
Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant - ssclafani
http://jasonkincaid.net/2014/01/evernote-the-bug-ridden-elephant/
======
GraffitiTim
I've been an avid Evernote user since the beginning (one of the first few
thousand users). I use it to record all sorts of ideas, thoughts, notes,
reminders, research, and references.

One year ago, my girlfriend was using Evernote (on my suggestion) to write her
travel journal on our trip to Southeast Asia. I saw her note sync a bunch of
times (the iOS app shows a little blue arrow when it's uploading). But one day
she opened it and the note was gone. I contacted support but they couldn't do
anything. (They offered her a year of free Premium service and "apologized for
the inconvenience".)

Since then, I've stopped recommending it to people because I don't want to
feel personally responsible if they lose notes too. I also have a tinge of
doubt every time I record important information. My biggest worry is Evernote
quietly losing a note, because once I record something in Evernote I typically
push it from my internal memory.

On top of that, their iOS app is incredibly slow. When I want to quickly jot
an idea down, it's very inconvenient.

I've started using SimpleNote lately, which is far faster, but I don't know to
what extent I should trust it to keep my data safely.

~~~
HelloMcFly
This happened to me early in Evernote's rise with a very important note. I
don't know, shame on me for trusting software I guess? I kept using Evernote
for awhile, but gradually I fully transitioned to OneNote which fit my
graduate school needs a bit more, and ultimately became more pivotal to my
life. I'm now one of the biggest OneNote advocates, a rarity for me with most
software I like.

~~~
7952
OneNote is fabulous. The way you can do multi-user stuff with just a shared
folder is so much better than the cloud.

~~~
Shivetya
I use it at work, I would love to have it at home but it is not available for
OS X which I do not want to understand why

~~~
orbitur
MS Word on OS X has very OneNote-like features, just choose the Notebook view.
I haven't used OneNote proper in a very long time (2007?), but notebook view
Word 2011 does automatic lists and you can even doodle.

Might be worth a look.

------
veidr
As a paying user for years, I've had Evernote lose data many times --
sometimes important, irreplaceable data that I hadn't yet had time to back up
elsewhere.

Evernote is some of the very worst software that has ever survived more than a
few months on my computer without being deleted. Horrible show-stopping
crash/data loss bugs are the norm, and have been increasing steadily as they
add feature after feature with apparently no quality control at all.

Fundamentally, the job Evernote does (for me, but I assume also for most users
with thousands of notes) is too important to delegate to a halfassed vc-backed
startup that flies its engineers economy and has never heard of an integration
test.

But replacing it isn't yet possible. It syncs across all platforms I use, does
OCR of everything in both Japanese and English, including handwriting and text
in photos, works out of the box with all my paper document scanners... There's
just nothing else on the market (or if there is, _PLEASE TELL ME!!_ ) that
does all that.

So Evernote hasn't lost me as a customer, yet. They've seemingly made a
spectacular effort to do so, but... Life without Evernote would still be, on
balance, more painful than with it.

But life with it is indeed pretty fucking painful, too.

~~~
belluchan
Use time machine or something like time machine to back up your data. Then you
can recover it when Evernote craps up later.

~~~
hrktb
I've tried Evernote for a while with various strategies. Time machine saves
you if you have an always on machine with Evernote permanently syncing. If you
can't have that setup, for everything you do on the go or not on your mac, you
won't have a back up.

Depending on how you do it IFTTT can help save notes to other services (you
have to save the note in authorized notebook if I remember well) but it's
still a PITA.

Globally having Evernote feed another system reliably seems to be really
tricky, as nowadays having two cloud based system play nice with each other is
usually a world of hurts.

------
farnsworth
I remember the day a year and a half ago when I went out apartment hunting in
a new town, looking at my notes on apartments in Evernote's Android app. It
was a complex note, with lots of text in deep hierarchies of bullet points. At
one point I tried to edit it, and after a few visual glitches, the text of the
note disappeared. Then it synced, and there was no undo or history option in
the app as far as I could tell.

I was able to get the note back by driving back to my hotel, retrieving my
laptop where the note was cached, and opening Evernote while offline to ensure
it wouldn't sync and wipe out that copy. Pretty frustrating. I've learned some
tough lessons about cloud services and free stuff.

~~~
protomyth
I'm hoping someone does a cloud service for note syncing using a code control
back-end. I would really love to be able to look at the changes and rollback a
change or delete.

~~~
michaelsbradley
What I'm using: org-mode + MobileOrg[1] + Dropbox, and a few times a day
checking my .org files into a Bitbucket private repo.

And it's all free! Though obviously you could use paid Dropbox and
Bitbucket/GitHub accounts as well.

Until fairly recently I used OmniFocus and Evernote, in conjunction with their
mobile offerings, but I don't think I'll be looking back anytime soon.

[1] [http://orgmode.org/](http://orgmode.org/)

[&] [http://mobileorg.ncogni.to/](http://mobileorg.ncogni.to/)

~~~
TomDavey
+1 for Orgmode. Its wealth of features is astonishing. And it just gets better
and better; the community supporting it and driving ongoing development is
fanatically committed. Bonus: it comes with a pretty good text editor. :)

------
tempestn
I really hope Evernote's take-away from this is that they need to scale back
development on all their auxiliary stuff - hello, food, whatever, as well as
all but the most critical feature requests, and focus as much as possible on
making the core experience bulletproof. I would _hate_ to have to give up
Evernote, but like others here, am extremely apprehensive about the
possibility of losing data.

One stop-gap they might be able to implement quickly would be a scale-up of
their version control. They could throw money (storage space and bandwidth) at
the problem, increasing the number and frequency of revisions stored.
Certainly not as good as preventing loss in the first place, but reliable
versioning would help minimize catastrophic loss in the meantime, and would
still continue to be valuable once things are more stable.

