Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login
Why Evernote failed to realize its potential (2021) (nira.com)
137 points by arishi on Nov 16, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 181 comments



Related ongoing thread:

Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33623402 - Nov 2022 (113 comments)


Over the years I've realized that I don't actually care for or need the "note taking" part of applications like these.

What I need is a textual data store that can be efficiently and effectively indexed, searched and (automatically) tagged, and for the ability to quickly filter streams and feeds of targeted information from that data store (with the option to share them publicly via RSS - my public feeds are in my profile for the curious).

It needs to be able to contain the 3 primary text-based sources of information I consume (with all of the table-stakes additional metadata): highlights from webpages, internet commentary, and highlights from eBooks.

Nobody seemed interested in making this so I just made it myself and I've been using it for the last 2 years very happily.


> Nobody seemed interested in making this so I just made it myself and I've been using it for the last 2 years very happily.

Based on your profile, I presume you're talking about https://notado.app/?


Yes, Notado is the labour of love that I'm talking about in the parent post :)


I'm also very interested in this, but particularly the book part, which I couldn't find on the website linked above, unless it only works with Kindle highlights?

I have a gigantic EPUB library and have yet to find a good way to export my notes and highlights from all these books (mostly read in KOreader).


Kindle-only right now as it's the biggest piece of the pie and what I use personally, but let me look into the KOreader highlights storage format and see if I can hook you and the other KOreader users with something.


Can you summarize how it works? You highlight something on kindle and it gets sent to your online db for storage?


You make your highlights on a physical Kindle or Kindle app as usual, and then go to https://read.amazon.com, select the book that you want to import the highlights for and right click to import them.

There are other services available that will take your oauth login details for your Amazon account and spin up something like Selenium on their end to scrape all of https://read.amazon.com after logging in on your behalf, which is a bit more like what you're describing (it's not instant, but scheduled), but in my experience this sacrifices a lot of flexibility (deciding which books you want to import highlights for) and reduces the quality of the content in your data store over time. The other downside of this approach is that you need to reauthorize the service every couple of weeks or so.


Ah I see, initially I thought it was something like a plug-in for kindle and it just does this automatically but I guess they don't allow such things.

Thank you, I am currently struggling to navigate in the world of RSS feeds, bookmarks, notes, reminders and everything else. I will check your app out if you don't mind.


I used to love these. When OneNote first came out, it was everything I ever wanted and more.

I think the later versions got worse. Eventually I switched PCs and it had an error syncing my notebooks. There was a mix of local and cloud copies, randomly, and it worked like 3 separate accounts on the same ID that could never combine files.

I did a sync anyway and it just deleted a bunch of notebooks randomly, and one of them became corrupted so I lost a ton of data.

I just use text files in a folder now after apple notes had an update once a few years ago that snuck in a “you consent to irreversibly delete all old notes to use the new version” in small text on the “what’s new” pop up, as if that’s not a critical thing to double confirm.


The funny thing is that writing notes (I.e., typing text) is among the easiest things to achieve on a computer. Actually figuring out what to do with them is what requires some thought.

I say that to say, I’m interested in your app. I was late to things like Pinboard and Delicious so I never got into the whole “public online bookmarks” thing.


It's a little bit different to Pinboard and Delicious; it's private by default and you can choose to share things in public feeds if you want, but instead of sharing bookmarks in the feeds, you share text highlights (ie. the things that you found interesting about the bookmarks - this is either a text highlight from an article or a comment from HN etc. on an article)

It has some surprising other uses, too. For example, after being frustrated at how difficult it is to find story and world-building refreshers (without spoilers) when going back to a multi-novel fiction series, I have started using feeds to keep spoiler-free Kindle highlights that focus on key elements of the world, story and characters to ease me back into a series (and to share with others who might be interested in the series).


This is the same use case I have, I use Evernote notably because of the excellent web scraper. Can you share more about your software?


I don't want to derail the comments on this post too much, but it's called Notado (another commenter has already linked it) and I have posted about it a few times on HN before (all in my submissions history).

There are quite a few high-quality discussion threads on those previous posts that are worth checking out if you're interested in learning more!


Thanks, I’ll check it out


Except of few ideological mistakes, I would say, quite a lot of time was wasted on doubtful technical decisions ...

One year was wasted on trying to make it as WPF application, .NET all that ... 5, if not more, years were wasted on making it work as Electron'ish like application (CEF was integrated).

Evernote is a typical companion application - the thing that sits in tray and pops up as quickly as possible when needed.

Management read once that "Premature Optimization Is the Root of All Evil" but missed the critical point - this kind of application MUST be lightweight or dead.

The elephant was born instead.


> Premature Optimization Is the Root of All Evil

Means don't drop down to asm to save a few cycles. It doesnt mean "dont fill your 10fps GUI app with crap".

