I dumped Evernote when they restricted their free accounts to 2 devices. Ironically I'm now paying for Ulysses, money I might have give to Evernote had they not been so awful to early adopters.
They don’t need to be jealous. Their relative utilitarian take on the matter is what makes them so unique and powerful in the market.
Yes, I love markdown, and Evernote just provides a slightly more powerful, WYSIWYG version of it. I neither want “everything and the kitchen sink” vision of Notion, and desktop centric view of Obsidian.
Ulysses and Bear are Apple first systems, and while I use Apple mobile devices, my ecosystem is much more varied, and Evernote accommodates all, with feature parity.
They are good and understated. Hope that I won’t need to move out after that acquisition.
Man this was not my experience at all. Granted I dropped Evernote quite a while ago, but for years they kept adding a kitchen sink of features that I didn't care about, while regressing at the basics like syncing and merging text notes across multiple devices.
They were maybe first company I experienced that blew up a really solid app I liked after raising a truck load of VC money and trying to take over the world.
Not everything is meant to be a multi-billion dollar business and that’s ok!
They had a relatively good product around v5X series and I left because they just started to fragment and add more and more non-notetaking related things at the expense of the entire product stability and core functionality.
Similarly, I miss their presentation mode for the notes. It was extremely useful, and the output was very pretty, too.
However, after the CEO change and rebuild, they really found themselves. I’m a pro subscriber, and the value they add into my life is immeasurable.
I would prefer to pay for my storage (or host my own) and have apps use my cloud backend. Every app running cloud server to sync all sorts of things has become too much for me.
I still rock 1Password 7 and use iCloud sync. I’d pay for the app but it’s free. I pay for iCloud storage.
Anyway I might give there new apps a look.
People say "Installing your own servers is cool, why don't you do that?". I do that, but for small things. At work, I have a fleet of servers, and managing them is enough. After being able to play with cutting edge stuff, renting a VPS from DO and putting stuff on top of it is neither fun, nor satisfying.
Instead, I diligently select and use services, and offload maintenance of such systems to the provider. Of course I take my backups and take my precautions, but I don't want to manage every service I use.
I personally don't like subscription services mostly, but some subscriptions provide real services which I see worthy, and I happily pay for them. Evernote is one of them.
Personally, I started using Evernote seriously only a month ago after several years, and recently trying pretty much everything else (notion, obsidian, joplin, workflowy and 10s more..). So I don't have any of the baggage from whatever mistakes they made years ago.
It's been awesome. Very wide featureset like more than just markdown, web clipping, auto scanning & OCR, sketching support on iPad, tags and fully cross platform. I found every other application to fall short somewhere and just be too opinionated. Evernote is solid and powerful enough to support almost every usecase I have but not opinionated.
I think you can add Craft to that list.
Too bad, they all look nice, but I've completely left the Apple ecosystem.
If they don't have Android and Linux desktop apps, they don't really compete for the same market
Hopefully recent economic events will change the culture and more companies will actually factor in reality into their growth models.
How would it, and how would they?
The way I understand it, the growth model is pretty ultimately set in stone when a company takes VC money. It's a Faustian bargain - you get a big and cheap loan, at the price of aiming for "some fantasy growth", or dying in the attempt. Companies that want sustainable growth take loans from banks.
It's easy to get yourself as a founder into a situation where you're trading fundamentals for next-round narrative, and a lot of times that's that can be the deathknell.
The difference between those two values represents a gap that has to be closed before you're on steady ground, and the gap widens at a higher-than-normal rate because of the growth expectations of the VC money.
Anyway, that's what it looks like to this complete outsider. Companies full of very capable people, pushed to do desperate things, and to do those things quickly. And, like the churn of leveraged Wall Street finance, there are plenty of people who live for the froth of it all.
Such people are a dead weight on our society, sucking at education funds, not weighing the cost they have, and giving lessons to everyone.
Those guys will never understand how to provide a service that customers are willing to pay for.
One point of anecdata: I haven't heard of any of those.
How do you define success?
Keep in mind Evernote was created in 2000 and the web version was launched in 2008.
I doubt any of the stuff in your list will be around in 14 years.
Maybe Roam, Obsidian, Logseq would be better examples of booming apps note-takers jump ship to? But then, I think all of these apps are rather niche compared to Evernote.
I care far less about the feature set than I do getting the whatever written down and out of my head.