~~~
lmuszkie
Phil: "We have independent teams building all the different versions. They
compete with each other to see who can make the best version. They steal each
others idea and they leap frog each other. We don’t have consistency as a
goal. There is no goal to make different versions of Evernote consistent with
each other. Cause I think what happens if you make consistency a goal, you
wind up achieving it though mediocracy. Like you achieve consistency by having
everything equally crappy." <[http://thisweekinstartups.com/thisweekin-
startups/phil-libin...](http://thisweekinstartups.com/thisweekin-
startups/phil-libin-ceo-of-evernote-twist-320/>)

When I heard Phil talk about this at SXSW (as part of his talk about making
Evernote a 100-year startup, I believe), I thought it was neat. But I wonder
if this strategy is undermining reliability.

~~~
reeses
This is the worst idea ever but it explains a _lot_. I had not heard this
before, and it's enough to make me hedge my bets and start trying to export
notes into mmd files in nested directories (which one cannot do at present
with stacks) and use Mavericks tagging.

I would definitely call this an anti-pattern for cross-platform software.

------
gmu3
This. I'm always particularly annoyed by the tech support when I've tried to
submit bug reports. One time I found a reproducible bug in the Chrome Clipper
and even offered a possible explanation/solution for what was happening and
the person first insisted that it wasn't happening. I couldn't believe he was
telling me what wasn't happening on my screen when I was looking right at it.
I pay for prime so next requested to be put in contact with a developer to
submit a bug report and was denied. Finally like the author they asked me for
activity logs which I also refused to fork over because they seemed too
personal so instead I just put up with a buggy clipper. I wish they focused
less on selling socks and more on the software.
[[https://www.evernote.com/market/feature/socks?sku=SOCK00106](https://www.evernote.com/market/feature/socks?sku=SOCK00106)]

~~~
bagels
Where I work, we have fans that have asked us for branded apparel. We have to
tell them that despite multiple reqeusts from customers, we don't sell them.
Your criticism on "focusing on socks" is one of the reasons we haven't done
so, despite the fact that nearly all of the "socks" work would be outsourced
or, at least obviously, not done by engineers.

~~~
Mithaldu
Please take a long look at the linked page. While i agree with the general
sentiment of your post, it's quite obvious that that product page cost quite a
bit of money.

------
lhl
I've been a paying customer almost from the start. Unfortunately, as Evernote
has expanded, it's gotten less and less useful for me.

Their web clipper is great, the best around IMO (especially since Clipboard
folded), however there's no way to exclude those clipped pages from search, so
after using the clipper for a while, searching for just about any phrase is
mostly irrelevant results. Ideally it'd be possible to filter by source or
have default searches to exclude certain types of content.

Another example of this is that I have a well-curated and geotagged Travel
Notebook (this was actually much harder than it should have been since their
geocoder is picky and you can't really massage it). I'd love to be able to see
these notes on a map, but the "Atlas" map view that Evernote provides doesn't
let you filter by notebook (or anything really).

Evernote does a great job of making it fairly painless to capture notes and
despite the author's problems, has generally worked well on syncing
everything. It's never done a good job for triaging/filing/finding or
organizing notes though, and it seems to simply get worse as you use it more
(and with each redesign). Evernote seems to want to encourage you to put
"everything" into it, but as you do, it becomes harder and harder to get what
you need out of it. Honestly, I'm baffled at how the Evernote devs/designers
use it.

~~~
TarpitCarnivore
>Unfortunately, as Evernote has expanded, it's gotten less and less useful for
me.

This has been my main complaint with Evernote. When I first found the software
it was merely a way to capture notes, URLs, etc. As it keeps expanding its
feature set and trying to make the tools more useful it keeps getting worse
and worse.

------
elbenshira
I'm a premium Evernote member, but I've also had lots of problems.

The iOS app is slow and clunky. I hate using it. It crashes _all_ the time,
especially when I'm trying to take snapshots of a document with many pages
(and all previous snapshots simply disappear).

The desktop app is better, but they really could improve the writing
experience. Pasting HTML blobs is impossible, and so is formatting my notes
the way I want (I use TextExpander for sanity).

Evernote is great when it works, but they really need to fix their stability
and bug problems.

~~~
coldcode
As an iOS developer this pains me to hear. It's not rocket science to make a
stable highly dependable app. I don't use Evernote or know anything about how
they do things, but I track all of our apps' crashes on a daily basis (lately
almost none) and do extensively performance testing before release. Our QA
staff is awesome and lets nothing get by them. I don't understand how other
companies can't do this as well. Our apps are complex, have a complex mobile
API on the server side and do ecommerce. So I really can't understand why this
is so lame.

------
temuze
While this post must be pretty distressing for the Evernote team, their
response time is pretty impressive! Within a couple hours of this post being
published, Phil Libin has already contacted him. See the edit at the end of
the post:

"Update: Evernote CEO Phil Libin contacted me and we spoke about the issues
described. He apologized, saying the post rings true and that there is a lot
of work to be done both on the application and service fronts — and that he
hopes my impression will be reversed a few months from now."

~~~
jkincaid
Hi, OP here. It was very gracious of him, but I should note that I've met Phil
several times over the years (including while I was formerly a TechCrunch
reporter), which I suspect had something to do with the speed.

~~~
atmosx
OP stands for Original Poster? (I know it's the Post's author, just trying to
catch the acronym because I see this often on HN).

~~~
colinbartlett
Correct.

------
Alex3917
If you store data in a format that's not future proof, using software that's
not open source, then you don't really get to complain when your data
disappears. Especially if you're not storing the files locally and making
regular backups.

~~~
Touche
Why is this not the top comment?

~~~
shadesandcolour
Because it's a typical useless comment from someone who doesn't use the
service. It doesn't really contribute to the conversation around Evernote. It
simply says "if you're not doing what I'm doing then don't complain about what
you picked"

------
AVTizzle
I think this is a direct consequence of how thinly they're spreading
themselves out across multiple platforms. They have a native app for every
mobile and computer platform, along with web, plugins for every major browser,
and then the other apps - skitch, penultimate, clearly, hello, etc...

It truly is in the face of the "do one thing and do it well" mindset that many
other companies subscribe to. It's a shame too, because I love Evernote. I
truly do live in it... true to Phil's vision, my mind is thoroughly mapped out
throughout my Evernote account.

~~~
grimlck
Doesn't Linux count as a major platform? I don't understand that with all the
funding they have that they can't hire a developer work on a linux app.

And see Dropbox as an example of something which supports every major platform
WITHOUT losing data losing bugs.

------
edanm
I also love Evernote, and rely on it for a _lot_.

But even putting aside these syncing issues, it's a really terribly-designed
piece of software There are so many issues with it, UI-wise, that is just bugs
the hell out of me. (See note below for an example of a feature designed
badly).

Still, Evernote fills a need I have that unfortunately there is no other
solution for. And while it's taking a long time, it _is_ gradually improving.
So I'm still hoping that, one day, Evernote fulfils its destiny and becomes as
amazing as it could be.

Note: Example of a badly deigned feature: tagging support is crazy-bad - you
can tag things, and you can even organise tags into a tag hierarchy - except,
no you can't, because it's only supported on some platforms. And the "support"
for it is purely visual - selecting a "parent" tag _doesn 't_ auto-select the
child tags, so it is basically no help. So let's go to solution 2, which is to
tag things with a prefix, like "History\Middle Ages" and "History\US". But
now, their generally awesome tag-completer will be annoying, since it will
force you to type "History\" before getting to the point. So lets reverse tag
it, like "US (History)". No, that wont' work, since you can search tags by
prefix (e.g. search for anything with a tag starting with "History") but not
by tag suffix. Even though, through the UI, you _can_ do this, you _can 't_ do
it with an actual search, so you can't select these tags.