Today, it more or less should be killed-off as a phrase. There isn't anyone optimizing anything, let alone "prematurely"


> There isn't anyone optimizing anything, let alone "prematurely"

Yes, but in a slightly different way than one might think at initial read of this. Most of the performance choices for a user-facing application have been made by the time the language and UI framework are decided. And these are just chosen out of inertia, to conform to a company standard or to use what you already know.

There's little one can do to make a WPF or CEF application super responsive.


I'd be interested in seeing if there's a YT video out there of a WPF expert doing just that.

It might be a matter of hacking-in a caching layer or something, but it feels like probably more things are possible than people think.

A framework is just code, and you can pick-and-choose.


It could be interpreted that way too.

But usually managers interpret it this way: let's mold it now from that pile of shit and firewood and think about concrete foundation later. VC driven development they say.

It makes sense in some cases of course. But not in cases when concrete foundation is the cornerstone feature of the application. That kind of application shall serve users during whole their lifetime. And so application core shall not rely on particular OS and its features.


> Except of few ideological mistakes, I would say, quite a lot of time was wasted on doubtful technical decisions ...

Not just technical, but remember when they expanded into physical products that made no sense? I don't mean the handful of scanner implementations - those made sense even if they were made obsolete. The notebooks with "smart" scanning were okay at the time as well, even if they quickly became obsolete too

But I mean stuff like backpacks and socks.[1] That never made sense to me.

I kind of wish Apple had never made iPod Socks, because then we could have a very good indicator of sock-selling as a sign that things will not end well.

Other socks I have around: Snap, Yak, a handful of defunct delivery apps.

---

[1] https://twitter.com/mlevchin/status/281668296628129792


I am grateful for whichever Googler who has managed to keep Keep up, running, unworsened and uncancelled over the years.

Sometimes a product is enough as it is, and man does the modern software world have a problem with recognizing that.


Keep is my favorite Google product. It opens instantly on iOS, makes it dead easy to create notes, and has a good search feature. It's easy to access on the web since I'm always logged into my Google account anyway. I find iCloud's web presence a bit finicky b/c I have to usually log in again every time.

A wishlist for Keep: * An API. I'd love to use Keep as a durable data store for all my notes. I want o be able to dump snippets collected from a Chrome extension or a PDF reader in there. Their current API provides just a few enterprise access knobs, and not the full data-plane API I'm asking for. * A better search in the sidebar companion app they have for Gmail, Calendar, etc. For some reason, search in the Keep sidebar doesn't return the same results as with the main Keep web or iOS apps.


Blogger is in a similar spot. It gets updates every few years to keep track of major changes in web technology, but nothing radical.


Me too. I know Keep is going to get cancelled but I use it so much.


I've tried a number of alternatives and keep coming back to Evernote's legacy apps (Windows and Android). The features I use are just right, and syncing just works, always.

A key feature for me is being able to (with the legacy desktop app) open multiple notes at once, something that I've not seen anywhere else. (I assume this is because the legacy app is a native Windows executable, whereas multiple windows are not supported in the cross-platform frameworks everyone uses nowadays. I may be wrong.)

On a new tablet I was forced to install their new app, and I find it just OK. I don't like it as much as the older one, but it's usable.

Once Evernote shuts off the legacy apps, I will be searching for an alternative once again.


Most features that appear to only be available in native apps can quite trivially be added using any cross-platform framework like Electron. Multiple windows is not something the is platform-restricted i.e. even web apps can do it if they try.

Have you given Notesnook a try? While it doesn't have multi window support they have it on their roadmap: https://notesnook.com/roadmap


I've been a regular Evernote paying user since the mid-naughts, using it mostly as a document archive (the built-in OCR is nice) ... but usage kicked off for me when I switched my main workhorse to a MacBook Pro two months ago. I guess it's mostly related to Evernote suddenly being fast.


Evernote went with option 3, finding a buyer: https://evernote.com/blog/evernote-next-move-joining-bending...


It failed because it turned the app into bloat and killed multi-device syncing.

Most of the decisions made regarding product features were user-hostile not just to the free tier, but also to paying users who did not want the "features" they kept pushing out.


This is a very similar path to the one that Skitch and Dropbox took. In each case, instead of perfecting and maintaining a really good app, business pressures caused them to pursue growth at all costs. This is a common problem these days.


I think more tech companies need to give up on growth mode and be OK with just being a regular old dividend paying company. I mean honestly, how big can some note-taking app possibly get? Or Snap for instance, which is getting into hardware, into content creation, etc. Who asked for this? I think the business and the users would be better served with being realistic about what an app is for and doubling down on a good user experience, rather than piling on layer after layer of bloat in the hope that some of it sticks.


More companies should just stay private and grow organically.


Once companies hire Product Managers, it is usually downhill from there in 80% of cases.

The problem is that the PMs are incentivized to deliver features, even if that is not the right thing to do.

See: Postman.


