2014 we annoyed them so much, we're got a very confident response: sync is
not a problem. Ironically, in a couple of months that "bug ridden elephant"
post was out with all the reputational consequences.

~~~
everdev
Who is "we"?

~~~
gritzko
Me and the other guy. I am Victor Grishchenko, PhD. At the time, we had a CRDT
based sync engine which we white-labelled to Yandex. We had been eager to work
with Evernote cause all their sync issues have been very clear to us.

These days, even Apple Notes syncs with CRDTs... at the time, it was cutting-
edge.

P.S. Please never let me feel that my response is more polite than necessary.

~~~
roelvdven
Why is your response so polite?

~~~
klank
It's interesting, because I didn't find anything in the OP's response to be
particularly polite. Sure, it wasn't impolite either.

With the exception of that postscript though. If it's as passive aggressive as
it sounds then I'd consider it rather impolite.

------
happytoexplain
I have over a thousand notes in Evernote.

One day I noticed that one was missing shortly after I created it. Eventually
I discovered that the convenient new-note shortcut was failing every time with
a database corruption error - but the error only appeared in a system log I
was unaware of. There was no indication to the user that the notes were
failing. To this day I have no idea how many notes I lost due to this bug. It
was a traumatic experience.

It also sometimes simply doesn't sync for days on end, until I notice and
trigger it manually. This leads to conflicts I must resolve manually.

What do other people use that has similar:

\- Low-friction global shortcuts for creating and searching.

\- Organization (tags and notebooks, or something similar).

\- A UI that handles large note bodies well.

\- Is at least on Windows, macOS, and Android.

I'd love an alternative, but I've yet to find one. And I don't even use most
of its features.

~~~
acl777
OneNote. It’s free on all platforms and handles your listed requirements.

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

~~~
criddell
How is the OCR in OneNote now? One of the features keeping me on Evernote is
being able to take a photo of a whiteboard and put it in Evernote which then
does a surprisingly good job of recognizing the text and making the photo
searchable.

~~~
landonxjames
Not bad at all, even with my atrocious handwriting it manages to be around 85%
accurate.

~~~
criddell
I'll have to check it out again.

Last time I spent some time with it, the UI just never clicked for me. My main
notetaking device is my iPad with a Pencil stylus and GoodNotes. It does a
great job of interpreting my handwriting and then I can export a searchable
PDF to Evernote, or I guess, OneNote.

Is the metadata search in OneNote decent? For example, can I search for notes
I created in Houston?

~~~
duado
The thing about Microsoft’s stuff is that it slowly but inexorably gets better
over time. Like a watched pot, if you are waiting for a feature it will never
arrive but if you walk away and come back a few years later it will be
significantly better.

------
taude
I haven't seen too many people mentioning the onslaught of Microsoft One Note
in developing a great note-taking tool, that syncs well in the cloud, and
integrates with several of their other tools like Word and Outlook.

Personallly, as a early Evernote User, once One Note came out for Mac, I
switched. And then getting a job somewhere where we used Windows PCs, just
solidified it for me, and I never found the need to go back.

~~~
macspoofing
For sure. I had an Evernote subscription, but I used OneNote at work - and
it's just better. Letting you place snippets and notes on the vertical AND
horizontal plane makes sense for quick note taking. Anyway, I switched last
year and the fact that OneNote had a convenient note importer for Evernote was
icing on the cake.

Evernote never seemed to evolve either. It was the same product 5 years ago,
as it was last year and the company employed hundreds of developers - doing
what?

~~~
underwater
The OneNote canvas based model doesn't really work for note taking for me.

Switching between mobile and desktop devices means the content doesn't fit on
either because it the form factors are so different.

I think they special case the mobile product to act like a traditional text
editor when there is a single text field. But it is a kludge on top of a
broken model.

~~~
macspoofing
That's fair. I personally never found value in note taking on mobile. I
present at conferences, and deal with partners and customers, and in those
cases pen with a pocket-size notebook beats fiddling around with a phone. To
compare, to take a note on a phone while talking to a partner, I have to 1)
take my phone out, 2) unlock it, 3) launch the app and wait for it to load 4)
wait until the software keyboard shows up, 5) start taking notes. At any point
the phone could start acting up. Maybe it'll be extra slow this time. Maybe
the app will crash. Maybe the fingerprint won't take on the first try. The
opportunity for delays are always there.

With a notebook, it's so much faster. You take it out, and you start writing.
And at the end of the day, I manually add my notes to OneNote.

------
hs86
After I noticed that their forum thread [1] about requesting LaTeX-style math
notes was almost as old as my Evernote Premium subscription, I came to the
conclusion that this is just a ripoff. I paid all these years only to keep my
access and for the occasional design update but the core experience stagnated.

Dropbox Paper already provided a better note-taking experience and with
Notion.so I finally found a full replacement. The product is in active
development [2] and I don't feel like I am just paying to keep the servers
running.

[1] [https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/16445-request-
support-...](https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/16445-request-support-for-
latex-formulas/)

[2] [https://www.notion.so/notion/What-s-
New-157765353f2c4705bd45...](https://www.notion.so/notion/What-s-
New-157765353f2c4705bd45474e5ba8b46c)

~~~
steve19
Notion looks great. I was hoping your comment implied it support latex math
but unfortunately not.

~~~
hs86
Paper does this right with single `$` for inline math and double `$$` for math
blocks. Currently, Notions supports only math blocks and you can invoke those
with `/math`.

~~~
steve19
Oh that's great, thanks. I looked at the docs but didn't find anything.