~~~
jkincaid
Agreed. The complexity feels overwhelming at times, and yet all too often
isn't flexible enough to do what I want.

------
chromejs10
So I've never used Evernote before, but after reading this article I decided
to try it out since I know a lot of people who swear buy it. My first time
user experience was awful... I immediately started creating test notebooks,
test notes, etc just to get a feel for how it worked. Within seconds the app
was freezing on me every time I tried to delete something (this was on a brand
new iPad Air). I had to either rotate the device or put the app into the
background in order to unfreeze it. This is a common scenario and I can't
believe there isn't quality control for that. I'm a developer and I understand
not having time for edge cases...but freezing on delete? I can repro it 100%
of the time

------
aroman
I consider myself an informal evernote evangelist, but honestly, I kind of
agree here. The new Safari web clipper is all sorts of buggy (and sometimes
messes with websites and navigation).

And yes, the OS X client is quite slow and bulky. And I _really_ don't
appreciate not being able to resize the window to half of my screen (1440x900)
size.

Hopefully there's an OS X client overhaul on its way?

~~~
RossDM
Funny you should mention the web clipper, as I've been uninstalling it from
all my browsers. It kept on inserting half-rendered HTML into random webpages
I would visit.

~~~
aroman
Hah, I just got that this morning in Safari. It only happens for me after I
disable the extension, on tabs which I had open with the extension enabled.
Apparently disabling the extension doesn't clean itself up properly on safari,
and it leaves those broken <iframe>s at the bottom of the page around until
you refresh it.

------
bdwalter
I have been a loyal Evernote premium payer since 2009, and using it even
longer. For a long time I recommended it to friends but since have stopped. I
have developed some concerns with it over the years.

1\. Fear of data loss... it's probably the largest part of my mistrust of all
these dang cloud services that want to control/own me or otherwise lock me
into their service. I run a 99.999% uptime, extreme scale, SaaS business
across multiple active/active data centers, I know exactly what it takes. It’s
incredibly hard to do, and I don't trust anyone at a rapid growth company to
do it right. In the ever constant scheduling battle between features and doing
it right, features frequently end up winning, especially in consumer focused
SaaS business with meaningless SLA’s. My Evernote library is clearly much much
more important to me than it will ever be to Evernote. No amount of marketing
spin will ever lead me to believe otherwise. This really is my own hangup
though. At some point I may just get over this. To their credit, I have only
ever lost a few notes in the 4-5 years I have been using the service.

2\. Tight lock-in (the cynic in me always says it’s clearly engineered this
way) to the platform, frustrating process to export my notes to another tool.
This is a problem across the industry. Everyone playing the lock-in/stickiness
game. Portability is key. A simple text export of my notes would go a long way
to make me happy. I really don’t want html exports of my text notes.

3\. Security of their cloud service...frankly, I don't trust anyone and wish I
could store my evernote data on my own; self managed; self encrypted; shared
storage platform. 2 factor was a nice step in the right direction. Self
managed encryption keys is when I will stop whining about it… I understand
this makes a lot of things hard, and am willing to forgo some features to get
this feature.

4\. Lack of reasonable support for Linux. Evernote is now the single sole tool
keeping me from dumping my Mac and moving to linux... Yup, note-taking is that
important to me. I have tried nevernote, everpad and the like, but they are
still pretty weak. I understand this isn’t Evernote’s problem and Linux is a
very small market, but its a big deal to me.

5\. A frankly lousy text editor. Seriously, I keep expecting this to get
better, and it just never quite gets there. And don't get me started on tabs
and indenting. I often edit notes in mac textedit and then copy them into
evernote. Not because TextEdit is great, but because its predictable and just
works. I'm not looking for advanced features here.

6\. Strange as this may sound (I may be using the tool wrong), I really hate
marking things off my list like at the grocery store. It takes so dang long to
mark off a list while pushing a shopping cart and fumbling with a phone. I now
print my list out and cross things off with a pen because its so way less
frustrating... This may be an edge side use case, but still... the phone apps
(both droid and iPhone) are not wonderful.

I fully subscribe to the belief that I am a weirdo, and these are really just
my perceptions and random thoughts. I have remained an active, albeit
reluctant user, and at this point plan to stay that way for at least a little
bit longer. I always used to joke that if evernote, things, and dropbox ever
merged, I would happily pay double. These days though, I am looking to support
my own stand alone instances of these types of tools without being tied to 3rd
party cloudy services so tightly.

~~~
dlu
Hello! Evernote employee here, I first wanted to say thanks for posting. Its
always good to hear from our users directly. I've been at Evernote for a while
and it is still weird to see us show up on HN.

Anyways, I enjoyed your comments wanted to give my personal opinion & point of
view for at least points 1 & 2.

1\. You're right that scaling is very hard. If you want a closer look at it,
we have a tech blog that even I can read and understand.
[https://blog.evernote.com/tech/](https://blog.evernote.com/tech/) Perhaps the
most reassuring thing I can say is that Evernote runs on Evernote. Err...
maybe this is more clear, Evernote (the company) runs on Evernote (the
service). We eat our own dog food as they say, which means I've lost count of
how many water cooler conversations turn into "there's something weird that
Evernote's doing on my computer..."

2\. Our Mac and Windows apps let you export your notes into HTML (including
resources). Both these apps run natively against local files so you could
export if you were offline or if for some reason our service was down. We try
to compete by making a great app and a great service. In fact, we don't make
money unless we've done a good enough job for you to upgrade to Premium. It
seems like your main concern is that your text-only notes export to HTML
instead of plaintext, which is a fair point. One of the nice things HTML is
that there are third party applications that can convert from HTML into a
number of other formats, so we're relying on that if you want your notes in
RTF or as a .txt or something else.

~~~
niels_olson
> third party applications that can convert from HTML into a number of other
> formats, so we're relying on that

You should fix that. Skip RTF, DOC, whatever. Just plain text is fine.
Everything else can handle it.

The world needs to wake up and realize plain text is the alpha and the omega
of language. Do that right first and make sure it's the last thing to fail.

~~~
vinceguidry
A brief foray into the world of character encodings should teach you that
there's really no such thing as plain text.

------
wpietri
Yeah. I lost substantial data in their web client.

All developers know that feeling when using an app: you're dealing with
something a little half-assed. Evernote has always had that feel for me.
Switching over to something else, preferably based on flat files using
something like Markdown, is on my to-do list.

