
I've Been Using Evernote All Wrong. Here's Why It's Actually Amazing - daw___
http://lifehacker.com/5989980/ive-been-using-evernote-all-wrong-heres-why-its-actually-amazing
======
Pxtl
Actually, all that stuff is why I _don 't_ like Evernote. It's so featureful,
it means that its mobile clients are quite heavyweight and thus quite slow to
boot.

When I open my notes, I want them 5 seconds ago, looking right at the last
notes I entered anywhere. I can wait for games and Netflix and whatnot to
boot, but Notes need to be the snappiest freaking things on Earth. Evernote is
not. I have to wait for it to open and then go find my notes.

I probably should be using a different notes system. I use Evernote as a
replacement for paper sticky-notes, whereas Evernote seems to be a replacement
for a locker full of course notebooks.

~~~
coldtea
> _It 's so featureful, it means that its mobile clients are quite heavyweight
> and thus quite slow to boot._

Heavyweight does not mean much in itself. What would that mean? Evernote has a
large binary? A cluttered UI?

For my use, I don't find it slow, FWIW.

> _When I open my notes, I want them 5 seconds ago, looking right at the last
> notes I entered anywhere._

So you don't want detailed notes spanning years -- you want to jot something
quickly.

In that case, it's true, that's not what Evernote's for.

~~~
saraid216
> > It's so featureful, it means that its mobile clients are quite heavyweight
> and thus quite slow to boot.

> Heavyweight does not mean much in itself. What would that mean?

You're hearing zir as an engineer, rather than as a customer.

To zir, "heavyweight" means "slow to boot". Why is it slow to boot? "I don't
know; just fix it."

~~~
Pxtl
... that is the worst genderless pronoun I've ever seen. Just use singular
they and make the grammarians angry, nobody else minds.

~~~
simbolit
i did not even read it as a pronoun. i just assumed the thread OP was called
'zir', that is until i read your post.

------
hengheng
I think Evernote is most important as a showcase of how much we have
transcended file systems. Mobile devices have abandoned them, and through
cross-platform apps like Evernote, this notion finds its way back to the
desktop.

Back in the day, we'd just make folders on hard disk for "thought projects",
adding text files, bookmark files (!), photos, possibly word documents. For
ordering, there are file name conventions, and the Mac OS finder still
supports colored files.

I think Evernote shows what any modern File Manager _should_ do for it to be
useful. Instead they are being stripped down until everybody thinks they are
useless. Their benefit is easily overlooked -- files are yours, easy to sync,
easy to back up, restore, pass on and copy, with no walled garden anywhere.

There are so many different use cases for file managers, yet most modern ones
don't go beyond basic folder maintenance and retreiving downloaded files from
an unmaintained folder.

~~~
girvo
Hey, I've been trying to think about this problem myself. If you've got some
thoughts about this id love to hear them, so I can possibly look at
integrating them into elementary OS, perhaps? My email is in my profile if
you've got time at all :)

------
alexholehouse
Evernote + Dropbox means that I am basically device/OS/location agnostic for
all my information needs, which given that I switch between 3-4 machines (all
with different OSs) regularly is absolutely crucial.

That said, some PAINFULLY obvious things which would be hugely benficial for
adoption;

\- LaTex support built in

\- Markdown (either in every note, or allowing you to add 'markdown' boxes, if
just for writing code)

And a stretch goal;

\- Better PDF/attachment integration. In a perfect world there would be a
Dropbox extension which creates an "Evernote" folder in your Dropbox and any
attachments are automatically stored in a notebook-hierarchy file-system
within that folder. This would autoupdate to reflect what's going on in
Evernote.

~~~
gjuggler
Re: PDF / attachment handling, you may be interested in what Paperpile
([http://paperpile.com](http://paperpile.com)) does with PDFs: we create a
subfolder in your Google Drive space which automatically stays synced with
your reference library, so PDFs and supplementary files are accessible from
anywhere.

It's tuned more specifically towards academic work than Evernote, but the
Drive sync is quite simple and robust.

(Disclaimer: I co-develop Paperpile, a web-based reference manager)

~~~
alexholehouse
I don't even.... this is amazing. I've been toying with the idea of making
something like this, but could never have produced anything as good. I don't
know when I was last this excited about a piece of software. When the
paperpile option appeared next to PDFs via the Chrome extension - goosebumps!
Thank you, this solves a massive problem I have and have had for a while, and
despite trying all kinds of managers have never found anything which really
combines organization with raw PDF access in a distributed manner.

------
girvo
Good to see Evernote has caught up to the single application made by Microsoft
that I completely adore: OneNote. It's in a similar boat: if you take
advantage of all its features, you can basically _live_ inside the
application.

This was a few years ago now, and I've moved to Mac, Linux and iOS, so alas, I
use iClouds Reminders and Notes app for everything now.