If you make we wait while you load a website's worth of js or phone home with surveillance data or whatever, I'm just going to delete you. I'd rather use a 1995-era Textedit or Notepad - they're instantly functional.
Just to make sure I maintain my curmudgeon's rep, I'll add - advertise AI and I'm also gone. I have zero need for assistance from a tripping robot to type in my work life.
https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/360052560314-Ins...
Evernote has ran my brain for 12 years but I can’t cope with new Electron app - no tabs?!
If you cancel an account that didn't pay them any money, what exactly did they lose?
I pay for todoist because I love using it and the free account doesn't have a must-have feature (reminders). I could dump them and find something else, but I get plenty of value for the money I spend with them.
That's true for normal companies. Startups operate by a different set of rules.
> If you cancel an account that didn't pay them any money, what exactly did they lose?
A user, and a potential source of future users.
For many startups, userbase growth matters much more than revenue, to the point they'll happily go negative on per-user profitability just to get more people on-board. Particularly those that aggressively pursue further funding ("actually making us profitable is something we'll consider after the next round") or an exit ("it'll be a problem for the sucker that buys us").
Yes, it is a source of a lot of pathology you see with today's software products, like products getting bloated with irrelevant pseudo-features ("oh shit, we can't actually make this sustainable; quick, let's try to extract all value we can from the userbase, and hopefully have something left after paying off the investors"), or getting acquired and shut down ("ha ha, we knew it was never going to be sustainable; we bought it to cheaply acquire talent and/or get you out of the way so you don't compete with our offering").
In every case, VCs and founders win, users lose.
Yup they did. Blew it when they didn't add 2FA. I emailed them repeatedly in the early years asking for them to add it citing risks of having all my information in a note taking application with poor security -> no replies. Then they got p0wned hard. Luckily I had my data out of their systems by then.
See screenshot of emails at https://twitter.com/GeoffreyHuntley/status/15930599365060894...
Thank God I happened to have my most important note open on my laptop, which was closed at the time. I opened it, shut down the wifi as quick as I could so it couldn't update, and copied that note into OneNote, which frankly works better anyway. I will never trust Evernote again.
> Same deal with Notion. They raised a $343M Series C on Oct 8, 2021 at $10 billion in valuation.
>These are all crazy numbers from a crazy time, and now the economic hangover is due.
https://world.hey.com/dhh/the-bubble-has-popped-for-unprofit...
I think we need to fast forward 10 more years to see how Notion is doing to make the comparison.
1) There is almost never a case for a total ground up rewrite of your core product. Just don’t do it.
2) Don’t abandon the users who made you successful in the first place. They’re the ones who advocate for you and get your foot in the door.
3) real time google docs style collaborative editing is table stakes for this software category. Build your V1 with it in mind. Otherwise you’ll have to do a rewrite later. See 1.
I think a better #3 would be: decide whether your audience is individuals or businesses, then build for that.
Any recommendations for good methods or good open source implementations of this that can be mined for ideas?
I want to be able to just start typing, on my phone. Instead, I have to wait for it to sync. If I am in a place with bad reception, that will take a while. It lags and freezes, all in order to support collaboration that I do not want.
I want to add pictures. I want to add links to other notes. I pay for a subscription to get bullet proof cloud backup. Sometimes I want to share notes. I don’t want to collaboratively edit my personal notes with my private thoughts and journal entries.
Evernote stopped focusing on that.
I might switch over to Muse. It was designed to be local first and uses cdrt for sync.
People that want a collaborative Docs app already have Google Docs. Evernote is mostly a "digital cabinet". It's where notes and documents go to die (in a good way).
Unfortunately, it's hard to sell to individuals compared to businesses, and so that's where their focus went once they had VC money driving the ship.
Collaborative editing makes sense for business users (taking meeting notes) and not much for individuals. That said, the tech that enables collaborative editing is kinda the same that allows solid sync and picking up your note taking session on a different device seconds after you put down another, which is something individuals do benefit from.
I like being able to go between my laptop and desktop very fast. Currently with Obsidian and using git for sync it kinda sucks a bit as if I am not careful I get merge conflicts.
We regularly collaborate on this stuff and for our intents and purposes, apple notes provides all we need
I've espoused this before, but I've come around to moderating my take on this.
"Almost never" is an exaggeration. I agree that they "almost never" work, but that's not the same as there being no case (there's a difference between "should not have done" and "should have done differently".