This is not necessarily true. PMs are incentivized to use product as a means to grow the business. This usually does manifest itself as delivering product features - but it can manifest itself in other ways. Ultimately product managers are tasked with discovering how to grow the product areas they are owning. Great product managers will work closely with users to understand their needs to refine & grow the product. Examples of ways PMs can accomplish things like this without necessarily delivering new product features: better user onboarding, in-app product tours & engagement, etc.

If a PM is just delivering features without tying it back to user needs, business growth & product strategy then they are just a "feature factory" which is bad product management.


You are defining an exceptional Product Manager not the norm.


Yeah I switched from postman to VS code’s REST client addon because it does less but it does enough. Postman is this really complicated and cumbersome thing now, just deeply unpleasant to use.


As a senior PM and multiple time founder, I don't think this is the right way to look at the situation. PMs should be incentivized towards driving user value not features. It's tough once an organization gets large enough for everyone on the team to be aligned to the same vision and what user value means; this is where a PM can be a positive multiplier effect. The situation you are describing seems to me more like a junior PM issue or a broader misunderstanding by that organization of how to use and incentivize PMs effectively.


> business pressures

You mean greed.


We've codified greed in how tech businesses commonly operate. Once they take VC money, the expectation is constant growth. If you have a product with a limited market/audience there are only a few ways to achieve that:

- Increase prices - which will drive some of your customers away.

- Revenue through ads - which will drive some of your customers away.

- New products - risky, and if successful it sometimes means the original product becomes abandonware.

- New features to try to increase the audience for your product or monetize directly - what it seems like Evernote did.

But not every product can have billions or even millions of users. So sometimes these all fail anyway. Basically investment, whether from VCs or an IPO, is often death for a small business serving a niche market.


also survival, but in the case of Evernote (which I still use)incompetence


> but also to paying users

I was a paid user of the lower tier, and I decided to leave when they kept showing me nag screens to push me to buy the higher tiers. Totally unacceptable in a product I was paying for.


I left chess.com for the same reason. You'd think it would be considered a best practice to not antagonize your paying customers . . . .


Dropbox does the same shit. they are totally shameless.


Apparently even Wikipedia does this. A HN user was saying the other day that he donates $50 every year and this year they emailed him to ask $250.


> It failed because it turned the app into bloat and killed multi-device syncing.

I disagree.

I have came back to paid plan last year and Evernote works really well on Mac (except slow startup, but that has also improved over last year), quite well on ChromeOS (in browser)... Evernote web capture extension is superior to everything else I have tried especially behind paywalls.

Evernote works so well, and it is quite polished and stable. So much that it had became base for my daily workflow which is mostly journaling with lots of attachments..


Shameless plug but for the past 2 years we have slowly been working to replace Evernote with Notesnook [1]. Sounds weird to say "replace Evernote" when Evernote is absolute shit (no offense) but one of the main reasons we went this route is because Evernote did one thing right: It made personal note taking approachable & actually fun. Nowadays, a lot of the modern note taking apps (Notion, Slite etc.) are focused on the "enterprise user" i.e. they prioritize business focused note taking with features like collaborations, integrations etc. Private & personal note taking is no longer the hype which, in my opinion, is really sad.

I might be mistaken in my viewpoint however, of later I have noticed a huge trend toward providing user experiences that target a team workflow. Personal workflows are an afterthought, at best. For some tools this works out but for note taking apps I think it creates a huge void. Not everyone wants a thousands ways to integrate, publish whole websites, buy & sell, and create presentations using their notes app.

[1] https://notesnook.com/


Do you guys optimize for local-first? Can I drop in to start editing without having to wait for network lag or sync? Is multi-device syncing rock solid?

Can I add pictures and links to other entries?

Can I import my existing Evernote notes?

If I wanted a team workflow, I'd use Google Docs and Notion. This is for just personal note and knowledge base I can tap into quickly via my phone.


> Do you guys optimize for local-first? Can I drop in to start editing without having to wait for network lag or sync? Is multi-device syncing rock solid?

Yep. Everything is offline-first stored right on your device. Syncing works mostly well but there a few rough edges which we are sorting out.

> Can I import my existing Evernote notes?

Yes. We have an official importer: https://importer.notesnook.com/


The one feature I loved in Evernote (when I was using it as a paid customer a few years ago) was that I could upload a pdf and it would be indexed for search. I ended up using Evernote as an extensive pdf library with very rapid search of all my pdfs. Does notesnook offer anything like that?


> Does notesnook offer anything like that?

No, and the main deterrent for this is our commitment to keeping everything E2E and client-side. Something like Tessaract or Paddle might work for OCR but I haven't looked too deeply into it.


I have been using ocrmypdf to do it on my own computer, but creating a searchable index of all my pdfs is either very time-consuming or requires me to pay for Adobe Acrobat Pro, neither of which has been very appealing. I've been trying to find a way to upload pdfs that already have OCR embedded (or as a separate text file) and have the OCR text indexed for search across all of my pdf collection.