~~~
possiblerobot
I've made that switch recently, after losing some stuff in Evernote for what I
decided was the last time. I briefly messed around with SimpleNote, which was
immediately doing weird stuff with tags (duplicating, not accepting changes).
Then, I replicated my Evernote structure with folders and txt files in
Dropbox. It works perfectly. And, there's a bunch of clients that edit txt
files right in Dropbox, like Byword (OS X and iOS), Plaintext (iOS), Notesy
(iOS), Ulysses (OS X), TextEdit + Spotlight (OS X), etc. You can switch apps
on a whim and leave your data in place, and the syncing has been great.
Simple, clean, and non-proprietary. I haven't checked into audio recording +
Dropbox, but surely there are mobile apps for that, too.

~~~
triplesec
Nice hack. Beware of the well-publicised security/privacy issues in Dropbox,
however.

~~~
possiblerobot
Totally. I've got an encrypted sparsedisk image for anything that needs to be
truly secure. That's definitely a caveat though, because its contents can only
be edited from my Mac. On the other hand, I didn't trust Evernote that much
either.

------
michaelcullina
I use OneNote on my Nokia 925 Windows Phone, my Surface Pro, my laptop, and my
workstation. All the data is synced in SkyDrive. I've got a lot of data.
Global search is instantaneous. The application is extremely reliable. I save
cut and paste snippets from the web. Stack Overflow answers with my personal
annotations; anything. Images and sound files are extremely easy. I can record
a meeting and take a few notes (by typing or using the stylus on the Surface)
and later I can search on the string to find the note. If that note was taken
40 minutes into a 60 minute meeting I can click and get the .wav file to play
that bit of the meeting. You can use OneNote on the other platforms as
described in this article.

[http://www.pcworld.com/article/2043415](http://www.pcworld.com/article/2043415)

I'm not shilling for the Redmond entity but I always do find it hilarious that
a very superior software product can hide in plain view and all the "think
different" people can't even see it.

~~~
devcpp
Well, I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that anything Microsoft
produces is out of question. The reason for that is that whenever I use one of
their products, it progressively turns into a locked proprietary program and
getting out of it becomes impossible. That's fine if the product remains
unbeatable in quality but it's rarely the case to say the least. I try to not
have that happen again and FOSS never lets me down on that.

There is also the question of privacy. That's why my Org files are on my
ownCloud and I have peace of mind forever.

~~~
michaelcullina
Well, I understand what you are saying and I agree that you are one of many,
but I disagree with your analysis. I use mostly Microsoft technology and most
of what I use is open source, from .NET to C# to NuGet to many, many
frameworks. I am very oriented toward open source and very comfortable in the
.NET world. It's very similar situation to a Mac user.

As far as storing data I also have my "own cloud" and I also use Dropbox and
SkyDrive. I like all of the above and I find Dropbox extremely convenient.
However, I do have a concern that Dropbox is not as secure as SkyDrive.

------
bowlofpetunias
A while ago we were discussing an interview with Evernote's CTO about security
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6881992](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6881992)).
He basically argued that fundamental security measures (like properly
encrypting passwords) are okay to do as an afterthought once the product is
out the door.

If Evernote takes the same "features first" approach to reliability,
redundancy etcetera, that would explain a lot.

------
gritzko
I do lots lots lots of paper notes. I even make my own notebooks according to
my system which evolved a lot over past 5 years.

Since 2008, I am making my yearly Evernote migration attempts. So far,
Evernote is not any close to the paper notebook + smartphone camera duo. On
every account excluding possibly search, it is inconvenient, complex, slow and
less reliable.

If core HWR functions of Evernote will be available as an one-button app in my
phone (like Camera), that will be a really strong value proposition to me.

Otherwise, the value of notes depends on being within immediate reach (ideal:
on the wall, open on the table). Every additional tap, click or wait-one-
second _halves_ the value of it.

Navigating a complex unreliable app, paying for it and worrying about
privacy/reliability/bugs altogether makes it less than helpful for me, hence a
no-go.

------
oe
> they said I should check the App Store release notes, which routinely
> includes the ambiguous line “bug fixes”

The trend of putting just "bug fixes" or "performance improvements" into
release notes drives me mad. Your users are not stupid. They know what bugs
there the app has and will be happy to know if those specific bugs have been
fixed.

"Performance improvements" is equally lame. It could mean that you cleaned up
some code and now a function call is 0.05 seconds faster without any visible
user benefit. Tell us how the app is faster.

HTML5 apps are sometimes sold on the promise of being able to update
themselves without going through an app store review, but you would also lose
the standard way of delivering release notes unless you build that
functionality yourself.

~~~
eswat
Wish our industry would take game patch notes[1] as inspiration. They’re very
meticulous in listing out exactly what bugs were squashed.

[1]
[http://www.dota2.com/news/updates/12114/](http://www.dota2.com/news/updates/12114/)

------
ChuckMcM
I totally relate to this note on two levels, one as a user and having Evernote
go wacky on me and just flat out lose something it used to have saved, and two
as an engineer having worked on systems that were not designed but instead
evolved at the hands of people "getting things done."

The latter aspect is the most intriguing because if Evernote is in fact
evolving and not designing, they are vulnerable to being out executed by
someone with good design principles. I sometimes wish I could look inside
their system and see how it is put together, and sometimes I worry about what
I mind find there if I did.

------
jonursenbach
I've been meaning to move off of Evernote because their OSX client is just
slow as all hell. Are there any alternatives, aside from something like
Dropbox? Evernote's OCR implementation was/is really useful.

~~~
awa
Onenote comes to mind, and it does OCR on client side so is quite fast. Also
does audio transcription which can be enabled (Disabled by default). Also has
version control built in, so you can you can look at older versions and do
manual merges (if required)

Disclaimer: Microsoft employee and Onenote user

~~~
derengel
Onenote is great but I think he wants something for OS X.

~~~
orbitur
Word 2011 (OS X) offers OneNote-like functionality if you choose the Notebook
view. Defaults to list, auto-headings, and it even lets you doodle in the
margins. That's all I ever did in OneNote, so I'm not sure how feature
complete Word 2011 is in comparison.

------
zvrba
Approximately a year and half ago I when I was evaluating Evernote, everybody
was speaking warmly of it. Now, a sudden bunch of people arises mentioning
rather serious problems.