After many years of seeing both play out (rewrites and decided-not-to-rewrites) I'd edit this adage to: "there is almost never a case to rewrite yourself" (for the individual) or "there is almost never a case to get the same team to rewrite" (for management).
I'm not saying that engineers can't learn from their own mistakes but if you wrote the software & you think it needs a scratch rewrite rather than a refactor, you're unlikely to have learnt enough within that gap of time to make the rewrite significantly better than a refactor.
The other reason for failure outside of the original architect repeating their same mistakes 2nd time around is outsourcing the rewrite. Wholesale outsourcing is an unbelievably inefficient & failure-prone way to build in-house software.
Relentless Refactoring replaces the ship piece by piece while it's under way. If you are effective at it, you can effectively (both definitions) rewrite the entire app with few people being any the wiser.
If you are not good at decomposing a problem into digestible, coherent steps, then you are also lousy at Relentless Refactoring. If you can't decompose the problem, your top-down rewrite is statistically guaranteed to fail. Someone somewhere will get lucky, accidentally beating 1:4 odds over and over for 50 failure points, but that person will probably not be you.
The people who can Relentlessly Refactor don't need to ask for a top-down rewrite. They just get down to doing it. Therefore most of the people who ask for one are incapable of taking advantage of such permission.
Ultimately, the only people who ask for a top-down rewrite are the people who don't deserve it. They believe in do-overs instead of doing the hard work of removing obstacles. They believe in the Second System (without the attendant Syndrome), not in observing and adapting to new information as it becomes available. They have, in essence, trained themselves to continue to misbehave in the face of new wisdom. They will repeat that behavior during the rewrite.
There is an important caveat here - sometimes the original is rough not because you didn't know how to do it better, but because you were emphasizing speed and flexibility e.g. very early stage startup and you don't really understand the product here.
[see also, ship the prototype problem]
1. Don't write code that's such a spaghetti mess in the first place that you feel the need to throw your hands up and say "nothing can be done except a rewrite".
2. If you do need to do a major rewrite, make sure you have the ability to staff two teams - one doing the rewrite and another maintaining and adding new features to the existing product.
3. Kinda related to number one, but if you have well-organized code to begin with I find it's much easier to do a major rewrite in "sections" (though there are obviously difficulties with this approach).
I think that's different from a user facing rewrite. I suspect while Google did its infrastructure rewrites, users didn't notice a difference. Additionally, Google probably had the resources to continue delivering features to users while the infrastructure was being developed.
The problem with a front end rewrite is (a) things might break and users will notice, and (b) it's hard to deliver new features to users while the front end app itself is being rewritten.
I guess my point is that there are right ways and wrong ways to do ground-up rewrites, and the fact that a lot of people do them the wrong way shouldn't mean the lesson should be to never do them.
It was not that you couldn't rewrite part of the product here and there over time, and end up with something that is only the same as the original product in the way the greek ship was.
5. If you're releasing a broken product missing core features, don't take many YEARS after release to un-brake your product and build some of the missing features again.
We started with OT [1] in mind for V1 of Taskade [2] with the intention to make our editor collaborative, but it was still a bumpy road before we were able to iterate on the product and speed up our dev cycle,. It continues to be a challenge to support the various use cases and customers, as improvements for offline editing, cross-device syncing, and recovery never ends.
This problem isn't fully solved and there are no perfect out of box solutions.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_transformation
It's been what? 3 years since they released their javascript app, and they still didn't rewrite some important old features. Just last week we got back the option to start writing a note in the title instead of the body.
3 years!
I could write an entire Evernote competitor from scratch in 3 years, as a single developer (as a javascript app, not as multiple native apps).
And they STILL don't have reliable note-synching.
It took them too long, and their app is too crappy. But a GOOD rewrite would have worked just fine.
You need to worry about deciding what functionality to preserve, what to change, and what to throw away. Most rebuilds either fail because they skip this step and the result is inadequate for the job, or they do this step and get bogged down in the minutiae of locking down requirements, digging into edge cases, and stakeholder management.
(e.g. when simultaneously editing, text will randomly disappear from one or both writers)
I adopted Evernote for its ability to synchronize my checklists and notes across all devices. Collaborating with others was not an initial feature IIRC (?)
