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Ask HN: What Happened to Evernote?

200 points by cconcepts 4y ago

I have depended on Evernote for a long time without even realizing how much of a daily utility it is. It has been so seamless that I had forgotten I was rolling with the free version, until recently. I noticed a few UI changes which seemed a little unintuitive and some of my notes didn't seem to sync as reliably between my phone and laptop. No biggie, I have gotten used to updates. Then this week I was working through a new project on a customer's site taking notes in Evernote as I normally do. I spent a good chunk of time going through the project onsite and making a comprehensive list of everything that would need to be done. I noticed the header on my note was grey but assumed it was a UI change. I had 4G reception on my phone and figured, even if something's not quite right I can sync it up back at the office like I normally do as the note would be on my phone. So I proceeded like normal. The whole note is gone as if it never existed. Is this some sort of effort to onboard me to the paid version? Have I inadvertently clicked a "yes I accept that the free version is going to become unreliable" button? I appreciate I am not a great customer - I have been using a free version for years without even thinking about it. But thats kind of the point, Evernote worked so well I never gave it a second thought. Now I am not 100% sure on the safety of my notes... What is other people's experience? Have I just been caught napping because I mindlessly clicked an updated terms of use without reading it (as I do)? If I go paid am I getting something as good as what the old Evernote was like?

