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Evernote. Evernote used to be a crucial component of my life. Quietly synced my notes between my computer and my phone. Let me collaborate with my husband on a

Evernote. Evernote used to be a crucial component of my life. Quietly synced my notes between my computer and my phone. Let me collaborate with my husband on a few things. Then they rewrote it from the ground up as a sluggish piece of Electron crap. Added a bunch of new stuff that sure looks pretty but gets in the way of the core function of “taking out your phone and scribbling down an idea before it vanishes”. I could roll back to the not-shitty version on my Mac but every time I pull out my phone it takes multiple seconds to load, then multiple seconds to leave the “Home” screen to search through my notes, or for the editor to be ready to use to write a new note. I still haven’t found a replacement and I really need to. (Requirements, before you suggest your favorite note app: needs Mac, Windows, iOS, Android clients; must not be a goddamn web view crammed awkwardly into an app; needs to let me access local copies of my notes when the internet is down; needs to let me share some notes with my husband. “Actually having a nice UI for handling sync conflicts” would be nice too, EN always did the bare minimum of “now you have two copies with a note about sync conflicts on one of them”.) Right now I am kind of thinking of spending a week trying to press Scrivener plus an external sync service (Dropbox, etc) into service, since their clients are all Very Native, and one of the things we actually use EN for is a writing project...