Thanks for responding to my question. I wish you success in your efforts.


GPLv3, needs(?) an account, has a paid version but I'm not sure what extra features it gets. Can write notes offline and sync later when online. On Play Store but not F-Droid. Download button from an Android web browser sends you to the Play Store, but if you choose "all platforms" and scroll down to Android, there are .apk downloads.

Dug deeper and I see paying gets you more storage for things like attachments.

I would love to see this on F-Droid, looks pretty good otherwise. I don't love needing an account, but I guess that's probably the easiest way to handle syncing. SyncThing integration would've been cool to decentralize things.

Can people host their own server if they want? Not sure if it's just the client on GitHub.


> Can people host their own server if they want? Not sure if it's just the client on GitHub.

We are working on open sourcing the sync server so it can be hosted later on.

F-Droid is also coming.


Expensive, 5 fold the price I paid for Evernote last year (Evernote used to give very generous discounts). For Electron app on macOS. Which could vanish moments notice....

I don't feel tempted.


Is it Electron-based?


Yes.


In what format does this store the notes?


HTML but you can easily export to MD, HTML, PDF or Text.


Still looking for viable replacement:

* Joplin had some issues I've checked year ago.

* Apple notes while I have iPhone there's no Windows app.

* OneNote is just trully horrendous app.

* Obsidian just can't convince myself. I'm forcing myself to use it work, while it works, it's not something I enjoy doing.

* Notion is odd, everything is a block and sometimes formatting is just meh...

* Google keep is just simple note and that's it(unless something has changed).

Any worthy apps to look at besides those?


What kind of notes do you take?

I've used OneNote for like 12 years now I think and I love it. It's where my school notes are and every note I've taken in my career since then. My personal diaries and life notes. Everything is in it.

I've been looking at Obsidian as well because I like the idea of self hosting but aside from that I've never seen a reason to leave.

So back to my question, what kind of notes do you take?


It's general notes. Some of them are TODOs, sometimes screenshots with notes, few with basic tables.

Nothing extraordinary.

I absolutely hate Onenote due to how it looks and forcing you to place a note on your note page to make a note :D


The note in note thing took some getting used to in the beginning. I didn't like it either.

I don't just type notes, though. I do LOTS of handwriting as well, and LOTS of diagramming. In that context the floating text/note boxes are really, really useful. I'll have a single note with a diagram in it and several explanations floating around. Or I'll have a vertically scrolling note alternating between text, pictures, and diagrams. The way I use OneNote has made the note in a note thing really useful.

But every now and then when I'm just typing some quick info out it gets in my way. I just have all the context of it being a useful feature to make me tolerate it.


To be honest, it's the best feature of Onenote is that you can arrange everything on the page (at least on desktop - win/mac) any way you want. Yes, note is kinda a note in a note, when the latter is a page.


I can understand some people like it, I however don't - not my thing :)


I can highly recommend logseq [0]. It's become something like my external brain, writes markdown files I sync between devices (mac, ipad, phone, linux (although no linux arm last time I checked)) via git (auto commits to a repo). It's superb.

0: https://logseq.com/


I am a big fan, I also just discovered emacs Org mode, and was delighted to find out that logseq supports this format as well.



+1 on this as long as you're not importing a decades worth of existing notes. It scales really poorly when your graph is huge.


What were the issues you found on Joplin that stopped you? I use it and it does what it does, which is saving/sorting/tagging notes you want to keep forever and a year. The UX is not the best, but functional. Which is my biggest gripe with it.


the generated filenames


I use Joplin daily and it's great for me. I have it set up with encrypted sync to fastmail storage via WebDAV and since I got that working I've had zero issues across the 3-4 devices I use it on.


> * Notion is odd, everything is a block and sometimes formatting is just meh...

I really like Notion as a way to create little mini-databases of things. Businesses in my new city I just moved to that I want to visit later, what I thought about different teas, vendors for my hobbies, etc.

It makes me extremely nervous to keep all that info there. It feels like vendor lock in. My recent struggle to get everything out of Evernote in a semi-usable format, much less into another app was eye opening.

So I've been looking for some similar sort of Notebook + Freeform DB replacement.


I followed a similar path until I discovered Heptabase. Focused on speed like Obsidian, but the solo dev pushes out new features at an insane pace. They do this by focusing, so you won’t see a laundry list of features, and it’s pay only but well worth the money.

Finding your note taking app is like finding sobriety. Some apps work for some people but any given app is unlikely to be “the one”. My strategy was to just keep trying them until one sticks, because I know note taking is crucial for my success.