Has something in Evernote drastically changed over time, or did it just got
more users? (= more testing under unenvisioned circumstances)

~~~
ronaldx
I think the issues in bdwalter's comment (above) illustrate the problem.

The concept of Evernote is great and it initially appears well-executed (in
fact, it _is_ very well-engineered).

But, there are many serious problems that users inevitably start to hit after
some time. Once these hits start to hurt, then you realise that reliable old
software and file sharing fit your need better.

Personally, the lock-in hurt me a lot. I was using Evernote to store some data
until I realised that I could not get it out of there without signficant
difficulty. Account deactivated.

------
capedape
I've been using it since the first month it came out, pay for premium, and
used to evangelize it. These days I find myself using Simplenote more and more
to avoid the frustration.

Problems I have with Evernote: Conflicing changes peppered throughout notes,
but no ability to see what the differences are clearly so I can consolidate
all in one. IOS is downright unusable to append to a note or delete anything
from a note, and it's mostly just text in all my notes. Errors syncing with
remote server on my windows Machine even after uninstall with revo uninstaller
and reinstalling. Web based version pinned as a tab in firefox or Chrome
sometimes takes a solid 45 seconds to respond on my 2013 Mac. I keep trying to
find workarounds or platforms it works well on, but Evernote keeps adding
extra features and crippling core functions and no platform seems spared.

I'd like a tool I can smoothly append to a list, seamless sync between
platforms, use hyperlinks between notes, and something I can easily access
past notes for research purposes. Lack of links in notes, amount of notes in
EN, lack of robust search, are only things keeping me from using Simplenote
fully.

Thought about Simplenote or clearly for lists, Devonthink for finding relevant
notes, though Devonthink is Mac only. Maybe the ultimate solution is a
personal wiki, I saw Clive Thompson of Wired mag researching that, so maybe
there will be a informative article there soon.

~~~
alexpopescu
> Maybe the ultimate solution is a personal wiki [...]

Maybe this: [http://zim-wiki.org](http://zim-wiki.org) (haven't used it myself
yet though)

------
ypeterholmes
I had to go find the original version of skitch, built by a different company,
because of how badly the Evernote team massacred it. They just seem like a
company more interested in high level bullshit than actual user experience.

~~~
gritzko
Well, the core OCR/HWR function of Evernote was developed by a different
company, in a sense. The company was headed by Pachikov who is a veteran of
the HWR field. He is currently retired, to the best of my knowledge.

I am not sure, who took the course of codebase/feature sprawl.
Retrospectively, that was a bad choice.

If only HWR was available separately from all that disorderly bunch.

------
jvagner
I have a lot of valuable data in Evernote and haven't experienced any of the
syncing issues described in these threads, but have two significant issues:

1) when you reach a critical amount of notes in the system, the tool itself
doesn't offer enough functionality to deal with this and I tend to stop
looking for old notes. 2-3 times a year i go in and try to manage all of it,
but I feel like a lot of new Evernote development is around creating shiny new
toys for new customer bases but not actually iterating the core of the tool
itself.

2) i hate the flat green Evernote homescreen on iOS that was introduced in
recent versions. in fact, i almost never open it anymore. i enter data on the
desktop and will open Evernote on iOS to access 2-3 notes, but searching
across notes and folders is confusing.

{snark}

1) I think that Evernote feels like the ACT! or Goldmine contact managers of
today... exciting (ahem) productivity apps of yesteryear that gets disrupted
hard and suddenly by something out of left field. I can't wait.

2)But, ya know.. at least their physical goods marketplace is bringing them
revenue

{/snark}

------
nedwin
Phil has spoken a lot about building Evernote into a 100 year old company.

Maybe that's why it takes so long to fix some of these issues?

The app is definitely getting better, and Skitch has come along leaps and
bounds in the last 3-6 months.

------
zmmmmm
Disturbing to see the number of reports of data loss. I am using Evernote
heavily for my PhD research. I haven't found another tool that works as well
as Evernote for this.

I've never had data loss, but I was very disappointed by my one interaction
with Evernote support - a simple bug report, (you cannot select more than one
line of text in a bullet list in the Android app), turned into a series of 6
or 7 email interactions asking me to do things that were unrelated to the
problem and clearly weren't going to (and didn't) help. It was obvious that no
human had bothered to even attempt to reproduce the issue or even read my bug
report in any detail. I don't know if they've outsourced their bug report
handling to some untrained / unskilled off shore group, but if not they were
trying extremely hard to emulate that. I don't like to think about interacting
with these people in the event that I have data loss or other kind of bug that
actually matters.

------
John_W_
I'm also an Evernote premium membership and i am so sick of their service.
Asked them an easy question (one of my pictures didn't get OCRd for days) and
they answered 3-4 days later with a standard answer: OCR can take some time ..
yeah thanks for that, it can (read: should) take like an hour but not days -
especially if you are a premium user..

I like the idea of a powerful tool to help organize your life and kind of
outsource part of your brain. But i just can't trust them enough and
considering their track-record - there is no reason to do so..

I also think its very sad that you seem to have to post online and
"endangering" the company through a PR stunt to just get the attention of
them. Seen the same thing with companies like T-Mobile where problems seemd
unsolvable till a facebook shitstorm threatened to rise.

------
mdavidn
I evaluated Evernote once two years ago. The iOS app crashed as I was
appending to a text note. The app lost a half hour of unsaved meeting notes. I
never trusted Evernote again. In my mind, a shoddy rich text editor cast
serious doubt on the durability of Evernote's distributed revision control.

~~~
trustfundbaby
Same thing happened to me. I don't even try to use to ios app any more, unless
its absolutely dire. Just opening the app, navigating to a note, waiting for
it to load then trying to edit it takes forever.

------
segphault
I recently had to disable the Evernote clipper extensions in Chrome after
discovering that it is breaking web pages after a recent update. I also
continue to be incredibly disappointed with the lousy way that Evernote is
maintaining Skitch, which has never worked reliably since Evernote's rewrite
of the code base.

I'm a paying customer and depend heavily on the service, but I get really
frustrated with the poor quality of the software and all of the engineering
problems.

I get the sense that Evernote really doesn't care. They know that their
audience is effectively locked in and that there aren't any alternatives that
do exactly the same thing, so they just don't have an incentive to fix the
bugs. I'm still a user, but I've personally stopped recommending Evernote and
Skitch to friends.

------
rikkus
Eventually, after it was recommended by so many people, I installed Evernote
on Android (on a fast new phone - Sony Xperia Z). I also signed up for
'premium'.

It was so sluggish when scrolling that I couldn't use it.

I contacted support and received this:

"As a valued customer of Evernote, you will receive support within 1 business
day."

8 days later, I replied to ask why I hadn't received anything more.

3 days after that, I received a stock reply saying I should reboot and install
the latest client.

Of course I had installed the latest client already, and rebooted to see if
that helped. I think the app is just slow.

So the app is unusable and customer support don't give you what you pay for. I
had simply thought, 'doomed product, will avoid in future' but I thought I'd
relay this here seeing as the subject has been broached.

------
k-mcgrady
I use it a lot an don't find it too buggy - but the interface is awful on iOS.
They took a decent, simple interface (table view) screwed it up into some new
skuomorphic design and then in iOS 7 took that and made it even worse.

