

Please, Evernote, wake up. I wanted you to win. - thorax
http://www.mattie.net/blog/2010/2/13/please-evernote-wake-up-i-wanted-you-to-win.html

======
htsh
The thing that has disappointed me about Evernote forever is their complete
and total lack of Linux support. This is a product that has Palm Pre and
Windows Mobile clients but for whatever reason has decided that developing a
Linux client isn't worthwhile.

A recent Hacker News poll of OS used day-to-day, Linux finished second in
frequency behind Mac OS: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=687267> . People
who do dev/database/IT work frequently need snippets of text like IP addresses
and passwords and API keys and this sort of tool would come in handy for us.
But a lot of us run Linux as well. Even ignoring the nerd market, Linux is
increasingly run by regular people on their netbooks.

I guess the reason I don't get this is that tech savvy folks seem like a great
market to go after with your software, as they tend to be very influential in
their social networks' decisions as well.

Apples and Oranges, I know, but I use and love Dropbox in large part because
it works with 2 of my 3 computers. On the other hand, Evernote runs poorly on
my mac and can only be accessed via the web on the others. I actually use
dropbox now as I would evernote, by keeping .txt files in my dropbox.

~~~
jasonkester
Out of curiosity, does anybody here know of a concrete example where a Linux
user actually paid money for Linux software?

I think that might be part of the explanation.

~~~
samdk
I just bought Galcon Fusion (<http://www.galcon.com/fusion/>) today. I
wouldn't have had it not run on Linux.

~~~
jonursenbach
I second that. Bought Galcon Fusion a few hours after it was released.

------
kes
Evernote is even worse on Mac. I've been using Journler
(<http://journler.com/>) because it's too much of a hassle to keep my stuff in
OneNote on a separate partition, or run VMware.

I wish there was a OSX port for OneNote, which I think is the most usable not
taking software I've ever tried.

~~~
mattew
Does journler have better formatting than Evernote?

~~~
z8000
A first-year CS undergrad student can write an editor with better formatting
than Evernote on OS X. I don't mean to be snarky but it's terrible to see EN
have so much potential only to be excruciating to use.

~~~
aschobel
Believe me, it's frustrating to see how much press they get.

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Groxx
I was pretty impressed with the app when I tried it a while ago, but was
_immediately_ turned off by the lack of secure uploads for the free version.
That, and the $45/year cost and the _complete_ inability to import / export
_anything_ means it's a lock-in tool designed to get them more money, not to
improve my workflow. This is all in spite of several postings I've seen of the
owner claiming to strongly support open standards. Put your money where your
mouth is, and just _maybe_ I'll believe you, instead of your application doing
everything possible to show the opposite.

A lot of applications could learn a thing or two from the design, and the OCR
is impressive. But it's an expensive lock-in, and I'm not touching it any
more.

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aschobel
My startup, <https://snaptic.com> , is trying to help them wake up by building
a better note taking app.

We are on Android, iPhone, and web.

Come hack with us in SF and scratch your own itch. hn@snaptic.com

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1089905> </shameless plug>

~~~
maxklein
If you're hiring more than one person with investment money, then I give your
company 1 year before you have to reorganise the company. You have 3 people
already, add one more engineer and optimise your resources. Hiring more is
going to be money wastage.

~~~
aschobel
Our founders don't get a salary, we use the money to hire engineers.

We are very fortunate to have passionate users (#1 note app on Android) and
need more folk to help us make something people want.

We are especially looking for data hackers, UX, and vis design people.

~~~
z8000
From someone knee-deep in the iPhone world but with zero experience in the
Android world, could you perhaps let me/us know how many downloads and/or
unique users a "#1 note app on Android" equates to? I'm genuinely quite
curious if it is worth my time to get into Android and well, the more data
points on usage numbers the better! Thanks.

~~~
aschobel
The metrics Google gives you are a bit coarse, you only get total downloads
and active installs. Not sure if this translates to unique users, iTunes
Connect is so much nicer in this regard.

Google Market publicly give out your download numbers in brackets, 50-100
downloads, 100-1k downloads, 1k-5k, etc.

We have two apps in the 250k+ bracket.

We've been on Android for over a year and the last few months have been
insane. The day of the Droid launch we saw our traffic triple, and things seem
to be picking up steam since then.

Feel free to email me at [username]@snaptic.com or hit me up on GTalk
[username]@gmail.com

We love the Android platform and it would be great to have more folks building
on it.

~~~
maxklein
Is the 250k+ bracket for a paid app or a free app? I have a free app that is
top 10 in its category, and we have 1700 downloads a day on iphone - so it
would take me 150 days to reach 250k, or 5 months. How does Android compare?

~~~
aschobel
All our apps are free.

We haven't publicly announced our numbers, but we have a "nice" multiple of
the daily download numbers you posted.

Sorry for being vague, I need to check with my co-founder before talking
publicly about this.

------
Goosey
The strange thing is, my typical evernote usage rarely involves me actually
writing notes myself. I always find myself spinning up a dropbox'ed tiddlywiki
for fleshing out ideas and in general using a pen and scrap paper for
temporary notes.

