Two tech geeks.

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.

Interesting. I’m also still keeping an eye on the recent hurdles that Evernote is facing.

We at Evernote are fans of Open Source, and use a good deal of Open Source products and libraries. Now it’s time to give back to the community. During the last half year we’ve been busy preparing our localization system, writing documentation, cleaning up code. And today we’re proud to release it publicly as an open-source product! It’s called Serge, an acronym standing for ‘String Extraction and Resource Generation Engine’.

That resulted in inferior products with lots of bugs, drawing bad reviews and heavy criticism from its users. PenUltimate, a handwriting app Evernote acquired in 2012, received a lot of complaints when it rolled out an updated version for the first time in 2014, causing the company to issue an apology and another update within a week.

Skitch, an app that lets you add captions or markups to photos, has a three-star rating (out of five) on the Apple App Store, while Work Chat, the new messaging feature it released last year, is seeing a lot of negative feedback on its own forum.

Evernote Food, a standalone app that lets users share recipes and food photos, entirely shut down last month, as did other experimental products like Evernote Hello and Peek.

via Evernote is in deep trouble – Business Insider

I’ve used and loved Evernote for a long time. However over the past year, I’ve been making many attempts to migrate away from it. It’s not exactly one specific reason/issue that is causing me to move away, but many little quirks that give you the feeling of death by a thousand cuts. Sadly they’ve also killed Evernote Food which I quite liked, but that’s understandable, as it always felt like some kind of a side project.

Nowadays I seldom use Skitch or Penultimate, as they now feel clunky and troublesome. It’s not entirely Evernote’s fault, as there are other factors that count against it, such as the current version of OS X offering pretty good annotation fools, and a solid Notes app. However, Evernote’s feature set is still powerful enough that they should be able to get through this tough period.

If anything, I feel Evernote should get back to sorting out some core issues, such as:

• Sync speed
• Sync conflict handling
• Stability of offline notes
• Ease of use

I’ve since tweaked my workflow to use these apps (Evernote is still a part of it):

• Simplenote: Still my current favourite quick note-taking app due to lightning fast sync, plain-text only notes, and support OS X, iOS, and web.
• OneNote: For offline notes. Evernote’s offline notes feature is still horrible, and what makes it worse is that it’s a paid service. I’ve had too many instances where I needed an offline file while traveling and couldn’t get to it.
• Evernote: Functioning more like an “archive of everything else” which I search slowly (because it really is very slow and clunky) for random bits of information.
• Apple’s Notes: The latest update of Notes with iOS 9 and OS X El Capitan offers support for images and PDF, which I’m currently testing as a replacement for OneNote as my travel notebook. Useful information such as scans of my passport, boarding passes, etc, can be stored in here now. So far so good. If it works out, I’ll be switching from OneNote to this. It also supports multiple levels of sub-folders, which is really useful to me.

I’m still a paying Evernote customer, but unless they get these core issues fixed, I probably won’t renew my subscription and will revert to the free tier.