I use bear.app and love the simplicity but is versatile enough to all my uses cases. It only runs on Apple platforms, so maybe a deal breaker. It seems similar to Obsidian, so maybe another deal breaker. It syncs via CloudKit and for what it's worth, the devs have shared that they are working on a web app version that would presumably use CloudKit Web Services.


also (IMO) - - exportable/importable to/from markdown in case that's ever needed - much faster than evernote ever was

It's what Evernote was supposed to be. They've got some richer formatting open issues - but that's coming in V2.


DEVONthink is very fast and powerful, a native App for Mac and iOS, no subscription, but rather expensive. Syncing is not perfect, you can use Dropbox or iCloud, but search is very powerful. https://www.devontechnologies.com/apps/devonthink


I love, love LOVE TickTick. It is a note-taking and todo list app and everything is so frictionless like I've never seen before. Also supports markdown notes. I'm only concerned that it looks like a Chinese Todoist clone. The about page doesn't is suspiciously elusive.


Would you mind sharing url? Hard to find with all the urls coming from TikTok. :D


My guess is they are referring to TickTick: https://ticktick.com/


Yes exactly, my bad, I meant TickTick!


Notesnook (https://notesnook.com/) - it's open source, has its own importer making it super easy to migrate, is fully cross platform, and doesn't force you to learn-and-relearn anything. It's note taking - just perfect-er.


I feel you, I tried all of the apps you mention and then some more. I am currently using Obsidian since it uses a simple, well-defined open format, but I am not enjoying a lot... Also it seems like the iPhone mobile app needs 30 seconds to sync every time I open it, regardless if there are updated files or not...


I use Simplenote to solve the problem of sharing quick notes between Apple Notes and Windows.

My core data storage app is still OneNote, though. I moved there when Evernote started getting buggy, and it is a perfectly fine replacement. I don't understand the hate for it.


How did you move your notes from Evernote to OneNote?


It's been many years, so I forget the details, but I seem to recall the OneNote was able to import files that were exported in Evernote's standard export format.


Microsoft offered a website/tool that allowed importing from Evernote but they shut it down a while ago.


For the people who like self-hosting web apps and a minimal wiki-like interface, I wrote Silicon: https://github.com/cu/silicon


What issues did Joplin have for you? It’s been the best notes app I’ve used.


Ulysses is great but similar to Obsidian (and I like Obsidian better personally).


> Any worthy apps to look at besides those?

Bookstack if you dont mind the lack of clients


NotePlan is my favorite


When people start going from EverNote to OneNote, that's an indication you've one-upped Microsoft in terms of un-usablity. Not to say all MS products are bad (Office is good) but the well-berated Teams is an example of a monstrosity that should be more usable.


I actually just joined a company that uses Teams and I REALLY love it as a Zoom replacement. It's a less great IM replacement for Slack, but the outlook integration, videochat quality, recordings, transcripts, chat (within meetings) is top notch.


Experienced with MS Teams are varying a lot.

I have exactly one setup, that works and I do not dare to change it, for the pain I had when trying anything else. Teams would not recognize my headphones. Only USB headset with integrated soundcard would work. All other programs did not have a problem using simply my headphones. This meant, that I could not use my 40€ mic with one turn of a switch on my aufio hub and have to have 2 headphones/sets lying around on my desk, only because of teams.

I have barely a workday, on which none of my coworkers are experiencing Teams issues. Mic not working, no sound, suddenly muted, suddenly crashed the whole thing, shown status of people and even oneself is wildly wrong, not being able to set status properly either to fix it ... All these are still a thing. Welcome to 2022.


Some people enjoy OneNote, it may not be bad.


Honestly, I don’t know what Evernote Corp. did during the last 10+ years of Evernote development. The feature set feels about the same.


I'd argue it's worse. Slower, at least.


They rewrote it from scratch as a sluggish web app, failed to address issues that have been annoyances since day 1, piled on dubious new features that just made it harder to open the damn thing up and write down the idea that just hit you, or to open up the note you're looking for at this very instant.


Evernote had multiple chances to get back on track. Its decision to rewrite its multiple apps into a single web-based one was one of them. In theory having only one codebase to fix bugs and build new features in makes a ton of sense.

Unfortunately the hard product work of simplifying the feature set and prioritizing server-side tech debt was overlooked. Therefore the new app was weighed down from the beginning because it had to support all these legacy systems.

IMO the best move for Evernote is to rethink the UX and tech architecture from first principals and have existing users opt-in to migrate their data over. It's a tough decision to make but I don't see any meaningful progress being made otherwise.


If only apps stayed the same over ten years. That would be a dream come true. Evernote got much slower and buggier in those ten years.


Evernote was the first note taking app I ever used. It was simple and effective. It turned into an unusable monstrosity at some point.


Literally that. Ever since they've redesigned app I have found myself using less & less which leads to more chaotic life :-(


Last time I was using their Windows app it felt non-native in a bad way (some 7-8 years ago).

Also, I managed to lose note content in their iPhone app just by opening note which contained large image. Image simply disappeared nowhere to be found either on phone or computer. After that happened for a second time I kinda switched to iOS Notes and later to Joplin.