~~~
the_watcher
OneNote was my savior during my year of law school. I'm painfully disorganized
while taking notes, OneNote saved me huge amounts of time by keeping
everything all together. It basically won't let you be too disorganized
without actively trying.

~~~
vidyesh
_It basically won 't let you be too disorganized without actively trying._

Hahaha. True. It has (almost) replaced all the random .txt all over my drive.

------
mortov
Am I the only one that read the article article as having a distinct
Astroturfing feel about it ?

~~~
Patient0
That was my thinking too. Who sits down and writes a lengthy blog post about a
piece of software that they like to use? How boring! It's like someone sitting
down to write a blog post about why they like Pepsi instead of Coke.

~~~
girvo
Welcome to lifehacker.com

~~~
taopao
It's Gawker's eHow, basically. [http://lifehacker.com/wear-your-bathrobe-all-
morning-long-to...](http://lifehacker.com/wear-your-bathrobe-all-morning-long-
to-avoid-spills-and-1461020293)

~~~
alanhenry
To be fair, we try to be significantly more useful than eHow.

------
adamnemecek
Evernote would be maybe 500% more useful for me if it had code highlighting
and markdown support.

~~~
6cxs2hd6
Although I'm not sure if it's exactly what you're looking for, org-mode for
Emacs is pretty awesome.

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

------
lazerwalker
I used to use Evernote obsessively. In college, all of my hand-written notes
would get scanned in right after class using a document-feeder scanner. It's
hard to put into words how mind-blowingly cool it was to scan a piece of
handwritten paper and be able to pull it up by searching for its OCR'd text
contents a minute later from my iPad.

Over time, I got frustrated with how slow, bloated, and un-native-feeling
their client apps were on every single platform I used. I switched to storing
everything as Markdown documents in Dropbox (with a few other web services for
some of the more niche uses I had for Evernote), and I've been much much
happier ever since.

~~~
taude
Former Evernote user here, too. I now use alt Notational Velocity, and
markdown (sometimes) with Drop box. It has the advantage of my content isn't
locked in to a proprietary system (last time I worked with it, I could only
export HTML versions of my notes from Evernote). Also, I can use my OS to
index and provide search capabilities into my files, if I need.

It's also led to a system where I take better notes on the things that I need
to remember.

------
capedape
Using multiple devices like a computer, tablet, phone in Evernote and getting
duplicate "conflicting change" notes is maddening. You then have to search out
within the note that you appended to what you added then delete the duplicate
note. This is a real pain when your note is longer than a screen and you have
to search out exactly what information was changed.

In a perfect world you should remember what was changed, but isn't offloading
information from your brain what Evernote is for? They need to sort syncing
out or at least give the option to show only what information was changed. I'm
about to go back to Simplenote's seamless syncing and save the money I'm
giving Evernote for something that's becoming increasingly kludgy.

Accessing a note in IOS is also super slow then trying to append to a note can
turn into a moment of wanting to chuck the phone out the window.

------
WA
A bit OT, but the article talks about organizing your bookmarks as Webclips,
so I thought I'll ask the HN crowd:

I have close to 1,000 bookmarks and I'm really too lazy to sort them, but
there might be some useful stuff in it. Thing is, I don't know without
clicking on them.

Does anyone know of a program that crawls all the bookmarks and tries to
automatically tag them?

I could simply wget everything, but I'm more interested in some sort of
tagging, classifying, indexing based on the headline and keywords, although
not all bookmarks are articles.

~~~
pramodliv1
You can feed the wget output to
[https://previous.delicious.com/url/](https://previous.delicious.com/url/)
which returns details about users bookmarking their url including tags.

You'll have to scrape the details though. Their public API
[https://github.com/avos/delicious-api](https://github.com/avos/delicious-api)
doesn't include this feature.

------
kuldar
I love the idea of Evernote but their implementation is absolutely horrible.
The slow and cluttered UI has frustrated me to no end.

Please, someone, make a good alternative for Evernote.

~~~
shavenwarthog2
I agree, for some reason Evernote always rubbed me the wrong way.

An alternative I really like is Springpad. You can write notes or Todos, put
in notebooks with tags, or take a picture. It recognizes what a "movie" is and
gives you extra information. Multiple people can collaborate on a notebook.
Plugins are for Firefox and Chrome; I mostly use the Android client. I found
it easy and fun to worth with!

[https://springpad.com/blog/](https://springpad.com/blog/)

------
lucaspiller
Are there any good self hosted alternatives?

~~~
pigeons
Probably more important an issue than the resource hogginess and slowness of
evernote, which has already been mentioned here, it seems self-hosted
alternatives (I see someone mentioned WebDav) are very important.

We used to have the luxury to think any notes we took were not interesting to
third parties and couldn't be used against us or our contacts and our service
providers might not be backdoor-ed. But we can't deny the facts any more.

