26 ms·

Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

384 points by taldo 4y ago

amh999 4y ago
I'm adding here in case Evernote reads this thread. 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.
mvkel 4y ago
The biggest mistake Evernote made was not looking at how their customers used the product. 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.
nathanaldensr 4y ago
How the mighty have fallen. Who the heck are Bending Spoons?
- graypegg 4y ago
  Seemingly producers of a random set of mobile apps [0] including a video editor, a basic photo retouching app, and a fitness routine tracker. 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. [0] https://bendingspoons.com/products https://bendingspoons.com/products
  - brookst 4y ago
    30 days?!?!?
  - vxNsr 4y ago
    I just got the reference. Bending spoons, doing the impossible, like in the matrix. At least the name makes sense now.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
      Isn't spoon-bending a "hoaxy" magic trick? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoon_bending https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoon_bending
      - seti0Cha 4y ago
        Yeah, maybe to young people that means "doing the impossible" but to me it means "tricking people into thinking you're doing something impossible" or "scam" for short.
        whoopdedo 4y ago
        Even in the modern usage the principle is to recognize that it's all an illusion. No spoons are ever actually bent in The Matrix.
      - teepo 4y ago
        It's also a heroin usage trope.
  - delusional 4y ago
    They also call their employees "spooners" and talk about how they "they share one thing in common: a drive to become the best person they’re capable of being." 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.
- martopix 4y ago
  The only reasonably modern app developer company in Italy, I believe, for the little I heard. Considering the technological desert that is Italy these days, not bad.
nathias 4y ago
evernote was one of the programs that trapped me, it took some effort to finally migrate my data (I'm now using md files/ obsidian for mobile frontend synced with syncthing)
- netsharc 4y ago
  I migrated to Joplin (with a Docker container on my NAS as the server), the Windows app has "Import from an ENEX (Evernote Export)" and I haven't noticed anything missing. I've noticed the few encrypted notes I had being migrated as garble though.
- cianmm 4y ago
  The final thing that has me trapped with Evernote is the very good OCR for both images and PDFs. The second I figure out a replacement for that which works great on Mac and iOS I am gone.
  - gumby 4y ago
    On ios this is now baked into Notes.app 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.
    - cianmm 4y ago
      Do you know if Notes performs the OCR on files that [are imported over from Evernote?](https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205793 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205793) I have many hundreds (maybe low-thousands) of PDFs and images that I need to be able to access once in a blue moon, but when I need them Evernote's OCR makes it easy. I guess I could just try it out with a subsection of notes.
      - cianmm 4y ago
        I’ve imported a bunch of PDFs and various image formats and it doesn’t seem to be scanning them. I’ll check back later in case it’s a feature it does in the background.
gmoore 4y ago
I do miss the old Evernote. Many of the 'enhancements' over the last few years just get in the way of the main benifit of the tool.
- tianqi 4y ago
  Indeed. Thier every 'enhancements' makes me feel that they have absolutely no idea what their strengths are.
- chillfox 4y ago
  Yep, if I could subscribe to the old Evernote then I would, but it's long gone.
- horsawlarway 4y ago
  Yup - it stopped being a functional note taking app. Which is the only reason I used it in the first place. 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.
isaacfrond 4y ago
I really liked Evernote. Yearly subscription instead of the monthly Netflix like prices that ever half baked app asks for these days. Integration amongst all my devices phone, table, various desktops. All nice. And no further dependency on Microsoft, Google or Meta. 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.
- pqs 4y ago
  Not stalled. They created Tasks, which I use every single day!
  - aNoob7000 4y ago
    If tasks is their big accomplishment they are screwed. How about allowing you to change the default font on a note or a task? 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.
    - seti0Cha 4y ago
      Recently their development pace really picked up. Unfortunately that was due to them replatforming as an electron app. Development speed improved, but the app itself felt sluggish and I had really started to hate it.
- brookst 4y ago
  Same. It was ahead of its time and incredibly useful, then behind its time and useful, and now antiquated but still full of my important notes. 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.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Though basically the same lock-in issue is what kept me from starting to put all my notes into OneNote years ago. Admittedly at this point, OneNote is presumably not going anywhere. But I still make the tradeoff to mostly keep notes in text files.
whalesalad 4y ago
imagine being at the local tech happy hour and someone asks you where you work and you have to yell over the loud music "BENDING SPOONS, I'M A L3 SRE" ... "what?" ... "BENDING. SPOONS."
- gnrlst 4y ago
  Bending Spoons is based in Milan so you would be at an aperitivo sipping a Negroni or spritz with not so loud music :)
idlewords 4y ago
gets checkbook ready
j-bos 4y ago
Welp, guess it's time to finally cancel the subscription and move to Obsidian.
mehrzad 4y ago
Interesting to see this now, I was thinking of switching to a new platform for tasks and notes because Evernote’s free tier is quite limited and Apple Reminders often doesn’t even show the correct reminder if there are multiple open. I was just reading about Evernote’s profitability last night.
- steveBK123 4y ago
  Apple notes is rock solid compared to reminders 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.
  - mehrzad 4y ago
    Apple Notes unfortunately does not let you export notes with the images attached, not always relevant but it really hurt me once.
egypturnash 4y ago
At long last, Evernote takes an Incredible Journey to be broken down for parts by its new owner. Can't get any more fucked up than it already has been, it went from being an important part of my daily workflow to a place of pain. The rewrite is part of why my last graphic novel ground to a halt, I was using EN to collaborate on scripts with my partner and it is just agony to use any more. I cancelled my subscription a few years back and really have not found anything to fill that hole. Every theoretical replacement is either a shitty sluggish web view, owned by a megacorporation I don't want to get involved with, or both. 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.
- reiichiroh 4y ago
  “Incredible journey?”
- kjs3 4y ago
  Could be worse. Wait till they start selling advertisers access to data-mine your notes.
- thefourthchime 4y ago
  I tried a few alternatives and landed on Apple Notes. It's blinding fast, and while it's not exactly feature-rich, it does everything I need while being seamlessly synced to the cloud and my devices.
  - ravenstine 4y ago
    I use Apple Notes because I realized that, for my needs, all the structure and organization that so many other note taking apps/services provide really just make things more complicated and isn't beneficial. Notes is simple, has one level of folders, and supports labeling. I'll almost never look at 95% of my notes again, but in case I do, I can just search by keyword and usually I'll find it. 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.
gumby 4y ago