Personally I think the best thing the new owners could do would be to dig up the pre-EN10 codebase, get it compiling again, and make that available. I would resubscribe in a heartbeat.
My one gripe with Notes is that the search function really isn't all that great. Maybe I need to force it to reindex or something. I've found many cases where it doesn't find a note by a word that I know it contains. I really don't get why it seems that nearly all search functions are terrible in any given app. It would be nice if Apple improved the search for Notes, and it shouldn't be that hard to do given that it's just using SQLite under the hood.
Not to mention that it avoids me onboarding to some unprofitable note taking tool that will languish until it gets stripped for parts.
There was a midtwit meme about productivity hackers vs "I just use apple notes" guys like this too haha.
edit: HN won't let me reply so...
That sure is a lot of trouble just to grab a copy of my notes. This is something I do often enough that I don't want to have to go through two MFA prompts, and then another when the process is done. Not acceptable.
"Make them use it on iCloud.com" is a non-starter, I don't wanna inflict a shitty web-app on them after fleeing EN mostly because it turned into a shitty web-app crammed into an app container.
The creators of the street angel graphic novel series said all of their ideas are in a google drive folder.
I'm not a fan of Microsoft, either. I've never had to swap Word documents around so that's not in my lie at all.
Evernote was on my computer, and on my phone; it's where I'd note down an idea when I had it, and since it was there I may as well just expand on it in there. When I'm doing solo comics then most of my notes in EN were collections of vague outlines, dialogue fragments, and photographs of scribbly sketchbook pages; actual writing mostly happened in Illustrator. It was easy to expand that to have a script sitting there in EN, since we were both already used to using it. Plus since EN is about keeping notebooks rather than files it's pretty nice to just have one place that holds all the various words and pictures related to getting from "some ideas we've kicked around" to "a script that I can turn into a bunch of Illustrator files on my hard drive".
This is similar to how there are a lot of programmers who do everything in Emacs. You're already there all the time, and it may not be perfectly built for this, but you can do most of what you need in it, so why not?
If you want to be totally anal about doing it The Traditional Industry Way then you can use a complex word processor template adapted from screenwriting templates and deal with rigid page counts. If you are not working as part of an assembly line with distinct separations between Writers and Editors and Pencillers and Inkers and Colorists and Letterers then your script can a pretty casual thing with simple formatting, and Evernote can handle that just fine. Or at least it could before v10 threw all performance in the toilet for that shitty Electron rewrite.
Lately I have been vaguely fiddling with using Scrivener for roughing out scripts of short pieces, and really need to get my partner on this long-brewing GN still kinda trapped in Evernote to give it a shot. If we can get a decent sync pathway to bring the .scriv files between our disparate devices then maybe my dusty Evernote notebook exports will turn into a handful of Scrivener projects, along with the scattered notes in Joplin and Apple Notes that have happened since I finally said "fuck this abusive relationship with New Evernote".
Scriviner has no collaborative features and IMHO you are making things unreasonably difficult for yourself by using the wrong tools for the job.
I've kept using Evernote "legacy" (or whatever its called, the pre electron version ) without upgrading to v10 so I don't even understand why you've created this problem for yourself if you still like Evernote.
* must be a native app, not a shitty web app
* must be able to run on my Mac & iThings as well as my collaborator's Windows & Android phone
* must be able to collaborate with other people
* must be able to ingest a decade of Evernote gracefully
* that includes attached images and PDFs, I make comics
* must deal with actual rich text, markdown is nice for commenting on the internet but notes need more
I don't think Simplenote really handles file attachments, so it'd be a complete no go.
1. Be accessible an up to date 2. Easily searchable, and to do so quickly 3. In the rare case that I need to take a note, it is best if I can do so easily and have those go back to my computer quickly and painlessly so I can do what needs doing to get that into the system better.
Org-mode simply does not do this well in any of my experience with it. It's fine if all you're doing is taking notes on a computer, but as soon as you add a mobile device to the mix, it goes belly up for me.
“let’s talk about Bending Spoons’ business model. The basic concept is very simple:
- Find a solid app that someone else built and buy it from them (see Splice (acquired from GoPro) and 30 Day Fitness)
- Optimize the monetization of said app (by implementing from scratch or fine-tuning existing subscriptions), thereby driving higher lifetime value (LTV)
- Take that higher LTV and use it to bid on expensive ad inventory (on Google, Facebook, Apple Search) where you can acquire more users (aka drive more downloads) - i.e. leverage performance marketing for growth
- Convert those new downloads to paying users
- Massively ramp revenues and cash flow by combining the new users + the better monetization
- Use the new cash flow - plus the debt from those lovely Italian banks - to fund the next acquisition
- Lather, rinse, repeat
There is absolutely nothing wrong with this business model. What differentiates Bending Spoons, though, is how they do it.