fluder 4y ago
https://fsnot.es https://fsnot.es for macOS/iOS ;-)
bsutt 4y ago
Being able to forward an email to create a new note has always been their killer feature for me. The majority of my tasks begin with an email. Does anybody know if any of the Evernote alternatives support this yet?
- randomluck040 4y ago
  You might write your own Pipeline where you forward a mail, scrape the content and e.g. save it to a Markdown or plain text file to open it with your text editor of choice. I don’t know of any piece of software unfortunately.
- viraptor 4y ago
  I've never used this, but Joplin seems to have a 3rd party solution for that: https://github.com/manolitto/joplin-mail-gateway https://github.com/manolitto/joplin-mail-gateway Some assembly required of course.
- coffeeling 4y ago
  Amplenote, OneNote, Mem, GoodNotes, Nimbus Note, Notejoy
masterofmisc 4y ago
Microsoft has decided to Clone Notion and call it it Microsoft Loop. Apparently its going to be a flexible canvas with widgets. Not sure if its been released though. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-loop https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-loop
fortran77 4y ago
OneNote
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
srvmshr 4y ago
Why don't you try Notion. Seriously, it feels so much better IMHO, with atomic rollback and you can export your data out in a non-proprietary format (MD, HTML, PDF) if it comes to difficult choices someday.
- 130e13a 4y ago
  I tried getting into Notion a while ago (~ 6 months) and ultimately stopped using it, due to general UI responsiveness issues and their lack of a full offline mode. Really liked the product, though. I think they're working on offline support so i'm planning to check it out again when that is added. Edit: looked into this a bit more and they promised offline support "soon" as far back as 2018 so maybe it'd be a good idea not to be too enthusiastic about this...
  - Oxodao 4y ago
    Yeah, I'm using Notion a lot but offline support is really a missing feature. Whenever I'm on a train and want to use it I just can't, it's a real issue, but it's still a good piece of software. Though I'd really like to find a self-hosted alternative that is just as good..
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- InCityDreams 4y ago
  Big red buttons abound: "Try notion for free" that lead to "Sign up with....". I'm interested (especially as i tried evernote previously and found it to be 'not for me'), but where's the pricing page [supposed to be]?
  - jitl 4y ago
    (I work at Notion) Pricing is here: https://www.notion.so/pricing https://www.notion.so/pricing Our business plan is to charge for collaboration, so Notion is free with no writing limits for personal users. You can pay $4/mo for deeper version history, bigger file uploads, more guest editors, etc; and more per month to use Notion with a team. I'll send a note to the marketing design team with your feedback.
hwers 4y ago
Feels like both the comments in here are paid for by Notion somehow.
- weird-eye-issue 4y ago
  Notion has a strangely huge and fanatic fan base so it's not surprising It's like a cult
  - molszanski 4y ago
    There are a few cults :D - Notion Nation - Roam Legion - Zettelkasten Zealots - Bear Bros PS. Add more ;)
    - weird-eye-issue 4y ago
      It's even worse than I thought
    - morituri 4y ago
      Obsidian Ocelots?
      - molszanski 4y ago
        Since Obsidian is a glass stone, it can be something related to mining?
        motoboi 4y ago
        Obsidian Dwarf Gang Member
    - WJW 4y ago
      Also the: - Evernote Evangelists - Orgmode Promotion Society - Plaintext Patriots - Joplin Javelins - Obsidian Organisation etc etc etc
klausjensen 4y ago
I still use Evernote for scanned documents (invoices, receipts, insurance papers etc etc), and have done so for ~10 years - because I can free-text search in scanned documents. During those years, Evernote has kept getting worse and worse, becomeing slower and more unreliable at doing cores things, while they slap features on it, that I do not want (collaboration, chat and other garbage). I want to migrate off at some point, but 10 years of scanned documents are tricky to migrate, and frankly I do not know of any good alternatives at this point.
- ungamedplayer 4y ago
  Has this changed your mind about hosted third party services? I have seen a number of people bitten by this kind of vendor behaviour, but they swiftly go back to making the same mistake.
  - nnoitra 4y ago
    How safe is my data if I use Notes on Mac and then upload it to iCloud? The reasoning is that Apple is a trillion dollar company and they've no interest in screwing me over. I know it's naive but a consolation I guess. If not, what would be an alternative?
    - joshspankit 4y ago
      They do have an interest in making sure you can’t take your data with you if you leave which I would argue is a type of screwing you over.
      - wiredfool 4y ago
        For a long while, notes backend used IMAP. I lost a bunch of notes that I didn't realize were stored on an email account that went away.
  - joshspankit 4y ago
    It’s certainly changed my mind. Now, part of my vetting process for new services is “can I not just get my data out, but also the metadata I care about?”. That’s done with the first few projects/documents/whatever, and then because of being bitten in the past, I know I must do the same export at least twice a year in order to know that the company has not silently restricted it.
olivermarks 4y ago
I have used Evernote practically since it's inception and had a similar doc loss to @cconcepts where I wrote a long piece on a plane which was synced with another user. It just disappeared and was a big loss as it was due the following day. I badgered Evernote support with my ZDNet blogger hat on but never got a satisfactory answer or the doc back. It's a terrific product but I no longer trust it for anything important. I also find the search is increasingly janky which is now a major problem. This is all a shame because it is still best of class to me
- 0des 4y ago
  > my ZDNet blogger hat on No disrespect but surely this was a hail Mary and not immediately expected to actually work out.
  - olivermarks 4y ago
    The great advantage of having a ZDNet column was you immediately get responses to personal product issues in case you write them up for public consumption.
    - 0des 4y ago
      Is that what it means to you? That's an interesting angle I had not considered.
      - olivermarks 4y ago
        Absolutely. companies are terrified of bad publicity.
kmarc 4y ago
While I cannot comment on what changed in Evernote, eventually someone unhelpfully will ask you "WHAT? You didn't have backup?!", which is kind of a legit question. Until then, on Evernote's Tos [1] scroll down to "What Else Do I Need to Know?" and read point f) of section "YOU EXPRESSLY UNDERSTAND AND AGREE That". In summary, it says they are not in any way reaponsible for your data loss. Reading in-between the lines, it basically says, they will have outages, disruptions, or buggy updates and your responsibility is to defend yourself against these events. [1]: https://evernote.com/legal/terms-of-service https://evernote.com/legal/terms-of-service I think you already assumed all these. I only elaborated on it because I saw this many times, even (especially?) with the largest providers like Gmail, AWS etc. And this will continue happening. I understand (and a bit scared for) that most of the people don't even know how unsafe their data is, however, on HN I would expect everyone is (paranoid enough to) back up their data. I hope you can recover your notes, and regardless of your success in doing so, please spend an afternoon looking up ToS's of the services you use. (disclaimer: I worked a bit in the backup sw industry, and yes I have multiple full offline copies of my emails and notes for the past 20+y)
- staindk 4y ago
  A backup of... what sounds like a newly-created note?
  - throwmeariver1 4y ago
    I bet it wasn’t even cold before it got wasted in a cache glitch.
- viraptor 4y ago
  Ok, but to be realistic, this comes from legal. Of course they will try to minimise the responsibility, regardless of technical possibilities. Even rsync.net which basically does data storage says the same under "LIMITATION OF LIABILITY" in their ToS. Unless you're ready to pay for an SLA on your enterprise contact with a company - who would ever say "we're financially / legally responsible for your lost data"? I challenge you to find a single public counter example.
mkl95 4y ago
Evernote have been walking a slow death march for 5+ years.
- srvmshr 4y ago
  It is quite unfortunate. Around 2013-2014, I started systematically saving everything to Evernote and even got a paid plan. There were two issues: 1. Their app was getting buggy to handle on mac/win. The migration was terrible and they had a custom container format for export which was pretty useless. It became like the Hotel California of software. You could bring your stuff in, but never leave due to the lock-in. I eventually migrated everything out of Evernote by saving printing emailing and started using plain Git on a local server for document save / version control. 2. There was no app for Linux. They made a lot of efforts on windows mac, and then ios/android but left native Linux support completely out of the picture. Evernote in 2015 had a hard time with Wine for emulation.
  - pedro2 4y ago
