I have been a loyal Evernote premium payer since 2009, and using it even longer. For a long time I recommended it to friends but since have stopped. I have developed some concerns with it over the years.
1. Fear of data loss... it's probably the largest part of my mistrust of all these dang cloud services that want to control/own me or otherwise lock me into their service. I run a 99.999% uptime, extreme scale, SaaS business across multiple active/active data centers, I know exactly what it takes. It’s incredibly hard to do, and I don't trust anyone at a rapid growth company to do it right. In the ever constant scheduling battle between features and doing it right, features frequently end up winning, especially in consumer focused SaaS business with meaningless SLA’s. My Evernote library is clearly much much more important to me than it will ever be to Evernote. No amount of marketing spin will ever lead me to believe otherwise. This really is my own hangup though. At some point I may just get over this. To their credit, I have only ever lost a few notes in the 4-5 years I have been using the service.
2. Tight lock-in (the cynic in me always says it’s clearly engineered this way) to the platform, frustrating process to export my notes to another tool. This is a problem across the industry. Everyone playing the lock-in/stickiness game. Portability is key. A simple text export of my notes would go a long way to make me happy. I really don’t want html exports of my text notes.
3. Security of their cloud service...frankly, I don't trust anyone and wish I could store my evernote data on my own; self managed; self encrypted; shared storage platform. 2 factor was a nice step in the right direction. Self managed encryption keys is when I will stop whining about it… I understand this makes a lot of things hard, and am willing to forgo some features to get this feature.
4. Lack of reasonable support for Linux. Evernote is now the single sole tool keeping me from dumping my Mac and moving to linux... Yup, note-taking is that important to me. I have tried nevernote, everpad and the like, but they are still pretty weak. I understand this isn’t Evernote’s problem and Linux is a very small market, but its a big deal to me.
5. A frankly lousy text editor. Seriously, I keep expecting this to get better, and it just never quite gets there. And don't get me started on tabs and indenting. I often edit notes in mac textedit and then copy them into evernote. Not because TextEdit is great, but because its predictable and just works. I'm not looking for advanced features here.
6. Strange as this may sound (I may be using the tool wrong), I really hate marking things off my list like at the grocery store. It takes so dang long to mark off a list while pushing a shopping cart and fumbling with a phone. I now print my list out and cross things off with a pen because its so way less frustrating... This may be an edge side use case, but still... the phone apps (both droid and iPhone) are not wonderful.
I fully subscribe to the belief that I am a weirdo, and these are really just my perceptions and random thoughts. I have remained an active, albeit reluctant user, and at this point plan to stay that way for at least a little bit longer. I always used to joke that if evernote, things, and dropbox ever merged, I would happily pay double. These days though, I am looking to support my own stand alone instances of these types of tools without being tied to 3rd party cloudy services so tightly.
I agree with every single point you mentioned. You are not alone.
I'm very glad to know that other loyal Evernote Premium users are also experiencing these pain points. The forums seem to be mostly inhabited by diehard evernote preachers and most everyone else has no idea what the service actually does (which is very understandable — evernote is a tool with a TON of intended use cases)
Hello! Evernote employee here, I first wanted to say thanks for posting. Its always good to hear from our users directly. I've been at Evernote for a while and it is still weird to see us show up on HN.
Anyways, I enjoyed your comments wanted to give my personal opinion & point of view for at least points 1 & 2.
1. You're right that scaling is very hard. If you want a closer look at it, we have a tech blog that even I can read and understand. https://blog.evernote.com/tech/
Perhaps the most reassuring thing I can say is that Evernote runs on Evernote. Err... maybe this is more clear, Evernote (the company) runs on Evernote (the service). We eat our own dog food as they say, which means I've lost count of how many water cooler conversations turn into "there's something weird that Evernote's doing on my computer..."
2. Our Mac and Windows apps let you export your notes into HTML (including resources). Both these apps run natively against local files so you could export if you were offline or if for some reason our service was down. We try to compete by making a great app and a great service. In fact, we don't make money unless we've done a good enough job for you to upgrade to Premium. It seems like your main concern is that your text-only notes export to HTML instead of plaintext, which is a fair point. One of the nice things HTML is that there are third party applications that can convert from HTML into a number of other formats, so we're relying on that if you want your notes in RTF or as a .txt or something else.
> third party applications that can convert from HTML into a number of other formats, so we're relying on that
You should fix that. Skip RTF, DOC, whatever. Just plain text is fine. Everything else can handle it.
The world needs to wake up and realize plain text is the alpha and the omega of language. Do that right first and make sure it's the last thing to fail.
I agree with all your points. It's why I've used Evernote less and less over time. As for point 6, if you are on Mac/iOS, Clear App is a great way to handle the list issue when you are actually in the store.
I use Clear for my shopping all of the time. Since they've allowed us to use more characters I've even started noting the aisle numbers so I can look them up without trying to peer over everyone and walking up and down for ages.
I hate shopping, but this has certainly relieved some of the pain for me.
This may sound a little batty and is perhaps off-topic, but some time ago I bothered to do an unofficial upgrade of my galaxy s purely so I could install the Woolworths (Aus supermarket chain) Android app. It has the ability to create and store multiple shopping lists, and to sort lists by aisle for the store of your choice. Best feature for ninja strikes; get in and get out with maximum efficiency. I hate shopping.
Love zim wiki, use it every day, but: it still doesn't detect file change on disk. So after (1) edit on host A, (2) sync with git (or rsync or btsync...), (3) go to already open edit window on host B, you can end up editing a stale buffer, and then you have to merge manually.
I tried Evernote a couple of times and always thought it was very weak especially when I couldn't even make a todo list. A good text editing experience is just just head-slappingly essential in a freaking note taking app.
I'm surprised that no-one has mentioned google docs. It has been continuously improving over the years. The features are very hacker friendly:
- cross platform
- proxima nova font (yum)
- in doc scripting interface
- external api interface
- stores a version history
- top drawer real-time collaboration
- searchable set of drive files
- very reliable
Definitely very hacker friendly. My only complaint is lack of a good offline mode across all platforms but when online it ticks my boxes.
I'd love to see a private controlled answer to these services - some kind of owncloud-box with apps for various mobile platforms. F/OSS server software so I'm confident in it, and then paid/closed everything-else.
Then again, the challenge is that hackers love to hack, so we'll put up with kludgy mashed-up solutions instead of a nice one-stop-shop of convenience. Meanwhile, layman users are perfectly happy with the lock-in of modern webapps.
A central server just ensures that all your other devices always have something that's turned on to sync to, and that there's a webserver for the webapp-based clients. It can still be a P2P protocol actually synchronizing the files.
Yes, exactly my point. The server should be just another p2p client that's never turned off. That sort of architecture means that you can shift easily from server to server, and you can host it yourself or have someone else host it. With an architecture like evernote you are always locked in to a certain degree, regardless of how easy it is to get your data out, because moving servers also means moving platforms.
Self managed encryption keys is not "hard" any more than any other secure web service. I can't imagine why you think that this would have any effect on features other than from a cost benefit perspective.
Linux support is fine, if you're willing to accept HTML5 and JavaScript executing who knows what in your browser.
If evernote can't make a good text editor with HTML5 and JavaScript then it proves that apps in the browser is a dead end. Text editor is basically, the "cost of entry" and if an entire team focused on that single feature can't deliver it after years, well... I'm not really surprised given the state of JavaScript (collectively ruined by Mozilla's lack of resources and Google's ill will) and HTML5 (collectively ruined by nobody giving a shit about the language before their own interests).
Given the crumbling of infrastructure of the web, I'm kind of surprised anyone still uses the internet at all for anything more important than facebook and tabloid news. Maybe nobody does?
I'm an evernote user too. I use it's very basic free account and I never had any problem. But I to edit notes rarely and don't depend on it.
However, given your level of expertise not finding a note-taking solution, seems ridiculous. Doesn't feel like a real problem. I never understood how a note-keeping application can attract that kind of money Evernote does, but then again there are many things I don't understand.
However, given today's tools, taking notes can be done using any level of encryption, privacy you need. Seriously, that's not a big problem for a tech savvy user.
ps. Caring about privacy (at that level) and using cloud services, other than Owncloud hosted in a server you alone have physical access is silly :-)
The cool thing about note-taking apps is that you can stuff tons of lists of little things in there over years, and it's all searchable. Evernote lets you put in photos, snippets of content from webpages and so on. Just copy & paste, and then it's available (and findable!) whenever you need it. Eventually you have a huge amount of content in there which is maximally relevant to you.
What is Workflowy? The page is just asking for me to signup without providing any details on what it is, and then there is a bunch of people saying how great it is.
I agree, their pre-signup information is lacking. No screenshots, no pricing info, no "what the hell is it", just a signup form.
I signed up recently after seeing repeated recommendations on HN however and its actually very good and I've started using it quite a bit already. I'm not sure that I could explain it sufficiently here so I'll just say try signing up and give it a go (it didn't ask me to even confirm my email address so getting started was pretty quick).
From: How to Plan your Wedding...without going insane
1. Sign up for WorkFlowy
2. Create a project list and 'zoom in.'
3. Create sections for the major components of your project
4. Fill out the details
5. Use #tags and @tags to filter your lists
6. Share your list with your collaborators
7. Mark things as complete as you finish them.
8. Complete your project
There should be a place where I could shout my "love" for it.
For years I have played with notes, lists, mindmapping software. Sometimes I think it was not created but "discovered". That workflowy is to life , what lisp is to software... i.e. the right way to program !
No, I work for iovation. We do large scale realtime fraud prevention for many of the largest banks and internet businesses through a shared network of device reputation.
There's a lot more to Portland than just Puppet, though we do use a ton of their product. We love those guys.
1. Fear of data loss... it's probably the largest part of my mistrust of all these dang cloud services that want to control/own me or otherwise lock me into their service. I run a 99.999% uptime, extreme scale, SaaS business across multiple active/active data centers, I know exactly what it takes. It’s incredibly hard to do, and I don't trust anyone at a rapid growth company to do it right. In the ever constant scheduling battle between features and doing it right, features frequently end up winning, especially in consumer focused SaaS business with meaningless SLA’s. My Evernote library is clearly much much more important to me than it will ever be to Evernote. No amount of marketing spin will ever lead me to believe otherwise. This really is my own hangup though. At some point I may just get over this. To their credit, I have only ever lost a few notes in the 4-5 years I have been using the service.
2. Tight lock-in (the cynic in me always says it’s clearly engineered this way) to the platform, frustrating process to export my notes to another tool. This is a problem across the industry. Everyone playing the lock-in/stickiness game. Portability is key. A simple text export of my notes would go a long way to make me happy. I really don’t want html exports of my text notes.
3. Security of their cloud service...frankly, I don't trust anyone and wish I could store my evernote data on my own; self managed; self encrypted; shared storage platform. 2 factor was a nice step in the right direction. Self managed encryption keys is when I will stop whining about it… I understand this makes a lot of things hard, and am willing to forgo some features to get this feature.
4. Lack of reasonable support for Linux. Evernote is now the single sole tool keeping me from dumping my Mac and moving to linux... Yup, note-taking is that important to me. I have tried nevernote, everpad and the like, but they are still pretty weak. I understand this isn’t Evernote’s problem and Linux is a very small market, but its a big deal to me.
5. A frankly lousy text editor. Seriously, I keep expecting this to get better, and it just never quite gets there. And don't get me started on tabs and indenting. I often edit notes in mac textedit and then copy them into evernote. Not because TextEdit is great, but because its predictable and just works. I'm not looking for advanced features here.
6. Strange as this may sound (I may be using the tool wrong), I really hate marking things off my list like at the grocery store. It takes so dang long to mark off a list while pushing a shopping cart and fumbling with a phone. I now print my list out and cross things off with a pen because its so way less frustrating... This may be an edge side use case, but still... the phone apps (both droid and iPhone) are not wonderful.
I fully subscribe to the belief that I am a weirdo, and these are really just my perceptions and random thoughts. I have remained an active, albeit reluctant user, and at this point plan to stay that way for at least a little bit longer. I always used to joke that if evernote, things, and dropbox ever merged, I would happily pay double. These days though, I am looking to support my own stand alone instances of these types of tools without being tied to 3rd party cloudy services so tightly.