Remini - Bending Spoons’ new app that the press is gushing over - is $10 a WEEK. And Splice, the app that started it all? That’ll set you back a cool $5/week.
Does anyone really think it’s appropriate to pay $10 a week for a photo editing app?”
https://open.substack.com/pub/impassionedmoderate/p/ryan-rey...
What super users of editing products do you know that only stay 10 weeks?
None. What’s actually happening is Bending Spoons is exploiting the App Store’s ease of payment and dark patterns to trick unsuspecting users into enrolling in a super high priced subscription without their knowledge.
It’s the worst of the post-VC models. Seems like they have been positioning for this for a while.
Generally I’m of the opinion that consumers are responsible for their own choices; but Apple has allowed bad actors to exploit the availability of weekly subscriptions and prey on suspecting users.
Paxys. You probably don't have a clear idea of what kind apps he was referring to. There are no power users in this case.
“There is absolutely nothing wrong with this business model… What differentiates Bending Spoons, though, is how they do it.
Remini - Bending Spoons’ new app that the press is gushing over - is $10 a WEEK. And Splice, the app that started it all? That’ll set you back a cool $5/week.”
In short, they buy apps, add aggressive and practically exploitative monetization, and ride the revenue stream until it dries up.
And what's with the snark about Italian banks?
> Italian app developer Bending Spoons has raised more than 340 million euros ($327 million) from investors including Hollywood actor Ryan Reynolds and Kerry Trainor, the former CEO of video streaming platform Vimeo.
> Bending Spoons, whose apps include popular video editing tool Splice and Remini, an image editor based on artificial intelligence technology, said the money could be used for acquisitions.
> A source close to the company said former Google Executive Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt was among the investors. Other backers included Italian banks Intesa Sanpaolo and Banco BPM.
Prior to acquisition, one could reasonably expect Evernote not to announce sudden, shocking price changes, because they were trying to build a long-term brand. Now, suddenly, that's not the case.
This is made worse when the app doesn't do a good job of letting you export your data in the first place.
I will never accept that selling wallpaper apps or something with the same level of complexity for hundred of dollars every year is an acceptable business model.
Apparently yes, otherwise it would have just been a failed experiment and revert back to $X/month
Even if they charged $100/week I don't see how it makes them a bad actor. If the pricing/cancellation policies are deceptive then sure, but that is irrelevant to the price.
I’ve honestly lost hope in Evernote and just kept using it out of laziness to migrate, but I don’t like what the future holds.
I'd prefer flat MD files and a fairly decent GUI. Joplin has zero hold on me and this is a great thing.
I fired up EN at one point recently. Wanted to add a note in a certain category and it took me like 20 seconds to get to the point where I can type in the actual note text. It wasn't even connected to the internet and still the app was slow. 5-10 second pauses for something that should be done in a millisecond. Useless popups.
WTF were they thinking?
I mean, I know exactly what happened. Everyone who cared about having a good app has left the company by this point.
Anyways, I really like Joplin. Android app works fine. Desktop app works fine. It even has a TUI mode. Server side for self-hosting (webdav) was pretty straightforward to set up.
I use swiftscan because I've been using it a long time (same reason you use evernote) but the Notes scanner is pretty effective if Notes works for you.
I guess I could just try it out with a subsection of notes.
It took me a while to figure out an alternative for this because so many of the note tools I had seen were focused on just written notes and not the PDF file use case.
I tried self-hosting Paperless, but that seemed like a lot of work too. When we're talking about my document archive here it's a lot of important files and I don't want to be my own SRE just to save myself $100 or so a year.
The best I have now is I upgraded my scanner to a new Fujitsu that OCRs and pushes the files into Dropbox, and paid Dropbox plans have full text search.
I use my ScanSnap with OCR turned on and haven't had any problems, but I'm always looking for what will replace it when it finally died (still going strong at about 10 years or so, I think!).
https://www.fujitsu.com/global/products/computing/peripheral...
I had been using the S1300M before that, which had held up since 2010 for me.