I experienced a similar data loss, which was very impactful: I was at the "fast-forward" session of SIGGRAPH, making notes on what I wanted to attend. Somewhere near the end of the session, EverNote crashed and took all of the data in such a way that it was neither on my device, nor on the cloud. That was a deal-breaker.

I uninstalled the app and deleted my subscription.

These days, I keep my notes as .md files and they stay in sync using Nextcloud. I've been using this for ~4 years now, and it works great!


I'm interested in an app that I can just throw a million disorganized documents (PDFs, word files, text files) at, and have it draw insights and help me write. There have allegedly been apps like this since forever but none of them ever really work. Devon Think is bad. Evernote is bad. OneNote is bad. Notion is bad. Men is bad. They all want data to be in tiny little chunks or formatted and tagged just so. Or they ignore it. All deal killers. I need to be able to just give the thing decades of emails and giant PDF folders and make sense of it.


> just give the thing decades of emails and giant PDF folders and make sense of it.

just?


I may be able to help. Would you email me? Contact info in bio.


My take? Evernote failed because it's a Feature, Not a Company ("FNAC") [1]. There are lots of examples of this. Just because something is a good idea doesn't make it a viable standalone business.

Evernote was early in this space but it already competed with (for eample) sending yourself emails. Nowadays there are all sorts of alternatives like Apple has a note-taking app on their devices, which is just free (it might use storage but that's a minor issue). Likewise, you can use Google Apps.

Evernote's attempts to make it a business by introducing the friction of a subscription to get syncing beyond 2 devices (and other variants I'm forgetting I'm sure) just exposed this FNAC problem.

Now could this have been leveraged to build a sustainable business of which note syncing was a part? Maybe. But that's not exactly easy either.

[1]: https://bothsidesofthetable.com/explaining-fnac-feature-not-...


Honestly Apple Notes works really well. It doesn't have much features, but its simplicity should be the baseline of any note taking app


I find the simplicity of Notes to be a big win. I don’t need to be able to publish a blog from it—I just need to know if I still need to pick up a bunch of kale or not.

Notes satisfies my three must-have requirements: it’s on every device my wife and I use, it allows mixing checklists with free form text, and we can effortlessly share information with each other.

I just checked and found that I have 1,321 total notes stored in iCloud. These range from my daily todo lists (invaluable for end of year performance review documents, saying nothing of just remembering what I’m supposed to do), to the all-important shared grocery list, which we will both update whenever we’re shopping at the grocery store.


How do you get your notes out of apple notes though? They're like some sort of covetous demon who won't let your notes go once it consumes them.

I literally went to the apple notes discord once and asked them directly and their response was basically "Apple Notes isn't design to be used for more than 100 notes"... so be very very careful about choosing to use Apple Notes cause you may never get your notes out of there



you're a legend. Thank you!


Wait… Apple is providing support via Discord now?

Anyways, if you have access to a Mac you can sync your notes via iCloud and then on Mac you can easily access the SQLite DB containing the notes. If you can figure out the schema it would be easy to write a tool to export this automatically. I’d guess someone has already built such a tool.


You can use AppleScript to copy them into other apps. Though a lack of an API is annoying.


Where exactly are my notes supposed to be going?


A local filesystem directory with text files would be a good start.


Many options, should you decide to leave the Apple ecosystem


Applescript can control Notes.


At this point it works really well as an Evernote replacement, including automatic OCR and search of scanned files – and it titles the note from the top of the OCR text, which Evernote never got working.


Syncing is not as great as Evernote, for all the CloudKit prowess. I tried to import my 22k-ish notes from .enex dumps and somehow it managed to display different note counts on all my devices.


I recently switched to Apple Notes for the ecosystem experience. I like it.

That said, it *absolutely boggles my mind that there is no Markdown support*.


What do you mean by that? I write markdown in it


If it were easier to link from one note to another, that'd be my main note taking app.


Yeah, no, I am not giving my notes to lock-in devil.


Hardly that much of a lock-in issue with a SQLite DB with some gzipped protobufs in it.


I use and encourage Joplin instead of any privacy-breaching commercialized product such as Evernote, Notion, or OneNote.


I use the multimedia and handwriting touch capabilities of my tablets and phones. Since Joplin does not have handwriting support, nor image embeds, nor file embeds. This is not to single out that tool, since most cross-platform notetaking applications have the same problem or a similar permutation.

I choose to be stuck with OneNote 2010 because:

1. It has local files I can back up and sync, no cloud account or online requirement (also more privacy from cloud scanning)

1. It supports embedding files so I can back up the notebooks and not have to go find every file scattered all throughout my hard drive in order to make those up two

1. I can hand write and have text be searched or OCRed

1. It has embedding support for images and audio and have them be interactive (you can see the image, play the video, listen to the sound right in the program)

Writing such a program is a very difficult problem. If it were easy, we would be having all of these features and not just another round of markdown text file editors.

