At the risk of being the lone guy out there. Evernote has been good for me. First of all I am happy to pay for any product that serves me. My definition is if it helps me make more than it costs, it is worth it. I finance Real Estate. Have thousands of notes ( 9,000) and I notate each conversation whether it is with lender or borrower or agent. I have been able to go back to my notes on this date and time you said this Saved my commission many times… It has gotten much better in being able to send things out as PDF. The web clipper is still the best out there.
I am looking for EV to be my file cabinet and repository of my thoughts and notes. It does that perfectly. I am a big believer in reading books, highlighting them and then writing notes from the highlights of what insights I got, not more words, but what did I learn, what are the key take aways. I have set that up as a folder, everything from Emmet Fox, Marcus Aurelius, Stoics, to the Second Brain etc.
Sure it could be better, but then again so could I. Constant and never ending improvement. Hope this helps. If anyone is interested happy to go into deeper depth.
You get what you pay for, it works, it has made me money.
You asked about Stability: new version 10 has been totally stable in my experience.
Usability: like all apps, that depends on if you’ll take time to learn all it can do (which is a lot) – if you’re really interested, Stacey Harmon’s Evernote Academy is the MOST in-depth amazing subscription membership to learn every tiny detail of how to use it.
I have loved Evernote since 2011. Use it multiple times a day, for multiple projects: online course notes, including screenshots & audio recordings & links to youtube vids; tracking EVERYTHING re settling my mom’s estate for the past year; planning trips; keep running “dossier” notes on all my friends over time, including dumping photos of their kids into it, etc; tracking stocks for my monthly investment club; etc etc – I love that you can put SO many types of media into it.
I’m sure plenty of notes apps do the same thing. I’m just sticking with Evernote cuz I can’t chase shiny new objects anymore!
I think the biggest hassle is that something could be in a number of places rather than in just one. I hate having to search for data in numerous apps.
After nearly two weeks of using Evernote daily, I have decided to cancel my trial. There is much that I liked about Evernote, but a couple of deal breakers for me.
Non-Native app. This is perhaps the worst part of the app for me. I need my notes app to connect with other apps rather than being a silo. I use Things and often select text and hit a keyboard shortcut and hey presto it’s in my inbox. Doesn’t work with Evernote. To many clicks and extra work required to integrate.
Multiple windows. For Evernote to be useful I need to see info in other notes and be able to drag and drop between them. This is awkward. You can open the note in a new window from the menu, but no default shortcut. Plus the sidebar doesn’t come along for the ride so you need to do sidebar stuff in the other window. To much friction.
Linking notes. Having been used to Obsidian’s, Bear’s just type, “[[” and a linking dialogue opens up, to being forced to go to a note and copy its link and return to paste it, created massive frustration. I know you can drag notes into a note to add links, but this is awkward with the multiple windows work. Also, dragging the note link into a task left you with a long Evernote url and not the note title.
As much as it was nice to try, I certainly cannot see myself using the app on a mac. It made me realise once again, why some apps really need to be native to be useful and this is one of those apps that should be native.
AFAIK the only examples of this are available to business users. Google offers “Cloud Search” that will search just about everything (with connectors) to Google Workspace Business Standard customers.
HoudahSpot is the best tool I have but it is limited by Spotlight’s ability to index files.
I rely on search and Spotlight does a good job of indexing files. And, IMO, HoudaSpot is an excellent tool for searching the index. But Spotlight was never able to match Evernote search on the same types of files (pdf, image, etc). YMMV
Today I’m primarily an iPad user and have moved almost everything to Google Drive except my archives which I keep in EagleFiler on my Mac.
It takes time to find the right fit. At least you gave it a shot!
Curious to learn more about what you mean by this. I use Things 3 as my to-do app, and I find it easy to get info into Evernote.
FYI as it may help with other apps – you can customize keyboard shortcuts for menu items in any/all apps in the Shortcuts pane of the Keyboard settings in MacOS System Preferences.
Not a feature I think I’d use, but I think they’re working on improving this.
Evernote and 1Password are the apps that helped me abandon my bias towards native apps. I can’t think of anything that can be improved (for my use) by making Evernote native. That said, I understand that native apps are generally better.
If I select some text in Evernote or a note and hit my Things fast entry shortcut, it is blank. For other apps it would pick up the text or note I selected and enter it into the todo.
I’m the total opposite, I like system shortcuts, working spellcheckers, dragging and dropping. Electron apps simply do not have the right level of connectivity to macOS for me. I’ve tried using them, but get frustrated every time. It’s the little things that matter, especially for keyboard users. I don’t want to have set up all my default shortcuts in Evernote and every electron app I install, when my system already has them set.
Oh, Thing 3’s Quick Entry with Autofill. I don’t think that’s an electron issue. In general, I find it unreliable, so I rarely use it. You’ll notice it doesn’t even work for items in Things 3.