Product development stalled a long time ago though. I do hope this thing stays in the air, cause I got a lot of notes in there.
However, their constant UI changes were maddening. The breaking point for me, which resulted in me now using several different competitors until I settle on one, was they decided that your cursor should start in the body for a new note instead of in the title field. I get that searching is supposed to replace every other single form of organization, but note titles are important in their interface, and actually really vital when searching! They got way out over their skis, discouraging you from adding titles when their own UI makes it a nightmare to have a lot of untitled notes. And it really was an effective nudge — after the change I struggled to consistently add titles even though titles are important for my workflow. I struggled between having a mess of untitled notes or applying constant discipline to fight the nudge, and I finally gave up.
That was just the straw that broke the camel's back. There were so many other fiddly UI changes that constantly forced me to learn new habits. I would gladly pay $30 per month (not kidding) just to have a version of Evernote frozen in time. I remember loving it for years starting around 2012 or so, then a few years of horrible quality problems that I wouldn't want to revisit, and then it was fine except for constant annoying changes.
I'll be paying my subscription until I settle on a replacement and figure out a workable export/import process to transition my notes to it (which I expect to be a struggle, based on the tools I've tried.)
Do I have a loyalty club membership at that one hotel I stayed in halfway around the world 15 years ago, when I had a different email address? Evernote is the only place I can find out.
As soon as there’s a dead simple migration path to OneNote, I’ll have $50/year more spending money.
Edit: Apparently he posted this on HN 8 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30521545
I ended up moving over to Obsidian, and while I am not entirely happy with it, it's at least better than what Evernote has become.
I'm being so picky because I used Evernote for ten years and could conceivably use my next choice even longer. I can't believe I used Evernote for over a decade and used it to create thousands of notes. What a shame they destroyed it.
Curious, would you have been willing to become an investor in Evernote to avoid this acquisition? And if so, what order of magnitude? I'm curious why they didn't just do a crowdfunding campaign.
Except one: speed. Evernote is dog slow, whereas Apple Notes is fast. This is what killed my reason for subscribing to Evernote. Though it has far fewer features, I can press CMD+N and start jotting down my ideas/things I have to remember.
I have no objection to paying for good tools, but they are tools and must support me in what I am trying to accomplish.
Then Evernote proceeded to cease all feature development on the main app. They where releasing food apps while the main product grew stale. Instead of making Evernote incredibly powerful, they didn't touch it and people left any of the dozen competitors that exist today.
I've been using Evernote for a while now, and I just don't get the pace of their development. Their changes seem almost incremental and take forever.
Who the heck are Bending Spoons?
As an aside, their site is also aggravatingly self-absorbed, at least as it seems to me. Copy about how "we create our own cutting-edge technologies" and "Impossible. Maybe." just hurts to read when they're talking about a 30 day fitness app.
Statements like "Are you ready to come join us in the Spooniverse? We saved you a seat." also make it sound a little like it's a cult.
With that being said, their goals seem admirable and they are scoring pretty well on some employee satisfaction inquiries, so it's perfectly possible that they are actually living up to their ambitions. A fitness app might not seem like a lot, but they may just be working their way up to something bigger.
They never really tried to re-engage me either, and have just continued on since then with a bare bones series of notes while I keep the critical stuff elsewhere.
Shame evernote was the first killer 'cloud native' app for me, the thing I couldn't do without once I had it.
Please someone release me from this foul daemon by suggesting an alternative with this key feature.
There must be a good reason for why its taken so long, they've created a solid app so it doesn't make sense that they dropped the ball on the web version.
It’s fair enough if they want to focus on the Apple ecosystem but they let people think they were developing the web version for a while.
It seems like businesses like this should give fair warning to their users before transactions like this occur to make sure they don't have a better option than shutting down or selling out.
Evernote has tens of millions of paying users. It doesn't seem too far-fetched to believe that each user would fork over on average $50 (as an investment, presumably) to just freeze product development, fix bugs, and improve performance.
Put another way, I'm pretty sure Evernote could have raised hundreds of millions from their user base.
Why not try that approach? Are there regulatory issues that make it unfeasible?
I agree it isn't ideal, but as a user, it's far better than allowing Evernote to get sold to someone whose goal is to raise prices and squeeze profits. Many Evernote users like me are in a situation where the switchover cost is several orders of magnitude larger than $50. So, the dynamics might look more like 1% of the user base investing $5000 each.