    Latest version has a closed beta Linux version.
lazzurs 4y ago
I’m a big fan of Joplin https://joplinapp.org/ https://joplinapp.org/ The sync works with a bunch of different cloud services and I’ve yet to have a problem with it.
- dzikimarian 4y ago
  More importantly - it can be fully self hosted.
- webwanderings 4y ago
  How about their export file? What happens if/when this software disappears?
  - jl6 4y ago
    Markdown format in a SQLite database, and there’s a command line client to script it if you like. Joplin is excellent.
    - webwanderings 4y ago
      I'm sure Joplin is excellent and I hate to argue one against the other. The markdown files in themselves should be independent. I have used several full featured, rather excellent, note-taking software, where the export is not "open". Obsidian is the only reasonable system I have seen where the software is up to date and it doesn't do anything with the markdown files to lock them in. I speak of this as a single user experience. And no, I don't like the idea of Mac Notes and Windows OneNote either. I'm all for note-taking apps which keeps the data/files independent.
      - hispanic 4y ago
        I recently migrated from Evernote to Joplin. This was a concern for me, as well. However, I got past it. This isn't a case of "lock in". Even if Joplin loses mindshare and stops being actively maintained, I know that I'll always have a version available (even if only locally on my desktop, seeing as how I install it manually) that I can use to export to plain, raw Markdown files. And, with them, I can migrate to Obsidian or whatever comes into vogue.
thesimp 4y ago
As a long time Evernote user I can say that the move from Evernote 6.x to the 10.x version has been a bit of a rough ride. I still use Evernote everyday because I did not find any other note taking tools that fit my workflow. And changing workflows ingrained over many years takes a lot of effort. Then again there are some very irritating things in the new Evernote 10.x versions of which I am constantly thinking: "are they using this feature themselves or am I the only one?". For example: * try to move a note to a different notebook. You would thing that the obvious thing to do would be to click on the current notebook name that is shown above the note and then it drops down a list. But no.... You have to hover over the current notebook name, then a _hidden_ button becomes visible, that you have to click and then you can move the note. * copy&pasting you tube links always shows a videoclip preview. I never want that, I copy and paste a link because I want to save a link thank you very much. *search through a stack of notebooks still does not work. You can only search through one notebook at a time or through every note.
- cianmm 4y ago
  The weird UI for moving notes to a new notebook gets me every single time. I’ve been looking for a good Evernote replacement for YEARS, but rely heavily on their OCR stuff to file well over a decade of important documents that I need to be able to call up fast. I’ve replaced text notes with Bear for years, but for scanning I’ve still got to use Evernote. And that god damned move note UI.
  - nicwolff 4y ago
    Apple Notes' OCR is about as good as Evernote's, and the bulk migration worked fine for me. And Apple Notes will name a new scanned-document note with the first words of the OCR'ed text, which I don't think Evernote ever got around to.
- coffeeling 4y ago
  Oh god, I just tried. That move note UI is awful, to say the least. Would it have hurt them to leave the button visible, at least?
DangerousPie 4y ago
Maybe this is just me getting old, but I feel like Evernote has only gotten worse since I started using it over 10 years ago. Back then it was just a list of notes with some formatting and sync capabilities - perfect. These days they have added all these extra features which I don't need, and which have made the whole app slow and terribly clunky. When I use the iPad app it takes several seconds to load notes or search, and the UI keeps jumping around if it hasn't loaded completely yet. Terrible experience. The icing on the cake is that they changed the welcome page of the app to no longer show the list of notes - and if you want to edit the page to get that list back, you have to sign up to their premium subscription! And I'm already paying too, just not for the right level of subscription apparently. I have been meaning to find an alternative for months now, so if anyone has any suggestions please do let me know! The most important features to me are note syncing across iOS/Mac/Windows and the ability to import my notes from Evernote.
- ibluehh 4y ago
  Notion
  - mywaifuismeta 4y ago
    Same thing. Incredibly slow and clunky for me as well. Seems like all tools go through this evolution because you know, somehow they have to get VC-sized returns instead of staying small and nimble. I stopped using tools with any kind of lock-in or custom format because I know they will eventually degrade into something unusable.
  - nnoitra 4y ago
    Notion is just way too convoluted.
  - mszcz 4y ago
    It's nice but it's slow. Would love to have a solution that combined Notion's capabilities with Sublime Text's speed and maybe JetBrains's ability to work with keyboard shortcuts.
fredgrott 4y ago
Hmm, that is why i use Github as my note taking tool as I have learned from experience that having a local git and being able to back that up to a cloud git server trumps everything that a normal 3rd party service can claim to provide
nfriedly 4y ago
Personally, I'm using the next cloud notes app. It's somewhat limited - essentially just plain text with a bit of markdown support, but the upside is that my data is stored in plain text files that are easy to backup and/or export if I ever decide to switch to something else. I'm running it on an unRAID server with nightly backups, but you could just as easily run it from a raspberry pi. Before next cloud, I was using text files in Dropbox. My employer just started using notion. It seems fine so far, but I don't see myself switching away from next cloud any time soon.
- 0ldskool 4y ago
  I basically have the same setup, using nextcloud notes. The notes aren't in plaintext, they are in markdown. Joplin can use nextcloud has a sync backend. There are also other note taking apps that can use nextcloud has the sync backend but in the end I wasn't happy with anything. Going to test drive Obsidian and dendron.so to see how they go.
  - nfriedly 4y ago
    I'm using https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=it.niedermann.owncloud.notes https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=it.niedermann.... on my phone. It's not super fancy, but it works well. I might try out Joplin sometime, but I'm pretty happy with what I've got.
smcleod 4y ago
They replaced the good enough native apps with a horrible Electron piece of garbage. That was the final straw.
- criddell 4y ago
  The new clients are terrible. I’ve been a paying user for close to a decade and am now actively looking for a replacement. I really, really dislike the Windows client. I thought the old one was quite good and did everything I wanted.
michelb 4y ago
Since the move to Electron, Evernote has become a dumpster fire. It's considerably slower in everything and no longer supports standard native affordances. I've moved my 12k notes to Apple Notes and the difference is staggering.
- bprasanna 4y ago
  Somehow the apps which are using Electron don't care about RAM. I always use Evernote in browser in a desktop, likewise Slack. Slack app in Mac is horrible.
- troad 4y ago
  Out of the frying pan and into the fire, eh? Sure, Apple Notes may have native window resize, but can you tell if the app is syncing right now? When was the last sync? What happens in case of a versioning clash? Will it decide to work with patchy Internet on that upcoming train ride? Will it sync once you go back online? Will it decide to party with some random Exchange server you used for work once, and how will this affect your notes? Are your notes safe from random changes in formatting when Apple rolls out improvements to the Notes app? Don't get me wrong, I love my iPhone and have used Macs for decades, but I wouldn't trust Apple cloud services with anything even remotely important. I'm even a little sceptical about Mac Finder at this point, which is ten minutes away from becoming a cloud service itself.
  - throwmeariver1 4y ago
    Never lost a note with apple notes lost a lot of notes with Evernote. anecdotal but I personally don't care about empirical data in regards of myself.
  - makecheck 4y ago
    My main issue with Notes right now is that somewhere along the way we became OK with software having no Undo at all, combined with the power to instantly sync your typo everywhere so it is truly gone forever, combined with UI that basically encourages accidents. So if I am perfect when typing with a tiny virtual keyboard, nothing goes wrong; otherwise, I could lose things in ways that are interpreted by the software as me choosing to lose them, which is bogus.
bprasanna 4y ago
I have been using Evernote for 10 years. Initially i was on free plan, but the upload limit made me opt for Evernote premium. With premium i never faced an issue with adding a note, searching a note and adding images. I really like their easy integration with browsers and apps. Saving an article is a breeze. Likewise PDFs. As i could see so many complaints from others, there seems to be buggy areas in Evernote. Wish Evernote takes it as constructive feedback and make its product a reliable one. Because, being reliable for so many years means a lot.