Here's a side by side of iOS 6 + 7. They are both terrible imho[1]. The
Android app is much more simply designed and much nicer to use[2].

[1]
[http://cdn1.digitalartsonline.co.uk/cmsdata/slideshow/346956...](http://cdn1.digitalartsonline.co.uk/cmsdata/slideshow/3469569/iOS-7-comparison-
Evernote.jpg)

[2]
[https://lh5.ggpht.com/lPMXIRwq4MI1RsWYP5zfTdRwM2czXpK6NhmCo0...](https://lh5.ggpht.com/lPMXIRwq4MI1RsWYP5zfTdRwM2czXpK6NhmCo05T0XSyHD9CYin9HEqzJRNp7jKseY0=h900-rw)

~~~
happolati
I agree, the iOS UIs continue to disappoint.

Before my eyes can locate the note's content -- the reason I'm looking at the
app in the first place -- my brain has to notice and dismiss all of the
unchanging but visually dominant UI elements grabbing for my attention.

In iOS6 screenshot, the only information is "3570 Notes". We can assume that
Tom Negrino didn't need a prompt to remember his own name.

At least the screenshot of iOS7 version has a few snippets of user content.
But, was the decision to make everything green made by someone who uses the
product heavily? I doubt it.

------
Shank
I filed a support ticket over behavior that appeared to be a bug.
Specifically, disconnecting a bluetooth keyboard while connected to an Android
device in the Evernote editor would delete all bullet indentation instantly.

They confirmed that this should not be happening, and said that they filed a
ticket on the internal bug tracker. The bug still exists in the Android
version to date, unfixed, even though the solution (overriding the event
Android calls when it disconnects a bluetooth keyboard) is somewhat trivial to
implement.

Their response: [http://puu.sh/69msM.png](http://puu.sh/69msM.png) My report:
[http://puu.sh/69mu1.png](http://puu.sh/69mu1.png)

------
yonasb
Definitely thought some of these issues were just me. My hypothesis is that
Evernote gets increasingly unstable the more notes (and data) you have stored.
Which sucks because I have over 1200 and I pretty much need Evernote at this
point. The desktop app is damn near unusable, takes forever to create a new
note.

I no longer trust that they will always have all of my notes, so I started to
back them up to Dropbox via the HTML export. But I'm lazy, haven't done it for
a while.

Perhaps this is an opportunity for a new company to do what Evernote is doing,
better. Automatic backups to Dropbox, lighting fast no matter how many notes
stored, reliable and instant syncing, etc.

------
victorhooi
I use Evernote as well, mostly for researching o the internet.

However, I've found their Chrome Web Clipper to be _remarkably_ bug-ridden and
unreliable.

It's very annoying - as you can queue up a list of pages to clip, and you
don't know if it's going to actually clip all of them. So you have to wait,
and make sure each one is clipped.

See here for other people's reports on it as well:

[http://discussion.evernote.com/topic/43399-clipper-hangs-
on-...](http://discussion.evernote.com/topic/43399-clipper-hangs-on-saving-a-
page/)

If I knew of an cross-platform alternative, I'd seriously look into it.

Any good alternatives for web clipping or research?

------
ja27
Yep. Lost 3 hours of writing once. No chance of recovery apparently. Now I've
learned to not edit existing notes on mobile devices if I can avoid it. Copy
the note to a new one and edit that so I have a backup.

------
middleclick
I don't mean to downplay this but seriously, make backups of all data that is
important to you. Lots of things can go wrong everywhere and they do go wrong.
Maybe it is a sucky app or maybe your own error -- if you have a backup, you
don't need to worry.

I know this is no excuse for Evernote's app being at fault, but if something
matters this much to you, you should not be trusting anyone or anything and
the only way to stay safe is to have backups in multiple places. Might seem
like a PITA but it is worth the effort.

~~~
dmlorenzetti
Not being an Evernote user, I'm not sure about this, but-- it sounds like the
author recorded the corrupted file using Evernote ( _...sometimes instinct
steers me toward the green elephant’s "record" button and I play for a
while._).

A backup of a corrupt file wouldn't solve the problem.

------
shurcooL
My dad used it for a month (at my recommendation), taking notes from courses
he was doing while in the process of looking for a job.

Through absolutely no fault of his own, ended up losing an important part of
his notes one day. They were completely gone due to a failed sync with no way
to get them back from our end. I tried contacting support, but it wouldn't let
me cuz he wasn't a paying member.

Never used it since out of principle.

------
codereflection
I've had a lot of the same issues in the Windows client. one particularly
annoying bug is how a simple slip of hitting backspace in the wrong spot can
delete an audio recording with no possible way of undoing the operation. I've
started using the service less and less over the years to where I barely open
it at all anymore, relying on services like git and drop box instead.

------
astrostl
Hyper-simple alternative: I've switched to
[http://simplenote.com/](http://simplenote.com/)

------
plibin
Folks,

We hear your concerns. I just wrote about my thoughts on the subject, and our
plans for 2014, on our blog: [http://blog.evernote.com/blog/2014/01/04/on-
software-quality...](http://blog.evernote.com/blog/2014/01/04/on-software-
quality/)

Thank you for caring enough to be on this thread,

\- Phil Libin, CEO, Evernote

------
whiskeyfoxtrot
Several years ago[1] I installed Evernote on my Mac and used it pretty
regularly for a few months, then just tired of the sluggishness and fragility
of the app. Mind you, I've never installed the web client, none of the browser
extensions, nor have I used it within a browser. It was always the OS X app
for me.

Spurred by this post (nicely done, btw) I went and gave a look at what was
inside my old Evernote account. Nothing. Everything's gone except the myriad
folders and tags I'd added to help keep everything organized. It's a ghost
town now.

I guess I don't really care the stuff is gone since I'd given up on the app
long, long ago. Still, I can't help wondering what I'm missing, if there was
anything truly important that marched in line & jumped off a cliff along with
millions of other users' data.

[1] Mid-2009 according to my Evernote Account Summary page.

------
maga
I've been using desktop app for quite some time now and it's good enough for
the most part. Just recently I was considering moving to the android app when
it hit me that Android app doesn't even have an option for so-called local
notes even on premium subscription. Whatever you write there should eventually
be synchronized with the cloud. That's no-go for me, I'm both paranoid and
dealing with rather sensitive information.

Though I can't find a reasonable substitute on Android. Most apps in this
category focus on getting notes easily or on some to-do/calendar side, and
very few has a good set of features to organize and navigate through a vast db
of notes. Springpad has the same notebook/tags system and pays a good deal of
attention to the organization part, but alas it is a web app with no option
for private local notes.