Bear should have been ported to Android and Windows/Linux(browser version?) years ago.
> And enterprises of great pith and moment, > With this regard, their currents turn awry, > And lose the name of action.
Hamlet, William Shakespeare
I was employee #3 at original Evernote, when we were just implementing that brilliant idea.
Here is the photo of pretty much precise moment when Evernote was born: https://notes.sciter.com/2017/09/11/motivation-and-a-bit-of-...
What a memory, I really miss that atmosphere ...
It used to just get out of the way and let me take notes in my browser with the comfort of knowing I could get them from anywhere later.
Now it's this horrible, janky app that tries to do too many things, shoves constant feature popups in my face, and isn't very good for taking notes.
I used it constantly 10 years ago. I don't use it at all today. I just loaded it up again to see if I'm missing anything -
It takes nearly 10 seconds to load on a developer machine on a gigabit internet connection.
It immediately asks for permission to send me popups
It tries to show me 7 different features on the home screen (notes/scratchpad/pinned notes/recently captured/notebooks/tags/shortcuts) instead of just fucking showing me my last note.
It takes multiple clicks to start a new note every time.
---
Basically - it's now worse than a physical notepad in basically every way.
* Multiple tags per note
* OCR/search on attachments
* Web clipping (full page and individual sections)
* Mail to Evernote (with attachments)
* Decent WYSIWYG
* Good scanning support ("scannable" app)
It did have its problems and did lose 3 or 4 notes due to syncing issues but today's web version is usable and the product seems stable now. I agree that the acquisition is probably not good news. So, if anyone knows of a replacement with these features, pls reply!
- Sleek UX/UI. It does not overoptimize there either. Just the right amount of perfect for me.
- Importantly, cross-platform: as someone on Android and Mac, it works seamlessly
- $24.99 Lifetime pricing. No subscription BS.
- Developers pay close attention to user feedback but they're also not dumping features there left, right, and center. Most updates are targeted at making this faster than bigger. (It is already fast enough)
- No "Social/collaborative" BS. I want my notes to be mine.
- Export capability to PDF, HTML etc.
Disclaimer: No, I have no affiliation with the product. Just a super-happy user who'd like to recommend this to everyone. I have tried many note-taking apps out there but this one really hits it out of the park
EDIT: I was able to export my main "Evernote" notebook into a 1.8GB .enex file, and have started importing all the notes into UpNote. It works well so far! I really like the Markdown editor, that's already a lot more comfortable to use. I will probably switch to this.
It's just a bit strange that importing notes from Evernote is a premium feature, so you can't even try it out properly before paying. There should at least be a free trial.
Looks quite flexible. Exports, iCloud Sync, Deopbox, can also have notes as a Git repo.
But big drawback — Apple ecosystem only. But since it syncs to things other than iOS I think other apps can be used on other platform.
Dev has made it clear he will not be able to develop for other platforms.
I have not used it a lot (still on Simplenote and exploring). It looks good and it’s open source so I thought one could check it out.
Then vast amounts of scrolling down that giant page of marketing fluff looking for anything resembling useful information. Then the tab got closed as "Meh. Not for me then."
Why must they make these pages pretend to be some sort of glossy coffee table magazine?
Employee shares are (apparently) being priced next to nothing. My understanding while working there was that if the company sold for $300m or less, we’d get nothing. So, $340m sounds about right. It’s a fire sale.
https://www.corriere.it/tecnologia/20_aprile_22/luca-ferrari...
I think part of the struggle here is that no two people can agree on what ailed them.
From lack of innovation for years, to an incomprehensibly bad rich text editor interface that broke all established conventions, to 0-60 from "zero monetization" to "monetize every time you even think about clicking a button", to a ground-up rewrite that put it on part with it's counterparts from 2012, etc.
It's almost like it's failure was overdetermined.
Fascinating case study in a journey from ubiquity to obscurity.
not sure if that is autocorrect, or a joke, or autocorrect making a pun from "end of an era" with "error" given the sentiment.
either way, it's funny!
[0] https://walkingredwoodcity.com/?s=Evernote&submit=Search
Reminders has been perpetually flakey, particularly around new OS releases and if your iPhone/Watch/iPad/Mac are in different states of latest vs non-latest OS.