spondyl 4y ago
The short history is that Evernote spent the early part of the 2010s expanding its portfolio into products that didn't really serve its core offering such as Evernote Food and Evernote Hello as well as other distractions. They should have used that time (and money!) to set themselves up for the future and now they're continually playing catch up. You can read about this era in detail here: https://nira.com/evernote-history/ https://nira.com/evernote-history/ As we come towards the third quarter of the 2010s, Evernote was being shaped up a bit in terms of non-core products being dropped, on-prem infrastructure being migrated to the cloud and so on but this wasn't without great pains as well. Not to mention, a non-trivial number of staff appear to have left during that period too which creates a negative feedback loop where the upper tier of potential candidates may be dismissive of an employer like Evernote (if it looks questionable on your CV) which is arguably the type of talent you might need in a period like this where your competitors have true realtime collaborative elements that the market is expecting from you as well as table stakes. Now after this period, and this is just from my own observations so I don't have any particular stories to link, Ian Small tool over as CEO with a personal focus on continuing to modernise Evernote. Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4I5cq2DfrSpehLO_71NCjKSZE0nGXIvf https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4I5cq2DfrSpehLO_71NC... I can't say how that has been received but I have a lot of respect for the "Behind the Scenes" series that occurred, showing Evernote's technical investments such as: * Sharding their databases * Standardising feature sets across mobile. Android might have had features for years that aren't on iOS and vice versa * Standardising their applications hence the move to Electron. In the context of them needing to move faster, it makes sense to focus on one codebase instead of five, regardless of how you might feel about Electron itself. While I don't know that Evernote can ever catch up, I have to say I have a lot of kudos for the risk that Ian took in showing us what they're struggling with. That said, I don't use Evernote so I can't exactly say I feel the pain of their customer base but as far as content that might attract new talent, I think transparency like that is pretty much the gold standard next to having a technical blog and so on.
bgribble 4y ago
It’s definitely not as featureful as Evernote, but Simplenote is working well for me for my day to day note taking.
- akshatmittal108 4y ago
  Same for me. I wanted a simple app like Google notes however a bit more suited for long form texts. Simplenote works brilliantly for me. I gave Evernote a try, however that seems to be more suited towards power users who take a lot of notes and want to capture notes in mixed medium - text, photos etc. Also, since Simplenote is from Automatic, I am less worried about shown any advertisements or product changing radically.
arapacana 4y ago
The future is Notion.so My entire information management pipeline has been overhauled: I know Notion can be a little culty, but it genuinely has improved my performance so drastically I think it is the best thing to happen to me since the internet itself.
- arapacana 4y ago
  rip, I see how this reads as an ad but it was a genuine declaration. :<
adamddev1 4y ago
Does anyone know of a note-taker or just an Android text editor with good paragraph-by-paragraph RTL support? I really like Obsidian but the RTL support is not there, no luck w a plugin either. It's too bad RTL is so often poorly supported in these electony apps when all it takes is adding dir="auto" to the HTML tags. Edit: I just found iA Writer. It works great!
nitin-pai 4y ago
I was a paid subscriber of Evernote for several years. Then, a couple of years ago, they removed features for paid users in what they called an ‘upgrade’. I switched to Obsidian and am very happy. Obsidian Sync and Obsidian Publish are value for money; and Obsidian+Syncthing is a great option for backing up the notes in a local machine.
opan 4y ago
Don't trust proprietary software. Stuff like this will always be a possibility. Syncthing + your text editor of choice (vim in termux on android is actually pretty good, imo) is a reliable bet. Emacs with org-mode could be used in a similar way. I'm sure there are other combinations as well.
- IshKebab 4y ago
  Stuff like this is always a possibility with free software too. I'm still bitter about KDE4.
  - throwmeariver1 4y ago
    GNOME3 for me.
lordfolken 4y ago
elcapitan 4y ago
I was equally hooked on Evernote as a main driver both for work and personal notes for many years, but switched to Joplin in 2020, and never looked back. It's also much better for development-related notes, as it supports markdown and syntax highlighting for code snippets. The only downside to me is the crazy large binary, but I can live with that.
seanhunter 4y ago
Quite agree, and as a paid user myself I would strongly recommend you don't go paid. Evernote just keeps getting worse. They add things with negative utility (like the annoying new "home" screen that you have to click past to get to your actual notes while basic features like "search", and the app's speed are significantly worse than they were a few years back.
- seanhunter 4y ago
  Another concrete example of this death by product management syndrome just occurred to me so (in the hope that someone from evernote is reading this) here goes. The "Scannable" app used to be great. Really slick scanning of documents on mobile to evernote. A little while ago they added one of those "new user experience" things you have to click through before you use the app. Fair enough I suppose. Except I have to click through it every single time. This grates given I use the app about twice a week. Then recently, scannable decided to forget my connection to evernote. Every single time I use it. So every time I use it I have to start by clicking through the new user experience and logging into evernote. It used to be I started scannable and in about 2 clicks a doc was in my evernote. Now there's this BS preamble every time.
wly_cdgr 4y ago
All those product managers gotta Make An Impact But also, if you want a good product to stay good, pay for it
singularity2001 4y ago
To me the core functionality of Evernote has been perfectly replaced by Apple Notes.
happytoexplain 4y ago
On Windows, when creating a new note with the keyboard shortcut, Evernote started to silently fail to save the note. Once I noticed, I checked its log, and saw that every time there was a database-related error. I reinstalled and that fixed it, but I had to stop using Evernote. I back up my notes, but that doesn't help when the program is silently failing to save them in the first place. I used Evernote for everything, and I will never know how much information I lost due to this bug. It was a data nightmare scenario. I also noticed one day that some of my notes that only had titles also had a body containing the same text. I backspaced through the superfluous body, and the note deleted itself. I reproduced this reliably. I think maybe those notes really only had bodies, but Evernote was duplicating the body text in the title textbox, or vice versa, tricking me into thinking it had both, so when I deleted the body, it considered the whole note empty. Luckily, I noticed what was happening before I could no longer remember which notes I had accidentally deleted. Other than the big bugs: Pasting without formatting never seems to work. Assigning a note to a notebook and tagging it is not keyboard-friendly, reducing efficiency dramatically. Filtering by notebook/tag takes way more clicks and screens than it needs to on mobile. Launching the app is incredibly slow, which means you can't use it for a quick look-up. The conflict rules seem overly simple, as I frequently get conflicts in a big note I have when I simply add a line anywhere in it on two devices.
- stevage 4y ago
  Wow, both of those issues are horrendous.
mario_kart_snes 4y ago
I switched from Evernote to Joplin
didip 4y ago
I am forever surprised that Evernote is still functioning as a company. It is just a note taking tool, something that can easily be done with a git repo hosted on github.
smugma 4y ago
I used Evernote 5-6 years ago. It was a decent product but somehow I lost a note once. I deleted the app and never tried it again. A few months later my wife went through the same experience. I now use the iOS Notes app. It’s good enough, including the sharing feature.
- tekstar 4y ago
  Same, iOS Notes all the way. Adding this because I didn't know about it for awhile and maybe someone reading doesn't know - iOS notes includes a pretty good document scanner with the iphone camera. Open a new note and press the camera icon, you can scan multiple pages with the camera and it turns it into a reasonable PDF.
- jl6 4y ago
  I would like to know if iOS notes has reasonable export/interoperability features these days, because last time I looked it certainly didn’t, unless you fancied doing PDF exports for every note manually.
  - smugma 4y ago
    You can export multiple notes at once (PDF or HTML) on macOS.
ilamont 4y ago