~~~
phillc73
Does Overleaf support what you're looking for?[1]

[1]
[https://www.overleaf.com/learn/latex/Mathematical_expression...](https://www.overleaf.com/learn/latex/Mathematical_expressions)

~~~
steve19
Thanks! Funnily enough I found it just hours before I saw this article posted
on HN

------
bad_user
I'm a paid customer of Evernote, I must say that it works great and it has no
reasonable replacement.

I use it for all kinds of notes, like for example short tutorials on the
command line, issuing commands that are hard to remember, TODO lists (both at
work and for grocery shopping), meeting notes, listing pros and cons,
everything.

In meetings I like the ability to record audio, or to add pictures I take with
my phone, which isn't necessarily a capability of your average open source
alternative.

Its search capabilities are also great. I have a ton of notes in my Evernote
and I never have issues finding what I'm looking for. Compared with Google
Docs for example, which is terrible.

My problems with it is that the data is not easy to port, I would have liked
for example periodic Markdown backups to my Dropbox. Also support for
encryption is weak. Apps like Evernote can be end to end encrypted, there's
absolutely no reason for Evernote, the company, to have access to my notes.

I also worry about Evernote, the company, dying on me like many other startups
before it.

~~~
dolguldur
> I'm a paid customer of Evernote

I think what you want to say is "paying customer"

~~~
bad_user
Sorry, English is not my native language and it's too late to edit the
message.

------
paultopia
Like many others in this thread, I lost data due to Evernote bugs; I also
found their app incredibly slow to use, and then combine that with the price
increases as perfectly fine alternatives (OneNote, Apple Notes) were still
free or much lower price (Bear plus Drafts on iOS are my current
replacement)---I cancelled my account last year.

The headline makes this seem like much more of a mystery than it is. "Offer an
unreliable product at a high price" isn't a recipe for commercial success, not
unless you're a monopolist (it works for the cable companies).

------
jem72
The problem with both Dropbox and Evernote is that their minimum pricing tier
is too expensive for what they provide - particularly when both functions are
provided as part of the Microsoft Office package with is the same price as
Dropbox alone. I used both for years and would have happily paid a couple of
dollars a month as I do for the basic tier of Google Drive. I abandoned both
when the 2 device limit came in.

~~~
majidazimi
This. Office 365 package provides full office suit + 1TB of storage + 50GB ad-
free mail box for the same price and they are already profitable at this price
tag. If you are an startup offering any service more expensive than office 365
you are doing something really wrong.

~~~
Traster
Well it's not so much that you're doing something wrong. It's that Office 365
has such a ridiculous market share so their developments costs make up almost
none of the price. Any start up is almost inevitably going to find their first
development costs push their price up so they've really got to offer something
new.

------
toss1
"To Pachikov (one of the founders), Evernote wasn’t just another app or a way
to capitalize on Silicon Valley’s burgeoning obsession with personal
productivity. It was an extension of the human mind itself that would let
users remember everything."

TFA made many good points about distractions into merchandise, missing the
group discussion opportunity, etc.

But the critical element that killed Evenote is it's unreliability and data
loss/corruption.

If anyone actually uses Evernote as intended -- the tool to extend your memory
-- the sync and storage functions simply can NEVER lose or corrupt data.

Absolute reliability is more critical than any other feature.

Yet they failed on this one key function.

My anecdata is that while evaluating apps for gathering info & taking notes,
Evernote's feature list came out on top in nearly every comparison -- but it
had significant reports of unreliability. Disqualified. Period. Never looked
back and no regrets, especially since it is still evidently not fixed.

Developers must distinguish between general usability features (e.g.,
supporting platform X or data format Y) and critical functions.

General features will lose you some users, but you can get them once you get
around to implementing.

Critical functions failing or missing will keep people away no matter what you
do, forever. And beyond that is the general damage you'll cause to other
people's lives by, in this case, corrupting their highly valuable data and
memories.

------
tnolet
Am I the only one just using the stock MacOs Notes and Reminders? Does the
trick for me. Never lost a thing. Does pictures and text and has basic
grouping.

Mac only of course.

~~~
drunken-serval
I'm using them. The web interface is a bit clunky and occasionally hiccups in
chrome but otherwise is pretty solid.

I only have 2 issues.

Syncing across 4 different devices (phone, ipad, mac, and web) is eventually
consistent. It can take hours for everything to sync up. Most of the time it's
instant but I've had plenty of times where syncing on one device gets stuck
for hours.

The other issue is locked notes. If I use FaceID/TouchID instead of a
password, syncing gets absolutely trashed. It looks like it's re-keying the
encryption for every locked note. (I have hundreds of them.) It's easier to
just disable FaceID/TouchID for locked notes.

~~~
tnolet
I didn't even know they had a web interface! I just logged into iCloud in the
browser for the first time...

------
Jedd
I've been trying to retain / sync / archive / etc my electronic notes since
the mid 1990's - starting with one of the early Palm models.

It's always been a fraught experience, especially if you're relying on someone
else's algorithms to give you peace of mind.

The most recent experiments were using Evernote, later Nixnote (because
Evernote didn't care about anyone using free software operating systems) I've
now moved to a breathtakingly basic platform of Google Keep + script that
reliably syncs between several devices, and allows me to pull in all my notes
nightly, pop them into git, and propagate to 3 hosts / 2 sites. The same
server pulls in and archives my Trello boards nightly, along with a bunch of
other more mundane backups.

I've never felt so _relaxed_ about my data.

~~~
temo4ka
Have you tried Syncthing? [1] An open source alternative to Dropbox.

[1] [https://syncthing.net/](https://syncthing.net/)

~~~
Jedd
It's on my todo list (in trello :) ... but haven't got to it yet.

I use a combination of Unison(-gtk) and Foldersync (android) to replicate some
quite large data sets between desktop, server, a couple of laptops, and tablet
& phone. Keybase and Synthing are definitely on the list of potential
replacements for the manual, periodic sync.

How does Syncthing go insofar as replacing a note-taking system (tagging,
collaboration, etc)?

~~~
maxaf
There isn’t any explicit notion of collaboration, and tagging can be
accomplished by way of a folder structure. I haven’t tried symlinks, which is
how you’d make multiple tags work on a regular file system.