Instead I use it as a place to clip anything I read online and find
useful/interesting. It is like using a bookmarking site that keeps a copy of
the article in case the original vanishes and is searchable beyond the titles.
For being sort of a permanent searchable extension of my brain's memory it
works really well.

I also use it to clip pages I want to read in the future into a 'ReadItLater'
notebook; a replacement for readitlaterlist that won't lose my articles if the
source vanishes and allows me to search things easily. Due to my hn/reddit/rss
addiction the 'ReadItLater' notebook is tremendously valuable for me. I tend
to encounter far more things I want to read then I have time to so my backlog
is perpetually increasing. However if I am searching I still will get results
from this list.. Honestly, sometimes it feels like I am sending myself
messages from the future saying "Hey this article is relevant to something
your doing. Now is the time to finally get around to reading it".

I don't have a premium account yet, but with GDC looming ahead I think I might
spring for it so that I can take advantage of the searchable PDF feature. I
would love to just dump all the pdf whitepapers I run across directly in
rather than my current practice of extracting the contents.

As others have pointed out though, Evernote does have some major concerns that
need addressed. The native clients are poor (luckily the web client is pretty
good), they feel very 'walled garden' (open up, open up, an app ecosystem
awaits you!), no linux client, and clipping web pages means settling for an
uglified unformatted version.

------
dsplittgerber
I think it's astonishing how nearly everyone posting here seems to have some
complaining to do about Evernote for some reason or another. Please try to put
yourself in Evernote's shoes - provide a Linux version? For which userbase?
Will they get 50-100k+ Linux users with at least 1k+ premium users to make it
worth their time (compared to other platforms)? Also, there are lots of
unspecific complaints. It's great everyone can vent his anger and opinions,
snark just doesn't really help. Does it help to just say "it sucks on platform
x"?

------
Herring
How do you guys do your note taking? I'm surprised there's so many people.
I'll probably be getting an ipad so I'm curious if there's any iphone
experiences.

~~~
babar
Textfiles in a dropbox folder so they are available on other machines and the
iphone if needed.

~~~
z8000
I use Notational Velocity and store the notes as markdown-formatted text files
in a Dropbox folder. I can render them to HTML as needed for "pretty" viewing.

------
Locke1689
Note-taking software has continued to fail me by not including LaTeX support.
I will not be taking notes without being able to format math. This affects
Evernote and OneNote equally.

~~~
urlwolf
actually, onenote 2010 support formulas. And the support is quite good, on par
with word.

It makes me sad, because I live on linux and notetaking apps there are
mediocre. The best I could find is keepnote.

Onenote is years ahead of everything else, but I don't want the vendor lock-in
and the binary files that it produces.

Evernote moved to .NET 3.5 so no wine support. Bah!

~~~
koenigdavidmj
Yes, but the problem with this is that you can't just enter a stream of text.
If I'm in a math class, attempting to take notes, I have to point and click on
those apps.

With apps that support LaTeX, I can just type $, start typing math, and type
another $ to go back to regular text. Sure, I'll have to type things like
\int, but that's still faster than trying to find the integral button in
OneNote.

Edit: fix typo.

~~~
Hacktivist
If OneNote is anything like Word you can use LaTeX notation once you are
inside an equation environment (Alt + =).

For example in Word typing Alt + = \int^1_2 \sum^x_(x+1) \ge \sqrt(25)

Would produce exactly what you would get in LaTeX.

You can even copy/paste between applications that support MathML.

~~~
koenigdavidmj
Sweet; I haven't yet had an opportunity to use the new equation editor. That's
exactly what I want; though.

------
grumpyfart
The funny thing is latest client is worse than the last client for Windows.
Previous client was quite good actually, new one doesn't even look like a
native Windows app.

I think they fall into "Let's rewrite this and make it better!" FAIL. You need
to be pretty stupid to rewrite something that's actually working unless you
got a great confident, team and time, and final client of them proves that
they sucked, and now it's going to take them another 6 months to come up with
something as good as their previous client.

When startups are going to learn to not to do obviously stupid like "OMG, our
client is not good enough, instead of improving it, let's rewrite it, yay!" ?

------
grumpyfart
BTW open sourcing their app wouldn't make a difference at all, actually it
doesn't even make sense.

~~~
thorax
Why do you say that? In theory much of their value is actually in the
sharing/networking aspects. Since they control the backend service and the
API, I'd say it could reasonably be a win for them to open source all of their
client variants.

~~~
grumpyfart
They already have an API and which is good. Because in products like this
(without millions of admirer) open sourcing the application won't help.

They can open source the application but not add any new developers outside of
the company (which wouldn't mean anything, other than good faith).

They can open source it and bunch of people might send stuff in an un-
organized way, it never ends good. There are thousands of open source projects
some serious usability issues because no one cares and it's hard organise
people in open source projects and consistency is the key for usability. So
open sourcing projects in this scale, %95 of the time won't be better than
what it's.

I can't even recall one successful product that area.

Although publishing more document, samples etc. about API definitely helps.