Ah, I drove past their office just last week and noticed all the lights were out and the parking lot was empty. 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.
vxNsr 4y ago
Bending spoon’s website is 100% bloat so that doesn’t bode well for a revitalized Evernote.
criddell 4y ago
I guess Phil Libin's plan to make a company that could last 100 years didn't quite work out. https://www.businessinsider.com/how-evernotes-phil-libin-plans-to-build-a-100-year-startup-2013-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/how-evernotes-phil-libin-pla...
jef_leppard 4y ago
I learned three things watching EN snatch defeat from the jaws of victory: 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.
- seti0Cha 4y ago
  Disagree on #3. Social & collaborative features are the bane of my existence. No I don't want to share all my scraps of information, no I don't want to let my friends know what I'm listening to, no, I don't want to publish product purchases I make to twitter. I think a better #3 would be: decide whether your audience is individuals or businesses, then build for that.
  - jef_leppard 4y ago
    If you don’t want collaborative editing, don’t use it. I’m saying most users wanted it and started looking elsewhere when EN couldn’t deliver. It’s easier to add a lock on collaboration than to backfill later.
    - hosh 4y ago
      The problem is that the effort to do collaborative editing creates a lot of other problems. 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.
    - criddell 4y ago
dpedu 4y ago
I used to work for a company that rented a portion of Evernote's HQ, in Redwood City. Nice office and location. Evernote eventually recovered and kicked us out. Just my personal piece of nostalgia.
- greenburger 4y ago
  You’re in luck that space might be available again. They moved out of that building several months ago[0]. [0] https://walkingredwoodcity.com/?s=Evernote&submit=Search https://walkingredwoodcity.com/?s=Evernote&submit=Search
  - dpedu 4y ago
    Wow, that's quite the downsizing! Evernote at one point occupied all 5 floors of that building and their new HQ looks like a single level over retail shops. I guess it makes sense with the move to remote work.
dahdum 4y ago
I loved Evernote and was a paying subscriber right up until they changed their TOS to let their employees read all my notes to work on ad targeting. They backpedaled after a while but trust was lost, I cancelled immediately. I have no sympathy for their failure.
- kar1181 4y ago
  Similar experience here, it was a series of changes, none of which made my experience better and a lot of dodgy privacy affecting TOS updates that caused me to can my paid account. 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.
- lancesells 4y ago
  I paid off and on through the years but for me it was when they started selling physical products and advertising them in the app. I can't remember what they were. T-shirts? Mousepads?
  - okuntilnow 4y ago
    And socks! https://www.aivanet.com/2013/09/evernote-gets-physical-why-a-software-makers-turning-to-tangible-goods/ https://www.aivanet.com/2013/09/evernote-gets-physical-why-a...
  - codalan 4y ago
    Moleskine notepads. But hey, it was more reliable and quicker to use than their software offering.
- d_graeme 4y ago
  That's horrible. It's the reason I'm still somewhat suspicious of a simplistic note taking app (Colornote) I use on my android. I oftentimes get the sneaky feeling it might be sending my (sometimes highly private) notes to a server somewhere in China, but the app is so simple to use that no matter how many time I decide to, I simply can't get myself to wipe and uninstall it
awinder 4y ago
Looks like these folks raised a big round (for the first funding round no less) last month: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bending-spoons-raises-340-million-130300382.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bending-spoons-raises-340-mil... So fund-to-acquire?
jbaczuk 4y ago
I didn't realize you could acquire a company just by bending some spoons...
ergonaught 4y ago
Result being that today I'll migrate everything out of Evernote and cancel my subscription. That sucks.
hirundo 4y ago
The only reason I've stuck with Evernote is because it scans all of my old paperwork and lets me search by the OCRed text. Without it, so many years of personal data would be locked in images I'd never have time to eyeball. Please someone release me from this foul daemon by suggesting an alternative with this key feature.
- soundnote 4y ago
  OneNote and Amplenote have OCR built in. Images only, not PDFs, mind you, but it's there in any case.
- bkishan 4y ago
  If you port over those images to Apple photos, you can literally search the for the text right inside the photos app. It works pretty accurately for all printed text ime.
  - kevinmgranger 4y ago
    Is there some way to link to those photos via URL, or something like that?
- abathur 4y ago
  Yeah... same boat. Photographed my notebooks and put them in. Sigh.
- steve1977 4y ago
  On macOS, Devonthink
- lazyasciiart 4y ago
  Pretty sure OneNote does this, I don’t know how the bulk move experience would be though.
ericd 4y ago
Can we all please go back to buying stable desktop software without continuous upgrade nags, now?
- izzydata 4y ago
  But without software as a service how will companies expand indefinitely until they bust?
Nursie 4y ago
Evernote came preinstalled On my second android phone, I think a Galaxy Note 2. It could not be removed and demanded to be allowed to update itself constantly. 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…
mblevin 4y ago
The End of an Error for the world's most disappointing note-taking app. 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.
- jjtheblunt 4y ago
  > The End of an Error 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!
  - hyperdimension 4y ago
    Yeah, regardless of the two it is, I'm saving that for later.
    - mblevin 4y ago
      Very much on purpose and I stole that from somebody else long ago.
offtotheraces 4y ago
This is going to be a disaster - Bending Spoons is not a good actor: “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-reynolds-didnt-pay-close-enough?utm_source=direct&r=1ix542&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web https://open.substack.com/pub/impassionedmoderate/p/ryan-rey...
- presentation 4y ago
  How dare they charge money for products they own that have value.
- nneonneo 4y ago
  The really key bit is right afterwards: “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.
- boole1854 4y ago
  I must admit it's not entirely obvious why that business model makes them "not a good actor". And what's with the snark about Italian banks?
etempleton 4y ago
on MacOS/iOS, Bear was the best note taking app I found. If you need cross platform capability and/or want free and open source I like Joplin a lot as well.
- rxyz 4y ago
  Bear was amazing but I dropped it because there's a lot of good enough alternatives (I use Craft right now) with more features and wider support. Bear should have been ported to Android and Windows/Linux(browser version?) years ago.
- akisd 4y ago
  I have also tried to find an alternative to evernote and i settled to Joplin for now.
- brycethornton 4y ago
  I used Evernote for a decade before switching to Apple Notes a couple years back. It took some getting used to but now it feels seamless. I'd highly recommend it if you don't need anything too fancy.
- MrZongle2 4y ago
  I switched to Joplin a couple of years back and don't regret the move. Was able to import all my Evernote stuff as well, which was one deciding factor.
c-smile 4y ago
Yeah. > 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-history/ https://notes.sciter.com/2017/09/11/motivation-and-a-bit-of-... What a memory, I really miss that atmosphere ...
- vibbix 4y ago
  The GUI is giving me Windows XP Plus! pack throwbacks, thank you for sharing.
- egypturnash 4y ago