Syncthing’s purpose is to ensure that a specific directory remain synchronized
across multiple computers and/or mobile devices. It accomplishes this goal
with the minimum of fuss, and (in my experience) works better than Dropbox in
that it burns fewer CPU cycles and doesn’t crash/hang/nag me to upgrade.

~~~
Jedd
I think when I looked at it a while back my concern was how it would cope with
one or more of my devices being off-network for days at a time (a regular
occurrence).

The other devices wouldn't be, and changes would only be done wherever I
happened to be, but the cost of evaluating this solution was unfortunately
higher than not making any changes. As I say, it's on my list. The suite seems
to be quite robust - but given Evernote's primary stated purpose was to ensure
none of your data was ever lost (and yet many people have sad stories of data
loss) I'm extra-cautious about changing my workflow.

~~~
acct1771
Evaluating as well, is your concern that the files won't come down at all?

Or that it'll be egregious when it's time? Solution?

~~~
Jedd
Actually much more pedestrian than that, as I'm confident it works on cases
more complex than me. It's simply that I've got a series of mechanisms that
work acceptably, and it takes time and effort to run up a VM, set up an
archive process, test a new suite & workflow over several weeks.

------
zwaps
For me real simple: Evernote works only on Chrome, at least the new version.
And the Evernote team was quite smug about it.

Since I do not use Chrome, i canceled my premium account.

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

------
guiriduro
I don't think Evernote need(s/ed) a team version, but I do think its not
sufficiently better to current alternatives for note-taking and bookmarking. I
use Pocket for tagged bookmarks and OneNote when I want more context.

Where there is a gap in the market, tying notation to memory and productivity,
would be some kind of notation context and intelligent reminder (e.g these web
tabs, that note, this tag) tied to some event or place where it would be
useful - you're in the workshed and picking up some old project; its someone's
birthday you wanted to remind them about xyz. Now that would be a genuinely
useful memory aid.

~~~
huffmsa
I saw a guy pitching a location based notes app years ago one morning on CNBC.
I believe it was called "Acorns" (not the investment app). I was super hyped
for it. Would mean the wife could just jot a note about grocery items at any
point during the week and I'd get an alert whenever I got to the grocery
store. Brilliant. No "don't forget milk" texts, which I forget because it's
not on my actual list.

But it never launched. Or did under a new name I was unaware of. I've been
waiting for location features for a long long time.

~~~
random_kris
I use google keep, it has time and location based reminders. I think there is
even an option to create shared note with your SO edit: yes it works :D I
managed to share a note with my gf and she sees it. Now she tried to set up a
reminder that will ring my phone when either of us gets close a certain
groccery store that we visit

~~~
huffmsa
Keep is my current go to. They've added a lot to it recently, but I was
unaware they've added locations. The ML predictions for grocery items when
you're writing a list is a nice touch.

I'm trying to get off Google's teat, but it looks like I'm on the Keep train,
until they abruptly discontinue it in 12-18 months.

~~~
rwc
I know the "until they pull the plug" is a popular meme but EOL expectations
for GSuite products are completely different than other Google products.

~~~
irrational
Hangouts and Google Talk used to be part of the core services of GSuite and
they still got the axe.

~~~
huffmsa
Rebranded as "meetings" or something. But I still use Hangouts.

------
sandgiant
Evernote is still the only accessible note taking solution to offer OCR +
related notes search. I've tried moving away from Evernote many times, but I
always come back because of this.

Example 1:

1\. Snap photo of document on table

2\. Seconds later: Open in Evernote and see related documents

Example 2:

1\. Take notes on laptop at lecture/meeting

2\. Evernote presents photos of slides and handwritten notes about same topic

If it wasn't for Evernote I would never revisit my handwritten notes, ever.
And I would have lost countless important receipts, bills, etc. I have tried
various open source home made setups but nothing has come close to the
portability and ease of use of Evernote. This is why I keep using Evernote to
this date.

I just wish they would fix basic issues such as slow, or completely broken,
search on mobile, etc. I think if they can strengthen their core product they
still have something unique that I think many people would use, and possibly
pay for, if they knew about it.

~~~
thanatropism
This essay convinced me to just find a way to organize handwritten notes:

[https://luhmann.surge.sh/communicating-with-slip-
boxes](https://luhmann.surge.sh/communicating-with-slip-boxes)

------
arx1422
Evernote isn't perfect. That said I've used it forever since the days when it
was just a desktop application and have thousands of notes. I've never lost
one. While it shocks me, after many years there is still no real alternative
to seamlessly synch all the documents I am reading and filing across all my
computers and my iPad. The product is feeling a little stale as if active
development has stopped but it does work fine as it is.

------
mortdeus
Honestly, who was sitting there in the middle of a CS class at Standford
taking notes and found themselves so absolutely bored to a point of absurdity
that they frustratingly sighed out loud,

"man, if only there was a way more exciting way to go about doing this.";

Which prompted the "ahah" lightbulb moment of the guy sitting just within
earshot, one row over, who just so happened to be jotting down his own notes
on some promising startup ideas?

~~~
asdff
I've yet to see a note app that didn't just serve up the same functionality of
plaintext files and calendar events in a bloated, proprietary, and pricey
package.

------
zihotki
I've been using Evernote for a while. But since the time MS made a shift to
the cloud and has put a lot of effort into OneNote and Office 365, OneNote was
doomed to decline in use. Why would you pay for it when you already have
Office subscription? On top of that I was struggling with the UX, it didn't
fit my habits.

~~~
dogma1138
OneNote is also more importantly completely free on all platforms including
all of it's cloud features.