------
rdhyee
Although Evernote does its share of problems, I want to throw in my generally
positive view of the company and the software. I've been a premium user since
2010, and despite its problems, Evernote remains the central program I use to
organize my thoughts and tasks. I'd be glad to expand on what I like about
Evernote if anyone wants to know. (I'm just a bit surprised by the high level
of criticism for Evernote here.)

[later edit: as I reread the thread, I now see the discussion as less negative
than I originally thought. Others are pointing out positives about Evernote.
If Jason Kincaid (the OP) does manage to get Phil Libin to focus his company
on improving the quality of the various clients, then I'd be quite happy. For
the time being, I still with Evernote because it's the best solution I've
found for what I do.]

------
mercer
A few years ago I used some wiki-style tool for Windows to keep track of all
my notes. When I switched to a Mac, I couldn't run it anymore. I started using
another tool called Journler, and copied all my data over to it. Took me quite
a while.

Then Journler was discontinued, and I realized there was no way to export the
notes without losing all kinds of metadata.

I briefly considered Evernote, but this time I didn't want the same thing to
happen. So instead, I settled for Notational Velocity (NVAlt, specifically),
which uses plain text files. The files reside in a dropbox folder, and I use
SimpleNote on my iPad and some other app on my Nexus. I can also use a whole
bunch of other text-editing tools if they have dropbox support.

While my solution only works for plain text, it's served me well and I'll
never be locked into some (buggy) tool again.

------
daphneokeefe
I've been using a Windows desktop app for years that's a lot like Evernote. I
have many MB of notes, especially code snippets. But also lots of other stuff,
exactly like what Evernote is intended to do. I would love to migrate it all
to Evernote to get cloud access to it all, but my experience with a Evernote
is that it is just not trustworthy.

My fear with the desktop app is that a Evernote is killing it. It's a great
app, though. Never let me down, not once. Never crashes, never lost a note.
And it has more features, more flexibility in formatting, and the ability to
have deep nesting of what Evernote calls notebooks. But the UI look & feel is
very outdated.

Check it out. It's called Info Select from miclog.com.

------
arabellatv
I just realized that I've stopped using my Evernote account ever since I
upgraded to iOS7...and that's just because it kept crashing on me even if I
had a brand new phone. This post just reminded me to cancel my Evernote pro-
account and move all my stuff over to -- I guess, Google Docs? (as others have
recommended). For receipts, I've been using the Flickr app to auto-upload my
iPhone photos into a private folder. Then, I just send download links to
accounting for reimbursement. It's even easier than Dropbox -- and it's free
for up to 1 TB. The security issues are scary...it'd be interesting to see
Evernote's reply.

------
cturner
If you want the basics of evernote, at the command-line, check out saga.
[http://songseed.org/unix.html](http://songseed.org/unix.html)

It's not fancy, but you control your data.

------
democracy
Any enterprise that grows to a certain level becomes slow and lame it is a
fact you have to accept. Until you are a fat account your bug reports do not
matter. I do third level support for my financial client and some very nasty
and obvious (and easy to fix!!) issues are coming from small people and are
put to backlog and never even looked at until someone big outside or important
inside comes across it. It is so disappointing and demotivating but I am tired
of fighting it and they pay well for not fixing anything.

------
jacquesc
The Evernote Mac client feels like I'm ssh'ed into a remote machine. I type
and half a second late the text appears.

Seriously sloppy stuff. They need to improve or I need to find something
better.

------
tobyjsullivan
It's worth correcting a small point the author makes.

"This strategy is tolerable for a social network or messaging app (Facebook
got away with atrociously buggy apps for years)."

But the truth is it wouldn't be tolerable for Facebook to lose photos or
posts. The experience can be buggy, sure, but users should and would never
tolerate data loss like this.

I suspect the only reason Evernote is surviving this is because relatively few
people use audio notes and, so far, text notes work fine-ish. I wouldn't
expect that to last.

------
tifareth
org-mode is vastly superior in every way. If you want to organize audio files,
you can do that to with the attachment feature.

Oh and most importantly, you host the data yourself - no verbose plaintext
logs containing your sensitive data and no support calls. Org can also encrypt
your Org files on-the-fly:

[http://orgmode.org/](http://orgmode.org/)
[http://orgmode.org/manual/Attachments.html](http://orgmode.org/manual/Attachments.html)

------
coldtea
I've used to use Evernote for years, but now I still use it.

Then one day there was an Evernote glitch and all my precious notes, were safe
right there in the backup I had taken, because always backup yourself too, no
matter how much you trust any app.

Seriously, all apps have glitches. I've been using Evernote for 2+ years and
haven't seen any spectacular failure. But even if there was one, I'd still
have my backups and I could restore my notes in a couple of hours.

------
habosa
Does anybody know a good way to export Evernote notes to a usable format (not
HTML, ideally?)

I really want to move from Evernote to Google Drive, which serves 90% of my
uses with a much, much better cloud service and interoperability.
Unfortunately, most of my Evernote notes are mixed formatted text and images
and I can't find a sane way to export them.

Ironically, even exporting to a .doc would work, since Google and many others
are forced to offer MSOffice import capabilities.

------
wellpast
I've been using Evernote (Win + iPhone) avidly (and reliably) for years -- now
at 2000 notes -- and haven't had (or noticed) any of the issues being
discussed here. But now I'm nervous!

I'll continue to use Evernote in the way that I have been and do periodic
evernote exports of my data to, say, Dropbox. And cross my fingers that this
bad press will kick Evernote into working on the reliability of their
excellent features and products.

------
CGudapati
I wanted to use use evernote to collect information for an app I wanted to
make. I can not comment on their iOS and Android app but their windows phone
app definitely needs a lot of improvement. No matter how many syncs i do on
both my mac and windows phone, the notes entered in the respective devices
won't sync. I really wish MS releases their One-note for Mac. The way their
one-note app on WP and windows 8 syncs is amazing.

------
synvisions
I haven't had any syncing issues, but I've had a hell of a time with Evernote
insisting on formatting my notes and changing characters even when I make the
note Plain Text.

A lot of what I use(d) Evernote for was shell snippets and other bits of code,
and having it mangle my quotes into other characters, and randomly insert
newlines was a bit of a nightmare.

Thanks to this thread I've found nvALT and I'm really loving it so far.

------
quinndupont
I hear these comments (and all the HN ones), but my use-case changed a long
time ago: Evernote is now (just) my digital "junk drawer". Not high praise
really, but it performs this job well. Really important stuff never goes in
there, but all the little bits that I would lose otherwise all end up in
there, only loosely categorized in a couple of notebooks with a couple dozen
tags.

------
whirlycott1
How do people feel about Springpad? I've only used both casually, but it seems
like the power users probably have thoughts or advice.