pantulis 5y ago
On the other hand, evernote had painted itself in the corner with the plethora of native apps without a common codebase: new features (even the crappy “enterprise” ones) had stopped coming. Now Evernote is releasing new features every couple of months and while it still not feature complete when compared with the old iOS or Mac native apps at least it has chance to compete. I switched to DEVONthink earlier this year but keep my Evernote account just to see how things are going. I want them to succeed, the key is wether the churn of existing users can be offset by new users.
- nicoburns 5y ago
  What makes you think it couldn't compete with the solid implementation it had without adding new features?
  - pantulis 5y ago
    This is a great question. My point of view is if you can't deliver new features you become the incumbent and new player will replicate those features with lower cost or better execution. Also, the ball is moving: newer apps are heavy on features like backlinking that could not be delivered with the glacial release cycles of the "good old Evernote". I understand that EN is still the best on being the ultimate digital repository, but as a "digital brain" the market has slightly moved towards the PKM space (see Obsidian, Notion, and so on).
- azalemeth 5y ago
  I don't want new features. I do want cross platform, native apps (Linux, MacOS and Android for me). I've yet to find a good solution that "just works".
  - largbae 5y ago
    I just came to this thread and searched for Evernote specifically to upvote or add this. Evernote evolved from a perfect extension of my private memory available rapidly and anywhere I needed it into a bloated collaboration suite. I would be surprised if any customer asked for it. I canceled the service but will gladly pay twice as much for an Evernote Classic that gets back to basics and does those well.
    - pantulis 5y ago
      Well the "collaboration suite" features are now slowly being phased out or at least dont receive that much attention. Their new calendar integration and task management features are small steps but I think they are intriguing at least.
- reilly3000 5y ago
  I think the downsides associated with having a common codebase are grossly underestimated. It inevitably leads to compromises for which a native UX would have been superior. Speed, layouts, native idioms, and continuity come to mind. Sure it’s a lot to ask for a truly native Android app to keep parity with a truly native Mac desktop app, but compared with a React Native codebase, the experience is sublime and the fussy platform shims aren’t needed.
  - bsder 5y ago
    > I think the downsides associated with having a common codebase are grossly underestimated. I don't. Event loops, for example, work completely differently on macOS, iOS, Android, Windows and the Web. You will abstract across them eventually and you will get that abstraction wrong unless you are a programming god--at which point you might as well just use a cross-platform system to start. The cross-platform guys have big companies with lots of money and programmers solving problems that you haven't even dreamed of. If you're releasing on multiple platforms, you will not win.
    - pantulis 5y ago
      I guess you need to decide what indicator are you trying to optimize: user experience vs cost effectiveness. Evernote's CEO decided for the latter and I believe he's right betting the company on the Electron based clients. This is also understandably infuriating existing users as they lose the biggest feature that was the native feeling of EN. Other features are being slowly added along with some new ones that are arguably useful, but snappiness will not come back.
chriskrycho 5y ago
You might try Obsidian. I think it checks all of those boxes except “web view”: it’s an Electron app, but like VS Code it shows that web tech doesn’t have to be slow (it just nearly always is). They just shipped the native client and it’s not perfect but it’s surprisingly good.
- egypturnash 5y ago
  It also doesn't seem to have any collaboration features?
noveltyaccount 5y ago
I think OneNote ticks all your requirement boxes.
- deepspace 5y ago
  Second OneNote. I switched to it back when they broke Evernote. It does not do everything as well as the old Evernote, but it is STABLE. Very few new features in the past 10 years, and that is a GOOD thing.
- egypturnash 5y ago
  Is there a way to get rid of that thing where you have to manually drag out text boxes to type in? I really hated that, if I want freeform page layout I’ll use an actual notebook or Illustrator.
  - noveltyaccount 5y ago
    I don't think there's any way to turn it off but I'm like you. I only ever use the default text area and never place free-form. So I just ignore the feature :)
ddon 5y ago
Switched from Evernote to Joplin, pretty happy, and since it is open source, it evolves and gets better all the time.
- mattbk1 5y ago
  I would add that Joplin is great because it's plain text. People keep trying to shove OneNote at us at work and all I want is one text box per note, that doesn't move around when I try to edit it.
- tucosan 5y ago
  Once you start using Joplin for a longer period, you start noticing bad UX issues. Encrypted sync is causing many people issues with multiple keys being generated after adding a mobile sync target. There is no easy way to remove superfluous keys from Joplin, once they have been created and synced across clients. The cli UX is weird and doesn't follow Unix best practices. The main developer made some weird design choices and some important features haven't been implemented for years now.
- egypturnash 5y ago
  Looks like a piece of Electron webshit, which I am loathe to touch, but on the other hand IT HAS A DIFF VIEW PLUGIN TO HELP WITH CONFLICTING CHANGES OMFG :)
simonw 5y ago
The only feature I want from Evernote is the one they fail to deliver: if I know I have a note about something, and I search for that note in the Evernote mobile app, I want it to find and display that note. Instead, about half the time it returns an error screen that says (paraphrasing) "That note can not be displayed right now, try again later" I do not want to look at my note later. You have one job: show me my notes! (I have nearly 3,000 notes in Evernote spanning back over more than a decode, so my hunch is that I'm tripping some edge-cases that most of their testing fails to cover)
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  This is literally why I'm still not buying the "searching is better than organizing" line that so many companies, including Google, try to push down our throats. Searching is only better than organizing if searches are exhaustive, and I can trust that they are exhaustive. My experience with variety of products, including Evernote, Google Drive and GMail, tells me I can't trust that. I had plenty of instances when I searched for a thing I knew I have stored, and search returned nothing. It's because of this why organizing is still better than searching - if you're able to sort your stuff into some hierarchy ("groups", "folders") and then be able to browse that hierarchy, you can do a fully exhaustive check manually, by just going over everything.
  - lucb1e 5y ago
    > I'm still not buying the "searching is better than organizing" line From what I see around me, though, most people just do not have any digital organizing skills whatsoever. It's honestly exceptional that I meet someone who has files going back more than five years and those files are not on their desktop in a "previous computer" directory; and even that category of people includes only those with tech friends that helped them move the data over and set the new system up. I don't disagree with you, but we might just be the minority.
    - eloisius 5y ago
      I agree with GP, and I'll pat myself on the back for having pretty damn well organize data going back over ten years, which has come with me over four computers. I still want powerful search on top of that, but I'm usually much more efficient at locating my own data than Spotlight is. Back when I had an MP3 collection, it was the same. I had a well-organized folder structure and it felt easier manage than Spotify. I recognize that us power users are a minority, but I really wish there was a shop out there that would build software for us instead of everyone converging towards "user-friendly."
the_lonely_road 5y ago
I never had any issue with Scriviner syncing between my windows machine and my iPhone using Dropbox. Took like 5 minutes to finagle into working. The setup instructions were top result on Google when I did it a while back. You should be aware though that merge conflicts were handled exactly how you said you didn’t want. You get a conflict folder with the date on it and a second copy of the document in it. It’s up to you to decide if the conflict version or the main document version is the right one.
treelovinhippie 5y ago
Get drunk/high and try to use their desktop app. The primary button to create a new note looks like a "new note" button. You'd expect that when you click it a new note will be created. Nope. It's a dropdown. You then need to click "note" in the dropdown. How they managed to fuck up the UX on that core button is insane. Two clicks to create a new note. Why? Just why?
eloisius 5y ago
I've been giving Ulysses a try lately and so far I'm pretty impressed. I've written about 4000 words with it so far and I'm reasonably happy. The only complaint I have so far is that the Revision and Dashboard buttons on the top right corner are supremely confusing with how they toggle the right sidebar. Oh, and it's a subscription app. I feel really weird about paying monthly to use a text editor that can very well work without any server-side component. I may not continue after the trial because of that.
larskarbo 5y ago
For quick capture of my thoughts Drafts is super fast and always starts with a blank document and the keyboard opened
- egypturnash 5y ago
  Seems to be Apple only? > needs Mac, Windows, iOS, Android clients
drw85 5y ago
I was actually shocked that a note taking app is running 15 processes in the background at all times. Wunderlist had the same problem. A todo list app that runs 10+ processes when it's not even open? WTF? I noticed the same about discord, slack and basically all modern apps. Why do these basic things need to run so many processes in the background? They are completely over-engineered and sluggish and slow. At this point i only use the web versions of most software when i need them, so they don't clog up my system with useless processes.
- perryizgr8 5y ago
  It's because each of those apps is actually a web page running inside its personal instance of Google Chrome. And Chrome looooves creating tens of processes.