Besides OneNote being much better for handwritten and typed note taking as
well as "rich notes" one of the most best features it has is email to note
which means that even if you have to take notes on a machine that doesn't have
it or you can't log in into OneNote from it or if you want to take notes from
someone else it can be easily done via emailing to your you@onenote.com
address and the auto formatting is pretty awesome.

~~~
coffeeling
You can email to Evernote, and it's better than OneNote, if anything, since
you can email to your Evernote from any account. OneNote needs the email
account to be yours and associated with the notebook you want to send it to.

~~~
dogma1138
Evernote formatting from email is absolutely horrendous and the fact that it's
restricted to specific emails is a huge bonus for OneNote, no spam.

------
egypturnash
Still using Evernote. Haven’t had the sync problems some describe. Still
storing everything I put in it. Still isn’t trying to cram my rich tech notes
into Markdown, still isn’t a web view pretending to be a native app.

I’m not using it for the original grandiose attempts to Remember Everything.
It’s just my notebooks. It’s great to have all my notes for a project in one
shareable place. And I’m still paying for it, like I’ve been doing for most of
its lifespan.

Every now and then I look into the competition and nothing feels worth the
hassle of trying to switch. I’ll do it if Evernote collapses as a company or
if I end up working somewhere I’m forced to use a different collaborative note
platform and end up liking it more. I got too many other things to worry about
to hassle with it until then.

~~~
irq
How are you OK storing your notes in a cloud system where your notes are
viewable by third parties? How do you get past Evernote not supporting end to
end encryption? This has been the dealbreaker for me since the beginning.

~~~
egypturnash
I don’t encrypt my email either.

------
netsharc
What a strange article. It's a note taking program. It has search. The author
called it brilliant. Huh? As a long-time (no longer avid) user, the screenshot
of the old version made me nostalgic, but I don't remember the search as
different to a standard search function.

~~~
criddell
Search in Evernote can also use metadata. So if you jotted down something you
wanted to remember while you were on vacation and now you can't recall what
that was, you can search for all the notes you created in Ibiza.

~~~
asdff
Is that useful? You already get date created/modified in every OS. Shouldn't
be hard to figure out when you were in ibiza and sort your notes folder by
date.

~~~
criddell
It is for me. It saves me a step searching me email for flight or hotel info
to get the dates.

If it is a note I made on vacation last week, then I would do what you are
suggesting. If it was for a note I made on vacation in 2013 (or was it 2014),
then the metadata makes things much easier.

------
PhasmaFelis
I used to love Evernote, but for some time it felt like they were hyperfocused
on adding features I had no use for (collaboration, business integration...)
while making the stuff I did use slower and buggier. The last straw when I
emptied the trash and it perma-deleted over 100 of my non-trash notes. From
the comments here it sounds like that sort of shit wasn't all that uncommon.

Once I found out that OneNote had launched Mac and Android versions, I
switched immediately, and found that OneNote just feels sleeker and more
usable to me anyway. My one annoyance with it is that the Mac version of
OneNote is fairly stripped-down, where EN had feature parity across all
desktop platforms. But I'm using my MacBook less and less these days.

------
kayhi
Is there an OCR out there that is better than Evernote?

It is the one feature that impressed me (searchable hand written notes, etc.),
but that was years ago.

------
schnable
This is the problem with taking on lots of venture capital - the pressure to
grow and meet impossible expectations. Evernote could have been a great small-
medium sized software company, making it's owners and employees nice money and
satisfaction. But instead they needed to make moonshots to make VCs happy.

The shift to business and all the bloated features in the core app became a
big turnoff to me.

I switched to Bear, happily paying for it, and haven't looked back. A nice
focused app that hopefully will stay focused.
[https://bear.app](https://bear.app)

~~~
armandososa
I never got into Evernote, the UI was just horrible. I started using Bear a
couple years ago and immediately fell in love with it and started paying right
away.

------
aristophenes
I use Evernote for anything that is relevant to others in my family. We can
keep each other up to date on things like shopping lists and trip planning,
family events or projects. Plus take notes. It’s one of the only apps I use
and pay for. Chose it because it works on all devices and is simple. They
could handle syncing a little better, when a change is made on two devices at
once. But the almost unforgivable sin is that they don’t have a calendar. It’s
hard to use a tool to organize your life that doesn’t have a calendar.

I hope they stick around.

~~~
StacyC
Same. I have been using it for my consulting business for years, keeping daily
notes for client work as well as personal items in a notebook that my wife and
I share. Evernote has proven to be quite useful for me.

------
jeffrogers
Early and longtime EN user here. In addition to bloating the app with little
features and collaboration tools —and the distraction of selling desk
accessories and a food app— one of Evernote’s failures was in not helping
users put the information they captured to better use. For example, if I was
collecting code snippets, my IDE could hit the API and have access to them.
There are many ways they could have similarly helped users better leverage the
information and become more valuable in daily life.

------
evo_9
I switched to Bear Notes long ago. The hash tagging feature is pretty powerful
and allows for really nice, complex structures for your notes (or simple,
really it's up to you).

------
Traster
It's absolutely crazy some of the reasons stated for evernote failing to get
investment early on. Today people would be clamoring to invest in a company
that was bringing in users by offering the product for free. The sell is so
compelling "Get our users to write everything in evernote, build a huge
userbase and then you can start to monetize because you've got a fantastic way
of keeping them". I feel like that's one of the most common uses of VC money
today.

~~~
a13n
I think it's opposite actually. 10 years ago, it was way easier to raise
without any profitability story.

Then a ton of VCs got burned, and Paul Graham wrote "Ramen Profitability"
(2009), and later "Default Alive or Default Dead?" (2015).

Nowadays, you NEED to have a story for how you're going to become default
alive, and not rely on investor cash. That's because of what we learned from
all of the failures from Evernote's era.

Think about other companies that started in that era – Facebook, Twitter,
Yelp. The entire strategy was user growth and figure out monetization later.
You don't see that as much today.

I suppose Uber/Lyft are good counter examples, but they at least had massive
revenue along the way, and a great story about future profitability. (Swap out
drivers with self-driving cars.)