I suppose maybe the reason there isn't already a popular open source, maybe
AGPL project for an evernote-like system (yes I know there is a OSS jambi/java
client to use with evernotes proprietary servers) is because the tools already
exist and the glue tying them all together with a friendly UI isn't as fun a
challenge?

~~~
girvo
OwnCloud had (don't know f they work with 5 yet) extensions that builds off
DAV and let's you host your own stuff, as well as expose APIs for client apps.
I'm hoping it takes off a bit more for that reason!

------
ChuckMcM
Wherein our author discovers that information has a 'network effect' as well.

It is important to note that the 'mosaic effect' which is new learning from
many bits of seemingly unrelated pieces of information is very real. And it
also provides perspective.

When my wife and I were trying to move past being 'so so' skiers (the kind
that 'warm up' on the easy runs and then ski the 'green' runs during the day)
to more advanced, we were advised that we needed to spend a week somewhere
skiing. The point was that over the course of a week you can not only learn
techniques but apply them, refine them, and capture that knowledge. More days
of skiing all together in one event were more power than the same number of
days done on individual weekends.

When I started keeping a notebook about my robotics efforts, the same thing.
One or two notes were pretty useless but when you start being able to refer
back to the motor you tested 3 months ago and it had a similar issue as the
current motor, etc you made more progress.

Lots of information over time is much more valuable than just any single piece
of information.

------
CoffeeDregs
I really tried to adopt Evernote (again) a few months ago, but I couldn't get
past the horrible HTML editor. I run Linux and the lack of a native client
meant I had to use the web client. After spending 5 minutes trying to unhork a
bullet list (including using WebKit Inspector), I gave up.

Looks as though there are some 3rd party Linux clients now. Anyone have
experience using them?

------
jseliger
This article is actually quite similar to Steven Berlin Johnson's 2005 piece
on how to get the most out of Devonthink Pro (DTP):
[http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/movabletype/archives/0002...](http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/movabletype/archives/000230.html)
.

DTP is OS X (and iOS, I think, though I don't use that) only, however.
Nonetheless, I've been using DTP the way Johnson describes for years and have
found it very useful.

DTP appears a little more "research-y" than Evernote. I suspect one challenge
with any of these mind-mapping programs is that by the time you develop enough
expertise and experience with one, you become reluctant to go through the same
process with another, given the long time investment.

------
isomorphic
I'm one of the people this article is targeting: I received a free year of
Evernote through a software bundle purchase. From time to time I go in to
Evernote, fiddle with it, then leave. I can't see what the fuss is about. I
feel vaguely disappointed that I'm burning through my "free" year with zero
utility.

On the other hand, I use the heck out of Apple's Notes.app with iCloud
syncing. However, I'd never pay (directly) for that.

------
runjake
It kind of looks like Lifehacker read "Learning to Love Evernote" by Bradley
Chambers [1] and decided to write an article off of it without crediting it.
Or maybe Lifehacker developed the same uses and techniques independently.
Anyway, the Chambers ebook is great.

1\. [http://chambersdaily.com/learning-to-love-
evernote/](http://chambersdaily.com/learning-to-love-evernote/)

------
lucianp
Too bad that there is still no client for Linux. Last time I checked, the
alternatives (Everpad, NixNote, or running under Wine) were nowhere close to
the Windows client. Does anybody know if they plan to release a version for
Linux?

------
kvee
Yesterday Evernote deleted a note I'd made. Just totally gone, randomly.
Eventually found it with Macroplant iExplorer.

Anyone else been having problems like this? Or know why it happens?

------
farginay
I'd like to like Evernote but the latency when you actually want to start
typing text in it on the iPhone is ridiculous compared to just a simple note
tool.

------
abraininavat
The problem with putting everything in Evernote is that it becomes stale. I
think that's what has prevented me from getting into it.

Some examples of items I would not put in Evernote, from the article:

 _\- Some sections of my server 's log, containing all the information I need
to troubleshoot my most recent problem_

You copied some sections of your server's log and put them in Evernote, so
that you can troubleshoot a problem? How is this useful? Why not troubleshoot
it by looking at the logs directly? Why do you want to store stale logs? Or,
are you saying your server automatically refreshes the Evernote note? That
would be more interesting and worthy of an article.

 _\- A web clipping from an article on the best VPN providers, since I 'm
installing a VPN on my home server_

Aren't you interested in whether the list of best VPN providers changed since
the last time you searched? And why store something that's a google search
away? How often will you need to review this stale list of VPN providers?

 _\- A web clipping on how to install OpenVPN on my home server, since I don
't remember how to do it by heart_

Same thing.
[https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+install+openvpn](https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+install+openvpn)
How often do you install OpenVPN?

 _\- A web clipping on setting file permissions, since I need to give my
girlfriend access to my server 's files_

What about just learning how to set file permissions, if it's something you do
very often? Or, "man chmod".

No offense intended, I know people think and work differently. I just still
don't get it.

~~~
ScottWhigham
+1 here. We use Evernote for documentation but we also spend hours and hours
each month maintaining it. That said, "How to install XYZ?" is valid
documentation - it might be that a specific way works on your setup and that
it took 25 articles/posts and three days to figure that out. The key thing is
to maintain the documentation - cull the old, update what you keep.

------
cylinder
So how much did Evernote pay for this ad?

Can HN auto-filter links with "Here's Why" and "21 reasons why..." headlines?

~~~
streptomycin
You could write a short Greasemonkey script to ensure that you never have to
see them.