pantulis 5y ago

On the other hand, evernote had painted itself in the corner with the plethora of native apps without a common codebase: new features (even the crappy “enterprise” ones) had stopped coming. Now Evernote is releasing new features every couple of months and while it still not feature complete when compared with the old iOS or Mac native apps at least it has chance to compete. I switched to DEVONthink earlier this year but keep my Evernote account just to see how things are going. I want them to succeed, the key is wether the churn of existing users can be offset by new users.

nicoburns 5y ago
What makes you think it couldn't compete with the solid implementation it had without adding new features?
- pantulis 5y ago
  This is a great question. My point of view is if you can't deliver new features you become the incumbent and new player will replicate those features with lower cost or better execution. Also, the ball is moving: newer apps are heavy on features like backlinking that could not be delivered with the glacial release cycles of the "good old Evernote". I understand that EN is still the best on being the ultimate digital repository, but as a "digital brain" the market has slightly moved towards the PKM space (see Obsidian, Notion, and so on).
azalemeth 5y ago
I don't want new features. I do want cross platform, native apps (Linux, MacOS and Android for me). I've yet to find a good solution that "just works".
- largbae 5y ago
  I just came to this thread and searched for Evernote specifically to upvote or add this. Evernote evolved from a perfect extension of my private memory available rapidly and anywhere I needed it into a bloated collaboration suite. I would be surprised if any customer asked for it. I canceled the service but will gladly pay twice as much for an Evernote Classic that gets back to basics and does those well.
  - pantulis 5y ago
    Well the "collaboration suite" features are now slowly being phased out or at least dont receive that much attention. Their new calendar integration and task management features are small steps but I think they are intriguing at least.
reilly3000 5y ago
I think the downsides associated with having a common codebase are grossly underestimated. It inevitably leads to compromises for which a native UX would have been superior. Speed, layouts, native idioms, and continuity come to mind. Sure it’s a lot to ask for a truly native Android app to keep parity with a truly native Mac desktop app, but compared with a React Native codebase, the experience is sublime and the fussy platform shims aren’t needed.
- bsder 5y ago
  > I think the downsides associated with having a common codebase are grossly underestimated. I don't. Event loops, for example, work completely differently on macOS, iOS, Android, Windows and the Web. You will abstract across them eventually and you will get that abstraction wrong unless you are a programming god--at which point you might as well just use a cross-platform system to start. The cross-platform guys have big companies with lots of money and programmers solving problems that you haven't even dreamed of. If you're releasing on multiple platforms, you will not win.
  - pantulis 5y ago
    I guess you need to decide what indicator are you trying to optimize: user experience vs cost effectiveness. Evernote's CEO decided for the latter and I believe he's right betting the company on the Electron based clients. This is also understandably infuriating existing users as they lose the biggest feature that was the native feeling of EN. Other features are being slowly added along with some new ones that are arguably useful, but snappiness will not come back.

chriskrycho 5y ago

You might try Obsidian. I think it checks all of those boxes except “web view”: it’s an Electron app, but like VS Code it shows that web tech doesn’t have to be slow (it just nearly always is). They just shipped the native client and it’s not perfect but it’s surprisingly good.

egypturnash 5y ago
It also doesn't seem to have any collaboration features?

noveltyaccount 5y ago

I think OneNote ticks all your requirement boxes.

deepspace 5y ago
Second OneNote. I switched to it back when they broke Evernote. It does not do everything as well as the old Evernote, but it is STABLE. Very few new features in the past 10 years, and that is a GOOD thing.
egypturnash 5y ago
Is there a way to get rid of that thing where you have to manually drag out text boxes to type in? I really hated that, if I want freeform page layout I’ll use an actual notebook or Illustrator.
- noveltyaccount 5y ago
  I don't think there's any way to turn it off but I'm like you. I only ever use the default text area and never place free-form. So I just ignore the feature :)

ddon 5y ago

Switched from Evernote to Joplin, pretty happy, and since it is open source, it evolves and gets better all the time.