------
tony2016
I will continue to use Evernote however it has two major flaws:

1- No way to resolve the conflicting changes. It puts the conflicting document
in the conflicting changes folder and you're on your own to find out what
changes are conflicting. They don't provide a side by side comparison. Any
developer knows what I am talking about. A way to resolve merge conflict
resolution.

\- It doesn't do partial text searches. Say you have a phone number like
9067372823 and you only remember the first 3 digits. You search for 906 and
you get zero results! It's a lame search Evernote uses. I heard excuses from
other users about performance issues. Screw that excuse. Users don't have tens
or million of text they are searching for. Computers are very fast in
searches.

We've been complaining about these issues for YEARS and the heavy lazy ass
Evernote company hasn't done anything to add these important features.
Everytime I get an update hoping they have a fix and they don't.

------
agbell
I've switched to plain text notes synced via google drive. There are a bunch
of great apps. I use The Archive, but nvALT is open source and looks great as
well.

[https://zettelkasten.de/the-archive/](https://zettelkasten.de/the-archive/)

[https://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/](https://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/)

------
idearoots
If Evernote will pursue the "Spaces" route, it's going to end up like Google+,
trying to be like others without truly understanding why.

What they should do, is double-down where the puck is going in the context of
individual productivity.

What is interesting in cases like this - it's all there, in their own forums.
A roadmap vector based on their own WHY in a form of their userbase voice.

That being said, I still use Evernote. For existing Evernote users there are
no real alternatives to it atm in my opinion (yup I'm using Notion, but for
diff purpose). It's astonishing how much bullets can an original purpose-
driven WHY take over the years and still keep going.

P.S I just build a tool for Evernote
([https://neuracache.com/](https://neuracache.com/)) just because these are
the things that were missing for me the most. Again it's all in their forums,
just as an example in the context of my own itch :
[https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/82427-spaced-
repetitio...](https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/82427-spaced-repetition-
with-evernote/)

------
lukebuehler
I'm working on an Evernote clone for markdown. I find that almost all my notes
are text. I _hate_ the buggy EN editor, it's where I constantly think the app
could do better and wonder what the heck all those engineers are doing...
Here's the gist of my idea: Similar UI like EN, but designed along UX
experience of VSCode. It's an Electron app using Monaco as the editor. Also
uses a similar concept like VSCode's workspaces. Each workspace is indexed for
quick search and has a powerful tagging system (just like EN has). The idea is
to support different file types for notes over time, but it will be first and
foremost designed for markdown. For me, it is essential that I can use
Dropbox, GitHub, or a different provider to sync my notes and that I don't
have to trust my note taking tool to do that. Anybody interested? (I know
there are different tools like this already, but nothing that a) tracks EN's
UX closely, and b) is comparable in usability and hackability to something
like VSCode.)

Edit: notes are simply text files. ".md" or whatever you want.

~~~
erkkonet
I like the concept - do you have any plans for a mobile client and how the UX
would translate to smaller displays? In terms of essentials, version history
would be on my list, perhaps using git as a backend so that you can access the
notes with other tools as well.

~~~
lukebuehler
I do not have any plans for a mobile client yet. I have thought about it quite
a bit, but I'm not sure what would work best there in relation to what I have
proposed. What is clear to me, especially from my own experience, is that
there are really _two_ main note-taking "activities": the quick memento from
mobile, often just a phrase, or picture, etc. And then the sustained effort to
write notes that will remain a source of knowledge for me for years to come.
Many of my notes are thousands of words long (book notes, research for
academic papers, etc). I want to solve the latter use-case once and for all.
When it comes to producing more sophisticated knowledge items, I'm usually on
my laptop or desktop computer.

------
xivzgrev
Yea...I don’t understand anything Evernote has done that’s new since I’ve been
using them. I also never understood why they charge based on upload volume vs
total storage, say 1000 notes or pictures, like every other storage provider,
or don’t fix the syncing errors. Like others have mentioned I’ve never had
syncing errors with google drive or box or Dropbox like I’ve had with
Evernote.

~~~
misnome
> I also never understood why they charge based on upload volume vs total
> storage, say 1000 notes or pictures, like every other storage provider

Because the purpose was to encourage you to trust them to store information
"forever" \- having a storage limit is antithetical to that because at some
point you will be encouraged to clear out old things to make space. With an
upload limit, once it's in you don't need to worry about it ever again, in
theory.

------
TheChaplain
The author is painting doomsday all over Evernote, but honestly I don't see
it. They are like Dropbox, they do one thing and do it very good IMHO.

I've been a subscriber for 2 years and use it daily on desktop and Android
without complaints or data loss.

If there is be a thing to complain about it's their api. It's rather quite
annoying to work with and some of the language SDK's are outdated.

~~~
dogma1138
Since OneNote became available everywhere and for free I'm not even sure if
Evernote still can be considered doing it well considering just how much
better OneNote is for actual note taking.

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

------
vertis
I think the nail in the coffin for me was lack of support for Linux (this was
years ago). I know that Linux is a tiny subset of their potential users, but I
needed my notes to be everywhere, not just on the main platforms.

Ironically, I'm not using Linux as much now, but going back to Evernote was
unappealing. I'm now using a combination of Bullet Journaling and Notion.

------
eeeeeeeeeeeee
I used Evernote for a bit years ago, but only for scratch notes I didn't care
to lose. Mainly because I saw there didn't appear to be any way to
export/backup my data from Evernote in a format that was not some proprietary
storage mechanism that only works in Evernote. I figured the end-game was
always to lure people with freemium and then dramatically increase the prices
later, holding your data hostage. And it appears that is exactly what
happened.