Old wunderlist user, migrated to MS todo which as expected has gotten worse over time, particularly the buggy macOS app but is good enough on the web and iOS. IIRC the original developer offered to buy it back from Microsoft but Microsoft refused.
Barrin92 4y ago
I was in the same boat. I switched to https://logseq.com/ https://logseq.com/ + Google Drive. Markdown based so there's no issue with being locked in at least.
- mfru 4y ago
  Second that, I switched from - Joplin (Nextcloud sync) - org-mode (Nextcloud sync) finally to Logseq (org format, not md) and Nextcloud sync. It feels like I found a solid note taking / life organising / knowledge management solution for me now. As soon as mobile is working as well I am set for a long time.
tlb 4y ago
Evernote got slower and buggier every year, until I finally gave up. I switched to Joplin and I like it a lot. It's very fast. It uses markdown syntax with all the features like LaTeX equations. It stores your notes as regular files in the file system so you can export or grep or whatever. Syncing to the mobile app works OK.
goopthink 4y ago
SimpleNote from Automattic is simple, markdown based, local and cloud synced. It doesn’t get too many updates because it’s pretty feature complete for what it does.
Brajeshwar 4y ago
I'm going to reproduce a comment verbatim that appeared on HackerNews from quite a while ago. I remembered and kept it for reference because Evernote was supposed to be a 100-year company (Phil Libin's words) and the decline of Evernote was that one reason why I decided to own my content even if I have to use various tooling on top of it. I moved to a text-based lifestyle spiced with some formatting with Markdown ever since. Phil Libin, as an entrepreneur, founder is an awesome and kind person. --- Let’s say you were just hired as the President of a furniture company. The owner says he knows it’s good furniture but even despite huge investments they can’t seem to sell any furniture. Your job is to turn things around. You start on the factory floor. The furniture is made by a combination of machines and human workers. Some people are employed to set up and configure the machines to make furniture parts. Around 150 people work on actually making furniture, either assembling it, doing quality tests, or setting up and operating the automated machinery. Things aren’t perfect, but you aren’t going to make any changes on your first day so you make some notes and move on. The furniture hasn’t changed much over the years, it is still basically the same as it was when the furniture store opened. The furniture gets ‘improved’ from time to time, you see a step stool with an alarm clock, a small safe, and a web-cam built into it, but when you ask the foreman he tells you nobody has ever turned on the alarm clock or used the safe or connected the web-cam on any of the step stools. People seem to mainly use the stools so they can reach things that are up high. There is a problem where sometimes people slip when the stools are wet, so they worked out how to add a nonslip pad, but the product managers have decided that the next feature will be to add scents to the stools, so you can buy a stool that smells like cinnamon or one that smells like apples. They have a big advertising campaign already paid for and they already sent out the press release announcing “ScentedStools”, so the machines need to be set up to start stamping out stools that smell like “Fresh Linen” by the end of the week. There are daily status meetings to update them on the progress. If the “Fresh Linen” stools aren’t being produced by Thursday they are going to start having two status meetings per day. You hear it’s someone named Jim’s last day, so you set up an exit interview. Jim tells you that the bosses and people upstairs don’t really know what is going on in the factory. Most days he just sits and reads the news, his “nontechnical” manager doesn’t know anything about furniture or how Jim does his job so there’s no way for the manager to know what is going on other than to ask Jim. Supervision primarily consists of making sure Jim is sitting at his desk and looking at his monitor. Since it is not a Startup thing to set Jim’s specific hours for him to be at work, his manager has started scheduling 9AM meetings every day to force people to turn up. Every week or so Jim has to update some Product Managers upstairs about what is going on, and he just says they are making steady progress and comes up with some specific problem to explain why they aren’t done, pretty much anything with jargon will work since nobody upstairs “could tell white oak from red oak”. It takes about 5 minutes to give his status update but he’s expected to stay for the entire 1 hour meeting, so he brings his laptop so he can read that FurnitureNews website. He says he is quitting to take a much lower paying job because he is bored and doesn’t respect his manager. Next you go upstairs to the office space and find 300 people having meetings with each other about annual plans and prioritization, writing mission statements and meeting to discuss mission statements. The 300 people upstairs are constantly in motion and complaining about how over worked they are. They each have 5, 6 or even 7 (sometimes more!) 1-hour meetings every day, but you only see them meet with each other, nobody has any meetings with anyone from outside the company, nobody has meetings with possible customers, and only very rarely do you see anyone from the factory floor in these meetings, and then it is almost always just to give a status update. None of these folks really understand furniture very well, they can’t really tell good furniture from bad furniture, they literally don’t know the difference between solid oak and cardboard, they don’t know how long it takes or how much money it costs to build a chair. After a few days of meetings you haven’t met anyone who cares about furniture at all, they all seem to want to work at the furniture factory because it pays well, or they like the prestige of being ‘in furniture’. Mostly they talk about how overworked they are and make the case for hiring a few more people. If they could hire another person for their team they wouldn’t be so far behind. You aren’t sure what they are getting behind in, are they talking about meetings they can’t attend because it conflicts with another meeting that is more important somehow? Do they need more time to work on power point slides for the next days meetings? Some of the office folks have degrees in furniture science, but none of them have ever successfully built or designed any furniture outside of little school projects. Then you go out behind the factory and see a massive mountain of furniture stacked up to the sky. The factory workers have been building furniture every day for years. People all agree that it is good furniture, maybe the best there is. Nobody ever buys any of it. It’s not sold in any stores. No hotels buy it. No businesses buy it. Lots of people are lined up as far as you can see to pick furniture out of the pile for free. How do you fix this company?
mark_l_watson 4y ago
I was a paying customer for years until I realized that I probably spent about 5 hours a month carefully curating notes, but spent almost no time reading them. Since then I have switched around using Google Keep, Apple Notes, and FastMail Notes for quick and dirty notes on things to do or things to maybe look at in the future. I consider myself to be a gentleman scientist, I am deeply interested in a small number of technologies. What I most enjoy doing now is organizing things I learn or little code experiments in online books that are easy to update, and eventually retire when I don’t want to maintain them or they no longer seem relevant. Sort of like blogging with more structure. Sorry for being so off topic here, but it seems too easy to get into long term habits and not occasionally decide what is really worth spending time on. My carefully curated Evernote notes were a waste of time.
Mikeb85 4y ago
I just use Google Keep. Tried Evernote back in the day and MS OneNote. Google does cloud sync so much better than anyone else though, even if it has less features.
ergonaught 4y ago
The only answer anyone can give you here is that that sounds like an unfortunate glitch, and perhaps some really poor programming/planning in some area, but no, destroying your notes is not an effort to onboard you to the paid version. “What happened to them” is covered in other comments (same thing that’s happened to everything that isn’t dominated by a benevolent vision-possessing dictator of sorts to keep things focused and say no a lot).
stblack 4y ago
I've resorted to downloading and using the legacy version of Evernote. I find this version is more stable. https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/360052560314-Install-an-older-version-of-Evernote https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/360052560314-Ins... (Windows/Mac) I've archived this install package in case the URL dies. Edit: This is version 7.14.1
- masterofmisc 4y ago
  I am a paying customer and thats exactly what I have done too.
dotBen 4y ago