mattbk1 5y ago
I would add that Joplin is great because it's plain text. People keep trying to shove OneNote at us at work and all I want is one text box per note, that doesn't move around when I try to edit it.
tucosan 5y ago
Once you start using Joplin for a longer period, you start noticing bad UX issues. Encrypted sync is causing many people issues with multiple keys being generated after adding a mobile sync target. There is no easy way to remove superfluous keys from Joplin, once they have been created and synced across clients. The cli UX is weird and doesn't follow Unix best practices. The main developer made some weird design choices and some important features haven't been implemented for years now.
egypturnash 5y ago
Looks like a piece of Electron webshit, which I am loathe to touch, but on the other hand IT HAS A DIFF VIEW PLUGIN TO HELP WITH CONFLICTING CHANGES OMFG :)

simonw 5y ago

The only feature I want from Evernote is the one they fail to deliver: if I know I have a note about something, and I search for that note in the Evernote mobile app, I want it to find and display that note. Instead, about half the time it returns an error screen that says (paraphrasing) "That note can not be displayed right now, try again later" I do not want to look at my note later. You have one job: show me my notes! (I have nearly 3,000 notes in Evernote spanning back over more than a decode, so my hunch is that I'm tripping some edge-cases that most of their testing fails to cover)

TeMPOraL 5y ago
This is literally why I'm still not buying the "searching is better than organizing" line that so many companies, including Google, try to push down our throats. Searching is only better than organizing if searches are exhaustive, and I can trust that they are exhaustive. My experience with variety of products, including Evernote, Google Drive and GMail, tells me I can't trust that. I had plenty of instances when I searched for a thing I knew I have stored, and search returned nothing. It's because of this why organizing is still better than searching - if you're able to sort your stuff into some hierarchy ("groups", "folders") and then be able to browse that hierarchy, you can do a fully exhaustive check manually, by just going over everything.
- lucb1e 5y ago
  > I'm still not buying the "searching is better than organizing" line From what I see around me, though, most people just do not have any digital organizing skills whatsoever. It's honestly exceptional that I meet someone who has files going back more than five years and those files are not on their desktop in a "previous computer" directory; and even that category of people includes only those with tech friends that helped them move the data over and set the new system up. I don't disagree with you, but we might just be the minority.
  - eloisius 5y ago
    I agree with GP, and I'll pat myself on the back for having pretty damn well organize data going back over ten years, which has come with me over four computers. I still want powerful search on top of that, but I'm usually much more efficient at locating my own data than Spotlight is. Back when I had an MP3 collection, it was the same. I had a well-organized folder structure and it felt easier manage than Spotify. I recognize that us power users are a minority, but I really wish there was a shop out there that would build software for us instead of everyone converging towards "user-friendly."

the_lonely_road 5y ago

I never had any issue with Scriviner syncing between my windows machine and my iPhone using Dropbox. Took like 5 minutes to finagle into working. The setup instructions were top result on Google when I did it a while back. You should be aware though that merge conflicts were handled exactly how you said you didn’t want. You get a conflict folder with the date on it and a second copy of the document in it. It’s up to you to decide if the conflict version or the main document version is the right one.

treelovinhippie 5y ago

Get drunk/high and try to use their desktop app. The primary button to create a new note looks like a "new note" button. You'd expect that when you click it a new note will be created. Nope. It's a dropdown. You then need to click "note" in the dropdown. How they managed to fuck up the UX on that core button is insane. Two clicks to create a new note. Why? Just why?

eloisius 5y ago

I've been giving Ulysses a try lately and so far I'm pretty impressed. I've written about 4000 words with it so far and I'm reasonably happy. The only complaint I have so far is that the Revision and Dashboard buttons on the top right corner are supremely confusing with how they toggle the right sidebar. Oh, and it's a subscription app. I feel really weird about paying monthly to use a text editor that can very well work without any server-side component. I may not continue after the trial because of that.

larskarbo 5y ago

For quick capture of my thoughts Drafts is super fast and always starts with a blank document and the keyboard opened

egypturnash 5y ago
Seems to be Apple only? > needs Mac, Windows, iOS, Android clients

drw85 5y ago

I was actually shocked that a note taking app is running 15 processes in the background at all times. Wunderlist had the same problem. A todo list app that runs 10+ processes when it's not even open? WTF? I noticed the same about discord, slack and basically all modern apps. Why do these basic things need to run so many processes in the background? They are completely over-engineered and sluggish and slow. At this point i only use the web versions of most software when i need them, so they don't clog up my system with useless processes.

perryizgr8 5y ago
It's because each of those apps is actually a web page running inside its personal instance of Google Chrome. And Chrome looooves creating tens of processes.