David Pierce interviewed the Evernote product lead on The Vergecast. I thought it was a super interesting conversation. I’ve never used Evernote and don’t really have any interest to, but hearing someone talk about building a “productivity” app and the trade-offs you have to make was really cool. I know the acquisition was viewed pretty negatively by the community, but the new folks seem pretty committed to improving the product. Well worth a listen.
Edit: Reading the Verge comments make me think I’m giving too much credit to the new owners and the company has a bad reputation, but this guy interviewed seemed pretty committed to improving the product. Just wanted to caveat before I get yelled at😂
I think most Evernote users are very emotional regarding the product due to its long life. I am not a fan of what Bending Spoons did with Filmic, but with Evernote they have managed to increase the development speed showing that they have the necessary engineering chops. Now we can argue if this was due to Ian Small’s latest platform decisions or not (I think so) but at the very least they are not dropping the ball so I keep rooting for the elephant.
While I have stopped using it exclusively, I keep uploading most important personal documents to it because basically I have never found a situation where Evernote didn’t find what I was looking for so it acts a failsafe.
I think that while this is a new team, the number of “reboots” Evernote has been through is significant, and just as each reboot (good or bad) seems to start to settle, we’re into new reboot territory.
I’ve not used the product for quite a while, but that is mainly due to the significant price increases over the years. I was an advocate early on and enjoyed using it, but when they added Chat to the product it jumped the shark and I gradually drifted away and never went back.
same with me with regards to Chat. The other deal breaker was the move to Electron.
Just listened to enough of the podcast to get a feel for how Bending Spoons thinks, and I’m pleased with their process. I was intrigued to learn that the archivers, the users who have 100,000+ notes in Evernote (every email, every scrap of paper they touch, everything…) are their “nightmare”. But, they are thinking of them; they recently increased the limit to 150,000 notes.
The move to Electron was fine IF they had preserved all the functionality of previous clients
Which unfortunately they didn’t !
The release of Electron client was rushed and it took sometime before it became usable.
Thankfully Evernote had kept the previous client (Classic) function which now Bending Spoons have discontinued.
I find the recent updates to Evernote good but the “webification” of the app is something I don’t like as much e.g. now when you link to notes it gives Evernote website link where as previously you could link to notes directly making it possible to work offline
Surprisingly the prices for Indian markets is still very reasonable. It roughly about USD 48/year for personal plan, so that isn’t much of an issue for me.
Anyway, it is product owned by BS and its upto BS to decide the direction for Evernote
Those of us who dislike the direction, need to find another options
Long time Evernoter here, but mainly because of inertia. On the plus side, they are definitely updating frequently (more frequently than any other app I use).
Also a plus is that I love their web clipper and don’t know of anything as good for capturing articles from the web.
On the downside for me is that I find the user interface cumbersome and Evernote files don’t show up for me in Spotlight.
That’s confusing! I wonder what was different with me. I tried clipping some very simple pages that had a few images I liked, and it bought down the text but showed error messages in the place where the images should have been.
I closed my account years ago but as mentioned in the video below, you can select multiple ways to save a web page. Perhaps a current EN user will offer some help.
I’ve just cancelled my subscription. There are a numbers of things I didn’t like:
As an Electron app, no real integration with the macOS system. You can’t even drag an email in.
On Android clicking a link in a note took 2-3s to open the linked note.
When they make a special offer they only offer it once. Those are not marketing tactics I want to support.
It’s too expensive considering it’s uncertain future.
Last time I exported notes I was limited to very few at a time.
The main driver behind my decision is that something like Evernote needs to be long term in my book. I just don’t trust the company and am not convinced it’ll be around in 5 years.
This works. I just generated an .enex file with 600+ notes from a Notebook.
It’s inconvenient if you happen to have multiple notebooks. I believe EN is, in essence, a tool for taggers (and it shows in the fact that you cannot nest Notebooks, only create Stacks which are not exactly notebooks) so the mass export capabilities should not be exclusively based upon Notebooks. I suspect there are vintage technical reasons for this, it’s not like BS is trying to hold customers this way (although they will surely not be inclined to solve this).
I agree. I stopped using Evernote before the electron version was released but I tried the new version out of curiosity. That is when I discovered the export limitation.