Xournal++ is considering moving to a file format that would enable you to embed files that would be zipped up as part of the file format, since it already supports handwriting recognition and has basic text and good enough image display, I continued to watch it to see if it can take over my onenote use cases, but it's just not there yet.


What do you mean by image/file embeds? You can embed images and files just fine.


I’m able to embed images into the Joplin app - not sure how long ago you tried?


I like Joplin, but it's a poor experience on iOS. Besides the material design theme feeling out of place, scrolling is weird/slow compared to other iOS apps, including webpages in Safari, and there's no gestures, so I have to reach all the way to the top to go back to the note list instead of swiping from the left of the screen like every other app I have installed.

Although it's not open source like Joplin, I've switched over to Obsidian.


Source for OneNote being privacy breaching. Highly doubt it that Microsoft has any reason to breach your notes privacy. From a legal standpoint smaller companies have less to lose by cutting corners. Example? Zoom had several breaches where people were able to activate the camera remotely.


I've been using Standard Notes[0] and haven't looked back.

[0] https://standardnotes.com/


Dropped Evernote years ago sadly. Kind of reminds me of how Sketch didn't keep up w/ Figma compared to other note taking tools. Been using Notion for awhile but that initial setup can be painful. Usually Mac Notes or Obsidian is my quick notes followed by Notion for the deep stuff.


I migrated to Apple Notes once I got an Apple Pencil and noticed simply touching it to the screen while off would instantly let me start taking a note like it was a piece of paper. There was no way to get that level of integration with Evernote, so I switched immediately.


For me it was the constant nagging to pay for it.

That alone wouldn't have been so bad, but even after I paid for their silver tier (or whatever it was called) they then started to nag me to upgrade to the gold one.

No respect for their paying customers.


I find this an interesting reflection of an org I used to work for. Originally successful product allowed to stagnate over the course of decades with all the energy being sucked up by new shiny bolt-ons while the core business need and core product is never re-imagined to fit in with modern industry trends.

On reflection it always looks kinda daft that this can end up happening but I think (at least in my case) its easy for orgs to lose sight of their product's failings which can be compacted by the need to always hype up their product in public and this bleeds into private and into strategy.


How would you design the org to avoid this? You basically need to disband the team once the product is done. How do game studios manage it?


They hire a bunch of people leading up to release, fire them, and start the cycle over on the next one. Same with the VFX industry: it's not unheard of for them to produce a record-breaking movie and shut down between then and the awards shows. I don't think most tech workers would tolerate it.


> How would you design the org to avoid this?

I don't know but it feels like a relatively common theme and perhaps there are factors that control its prevalence. I would tentatively suggest that refreshing decision making structures from time to time might help mitigate against complacency but you might also be rolling a dice if you're force-replacing to keep fresh.

Perhaps its more to do with how a business will diversify strategically without diversifying organisationally? I feel like there should be some form of conflict when resource is split from core product into diversification products (e.g. like Evernote food or Evernote market) and perhaps the absence of that conflict is a contributing factor to the speed at which the rot can set in.

Also maybe there's something to say about having a clear roadmap and never thinking the core product is done. Some of the most successful products I've seen seem to have some sort of force that is always seeking to iteratively improve it.


Although evernote is in the category of the lightest must-have app, it's an extremely bloated app. too bloated in terms of features. I really wonder what percentage of users use all the features.


Evernote always felt like a product that was wasting its potential. Years ago I approached them about doing a portable version for PortableApps.com, with us doing the portablization for free. They refused and said they were happy with their proprietary portable version that only worked within Ceedo (a closed source portable virtualization platform that was fee-based for most use cases). Ceedo never gained traction and was discontinued.


Am I the only one who still pays for and like Evernote? (:

I don’t love it, it’s too bloated for that. But it still works (if not optimally).

I could switch, but doing research to find an alternative and then migrate would take quite a lot of time, and time is always a constrained resource.


I paid for Evernote when it had the silver/mid tier, and it was about $35/yr. Then they got rid of that tier, and now it's $80/yr. for Personal. So I switched over to Joplin[1].

--

[1] https://joplinapp.org/


If you ask, there's still a $35 / year tier called Evernote Plus. I'm on it and that feels like a fair price however I'm not going to be renewing. I've been meaning to get off it ever since the Windows client turned into a slow, bloated mess and this year I'll probably finally do it.


Same, my subscription runs out in January, I will not be renewing after past year mess..


I pay for it, I use it every day, I love it and I can't find the time to switch. I used it for my personal stuff and to coordinate the work with my 3 people team. It's great, albeit slow. The Android app doesn't work well on my phone. Never syncs.


What got me hooked on Evernote was its web clipper. It did a great job of grabbing elements from webpages, retaining (or not!) their formatting. This made them easily searchable and nice to read, too. I used this to grab individual forum posts for things I cared about.