It looks like you still cannot backup to an open format:

[https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/209005557-How-
to...](https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/209005557-How-to-back-up-
export-and-restore-import-notes-and-notebooks)

"The Evernote XML (.enex) file generated by the above process can be used to
import notes or notebooks back into Evernote. This process can help you move
notes between Evernote accounts or restore lost notes from a backup."

~~~
bsamuels
how would you prefer to export your data if not in a plaintext xml file?

would you prefer it export to markdown and lose information? (evernote's
markup doesn't cleanly convert into markdown)

------
capedape
I’ve been using Evernote since it came out and have about 19,000 notes in it.
They’ve been slow going at adding new features or at least making it super
stable and it’s starting to feel dated.

I’d like to see: ability to put tags to sections of other notes, ability to
put links to notebooks within a note, collapsible/expandable text blocks,
recurring reminders, Apple Pencil support for iPad where you can freehand draw
instead of having to import from Notability/Goodnotes, quicker access to text
colors on mobile and desktop.

I’ve tried all the competitors and keep reluctantly coming back to EN.
Notability was the one I liked the best, but it is super slow and it can’t be
used offline on mobile. Evernote has gotten a lot better on iOS in the last
year and I’m still paying to use it until something better comes along, which
I don’t anticipate will be long. I hope they step it up.

------
burtonator
OK.. this is the second time today I've dropped a reference to Polar. Not
trying to spam HN I sware :)

Polar is sort off like Evernote but mostly (for now) focused on book
annotation (PDF and web content).

[https://getpolarized.io/](https://getpolarized.io/)

I'm trying to nail the work flow where you read a book on your computer and
can easily annotate highlights as 'notes' and then those can become sort of
like notes as in Evernote.

I think we're about 95% of the way towards having something killer and I'm
still putting on the final touches.

Right now you can read and annotate amazingly well, create flashcards,
highlights, and comments.

The remaining things I need to polish are to add support for annotating area
highlights and to have better management of the annotations.

We have web and mobile is coming along too.

------
cjensen
Comparing Evernote to Dropbox is interesting to me.

Evernote had a bad rep for reliability, and was messing about with very
questionable enhancements to its product line. I switched to a Good Enough
competitor after being an Evernote customer.

Dropbox has a great rep for reliability, and is messing about with very
questionable enhancements to its product line. I have plenty of OneDrive and
iCloud disk space, but I pay for Dropbox because it just works.

To me the lesson is make sure your primary product works and remains best in
class. "Fly the Aircraft First" [1].

[1]
[https://www.faa.gov/news/safety_briefing/2018/media/SE_Topic...](https://www.faa.gov/news/safety_briefing/2018/media/SE_Topic_18-07.pdf)

------
dmuth
I travel a couple of dozen times a year for both business and personal
reasons, and I've found Evernote to be a good tool for handing travel related
documentation.

For each trip, I create a new notebook, and anything relating to that trip
goes into that notebook. Screencaps/PDFs of my hotel and flight reservations,
boarding passes, etc. If I'm on a business trip, I scan my receipts with
ScanBot and sync the scans over to Evernote, where I move them into the proper
notebook for that trip.

Being able to add in my travel documents on my computer, receipts through my
iPhone, and retrieve the receipts back on my desktop is exactly what I need,
and so far Evernote has been the best tool for the job. 2,604 notes and
counting!

------
c-smile
For the history, here is photo of initial EverNote team:

[https://notes.sciter.com/2017/09/11/motivation-and-a-bit-
of-...](https://notes.sciter.com/2017/09/11/motivation-and-a-bit-of-history/)

Yet, I think the article is incorrect about the role of Phil Libin.

First production ready version of EverNote contained all basic components and
ideas. Phil was far from EN at that time.

Role of Phil and then CTO Dmitrii Stavisky was to transform initial startup
alike environment to formal "enterprise" thing. And the result we see.

------
MagicPropmaker
I used to use Evernote when I was using a "digital ink" product (that also
never caught on). I used it for several years and it worked well.

But then Micosoft's OneNote got very, very good. And I switched.

------
nizmow
Are there any good self-hosted alternatives to Evernote/OneNote etc?

~~~
devit
NextCloud has simple notes and document sharing

~~~
nizmow
I actually run a NextCloud instance and never thought to check. Thanks, I'll
take a look.

------
chillfox
Evernote is very frustrating and yet I can't fully move over to something
else. It feels like they are swinging between being indifferent to paying
customers and outright hostile. I particularly dislike that they display ads
in the product when I am paying for it. I have been a paying user since 2010
and I have got 3901 notes in Evernote. Last year I started using Zoho Notebook
and I have been quite happy with it for note taking, but I am still stuck with
Evernote for the webclip function.

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

------
throwaway35468
So, with all these sync tools, there is a potential problem. We do not know if
any data is lost until we look for them.

Recently, my apple notes were not getting update in Yahoo Mail(Its the way
apple notes works). For a long time, I thought it was Yahoo mail problem. I
did upgrade to iOS 12 and lost my notes. It turned out that apple was not even
sending my notes to yahoo mail for backup.

Some one needs to come up with the a service which monitors whether these
syncs are happening or not.

------
Quanttek
Are there any good, preferably open source, alternatives to Evernote/OneNote?
I like Markdown but plaintext is not enough as I need support for pictures,
tables, ...

~~~
asdff
Do you need them in the same file? I'll do plaintext notes and have the
relevant pic or other file have the same file name (or filename_fig2.png,
etc.) as the plain text to keep things together.

------
Karrot_Kream
Evernote and most note-taking or knowledge repository solutions are pretty
solved problems for those willing to do a bit of self-hosting. Personally, I
host a Tiddlywiki server on a cheap VPS I own that runs other things. A cron
job regularly backs up the entire TiddlyWiki to a git repo, and the contents
of the repo to cloud storage. TiddlyWiki is responsive and works fine on
mobile, and I am assured that all my data is backed up and private.

~~~
underwater
Your post echoes the infamous comment on Dropbox's announcement:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224)

There is a difference between building something that works for you, a
technical person, and something the general population will trust and pay for.