  Hey, thanks for your hard work making a great tool that I used for most of a decade.
- approxim8ion 4y ago
  Thanks for sharing! The state of application development is rather sad, that screenshot just conveys a feeling of speed and efficiency to me that is lacking in modern software.
Kye 4y ago
Good thing I moved off Evernote years ago. I use Simplenote since it seems to be in good hands with Automattic. They use it internally, so it's not likely to go away.
deleted 4y ago
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pyrophane 4y ago
I'm not familiar with Bending Spoons. Anyone able to give me a bit more context on what this will likely mean for the future of the product?
- squarefoot 4y ago
  They became sorta famous over here for developing the Covid19 contact tracing app "Immuni" that was then adopted by the Italian Ministry of Health. Being a government project, they probably got a life-changing amount of money because of that. I can't comment on the quality of the app as i never used it. https://github.com/immuni-app https://github.com/immuni-app
  - CastFX 4y ago
    Actually this is wrong. They did not receive any funds from the Government. There is an article in Italian with the words of one of the founders. https://www.corriere.it/tecnologia/20_aprile_22/luca-ferrari-bending-spoons-su-immuni-nessun-guadagno-fiducia-privacy-sono-fondamentali-3dc9cf52-84cf-11ea-8d8e-1dff96ef3536.shtml https://www.corriere.it/tecnologia/20_aprile_22/luca-ferrari...
    - squarefoot 4y ago
      I stand corrected, thanks for the link.
deleted 4y ago
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calabaza222 4y ago
I use paper & pencil. Works fine :D
gertrunde 4y ago
I was a bit like "Bending Spoons? Who?", so I followed the link to their website and looked at the products page... 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?
- balls187 4y ago
  There was clearly no rhyme or reason to their portfolio. Basically the app store version of a private equity firm.
- Manjuuu 4y ago
  I suppose that's what their target audience wants to see.
- rusl1 4y ago
  That's literally their business strategy, total bullshits. It's all fluff
fairity 4y ago
Can someone educate me on the difficulties in raising money from your user base? 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?
- notfried 4y ago
  ICOs are technically a way, and scams aside which wouldn’t apply to Evernote if they would have used it, there is still a fair amount of legal ambiguity in doing it. There has been many voices pushing for creating a regulatory framework to allow doing what you are asking for.
- kjs3 4y ago
  Paying recurring for an app should make this problem non-existent. If $5/mo or whatever doesn't allow you to deliver a stable, performant product, then you need to reconsider your pricing or your business model. Evernote isn't a startup and they should have this figured out by now. And do not do a release that amounts to "look at this whizzy, non-core feature we've been working hard to add (see: chat) which means we didn't get around to fixing all the boring issues with the core product you're paying for"; that's just insulting. The only thing I imagine worse, if I'm already paying you money for the product, is for you come to me with "Oh...you want it to work? Fix the bugs and the performance? That'll be a $50 'investment'.". That guarantees I'm going to look elsewhere real fast, because fixing bugs and improving performance isn't a one-time thing and you'll be back to extract more from me at some random time in the future where your business decisions don't cover the next shortfall.
  - fairity 4y ago
    I'm imagining that $50 raised from 10 million people ($500m raised) would allow for an outright recap of the entire company, including bringing in new management that serves the users' best interests. 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.
dang 4y ago
Related ongoing thread: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential (2021) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33626047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33626047 - Nov 2022 (143 comments)
awill 4y ago
They must be incredibly jealous of all the successful note taking apps (Notion, Ulysses, Bear, Craft). Evernote were first, and blew it. No other way to describe it. 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.
- w0m 4y ago
  I loved evernote ~10-15 years ago; used it for ~all personal stuff. Eventually it became more metered/locked down (I don't remember specifics anymore) and i moved to OneNote.
- ddbb33 4y ago
  Still upset when Evernote lost my lecture notes when I synced after turning off WiFi to save laptop battery (back in 2010)
- riffic 4y ago
  roam, obsidian, logseq, etc so many new or really interesting players in this space.
- sedatk 4y ago
  I'd stopped using Evernote involuntarily because their 2FA recovery scenario was broken and I got locked out of my account despite that I still had access to my email. I moved on. I checked it again years later, and they fixed it, but never went back. Such small omissions can create a whole chain of losses.
- bigtones 4y ago
  I don't know that Evernote the company or it's management would be jealous - Evernote probably has more annual revenue than all of those app combined.
- bayindirh 4y ago
  Actually, their experience is pretty pleasant and the product works very well after they have rebuilt their apps. 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.
unixhero 4y ago
I for one released on simplenote.cpm for my noting needs
- emeril 4y ago
  I've been using resophnotes as windows client for simplenote for years (and the ios client if I need to look something up on the go) after evernote become terrible 10+ years ago 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...
dotcoma 4y ago
Any idea of how much Bending Spoons paid for Evernote ?
- baron816 4y ago
  Ex Evernote employee here. Someone else posted this: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bending-spoons-raises-340-million-130300382.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bending-spoons-raises-340-mil... 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.
  - driverdan 4y ago
    Seems unlikely they'd spend that whole round of funding on one app. I bet it was much, much less.
    - dotcoma 4y ago
      But how much was Evernote bringing in in revenues ?
dools 4y ago
Ever-ishNote
xablau 4y ago
"At Bending Spoons, we create our own cutting-edge technologies and products." https://bendingspoons.com/ https://bendingspoons.com/
irrational 4y ago
I stopped using evernote when it kept having some sort of syncing issues and lost what I had written over and over again. Maybe they have fixed it, but I've lost any trust in them, so, I'm not willing to risk it.
nashashmi 4y ago
I used to love Google Notebook. And then they shut it down. Evernote offered to take in that google notebook data and integrate it into their system. 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.
- nashashmi 4y ago
  Using notion to migrate my data out of evernote.
frans 4y ago
These are mostly negative reviews of Evernote. Yet, I do like the product and I am yet to find a replacement that offers these must-haves: * 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!
- soundnote 4y ago
  Amplenote and OneNote are pretty much what comes to mind with those requirements. Both OCR images, but don't do PDFs.
- frans 4y ago
  I did some searching via [1] and it turns out amplenote comes closest to my requirements list. [1] https://www.noteapps.info/apps https://www.noteapps.info/apps [2] https://www.amplenote.com/ https://www.amplenote.com/
  - deely3 4y ago
    Hey, thanks!
SergeAx 4y ago
I am a many years paying user of Evernote. Startup time on Android became painfully slow several years ago. On Windows I just keep the app always open. Otherwise I don't see any benefit of switching to another app.
Manjuuu 4y ago
If you want to delete your account: https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/360056549574-Permanently-close-your-Evernote-account https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/360056549574-Per...
techky 4y ago
I still hate that Evernote bought Skitch. Really wish the new team would revive it or sell it off to an interested dev.
- tomhoward 4y ago
  I'm good friends with one of the founders of Skitch. He effectively got less than nothing for that sale. It was an acqui-hire with vesting stock valued in the several $million, but when he couldn't handle working in the big corporate environment at Evernote, he had to leave, and lost his stock with zero remuneration. He couldn't even pay off the debts he'd incurred over the years building Skitch. Terrible outcome for him, as well as the product. So sad.
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rodolphoarruda 4y ago
EN (happy) customer since 2014 here. I just hope the acquiring company won't kill it.
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rvbissell 4y ago
As much as I love (and still pay for) Evernote, I've just now realized that I haven't added to my collection there over 6 months. Without intending to, I seem to have largely switched to just saving websites with the "SingleFile" extension for Firefox.
floatinglotus 4y ago
Another lesson from Evernote: if your primary business is digital (ie software) don’t make a corporate strategy of selling physical things (notebooks).
jshaqaw 4y ago
Evernote is still the only product that meets my workflow needs. Hope they don’t mess it up.
skilled 4y ago
Is that an announcement or a marketing jargon dictionary? I had forgotten this app even exists, but I can see why.
jdshaffer 4y ago
I had enjoyed and even paid for Evernote for several years, until their "restructuring" and they dropped the export of everything but "Evernote Database"... I think they have since restored an export to HTML, but that always was the biggest problem for me... I want to be able to export (and backup) my notes in TXT or MD, not just HTML or their proprietary format. No idea if they've since added in more reasonable export features, but it was a dealbreaker for me (a big plain-text fan).
pyrophane 4y ago
Bit late to the thread. This is a hbit of a shame but also quite clarifying. 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.
- azinman2 4y ago
  They took a bunch of VC cash. Like a lot. They’re going to want 10-1000x on that, and consumers are only willing to pay so much. Apple Notes and Google Keep sucked away most of the consumer market.
arczyx 4y ago
This is unrelated to the news, but does anyone here ever get unknown charge from "Google Play Bending Spoons"? It doesn't appear in the Google Transaction History, but my ewallet provider confirmed it was from Google Play. Someone has asked about it in Google Play Help and got no meaningful answer https://support.google.com/googleplay/thread/159064766/help-with-bending-spoons-bank-deductions?hl=en https://support.google.com/googleplay/thread/159064766/help-...
hk1337 4y ago
If you didn’t know “Bending Spoons” was an organization, the title would come across a bit differently.
tzury 4y ago
a) Happy for Evernote and hope they have found a new home. This app was pioneering the realm and leading for quite some time! 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/
filmgirlcw 4y ago
I was a paid Evernote user who didn’t use the service much but paid anyway, partially because I liked the company, until they raised prices in 2016 by like 40% for the premium plan. 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.
another-reader 4y ago
I opened up File Explorer I and I see I made a full dump of Evernote on 30 July 2019. I was a paying customer for a few years but decided at the time to dump it before it was too late. 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?
imwillofficial 4y ago
Remember when Evernote was the shit? Oh how the mighty have fallen
627467 4y ago
The main reason I never stopped using Evernote is that somehow I got "stuck" on a personal plan that never really got updated for at least 7 years. 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?
- ramraj07 4y ago
  Hopefully you are backing them up now lol.
rfreiberger 4y ago
I used to be a huge fan of Evernote, but a few things made me look at other solutions. One issue is the capturing of code was automatically formatted and I was burned a few times keeping my code snippets for reference. 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.
lenova 4y ago
Everytime Evernote gets mentioend on HN, I love to promote my favorite replacement: https://getupnote.com/ https://getupnote.com/ Right now, it's more of Bear app replacement than an Evernote replacement, but I feel like they're heading in the right direction.
RefSnow 4y ago
I used evernote for a long time. I migrated to Joplin seeking greater control and security. I use it to this day and never thought about going back to Evernote.
brailsafe 4y ago
Wow, I'm sure I'm not alone in having completely forgot about Evernote after importing all my notes into Bear. They fell off my radar with such force that I literally haven't even thought of them in years, except for one moment months ago when I noticed their logo on maybe a physical notepad sitting in some old bookstore window. Other than that, I have not even seen the logo anywhere else. Like others, it was the device restriction, but also just terribly glitchy note editing/pasting etc.. Moving to Bear (which has also now stagnated pretty hard, but is still good) I was just stoked on the fact that editing was a smooth experience and it kind of got out of my way.
- HuwFulcher 4y ago
  I love Bear but it's been a big disappointment in how quickly it ships features. They've been working on the web version for what seems like a few years now. If you're 100% in the Apple ecosystem it's great. I have an iPhone and M1 Air for personal use but my last 3 jobs have used Windows, being able to transfer knowledge across devices is a massive pain. I ended up switching to Obsidian due to that. 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.
  - r2222 4y ago
    Yeah it’s been extermely slow with the updates. The Bear 2.0 is currently on Mac-only beta but not yet open (unless you join their beta forum and ask for access), but even then, it doesn’t have the web app. I’ve seen the Bear team say that they did a full rewrite (in C++ I think?) so that it would be easier to implement the web app in future but who knows how many years in the future that is.
    - HuwFulcher 4y ago
      I may be wrong on the features on Bear 2.0 but it doesn’t seem like a lot new features. A full rewrite in C++ may be why it’s taking so long but it definitely feels like they’ve quietly dropped 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.
Vibgyor5 4y ago
For anyone looking for an INCREDIBLE note-taking app, check out UpNote. https://getupnote.com/ https://getupnote.com/ - 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
- crossroadsguy 4y ago
  There’s FOSS https://fsnot.es https://fsnot.es. 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.
- nathan_f77 4y ago
  Thanks for the recommendation! I'm going to try them out now. 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.
  - Vibgyor5 4y ago
    Glad to hear you tried and liked it
woofwoofwoof 4y ago
They were such a cool company to work for in the Valley when they started started.
deafpolygon 4y ago
Looks like the acquisition is for the customer base and data (for AI training). Bending Spoons is leaning on AI tech and Evernote has both customers and data they need for training their AI.
- pqs 4y ago
  That's what I thought and I don't like it at all. My private notes, being used to train an AI. I have boarding passes and alike in there, which probably have my ID card number. Then, an AI somwhere will print my private data. Yes, they try to filter these things out, but we know how hard this is, as we saw with GitHub Copilot.

384 points by taldo 4y ago

I'm adding here in case Evernote reads this thread. 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.

mvkel 4y ago

The biggest mistake Evernote made was not looking at how their customers used the product. 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.

nathanaldensr 4y ago

How the mighty have fallen. Who the heck are Bending Spoons?

graypegg 4y ago
Seemingly producers of a random set of mobile apps [0] including a video editor, a basic photo retouching app, and a fitness routine tracker. 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. [0] https://bendingspoons.com/products https://bendingspoons.com/products
- brookst 4y ago
  30 days?!?!?
- vxNsr 4y ago
  I just got the reference. Bending spoons, doing the impossible, like in the matrix. At least the name makes sense now.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
    Isn't spoon-bending a "hoaxy" magic trick? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoon_bending https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoon_bending
    - seti0Cha 4y ago
      Yeah, maybe to young people that means "doing the impossible" but to me it means "tricking people into thinking you're doing something impossible" or "scam" for short.
      - whoopdedo 4y ago
        Even in the modern usage the principle is to recognize that it's all an illusion. No spoons are ever actually bent in The Matrix.
    - teepo 4y ago
      It's also a heroin usage trope.
- delusional 4y ago
  They also call their employees "spooners" and talk about how they "they share one thing in common: a drive to become the best person they’re capable of being." 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.
martopix 4y ago
The only reasonably modern app developer company in Italy, I believe, for the little I heard. Considering the technological desert that is Italy these days, not bad.

nathias 4y ago

evernote was one of the programs that trapped me, it took some effort to finally migrate my data (I'm now using md files/ obsidian for mobile frontend synced with syncthing)

netsharc 4y ago
I migrated to Joplin (with a Docker container on my NAS as the server), the Windows app has "Import from an ENEX (Evernote Export)" and I haven't noticed anything missing. I've noticed the few encrypted notes I had being migrated as garble though.
cianmm 4y ago
The final thing that has me trapped with Evernote is the very good OCR for both images and PDFs. The second I figure out a replacement for that which works great on Mac and iOS I am gone.
- gumby 4y ago
  On ios this is now baked into Notes.app 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.
  - cianmm 4y ago
    Do you know if Notes performs the OCR on files that [are imported over from Evernote?](https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205793 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205793) I have many hundreds (maybe low-thousands) of PDFs and images that I need to be able to access once in a blue moon, but when I need them Evernote's OCR makes it easy. I guess I could just try it out with a subsection of notes.
    - cianmm 4y ago
      I’ve imported a bunch of PDFs and various image formats and it doesn’t seem to be scanning them. I’ll check back later in case it’s a feature it does in the background.

gmoore 4y ago

I do miss the old Evernote. Many of the 'enhancements' over the last few years just get in the way of the main benifit of the tool.

tianqi 4y ago
Indeed. Thier every 'enhancements' makes me feel that they have absolutely no idea what their strengths are.
chillfox 4y ago
Yep, if I could subscribe to the old Evernote then I would, but it's long gone.
horsawlarway 4y ago
Yup - it stopped being a functional note taking app. Which is the only reason I used it in the first place. 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.

isaacfrond 4y ago

I really liked Evernote. Yearly subscription instead of the monthly Netflix like prices that ever half baked app asks for these days. Integration amongst all my devices phone, table, various desktops. All nice. And no further dependency on Microsoft, Google or Meta. 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.

pqs 4y ago
Not stalled. They created Tasks, which I use every single day!
- aNoob7000 4y ago
  If tasks is their big accomplishment they are screwed. How about allowing you to change the default font on a note or a task? 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.
  - seti0Cha 4y ago
    Recently their development pace really picked up. Unfortunately that was due to them replatforming as an electron app. Development speed improved, but the app itself felt sluggish and I had really started to hate it.
brookst 4y ago
Same. It was ahead of its time and incredibly useful, then behind its time and useful, and now antiquated but still full of my important notes. 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.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Though basically the same lock-in issue is what kept me from starting to put all my notes into OneNote years ago. Admittedly at this point, OneNote is presumably not going anywhere. But I still make the tradeoff to mostly keep notes in text files.

whalesalad 4y ago

imagine being at the local tech happy hour and someone asks you where you work and you have to yell over the loud music "BENDING SPOONS, I'M A L3 SRE" ... "what?" ... "BENDING. SPOONS."

gnrlst 4y ago
Bending Spoons is based in Milan so you would be at an aperitivo sipping a Negroni or spritz with not so loud music :)

idlewords 4y ago

gets checkbook ready

j-bos 4y ago

Welp, guess it's time to finally cancel the subscription and move to Obsidian.

mehrzad 4y ago

Interesting to see this now, I was thinking of switching to a new platform for tasks and notes because Evernote’s free tier is quite limited and Apple Reminders often doesn’t even show the correct reminder if there are multiple open. I was just reading about Evernote’s profitability last night.

steveBK123 4y ago
Apple notes is rock solid compared to reminders 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.
- mehrzad 4y ago
  Apple Notes unfortunately does not let you export notes with the images attached, not always relevant but it really hurt me once.

egypturnash 4y ago

At long last, Evernote takes an Incredible Journey to be broken down for parts by its new owner. Can't get any more fucked up than it already has been, it went from being an important part of my daily workflow to a place of pain. The rewrite is part of why my last graphic novel ground to a halt, I was using EN to collaborate on scripts with my partner and it is just agony to use any more. I cancelled my subscription a few years back and really have not found anything to fill that hole. Every theoretical replacement is either a shitty sluggish web view, owned by a megacorporation I don't want to get involved with, or both. 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.

reiichiroh 4y ago
“Incredible journey?”
kjs3 4y ago
Could be worse. Wait till they start selling advertisers access to data-mine your notes.
thefourthchime 4y ago
I tried a few alternatives and landed on Apple Notes. It's blinding fast, and while it's not exactly feature-rich, it does everything I need while being seamlessly synced to the cloud and my devices.
- ravenstine 4y ago
  I use Apple Notes because I realized that, for my needs, all the structure and organization that so many other note taking apps/services provide really just make things more complicated and isn't beneficial. Notes is simple, has one level of folders, and supports labeling. I'll almost never look at 95% of my notes again, but in case I do, I can just search by keyword and usually I'll find it. 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.

gumby 4y ago

Ah, I drove past their office just last week and noticed all the lights were out and the parking lot was empty. 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.

vxNsr 4y ago

Bending spoon’s website is 100% bloat so that doesn’t bode well for a revitalized Evernote.

criddell 4y ago

I guess Phil Libin's plan to make a company that could last 100 years didn't quite work out. https://www.businessinsider.com/how-evernotes-phil-libin-plans-to-build-a-100-year-startup-2013-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/how-evernotes-phil-libin-pla...

jef_leppard 4y ago

I learned three things watching EN snatch defeat from the jaws of victory: 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.

seti0Cha 4y ago
Disagree on #3. Social & collaborative features are the bane of my existence. No I don't want to share all my scraps of information, no I don't want to let my friends know what I'm listening to, no, I don't want to publish product purchases I make to twitter. I think a better #3 would be: decide whether your audience is individuals or businesses, then build for that.
- jef_leppard 4y ago
  If you don’t want collaborative editing, don’t use it. I’m saying most users wanted it and started looking elsewhere when EN couldn’t deliver. It’s easier to add a lock on collaboration than to backfill later.
  - hosh 4y ago
    The problem is that the effort to do collaborative editing creates a lot of other problems. 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.
  - criddell 4y ago

dpedu 4y ago

I used to work for a company that rented a portion of Evernote's HQ, in Redwood City. Nice office and location. Evernote eventually recovered and kicked us out. Just my personal piece of nostalgia.

greenburger 4y ago
You’re in luck that space might be available again. They moved out of that building several months ago[0]. [0] https://walkingredwoodcity.com/?s=Evernote&submit=Search https://walkingredwoodcity.com/?s=Evernote&submit=Search
- dpedu 4y ago
  Wow, that's quite the downsizing! Evernote at one point occupied all 5 floors of that building and their new HQ looks like a single level over retail shops. I guess it makes sense with the move to remote work.

dahdum 4y ago

I loved Evernote and was a paying subscriber right up until they changed their TOS to let their employees read all my notes to work on ad targeting. They backpedaled after a while but trust was lost, I cancelled immediately. I have no sympathy for their failure.

kar1181 4y ago
Similar experience here, it was a series of changes, none of which made my experience better and a lot of dodgy privacy affecting TOS updates that caused me to can my paid account. 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.
lancesells 4y ago
I paid off and on through the years but for me it was when they started selling physical products and advertising them in the app. I can't remember what they were. T-shirts? Mousepads?
- okuntilnow 4y ago
  And socks! https://www.aivanet.com/2013/09/evernote-gets-physical-why-a-software-makers-turning-to-tangible-goods/ https://www.aivanet.com/2013/09/evernote-gets-physical-why-a...
- codalan 4y ago
  Moleskine notepads. But hey, it was more reliable and quicker to use than their software offering.
d_graeme 4y ago
That's horrible. It's the reason I'm still somewhat suspicious of a simplistic note taking app (Colornote) I use on my android. I oftentimes get the sneaky feeling it might be sending my (sometimes highly private) notes to a server somewhere in China, but the app is so simple to use that no matter how many time I decide to, I simply can't get myself to wipe and uninstall it

awinder 4y ago

Looks like these folks raised a big round (for the first funding round no less) last month: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bending-spoons-raises-340-million-130300382.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bending-spoons-raises-340-mil... So fund-to-acquire?

jbaczuk 4y ago

I didn't realize you could acquire a company just by bending some spoons...

ergonaught 4y ago

Result being that today I'll migrate everything out of Evernote and cancel my subscription. That sucks.

hirundo 4y ago

The only reason I've stuck with Evernote is because it scans all of my old paperwork and lets me search by the OCRed text. Without it, so many years of personal data would be locked in images I'd never have time to eyeball. Please someone release me from this foul daemon by suggesting an alternative with this key feature.

soundnote 4y ago
OneNote and Amplenote have OCR built in. Images only, not PDFs, mind you, but it's there in any case.
bkishan 4y ago
If you port over those images to Apple photos, you can literally search the for the text right inside the photos app. It works pretty accurately for all printed text ime.
- kevinmgranger 4y ago
  Is there some way to link to those photos via URL, or something like that?
abathur 4y ago
Yeah... same boat. Photographed my notebooks and put them in. Sigh.
steve1977 4y ago
On macOS, Devonthink
lazyasciiart 4y ago
Pretty sure OneNote does this, I don’t know how the bulk move experience would be though.

ericd 4y ago

Can we all please go back to buying stable desktop software without continuous upgrade nags, now?

izzydata 4y ago
But without software as a service how will companies expand indefinitely until they bust?

Nursie 4y ago

Evernote came preinstalled On my second android phone, I think a Galaxy Note 2. It could not be removed and demanded to be allowed to update itself constantly. 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…

mblevin 4y ago

The End of an Error for the world's most disappointing note-taking app. 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.

jjtheblunt 4y ago
> The End of an Error 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!
- hyperdimension 4y ago
  Yeah, regardless of the two it is, I'm saving that for later.
  - mblevin 4y ago
    Very much on purpose and I stole that from somebody else long ago.

offtotheraces 4y ago

This is going to be a disaster - Bending Spoons is not a good actor: “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-reynolds-didnt-pay-close-enough?utm_source=direct&r=1ix542&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web https://open.substack.com/pub/impassionedmoderate/p/ryan-rey...

presentation 4y ago
How dare they charge money for products they own that have value.
nneonneo 4y ago
The really key bit is right afterwards: “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.
boole1854 4y ago
I must admit it's not entirely obvious why that business model makes them "not a good actor". And what's with the snark about Italian banks?

etempleton 4y ago

on MacOS/iOS, Bear was the best note taking app I found. If you need cross platform capability and/or want free and open source I like Joplin a lot as well.

rxyz 4y ago
Bear was amazing but I dropped it because there's a lot of good enough alternatives (I use Craft right now) with more features and wider support. Bear should have been ported to Android and Windows/Linux(browser version?) years ago.
akisd 4y ago
I have also tried to find an alternative to evernote and i settled to Joplin for now.
brycethornton 4y ago
I used Evernote for a decade before switching to Apple Notes a couple years back. It took some getting used to but now it feels seamless. I'd highly recommend it if you don't need anything too fancy.
MrZongle2 4y ago
I switched to Joplin a couple of years back and don't regret the move. Was able to import all my Evernote stuff as well, which was one deciding factor.

c-smile 4y ago

Yeah. > 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-history/ https://notes.sciter.com/2017/09/11/motivation-and-a-bit-of-... What a memory, I really miss that atmosphere ...

vibbix 4y ago
The GUI is giving me Windows XP Plus! pack throwbacks, thank you for sharing.
egypturnash 4y ago
Hey, thanks for your hard work making a great tool that I used for most of a decade.
approxim8ion 4y ago
Thanks for sharing! The state of application development is rather sad, that screenshot just conveys a feeling of speed and efficiency to me that is lacking in modern software.