I had been holding on to EN as there is no app that does quite what it does quite as well. I liked being able to mix notes, to-dos, captured images, web content, etc, and organize it into folders. The fact that they are working towards a Linux client helped, as well.
What I didn't like was their prioritizing of features that were aimed at enterprise customers at the expense of everything else. The world didn't really need another collaborative text editor for teams with chat, and I never saw EN being anyone's choice for that.
It is a shame. Seems like yet another company that could have made a nice living for its employees by servicing their natural customer base but was instead destroyed by the ambitions imposed on them by their investors.
I live in a high inflation country and right now I'm paying the equivalent of 0.75usd/year.
There's has been several moments through the years that I planned to at least backup my notes to another service but thought: I am paying, so surely I won't lose my notes?
Now evernote is being bought. I need to migrate my data out. Evernote was a great company early on. Not sure why they lost the race. But I think it has something to do with task managers, like trello, and heavy data collectors like database in notion.
Nothing sophisticated for sure, but a little windows macro and I can make a new note for something with a timestamp sorted the way I want with one keystroke
plain text is underrated though I think they are more sophisticated plain text options now but I don't feel like importing my database elsewhere when my current solution works pretty well
further, for super ad hoc stuff, I just need notepad++ open with 100+ tabs using pleasantly little memory...
At the time I assumed they'd actually gone under, but now I realise that that would have been the "there is no spoon" scenario.
Someone has asked about it in Google Play Help and got no meaningful answer https://support.google.com/googleplay/thread/159064766/help-...
Why Evernote failed to realize its potential (2021) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33626047 - Nov 2022 (143 comments)
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-evernotes-phil-libin-pla...
No idea if they've since added in more reasonable export features, but it was a dealbreaker for me (a big plain-text fan).
I used to use Evernote extensively, mainly for web clipping, but also filing things away.
Nowadays I rarely use anything except the mobile apps, or the clipping browser plugins, but Evernote is essential to me for permanent filing which I can search at any time. I would be lost without it and am willing to keep paying for it. I'm sure other people want it for note keeping and I have no idea how well that works. What does work is their document/photo scanning app, which I use regularly.
A long time ago, the founder made much of the fact that my data was fully portable and provided the api details to enable me to export it out of Evernote completely. I think this is very important, especially for a company that may be seen as less viable for a while. I was disappointed, the other day, that I could no longer use Evernote's published query language to search using a boolean query. This may well be because the facility is now a pay-extra feature. I have to say that adding on little features and then asking users to pay for them is the worst thing when I am already a premium user! Please stop doing this.
That's my two penn'orth.
I’m one of those whale customers that SaaS companies love because I’m fairly price insensitive and I often don’t have tons of usage or support needs. For a solid 5 or 6 years, I’d been giving Evernote $50 a year, even though I mostly used other services. But raising the price 40% (and neutering the free plan that was the only reason they had as many users as they did) was enough that even I took the time to cancel.
It’s a sad end to what was at one time such a good (if significantly overvalued) product, but the writing has been on the wall for 6 years.
OneNote is more than good enough for most people who want an Evernote sort of note system and for people who are more particular and want to pay, the new wave of single brain apps is just far, far better.
When Evernote tried expanding into food and all these other areas, that was a sign things were getting out of control.
I used to be mad about what happened to Skitch, but CleanShot has finally filled that void from me from back before Evernote neutered and abandoned it.
That sucks.
I’ll never know whether it was any good, because it annoyed me from the word go.
If you’re a cool, tech-crowd oriented tool, for god’s sake don’t let Samsung install you as a ‘system’ app…
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bending-spoons-raises-340-mil...
So fund-to-acquire?
They insisted on this to emphasize privacy (fair enough), but never stopped to consider 1. If their customers even cared 2. How they would learn how the product they were building was actually used.
The result is a note app that tries to do everything good, so it does nothing well.
To this day, the one thing I truly truly miss from Evernote was the web archive. They had the best at the time, and I have yet to see it matched.
So, it seems from the thread that I should give it a try again?
Been using Notion for a few years but I prefer the tree view and there's not many note apps that work well with this method.
Right now, it's more of Bear app replacement than an Evernote replacement, but I feel like they're heading in the right direction.
b) Obsidian [1] simplified the zettelkasten [2], that anyone must give it a chance. Just like you must give Vim.
1. https://obsidian.md/
2. https://zettelkasten.de/posts/overview/