I would happily pay for a subscription because of the amount of legacy data I have in there, but $90/year seems silly, my usage dropped way off once they restricted the number of devices, and at this point there are OSS options that are about as good. I probably should hire someone of fiverr for $90 or less to export/import my data.


I really wanted to finally use Obsidian to start collecting possible DIY and art projects... and was unable to get thumbnails.

Along with useful (if slow) web clipping extensions, evernote is great for saving, tagging, and searching for visual information.


I stopped using evernote after their drastic UI change (which was universally loathed), and I got tired of it not supporting markdown or code snippets.

While I found the product useful for keeping tech notes, I was constantly getting tripped up by the formatting. It became clear to me this was aimed at journalist rather than software developers.

While I support journalist having a product that is a good fit for them, from a business perspective I think they were chasing a relatively poor demographic with a shrinking user base.

It's a shame though, it was a great product I was otherwise happy to pay for.


I never installed it, because there are too many other ways to make notes. They were solving a problem that was already solved, albeit imperfectly.

I can send an email to myself. If it's a person's info, I can put them in Contacts. Or I can have a Google Doc called "Notes" where I write stuff. All of those have interfaces I already know.

One can validly object that all of those methods have drawbacks. But they've worked well enough for me that I wasn't wishing for Evernote and one more thing to learn.


I was a paying user and they switched plans, removed me. Bloat, constant unwanted change killed it for me. I now use a mix of Notes, Joplin, Notion, Paper and Google Docs.


The main reason why I switched from Evernote to Notion like 5 years ago or so was because syncing 3 devices on Notion was free. I just checked the pricing page on Evernote and you still need to get the paid plan to sync more than 2 devices.

https://evernote.com/compare-plans

https://www.notion.so/pricing


They let the software become buggy and unreliable. It's that simple. In the meantime, other notetaking apps came along that were able to compete, and a lot of them are free. There is clearly still demand for this kind of software.

I don't think it mattered that Evernote was selling branded Moleskines and wallets -- that was a weird thing to do, but I have a hard time believing that sucked away all the resources from engineering for the core app.


Not seeing many mentions of Simplenote. Does anyone else find it sufficient (syncing, web-app, tags, search, *no-payment)?


Yes. It provides exactly what I need: text notes, reliably saved to the cloud, which are searchable. Being free ($) is a nice bonus but not required; being not-free (open source) a minor negative.


Evernote raised too much money. End of story.


You just can't make this shit up. Evernote was basically a no-service from the get-go. It was an app built around the fact that sooner or later they would force users to pay. Popular around that point in time. Slack, Miro and so on had similar plans. At least Slack kinda works without paying.


Seems to me it has the same issues IoT does: too many walled gardens, not enough open interop and standards.

At some point we'll just start recording our entire lives. Security, storage, indexing, access-from-anywhere, and autotagging will be the keys. Anyone working on that?


The CIA?


Business/Product managers don't know what "do one thing and do it well" means.


evernote was a feature not a product


In what way? PIMs seem to be a popular product category.


they also just come with your phone, so if all you do is "the same", you're just a feature, not a product, even if you package yourself as a product.

(and even if when you launched that was not the case, times change drastically on mobile. Evernote very quickly became a feature, not a product)


For it was the unnecessary feature bloat and the terrible performance made it painful to do what I want - write at the speed of my thoughts, write often and search often. It took me a few days to move thousands of my notes to bear but it was worth it.


Evernote absolutely did realize its potential. The problem is that they threw everything into the trash afterwards with their decisions.

It's what happens when you don't care about building a decent product.


Been building a tool[1] to replace my usage of Evernote. I agree that caring about the product and its vision is the only way to keep the quality and attention to detail afloat.


Missed the link! https://www.bleep.is




Dropbox was better. There was/is no need for Evernote to exist.


Office 365, Google Keep, iCloud notes is the answer.


And Obsidian for the privacy conscious


Tried Obsidian for couple of minutes, promptly deleted the app when I noticed I can't have special characters in the title of the note.


Obsidian is great for syncing my notes across several devices. It was the major challenge I've struggled with for several years before it.


Are you using the Obsidian subscription/cloud service, or have you made a system to sync directly, e.g., Windows <-> Android platforms?

If the latter, could you share your solution (I took a quick crack at it, but the link structure seems to require nontrivial management?)

TIA


I've used Obsidian Git.

It definnitely takes some set up to make it work, but once working, it is pretty reliable. It requires an occasional merge conflict resolution, and setting the right files to be ignored.

I love that it is just folder with markdown files.

https://github.com/denolehov/obsidian-git


I'm using SyncThing across Windows, Linux, and Android


OneDrive


[flagged]


tldr it's very hard to get people to pay for something they can live without.




Join us for AI Startup School this June 16-17 in San Francisco!

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: