Bradley Chambers wrote about fixing Evernote.
For a service I pay for, Evernote had become quite annoying. Instead of making its core features even better, it adding features like Work Chat, and became seriously annoying with notifications about explaining new features….over and over again. I do not want another chat client. I do not care about Evernote for Teams. I simply want Evernote to work how I have always used it. Over the past 3 years, the application seems to get in my way more than it helps me. A perfect example is that on iOS, the reminders section is easier to get to than the search bar.
This resonates with me. I used OneNote heavily to sort out my ideas, research materials and writings. It had many shortcomings and I searched intensively for a replacement but never found one until Evernote was launched. I imported my OneNote library into Evernote and loved working with it so much that I subscribed for a Premium account.
The service has been stagnant for a while, and as Chambers pointed out, the app has been bogged down by unnecessary features. Why build a chat client? Hook Evernote to Slack and it would help immensely. It might even bring in new users.
Plain Text Option
This would allow people to easily get their text in and out of Evernote. Exporting notes out of Evernote also generates a .html document. They’d be better off to export files as a .docx than .html.
One of my main complaints about Evernote is the lack of plain text support. Evernote text is stored in some form of proprietary syntax based off xhtml. You can copy and paste rich text, but your mileage may vary depending on the input or output sources.
This is why I prefer to work with plain text. Rather than risk having my formatting mangled by the various ways different apps style rich text format, I type in Markdown. This ensures that my final output would always be the consistent.
Evernote doesn’t even have to explicitly support Markdown. It just needs to allow us to save notes in plain text and Markdown users can work with our preferred Markdown converter to get our desired output.
This is where Apple’s Notes app comes in. The latest update with iOS 9 and OS X El Capitan has made the app a big contender as a replacement for Evernote, in my personal workflow at least. I tested iCloud sync across iOS and Mac. It is basically watching yourself type on the one device and watch the text appear on the next. Of course, you need a stable internet connection for that to happen. But I suspect you don’t need a fast connection, especially if you’re working with only text.
The initial impressions of the new Notes app have been positive and I’m optimistic that it will eventually become my primary, or even sole, note-taking app.
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