~~~
Karrot_Kream
Well, Dropbox itself is struggling these days, because consumers are a fickle
market (and because there is tons of competition in the space from Google Keep
and others). My comment was specifically meant for technical people who are
readers of this forum.

------
stared
I use Evernote, and like it. (Mostly for to-do stuff, in a way I can tweak it
in a way I like + sync with phone.)

For the other alternate solution is text notes (in Markdown), which I use a
lot (when I don't need to sync stuff + want to enjoy distraction-free
environment without Internet).

The only real annoyance of Evernote is that each time I click on an external
link, it asks if I really want to leave Evernote (anxious attachment?).

------
bluedino
I liked using Evernote for myself, but we subscribed to the team version or
whatever they call it, and didn't enjoy it.

"I put that in Evernote. Did you see it?"

Turns out you have to add it to the right notebook. Then you have to
explicitly share it with your team members.

THE WHOLE POINT IS SHARING. It should be default. It's too much work to do the
one thing I want to use this for.

~~~
egypturnash
Once you’ve shared an entire notebook then anything added to it should be
visible to other people with access to that notebook? I don’t use the team
version, I just share a couple notebooks for collaborative projects (writing a
comic, planning a cross country move) and it’s pretty seamless. Aside from
“oops it defaulted to the wrong notebook and now I have to acknowledge that
this note will (now/no longer) be shared with N people if I move it to the
right one, why can’t I tell it to stop reminding me of this”

------
mattca
I've been using Evernote since September 2008. There's lots of things I would
like to improve, but overall it's invaluable to me. I've tried Apple Notes and
OneNote and they both lack some of the organization features. Some people say
it's bloated, but I actually find it quite simple.

------
gyvastis
Notion has been getting a lot of hype recently as Evernote, Trello, Todoist,
etc., killer. Switched to it recently. It has a bigger learning curve compared
to the other apps, fetlt unconfortable at first a bit but now I'm glad to have
everything in one place with less confusion.

------
marcell
Evernote had (has?) five different client implementations:

1\. Windows desktop

2\. Mac desktop

3\. iPhone

4\. Android

5\. Web

5 and 1/2\. Mobile web

While I haven't worked there, I feel this must have created a huge burden on
development. Any client feature has to be re-implemented 5 times! This must
have made it very difficult to keep up with competitors that supported just
2-3 platforms.

------
mattrp
I have thousands of Evernote notes and have been an Evernote user since 2009.
I’ve often thought of switching to Apple notes but I stick with Evernote. If I
could change things, I’d make searching better and I’d find a better ways to
create utility from old notes.

------
nafizh
I love Google Keep. It's simple, syncs great and overall it's a great tool for
keeping notes. But I am trying to switch to something else. I don't want to
wake up one morning and see a blog post from Google saying they are shutting
it down.

------
i386
Evernote and Dropbox would have made a great start for Apple iCloud.
Convergence is the future.

------
rb666
NotionHQ is simply better, less bloated, and their free tier beats Evernote in
functionality.

------
huffmsa
I think they need to bet the farm on collaboration. Maybe focus on building a
solution for the education market.

Perhaps even roll the dice on AR applications.

I say this as someone who has wanted to love Evernote, but has ultimately
stuck with pen and paper and occasionally Google Keep.

------
charlie0
I think Google Keep killed it. I'm part of the user base that hardly takes
notes, so for me, none of the advanced features of Evernote appealed to me.
Once Keep came out, I just stopped using Evernote because Keep was more
convenient.

------
mruts
Does anyone have a solution for notes that include equations? I don’t want to
spend the time on LaTeX for simple math notes for myself. Something that I
could just type in “sum” and a summation sign would appear?

~~~
sxldier
This blog post has a nice workflow that discusses how they take notes for
their math classes in vim. It's an interesting read regardless if you want to
go this route or not.

I think it was on HN not long ago. "How I'm able to take notes in mathematics
lectures using LaTeX and Vim -" [https://castel.dev/post/lecture-
notes-1/](https://castel.dev/post/lecture-notes-1/)

------
thanatropism
I paid for Evernote for in-pdf and -docx search. It was too slow, though. Too
slow, too slow.

Nowadays my personal notes are all written in paper and filed in cardboard
boxes. My work stuff is all in gmail somehow anyway.

------
gumby
The web clipper is still the best I’ve seen (though also buggy, sigh). Do any
of the EN alternatives have something like it?

I’d be happy with Apple notes if I could restrict a search to a folder.

~~~
sballin
If you have Alfred, you can sort of do this with an extension I made:
[https://github.com/sballin/alfred-search-notes-
app](https://github.com/sballin/alfred-search-notes-app)

The default search looks for folder names too, so searching "[folder name]"
will bring up all the notes in that folder, and "[folder name] [note name]"
will bring up the specific note in that folder, as of the latest commit a few
minutes ago :)

------
habosa
I used Evernote for all of college but it just became clunkier over time and
some workflows were just not optimized.

I recently gave Notion a try ... wow. It's everything I ever wanted.

------
shosko
Evernote was never simple to use, and its design was clumsy. I have always
wanted to use it but never enjoyed the product.

Makes me miss del.icio.us. So simple and useful.

~~~
cparsons3000
I agree. Always found it clunky. Now I use Bookmark OS for notes and bookmarks
and am happy [https://bookmarkos.com](https://bookmarkos.com)

------
Kiro
I would pay big money for one single feature that's for some reason is missing
in their premium tier: backups. What's up with that?

------
ticmasta
>> They say that elephants never forget, and Silicon Valley is no different

I'd say this statement is both incorrect and accurate.

------
kevitivity
I've been a paying user of Evernote for years and love it. Use it daily.

------
revskill
The problem with Evernote (and most of desktop apps) is that, it requires a
bunch of RAM and CPU usage to use it. (Can relate with Slack desktop app, or
Github desktop app).