------
erichocean
What's ridiculous are sync services without history. Just blowing away data
blindly and hoping for the best is beyond stupid.

Sadly, both Evernote and iCloud follow this "strategy". If you've never
experience the joy of watching iCloud blow away every contact in your address
book during a sync, consider yourself lucky.

------
panzi
I don't quite understand: He does not want the Evernote staff to be able to
read his notes, yet he uses Evernote? The notes are NOT encrypted by a key
only the user knows! If that where the case the browser version and search
could not work. Any Evernote admin can read your personal (sensitive) notes
anyway.

~~~
chris_wot
Except that support people may not have database access. I certainly wouldn't
be happy if it added unguarded content into the logs and they got me to
_email_ it to them!

~~~
panzi
Oh, right. Support != admins. So he is fine with the admins be able to read it
but not with the support?

~~~
chris_wot
Sure. An admin doesn't get the logs in an email, over an unsecured medium.

------
volume
I'm going to keep using Evernote but I'll factor in some of the complaints and
horror stories by a technique called "backing up" or "exporting" my notebooks.

Evernote solves a great problem awesomely and at the moment for my personal
use case. For now I'd rather focus on optimizing other things.

------
natch
Great tour of the problems, but I felt my sympathy with the writer deflate
quite a bit when he said that (at one point) he hadn't updated in a while. As
a software developer, it's irking to see people bitterly complaining about
bugs that were fixed and made available as free updates a long time ago.

------
nl
I like Evernote.

But I had trouble logging into the Mac client using my email address (prior to
2 factor author being implemented) and it didn't work. I raised a support
request and got this reply

 _Unfortunately this feature has been disabled and you must sign in with your
username instead of the email._

That seems weird and annoying to me.

------
pbreit
Could Evernote be substantially replicated using email technologies like IMAP
and Postfix/Dovecot, etc?

------
ConAntonakos
UX is one of the main reasons why I simply don't commit to Evernote unless
it's just to take a note here or there. I almost preferred Google Notebook
when it was available. Or try out
[Draft]([https://draftin.com/](https://draftin.com/)).

------
Kiro
My main problem is "conflicting notes". I suspect it has something to do with
using both the Mac client (work) and Windows (home). Nowadays I always
manually press "sync" before shutting down but I still get the occasional
conflicting note which is a real pain.

------
mrmondo
I too use Evernote very day, and have done for several years.

I have three issues:

1) The mac client is slow / laggy

2) Security

3) Formatting - please don't add smart quotes to my SQL snippets!

If someone made a product that syncs like Evernote, had a browser plugin as
good as evernote's and used client side encryption - I'd certainly give it a
go.

------
spiderPig
I still don't understand why one would choose evernote over OneNote. It's a
dream to use.

~~~
CGudapati
People on Mac OSX. one thing sorely miss from my windows days.

------
phaed
Shit, here I am finally taking the time to see what Evernote is and finding
that I could find use for it in my day to day. Yet now there is no way I could
ever trust it with my data, everything I would put on it is important to me.

What are some good Evernote alternatives?

~~~
sheetjs
I like Simplenote ([http://simplenote.com/](http://simplenote.com/))

~~~
phaed
Funny, they support all the platforms but the most used platform around which
also happens to be thee one I am looking for. Windows.

------
yayitswei
I'm also a paying customer and have lost an important note recently. Spent
weeks of back-and-forth with support (including the anxiety-inducing handover
of my Activity Log) until they concluded that my note was lost for good,
without even an apology.

------
dangoldin
Both my wife and I have also lost notes in Evernote. I'm a paying member and
just last week exported everything out into text files within Dropbox. I have
to get the workflow right but at least I know my files won't disappear.

------
midas007
LOL. Evernote has always had more rough-edges than Android.

So I ditched it after that huge security incident by using cloudHQ to migrate
to something else:

[https://www.cloudhq.net/evernote](https://www.cloudhq.net/evernote)

~~~
aroman
What did you migrate to? How does it compare and how do you like it?

------
lowglow
I think this area is ride and wide open. Personally speaking, I think evernote
has done a terrible job at making technical progress. I hope they get their
act together soon -- they have such potential and significant traction.

------
robbyking
Off all the dedicated note taking apps available, Dropbox + an iOS Dropbox-
compatible text editor has worked best for me. Even if DB were to go down, I'd
still have my local synced copies.

------
idoescompooters
Just deleted my notes(the welcome note and a blank untitled one), changed my
email to a fake one, and deactivated my account. I never used this
application. Thanks for reminding me.

------
uladzislau
Evernote team, please make a usable bookmarklet for iPhone/iPad. A lot of
people are clipping pages on their mobile devices and currenly the user
experience is awful.

------
donniezazen
I stopped using Evernote the day I was notified that web version is not
supported on Chrome running on Linux. I use diigo for web clipping and text
files for note taking.

------
syllogism
I always just send myself SMS messages. What are the killer features of
something like Evernote, if it has these bugs?

------
keithpeter
_" Mac’s ‘helper’ — an official mini app that’s meant for jotting down notes
without having to switch to the hulking beast that is the desktop
application."_

This set buzzers off in my (perhaps simple) mind. Is this feature creep? I'm a
physical notebook and 'one big textfile' person myself.

------
AdrianRossouw
skitch used to be such a wonderful little application, but I refuse to pay for
it since evernote bought it and crapped all over it.

is there a good alternative to skitch yet?

~~~
pault
[Skitch
1.0.12]([http://evernote.com/download/get.php?file=SkitchMac_v1](http://evernote.com/download/get.php?file=SkitchMac_v1))

------
kumarski
building and scaling a multiplatform app is incredibly difficult.

Buggy sure, will they become the leviathan force if they fix the bugs, most
likely.

Any good alternatives to Evernote?

------
contextual
The Evernote app for BlackBerry 10 has never synced without producing an
error. This wouldn't bother me so much if I wasn't a Premium member.

I'm open to switching to an Evernote alternative, provided this alternative
has an Android app. Android apps are becoming as easy to install on BlackBerry
10 as native BlackBerry apps.

Curious, what are the Evernote alternatives?

~~~
1rae
I am not a fan of the desktop version but the BB10 version works perfectly for
me... Are you sure the software is up to date?

~~~
contextual
I just reinstalled the app, and it will take awhile before everything is
synced again - that is if the app version was the source of the problem. I'm
running the leaked OS 10.2.1.1925 for the Z30, but I doubt that had anything
to do with it. The OS has been rock solid.

------
mosselman
"To say this post pains me would be an understatement. More than any other
technology, Evernote is part of me, having evolved from habit to instinct over
several years and nearly seven thousand notes. "

This is the kind of stuff that makes me not want to read what you have to say.
Come on, what you are saying is car ad bullshit.