I migrated from Evernote to Microsoft OneNote. If I was 10 years younger or still an engineer I would have experimented with a 'roll your own' FOSS option but these days I'm an exec and I just need my notes to be stable, dependable, easily accessible etc. OneNote is essentially free, it's Microsoft's gateway to get people to come back into their ecosystem and you obviously know it's going to be well maintained, high integrity of storage, etc. I know it will be still around and maintained in 10 years time when I still want to access my old notes. The mobile and iPad apps are nice, there's also a convenient Evernote to OneNote importer: https://www.onenote.com/import-evernote-to-onenote https://www.onenote.com/import-evernote-to-onenote My take on Evernote is that they never managed to properly monetize it. I was a single user, not in a team, didn't need shared notes or chat functionality and there was no need for me to pay for it... until they decided to arbitrarily limit the number of devices you could use your account on which is just such a shitty approach because we all know there's no actual cost to servicing three devices vs two. In other words the only thing they could do to get me to pay for it was hobble my UX until I coughed up. Sorry, no thanks. Honestly, if you just want a solid 1:1 Evernote replacement that isn't markdown, self-hosted, etc just use MS OneNote. It's great.
- danielodievich 4y ago
  I've been a onenote user from its inception, desktop only. I've never lost a note yet and have all of them since I started gosh whenever it shipped. It survived moving 4 companies offline until 5th forced me into syncing it to cloude one drive so that I can share it between 3 macs and 4 windows machines and vms. An incredible tool that I can't do without.
- prox 4y ago
  Joplin is a solid alternative for me. You can also spin your own cloud or just buy a bit of space.
  - 0ldskool 4y ago
    For mobile users, Joplin does not support widgets and never will. Its written in react-native and that does not support widgets. They have an open issue and basically responded with will not implement or support. I'm someone who needs widgets for my notes...
sandgiant 4y ago
I switched to DEVONthink Pro when Evernote switched to Electron and started removing features (e.g. related notes). I capture a lot of images of documents and need the OCR capabilities and search. They also have a fairly extensive AppleScript support so you can automate almost everything. Very happy with the move so far.
kodah 4y ago
Evernote hasn't really advanced for me, especially as my needs have evolved. I ended up switching a while back because of that. I'm currently using Notion because those little built in databases are powerful, but what I really want is a mix of Obsidian and OneNote that can be easily extended and self-hosted.
kactus 4y ago
Evernote started going south for me in 2014. I switched to OneNote and things were great, but it’s far more than I need. These days I just use Apple Notes and it’s been flawless. Notion looks neat but I’m wary of startups now. I’d probably use SimpleNote if I switched. I also have a bunch of scattered markdown notes everywhere, wouldn’t be too hard for me to just sync a folder and use something like Typora to make adding images easier.
pedro2 4y ago
I periodically return to Evernote: * Linux support (closed beta) * tags! omg, I hate and love tags! If you wish to hop on Microsoft land, Microsoft Todo and Onenote seems an adequate combo. NOTE: blocking ads somehow blocked Onenote. Not sure which config I used, only that it was DNS, and wasn't able to replicate.
j45 4y ago
Evernote missed the opportunity to be the first Google docs. It was perfectly lightweight to capture and organize information, often better than its peers on mobile. Didn’t seem to get ahead. OneNote is nice except it lacks offline support. Notion is even better with great collaboration but one fatal flaw, no real offline mode. Evernote was always instant on and with you for the most part, except where it started losing notes on me.
- coffeeling 4y ago
  > OneNote is nice except it lacks offline support. Huh? If you mean purely local, yeah, that's impossible outside the Office app on Windows. But apart from that, OneNote can't even operate without downloading a full local copy of a notebook you open. Any changes you do get applied to the local copy first and then synced to the master copy on OneDrive separately.
  - j45 4y ago
    Sorry, typo. OneNote works fine offline but is poor at collaboration and granular sharing and permissions. Notion is poor at working offline but strong at collaboration and granular sharing/permissions.
    - coffeeling 4y ago
      Yeah, the notebook as the fundamental sharing unit can be troublesome. OneNote should technically have the ability to make individual sections shareable (a OneNote notebook is stored as a folder containing .one files (sections with their pages) and subfolders (section groups) on disc) since every section is its own file. You could in principle just permission that via OneDrive and I think they had plans to, but I haven't seen anything on that front.
tronicdude 4y ago
https://github.com/akosbalasko/yarle https://github.com/akosbalasko/yarle This is an excellent evernote to md exporter.
muhehe 4y ago
I just tried to login to my 10y+ account to see what I left there. On mobile. It doesn't work and I have to use the app. O my, that's so slooow, it's painful.
627467 4y ago
Where I live I pay almost nothing for evernote (just over 1usd/year) so I don't complain about it much. I do try to keep synced copies of the notes in certain desktop devices just in case the service disappears one day. I also encrypt notes before pasting them in evernote of they are sensitive
simne 4y ago
Unfortunately, evernote is interesting example of very strange behavior - when they become in troubles with slow backend written on C#, they switched to C++. To be honest, I cannot say anything about e-note client quality, I have not used it at all (I try to use opensource self-hosting alternatives), but such solutions on backend side, look very odd for me, and not look trustworthy. Returning to your case, at adequate services, should be possibility to backup your documents yourself, or service should have incremental backups. So, in such circumstances I will first figure out, if it is possible to make backup myself (and will do backup; and will plan backup frequency based on value of day work for me - for most valued - daily or even few times per day; for less valued - weekly). If self backup impossible, I will ask tech support to return to previous state on server side. For alternatives, as I know, e-note is best for its cost per client, I think anything else will be more expensive (unfortunately, self hosted FOSS solutions are more expensive, even considering, I trust them much more).
erikpukinskis 4y ago
I’ve tried to use Evernote a couple times, but within days it always lost data in syncing between devices. For me Evernote fails the “you had one job!” test. SimpleNote has been great to me. You can tell they’re not going to mess with the core recipe either.
- crossroadsguy 4y ago
  Another Simplenote user here! Tried many but kept coming back. I wish Simplenote had a feature where I could toggle a flag to make a note “read only” and toggle again to edit if needed. That’d be lovely.
eternityforest 4y ago
I am using Obsidian, synced with SyncThing, after trying all the FOSS alternatives out there. It's the first time I've actually been happy with a notes app. I wish it were open, and there's a few features I wish it had, but it's the best setup I have ever used.
nfcampos 4y ago
https://reflect.app/ https://reflect.app/ Always open on 1/3 of my screen.
gentlesoulcarp 4y ago
What happened? They took VC money which forced them to "grow without bounds". This caused them to lose focus and expand their features in irrelevant ways while stretching their internal teams too much and not listening to their active customer base on features to prioritize (even though they had forums for this very purpose). Over time their tone-deaf stubbornness caused the accumulation of too much technical debt. Instead of doubling down on developing performant features that customers actually needed and wanted to use in their knowledge-bases systems, they dressed as Teletubbies (seriously, it was on their "Careers" page a few years back) and created a disjointed mess of alternate products that they did not integrate properly into their system (i.e. Penultimate does not integrate in any useful way). Then they had a brain drain and executive flight (new CEO etc.). Then they moved to Electron, lying to customers saying it was "Feature-Ready" (from the mouth of the CEO) when it was a dumpster fire of a regression, actually removing features and poorly implementing then existing ones. Now its a nagware-bloatware. Don't take VC money for knowledge-base companies. You need thoughtful development for these types of applications and a commitment to the very long term, which is incompatible with VC. Obsidian has fallen into this same trap.
unixhero 4y ago
I for one use simplenote.com
stevage 4y ago
I hated Evernote ever since it decided it wanted to be a platform instead of a note taking tool. It was useful in the early days, then it became a gigantic, bloated, ever changing mess that was always trying to get me to use it in ways I didn't need. Wish I had ditched it much earlier to be honest. These days I use VSCode Notes, a pretty minimal extension that suits the way I work.
glmeece 4y ago
I switched to Nimbus Note a few years back - no real regrets. Minor issue (vs. Evernote): it's not "smart" like Evernote and doesn't know how to suggest the right tags or categories for a note. https://nimbusweb.me/note.php https://nimbusweb.me/note.php