Just like user/customer could blame your web app if it starts too slow. The
same applies to desktop apps, too.

~~~
V-2
I don't know. I've it open all day, I'm editing plenty of notes because I'm
preparing a seminar... it consumes 44.1 MB of memory right now, I just looked
it up (running W10).

Slack, totally idle, oscilates between 225-250 MB for some reason - now this I
agree is a resource hog.

What is your reference scale?

~~~
WaltPurvis
On my Mac it's using 708MB of memory and the CPU, which should be <1% since
it's in the background and presumably not doing anything, bounces around
constantly but is almost always in the 20%-30% range, which makes Evernote a
ridiculous battery wasting abomination.

The memory use also grows for no reason. I have caught it consuming 20GB+
after a day or two. There's obviously an egregious memory leak and that's been
true for at least a year; I can only conclude that Evernote is a crap company
that doesn't care at all about bugs, even critical ones.

I have taken to only running Evernote on my desktop when I absolutely have to,
and I try to remember to quit it so it doesn't gobble CPU and RAM, but
sometimes I forget.

~~~
V-2
Intrigued, I checked again. It's at 21.5 MB now. I wonder to what extent is
the difference caused by platform implementation (Mac vs. Win), and to what
extent by the content (admittedly my notes aren't media-heavy).

~~~
WaltPurvis
I just checked again. After 4 hours of sitting idle in the background with its
window minimized, Evernote is now using 901MB of memory, up almost 200MB. And
it's not really "idle": it was using 34.1% CPU when I just checked. For
what???

I do have a lot of notes, like 20,000, and many of them are HTML pages, but I
don't have any huge graphics or videos or anything. Even if I did, I can't
imagine why it would need so much RAM to just display a list of note titles,
or why it would constantly be using between 5 and 40% of a CPU, or why the RAM
usage would constantly creep up. It's just really terrible software. It galls
me that I'm paying $7.99/month for this crap, and I would instantly pay that
much or more for an alternative that worked properly.

------
chdaniel
very sweet design for your blog post, if OP is the owner — even leaner than
Medium!

~~~
kaffeemitsahne
> _leaner than Medium_

Not so difficult nowadays.

~~~
chdaniel
true! any other blog designs you've got that you like? For some reason I pile
them up in bookmarks and have developed a hobby around that

~~~
kaffeemitsahne
Sorry, I don't blog!

------
irrational
>However, the real brilliance of Evernote was its search functionality

I'm surprised this is supposed to be a selling point. Search has rarely found
what I am looking for and I almost always have to go hunt for the note I am
looking for manually. I've even been known to export all my notes as plain
text files and use an external program (even the OS!) to search for something
I'm looking for.

Frankly I've had so many many problems with Evernote. The synching is
terrible. I can't tell you how many times I've been working on a lengthy note
when it will try to synch and have a problem and it will trash everything I've
written since the last synch and revert the note back to what it was before.
This has happened to me so many times that I've started to write my notes in
other apps and then copy and paste the text to Evernote when I am finished.

I've tried other note taking apps, but they all have problems of one sort of
another. My ideal note app would have the following features:

* The ability to export all of the notes with the click of one button to plain text Markup files. Ideally any folder structure within the note app would be maintained and the notes would be zipped up and could be either saved locally or emailed to me. I have seen so many cloud services go up in flames suddenly that I have less than zero trust in cloud services. I want my data to be available in a format that I could easily move it to another service and I can back it up locally. Evernote doesn't really do this. This is the primary reason I only trust it for notes that I don't really care about. Anything really important I keep in other note apps that do let me easily export the notes. Unfortunately those other apps have other downsides that keep my coming back to Evernote.

* The note app can store notes of just about any size. I have some really really long notes that I don't want divided up among multiple notes. Evernotes doesn't appear to have a note size limit, I've found that most other note apps do have a limit that is far less than the length many of my notes already are.

* I want seamless and automatic synching across platforms. It needs to work well and not lose any of what I have typed (Evernote fails in this regard). I shouldn't have a ton of duplicate versions of my note with timestamps because the synching has gotten all out of wack (Evernote does this a lot).

* It should be easy to create a new note. This is basically Evernote's number one benefit from what I've experienced.

* It should be easy to create links between notes like a personal wiki. I have one (unfortunately no longer being developed) note taking app that excels at this. So far I haven't found how/if this is possible in Evernote. It's certainly not easily discoverable if it is possible.

* It should use Markup as the underlying formatting engine. This goes back to the first point about being able to export the notes in a non-propietary format.

------
_bxg1
tl;dr, "Silicon Valley company with strong vision and passionate founders
takes too much VC funding and loses its direction under the pressure to grow
at all costs."

------
black-tea
Reading these comments reaffirms my position that I've had for years: I only
trust plain text. For this reason alone org-mode is the only note taking
system worth using. But it's also good for other reasons. You should try it.

~~~
merlincorey
Indeed, and org-mode is supported (mostly, anyway) by Github and Gitlab
renderers, as well as to a lesser extent by Gittea.

Since it is plain text, it is easily stored in revision control.

Apparently, this is not the case with Evernote[0].

[0] [https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/95214-evernote-to-
supp...](https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/95214-evernote-to-support-git-
version-control-as-backup-mechanism-for-evernote-repository-and-document-
change-tracking/)

~~~
black-tea
Yeah, I'm so glad it has support on gitlab and github. It's a far superior
format compared to markdown and does most of what RST can do as well. I would
prefer it to markdown even if I didn't use emacs.

------
crushcrashcrush
Evernote is a pig. It's the single biggest issue. It's slow to launch, slow to
respond, doesn't follow Windows or Mac OS UI/UX standards, and is just clunky.

Note apps need to capture thoughts and objects seamlessly, quickly and with
very little friction. Evernote doesn't do that. Launching Evernote feels like
launching Excel or Photoshop, when it should feel like clicking on your Wifi
menu.