Kye 4y ago

Good thing I moved off Evernote years ago. I use Simplenote since it seems to be in good hands with Automattic. They use it internally, so it's not likely to go away.

deleted 4y ago

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pyrophane 4y ago

I'm not familiar with Bending Spoons. Anyone able to give me a bit more context on what this will likely mean for the future of the product?

squarefoot 4y ago
They became sorta famous over here for developing the Covid19 contact tracing app "Immuni" that was then adopted by the Italian Ministry of Health. Being a government project, they probably got a life-changing amount of money because of that. I can't comment on the quality of the app as i never used it. https://github.com/immuni-app https://github.com/immuni-app
- CastFX 4y ago
  Actually this is wrong. They did not receive any funds from the Government. There is an article in Italian with the words of one of the founders. https://www.corriere.it/tecnologia/20_aprile_22/luca-ferrari-bending-spoons-su-immuni-nessun-guadagno-fiducia-privacy-sono-fondamentali-3dc9cf52-84cf-11ea-8d8e-1dff96ef3536.shtml https://www.corriere.it/tecnologia/20_aprile_22/luca-ferrari...
  - squarefoot 4y ago
    I stand corrected, thanks for the link.

deleted 4y ago

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calabaza222 4y ago

I use paper & pencil. Works fine :D

gertrunde 4y ago

I was a bit like "Bending Spoons? Who?", so I followed the link to their website and looked at the products page... 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?

balls187 4y ago
There was clearly no rhyme or reason to their portfolio. Basically the app store version of a private equity firm.
Manjuuu 4y ago
I suppose that's what their target audience wants to see.
rusl1 4y ago
That's literally their business strategy, total bullshits. It's all fluff

fairity 4y ago

Can someone educate me on the difficulties in raising money from your user base? 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?

notfried 4y ago
ICOs are technically a way, and scams aside which wouldn’t apply to Evernote if they would have used it, there is still a fair amount of legal ambiguity in doing it. There has been many voices pushing for creating a regulatory framework to allow doing what you are asking for.
kjs3 4y ago
Paying recurring for an app should make this problem non-existent. If $5/mo or whatever doesn't allow you to deliver a stable, performant product, then you need to reconsider your pricing or your business model. Evernote isn't a startup and they should have this figured out by now. And do not do a release that amounts to "look at this whizzy, non-core feature we've been working hard to add (see: chat) which means we didn't get around to fixing all the boring issues with the core product you're paying for"; that's just insulting. The only thing I imagine worse, if I'm already paying you money for the product, is for you come to me with "Oh...you want it to work? Fix the bugs and the performance? That'll be a $50 'investment'.". That guarantees I'm going to look elsewhere real fast, because fixing bugs and improving performance isn't a one-time thing and you'll be back to extract more from me at some random time in the future where your business decisions don't cover the next shortfall.
- fairity 4y ago
  I'm imagining that $50 raised from 10 million people ($500m raised) would allow for an outright recap of the entire company, including bringing in new management that serves the users' best interests. 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.

dang 4y ago

Related ongoing thread: Why Evernote failed to realize its potential (2021) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33626047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33626047 - Nov 2022 (143 comments)

awill 4y ago

They must be incredibly jealous of all the successful note taking apps (Notion, Ulysses, Bear, Craft). Evernote were first, and blew it. No other way to describe it. 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.

w0m 4y ago
I loved evernote ~10-15 years ago; used it for ~all personal stuff. Eventually it became more metered/locked down (I don't remember specifics anymore) and i moved to OneNote.
ddbb33 4y ago
Still upset when Evernote lost my lecture notes when I synced after turning off WiFi to save laptop battery (back in 2010)
riffic 4y ago
roam, obsidian, logseq, etc so many new or really interesting players in this space.
sedatk 4y ago
I'd stopped using Evernote involuntarily because their 2FA recovery scenario was broken and I got locked out of my account despite that I still had access to my email. I moved on. I checked it again years later, and they fixed it, but never went back. Such small omissions can create a whole chain of losses.
bigtones 4y ago
I don't know that Evernote the company or it's management would be jealous - Evernote probably has more annual revenue than all of those app combined.
bayindirh 4y ago
Actually, their experience is pretty pleasant and the product works very well after they have rebuilt their apps. 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.

unixhero 4y ago

I for one released on simplenote.cpm for my noting needs

emeril 4y ago
I've been using resophnotes as windows client for simplenote for years (and the ios client if I need to look something up on the go) after evernote become terrible 10+ years ago 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...

dotcoma 4y ago

Any idea of how much Bending Spoons paid for Evernote ?

baron816 4y ago
Ex Evernote employee here. Someone else posted this: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bending-spoons-raises-340-million-130300382.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bending-spoons-raises-340-mil... 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.
- driverdan 4y ago
  Seems unlikely they'd spend that whole round of funding on one app. I bet it was much, much less.
  - dotcoma 4y ago
    But how much was Evernote bringing in in revenues ?

dools 4y ago

Ever-ishNote

xablau 4y ago

"At Bending Spoons, we create our own cutting-edge technologies and products." https://bendingspoons.com/ https://bendingspoons.com/

irrational 4y ago

I stopped using evernote when it kept having some sort of syncing issues and lost what I had written over and over again. Maybe they have fixed it, but I've lost any trust in them, so, I'm not willing to risk it.

nashashmi 4y ago

I used to love Google Notebook. And then they shut it down. Evernote offered to take in that google notebook data and integrate it into their system. 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.

nashashmi 4y ago
Using notion to migrate my data out of evernote.

frans 4y ago

These are mostly negative reviews of Evernote. Yet, I do like the product and I am yet to find a replacement that offers these must-haves: * 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!

soundnote 4y ago
Amplenote and OneNote are pretty much what comes to mind with those requirements. Both OCR images, but don't do PDFs.
frans 4y ago
I did some searching via [1] and it turns out amplenote comes closest to my requirements list. [1] https://www.noteapps.info/apps https://www.noteapps.info/apps [2] https://www.amplenote.com/ https://www.amplenote.com/
- deely3 4y ago
  Hey, thanks!

SergeAx 4y ago

I am a many years paying user of Evernote. Startup time on Android became painfully slow several years ago. On Windows I just keep the app always open. Otherwise I don't see any benefit of switching to another app.

Manjuuu 4y ago

If you want to delete your account: https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/360056549574-Permanently-close-your-Evernote-account https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/360056549574-Per...

techky 4y ago

I still hate that Evernote bought Skitch. Really wish the new team would revive it or sell it off to an interested dev.

tomhoward 4y ago
I'm good friends with one of the founders of Skitch. He effectively got less than nothing for that sale. It was an acqui-hire with vesting stock valued in the several $million, but when he couldn't handle working in the big corporate environment at Evernote, he had to leave, and lost his stock with zero remuneration. He couldn't even pay off the debts he'd incurred over the years building Skitch. Terrible outcome for him, as well as the product. So sad.

deleted 4y ago

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rodolphoarruda 4y ago

EN (happy) customer since 2014 here. I just hope the acquiring company won't kill it.

deleted 4y ago

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rvbissell 4y ago

As much as I love (and still pay for) Evernote, I've just now realized that I haven't added to my collection there over 6 months. Without intending to, I seem to have largely switched to just saving websites with the "SingleFile" extension for Firefox.

floatinglotus 4y ago

Another lesson from Evernote: if your primary business is digital (ie software) don’t make a corporate strategy of selling physical things (notebooks).

jshaqaw 4y ago

Evernote is still the only product that meets my workflow needs. Hope they don’t mess it up.

skilled 4y ago

Is that an announcement or a marketing jargon dictionary? I had forgotten this app even exists, but I can see why.

jdshaffer 4y ago

I had enjoyed and even paid for Evernote for several years, until their "restructuring" and they dropped the export of everything but "Evernote Database"... I think they have since restored an export to HTML, but that always was the biggest problem for me... I want to be able to export (and backup) my notes in TXT or MD, not just HTML or their proprietary format. No idea if they've since added in more reasonable export features, but it was a dealbreaker for me (a big plain-text fan).

pyrophane 4y ago

Bit late to the thread. This is a hbit of a shame but also quite clarifying. 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.

azinman2 4y ago
They took a bunch of VC cash. Like a lot. They’re going to want 10-1000x on that, and consumers are only willing to pay so much. Apple Notes and Google Keep sucked away most of the consumer market.

arczyx 4y ago

This is unrelated to the news, but does anyone here ever get unknown charge from "Google Play Bending Spoons"? It doesn't appear in the Google Transaction History, but my ewallet provider confirmed it was from Google Play. Someone has asked about it in Google Play Help and got no meaningful answer https://support.google.com/googleplay/thread/159064766/help-with-bending-spoons-bank-deductions?hl=en https://support.google.com/googleplay/thread/159064766/help-...

hk1337 4y ago

If you didn’t know “Bending Spoons” was an organization, the title would come across a bit differently.

tzury 4y ago

a) Happy for Evernote and hope they have found a new home. This app was pioneering the realm and leading for quite some time! 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/

filmgirlcw 4y ago

I was a paid Evernote user who didn’t use the service much but paid anyway, partially because I liked the company, until they raised prices in 2016 by like 40% for the premium plan. 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.

another-reader 4y ago

I opened up File Explorer I and I see I made a full dump of Evernote on 30 July 2019. I was a paying customer for a few years but decided at the time to dump it before it was too late. 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?

imwillofficial 4y ago

Remember when Evernote was the shit? Oh how the mighty have fallen

627467 4y ago

The main reason I never stopped using Evernote is that somehow I got "stuck" on a personal plan that never really got updated for at least 7 years. 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?

ramraj07 4y ago
Hopefully you are backing them up now lol.

rfreiberger 4y ago

I used to be a huge fan of Evernote, but a few things made me look at other solutions. One issue is the capturing of code was automatically formatted and I was burned a few times keeping my code snippets for reference. 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.

lenova 4y ago

Everytime Evernote gets mentioend on HN, I love to promote my favorite replacement: https://getupnote.com/ https://getupnote.com/ Right now, it's more of Bear app replacement than an Evernote replacement, but I feel like they're heading in the right direction.

RefSnow 4y ago

I used evernote for a long time. I migrated to Joplin seeking greater control and security. I use it to this day and never thought about going back to Evernote.

brailsafe 4y ago

Wow, I'm sure I'm not alone in having completely forgot about Evernote after importing all my notes into Bear. They fell off my radar with such force that I literally haven't even thought of them in years, except for one moment months ago when I noticed their logo on maybe a physical notepad sitting in some old bookstore window. Other than that, I have not even seen the logo anywhere else. Like others, it was the device restriction, but also just terribly glitchy note editing/pasting etc.. Moving to Bear (which has also now stagnated pretty hard, but is still good) I was just stoked on the fact that editing was a smooth experience and it kind of got out of my way.

HuwFulcher 4y ago
I love Bear but it's been a big disappointment in how quickly it ships features. They've been working on the web version for what seems like a few years now. If you're 100% in the Apple ecosystem it's great. I have an iPhone and M1 Air for personal use but my last 3 jobs have used Windows, being able to transfer knowledge across devices is a massive pain. I ended up switching to Obsidian due to that. 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.
- r2222 4y ago
  Yeah it’s been extermely slow with the updates. The Bear 2.0 is currently on Mac-only beta but not yet open (unless you join their beta forum and ask for access), but even then, it doesn’t have the web app. I’ve seen the Bear team say that they did a full rewrite (in C++ I think?) so that it would be easier to implement the web app in future but who knows how many years in the future that is.
  - HuwFulcher 4y ago
    I may be wrong on the features on Bear 2.0 but it doesn’t seem like a lot new features. A full rewrite in C++ may be why it’s taking so long but it definitely feels like they’ve quietly dropped 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.

Vibgyor5 4y ago

For anyone looking for an INCREDIBLE note-taking app, check out UpNote. https://getupnote.com/ https://getupnote.com/ - 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

crossroadsguy 4y ago
There’s FOSS https://fsnot.es https://fsnot.es. 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.
nathan_f77 4y ago
Thanks for the recommendation! I'm going to try them out now. 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.
- Vibgyor5 4y ago
  Glad to hear you tried and liked it

woofwoofwoof 4y ago

They were such a cool company to work for in the Valley when they started started.

deafpolygon 4y ago

Looks like the acquisition is for the customer base and data (for AI training). Bending Spoons is leaning on AI tech and Evernote has both customers and data they need for training their AI.

pqs 4y ago
That's what I thought and I don't like it at all. My private notes, being used to train an AI. I have boarding passes and alike in there, which probably have my ID card number. Then, an AI somwhere will print my private data. Yes, they try to filter these things out, but we know how hard this is, as we saw with GitHub Copilot.