grandchild 4y ago

I find it telling that notion managed to break the core web concept of the hyperlink by implementing their own version of the <a> tag. If I middle-click on a link to open it in a new tab, I paste-insert my clipboard content _into the link text_ instead (I'm on Linux). That's just horrible.

jitl 4y ago
(I work at Notion) It's actually the browser's default behavior to do what you're describing! Inside a `contenteditable` element, links no longer behave as links -- they aren't clickable, and hovering over the link doesn't show a preview of the HREF attribute in the browsers I've tested. So in order for links to do link things, we have to fight the browser and re-implement these behaviors. Here's a codesandbox with no JS to demonstate this: https://codesandbox.io/embed/optimistic-resonance-jbyeef?fontsize=14&hidenavigation=1&theme=dark https://codesandbox.io/embed/optimistic-resonance-jbyeef?fon... I created a task to track this bug internally. I think we can probably solve by calling preventDefault for the middle-click event if it bubbles up from inside a link.
- jfdksjf4hfsfasa 4y ago
  (not gp) Is there any way to track the progress of this? I would be very happy to see this fixed. Btw, if links inside a contenteditable aren't supposed to behave as links, why make it clickable in the first place? Because if you make it act like a link, you indeed have to reimplement the whole thing because of expectations. I'm no interaction designer, but imho a simple edit button would be mucher simpler. It could still be integrated nicely, no need to have wiki-like editing where the entire context is lost.
  - jitl 4y ago
    I think an edit button could improve Notion’s UX for small touchscreen devices where drag gesture is used for both scrolling and editing, but it would make the product worse for larger screen devices with precise pointing. It’s better to work hard in order to build the ideal product, than to make developers lives easy at the cost of a worse product.
- grandchild 4y ago
  Oh hey, I didn't see your reply until just now, thanks for the explanation and trying to resolve it! I understand the technical issue now. I still don't understand the UX. Am I assuming correctly that it's core to the concept of Notion to always be editable and not have an edit/view flip switch? Because I never used Notion to write anything, I just read things other people wrote. And so it's arguably weird to interact with a webpage that as it turns out is secretly an editor only masquerading as a webpage. Sly!

zerr 4y ago

Many products would have been better off by declaring them as feature complete and only continuing fixing bugs. Unfortunately, this happens rarely due to misalignment with employment incentives I believe.

DesiLurker 4y ago
This is the reason I believe there should be a framework/mechanism for dying companies to open source their works. this way they can continue to live on forever or at least have a way to influence something better.
- lukifer 4y ago
  "Exit to Community": https://www.colorado.edu/lab/medlab/exit-to-community https://www.colorado.edu/lab/medlab/exit-to-community
  - DesiLurker 4y ago
    I did not know about that but thanks for sharing. this is what I am talking about though I believe it will have more teeth if VC firms have some sort of an alliance that adopts this model. in-fact if they do that they can dictate the terms of s/w release in more palatable licenses than say GPLv3. overall I feel a lot more work is needed in establishing some sort of commons framework.
    - lukifer 4y ago
      > establishing some sort of commons framework I very much agree, and there are some compelling projects happening in that space as well: - https://commonsstack.org/ https://commonsstack.org/ - https://commonsengine.org/ https://commonsengine.org/ Getting VC firms on-board is a tough sell, though. Their model intrinsically involves getting a greater return than the up-front investment, usually through centralization, quasi-monopoly, and rent-seeking. The low hit-rate of breakthrough successes makes the perverse incentive all the stronger: VCs need unicorn cash-cows, to offset and subsidize the failures. At best, exit-to-community would be a mechanism to cut losses on investments with a small-but-loyal userbase, but without enough revenue to be truly profitable from the VC's perspective.
- thfuran 4y ago
  That doesn't really do anything to address the incentives.
  - DesiLurker 4y ago
    No it doesn't but I am assuming current financial incentives of 90% of failed startups are already fine tuned enough. eventually one of those startups would get it right but what this gets us as a whole is to not reinvent the wheel (or at least take the good parts of the wheel) move to the next stage by building on top of existing infra. Big VCs or accelerators like YC should be creating 'commons' to house freely available works of failed startups to be used by next venture. the big idea is that after a few such iterations startups will focus on solving the core fundamental issues of the target market rather than build out a bunch of infra. IMO this would reduce capital cost for newer startups in the same field, that should impact the incentives but its subtle. also, who know if all the work is out in open maybe some new startup would get an idea to put things together in a entirely new way. just imagine if BeOS we opensourced when it went under instead of letting it rot in some server.

causality0 4y ago

Evernote has only gotten worse since I started using it over 10 years ago That is the modern business model. First you build something so good it becomes indespensible then you squeeze money out of it until your customers hate you just enough to not stop using you.

