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The thing is - what made Evernote great at some point - take a picture of anything and forget it doesn't work anymore. You can't trust Evernote to have searcha

The thing is - what made Evernote great at some point - take a picture of anything and forget it doesn't work anymore. You can't trust Evernote to have searchable archive anymore. Instead it's a convoluted app with lot of useless features. They lost their focus.

duxup 7y ago
I think a lot of the problem is the sort of hook that makes these apps great ... isn't often a sustainable thing or isn't enough to maintain user and/or investor expectations. There's a lot of gee whiz out there.
- acdha 7y ago
  > isn't enough to maintain user and/or investor expectations. I think the latter part is key: VC funding means people are pressured to chase huge returns and over-compensating staff (especially at the executive level) as if they’re a billion-dollar company. That frequently leads to neglecting the “little” things which would actually make it better for users — in the case of Evernote, I stopped using it because the sync was unreliable and the apps desperately needed a QA/UX team with veto authority. Tossing everything into Dropbox should not have — but almost always was — a better experience for me and I stopped using them around 2013.
lloydde 7y ago
This is still my workflow today on iPhone and macOS. Works as well as it ever has for me.
- hartator 7y ago
  Oh, yeah. You are able to snap a picture of a receipt and search for the amount and it will highlight the part of the picture with the amount? It was my workflow at the very beginning of Evernote. This was soon pay walled - breaking search if you were relying on it - and even when you pay highlights weren't working anymore. If it's working fine now, I might come back.
  - lloydde 7y ago
    It might be that I’m a paying customer. I get enough value out of iOS Scannable into Evernote with OCR to warrant the $35/year.
ryanfox 7y ago
I've been working on APSE[0], which does something similar. Everything's stored locally, so you'll never lose your archive. [0] https://apse.io https://apse.io

duxup 7y ago

I think a lot of the problem is the sort of hook that makes these apps great ... isn't often a sustainable thing or isn't enough to maintain user and/or investor expectations. There's a lot of gee whiz out there.

acdha 7y ago
> isn't enough to maintain user and/or investor expectations. I think the latter part is key: VC funding means people are pressured to chase huge returns and over-compensating staff (especially at the executive level) as if they’re a billion-dollar company. That frequently leads to neglecting the “little” things which would actually make it better for users — in the case of Evernote, I stopped using it because the sync was unreliable and the apps desperately needed a QA/UX team with veto authority. Tossing everything into Dropbox should not have — but almost always was — a better experience for me and I stopped using them around 2013.

lloydde 7y ago

This is still my workflow today on iPhone and macOS. Works as well as it ever has for me.

hartator 7y ago
Oh, yeah. You are able to snap a picture of a receipt and search for the amount and it will highlight the part of the picture with the amount? It was my workflow at the very beginning of Evernote. This was soon pay walled - breaking search if you were relying on it - and even when you pay highlights weren't working anymore. If it's working fine now, I might come back.
- lloydde 7y ago
  It might be that I’m a paying customer. I get enough value out of iOS Scannable into Evernote with OCR to warrant the $35/year.

ryanfox 7y ago

I've been working on APSE[0], which does something similar. Everything's stored locally, so you'll never lose your archive. [0] https://apse.io https://apse.io