netsharc 4y ago
I had an idea for a website: crowd-maintained list of downgrades for products, e.g. "Product: Twitter, Feature: login nag-wall when you scroll down. First Noticed: $month 2021,; Feature: killed the open API, Date: ___", etc. I still have the idea, if anyone wants to implement it, feel free.
- maccard 4y ago
  I bet you would get a much better conversion rate if you implemented a login wall on that service though!
- causality0 4y ago
  Hell, it's fractal, all the way from major services to operating systems to the most minor app store apps. Products get better until someone decides they aren't growing fast enough and then they get worse until they die or someone sane realizes that your video file player doesn't need its own social network.
joshspankit 4y ago
This is what I call “cashing out the social capital”. I don’t know if I’d call it a business model, but it’s certainly something that many modern businesses do.
- shrimp_emoji 4y ago
  Ah, so that's what Blizzard/Bethesda have been doing. :D
  - joshspankit 4y ago
    Yes exactly
  - BiteCode_dev 4y ago
    And EA
    - amacbride 4y ago
      and Dropbox
      - causality0 4y ago
        I will never forgive Dropbox. I spent a decade evangelizing them as the way to do cloud file storage to all the tech-illiterate people in my life and then Dropbox decided to limit free accounts to three devices. The sheer number of pissed-off and/or confused phone calls I got from all of those people was enough to make me wish eternal suffering upon the Dropbox executives.
        joshspankit 4y ago
        That is basically the dictionary definition of cashing out social capital: be so good that people evangelize your brand, then start aggressively putting profit first once you reach a critical mass of public awareness.
        bayindirh 4y ago
        I think they didn't cash-out on social capital. They grew, and became "enterprise first". The recipe is to limit free services and increase the price of paid service, so only big customers and serious users get attracted to you. Trello did the same thing. They killed their single-user friendly features and moved to enterprise first, gouging serious solo users in the process. I'm still subscribed to both, but I'm not as happy as before.
        joshspankit 4y ago
        The 1:1 analogy is to investment capital: let's say someone started a successful company that got purchased and has now invested the $5mil USD they got paid (the capital) with an annual rate of return of 5% giving them $250k/year. They could reasonably retire off just the return on investments. However, if they start using the $5mil to buy houses and cars and whatnot, they are "cashing out the capital". As they spend more and more, the return on investment drops but everything looks great from the outside: they have lots of cash, a lot of "things", and so-on. However, look ahead a few years and they might be left with $500k invested giving them a return of $25,000/year and it's possible that they would no longer be able to retire off that putting them in to a possible tail spin of needing to spend the remaining capital just to pay the monthly bills. I propose that this is what companies are doing with their "social capital" (which includes the public's impression of the brand and that brand's work on building up their customers). Creating a brand with integrity and values while working to solve a problem well builds social capital. All they have to do is "maintain the balance" (stay true to the values and mission that got them there) in order to keep getting the "return on investment" (continual influx of new paying customers). However, if they choose to start sacrificing values and quality for the short-term gains they can definitely do that. On a quarterly balance sheet it even looks like they are "rich": "We're spending less on dev time by ignoring bug reports and less on servicing free customers while also converting 10% of those old free customers to paying customers. The bottom line is way up!". But because they've sacrificed the values that attracted those customers in the first place new potential customers will start looking more critically, or will choose a competitor, or will even start their own competing service. It's only a matter of time before the company looks at the balance sheet and wonders why income is down. If they are really looking to ruin the company they might even point fingers like "we used to get $250k/yr, but now we're getting $25k and our competitor is getting $225. we must conclude that the market is saturated and we have to go on the offensive against that competitor.", when what they could do is simply accept that they have to start over to rebuild the social capital so they can have the same level of return again (or maybe even take the lesson and work harder to build more capital and have a bigger return in the future).
  - simonebrunozzi 4y ago
    And what Notion will do really soon.
temp8964 4y ago
I stopped paying for Evernote two years ago. I guess the more individual customers leave, the more it makes the management depending on business users, so the less they care about individual customers.
dehrmann 4y ago
The challenge is every PM at the company thinks they can see a step function increase in engagement, retention, etc. if they just add the right features.
- lifeplusplus 4y ago
  This! Can't get that promotion until your feature that somehow increases some kpi somewhere in short term.. this why lot of sites go through complete redesign when everything is already working
bayindirh 4y ago
I don't think so. Yes, the "first" Evernote had great features, but it was all over the place. No clients had the same set of features, and web side was even worse. When they ditched everything and rebuilt all clients from the same base, they've lost some of the cool features, but I find it much easier to use and rely on. Only after that point I bought a subscription, fully went into it, and currently building my knowledge base inside it, and collaborating on some stuff. Simpler is not always worse. Yes, the old Evernote was a "road warrior's utopia", but the current incarnation works much better on a cross-platform perspective, and I'm a happy camper.

temp8964 4y ago

There are comments recommending popular apps like Notion, Joplin, Obsidian, etc. I find hard to trust those apps will last 10, 15, or 20 years. I have switched note-keeping apps a few times in the past and no longer want to do so. That's why I decide I will not use any of those apps. Now I use MediaWiki through docker (with Sqlite database) on my home server. It's lightening fast for my personal use, and comes with tons of powerful features (categories, subpages, templates, math syntax, etc.). Because MediaWiki is the same system running Wikipedia, I believe it is very likely will run 10, 20, or even more years. It is not the most convenient to use, but I don't use it for quick notes, for which I just use the default note app on my phone.

deleted 4y ago
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kvark 4y ago
The beauty of Obsidian (at least) is that it does not matter whether the company is still around. It’s your files in a standard Markdown format.
- temp8964 4y ago
  I used to think so. Now I believe it's a misconception. Not all your notes can be just Markdown format. You will have image files. And then different apps handle image file location differently. Joplin turns attachment filenames to random strings. Also, Markdown format is insufficient. I will need categories and subcategories, etc. And then different apps handle those differently.
bmarquez 4y ago
I've previously bounced between different open-source notetaking apps but the great thing about any note format based on Markdown (Standard Notes/Obsidian/Zim/etc), is that it's pretty easy to move from one platform to another if they stop being maintained. Although in the end I ended up with Microsoft OneNote (with Obsidian for special cases), Microsoft isn't going away and they don't have a habit of killing core products like Google does.
- temp8964 4y ago
  Yes. I almost settled on Microsoft OneNote. I just don't like several things of it. The writing and reading experience is not great. And I constantly find I really need one note to belong to multiple categories, but OneNote forces me to think where to save a note (which leaves me writing fewer notes).
  - coffeeling 4y ago
    A solution to that is to have a fleeting / unfiled notes area where you write notes and to have a separate maintenance process where you file them. OneNote also lets you link to notes internally, so you can have a dummy in one place and a link to the actual note in the dummy.