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Comment by akulbe | Hacker News Reader

This is reason #1 why I like DEVONthink for the Mac. It uses exactly this model. I'm sure equivalents exist on the other platforms, but I'm not all that familiar.

I have been an Evernote Premium user for a long time, and since the company seems to be having a rough time, I recently looked at getting all of my data out of Evernote. What a nightmare.

I loved Evernote. I loved the fact that Phil Libin said he wanted it to be a 100-year company. I don't know all the details, but the fact that he seems to have given up... what a letdown. I'm working on getting my data out. Once I'm done, I think I'm going to let my subscription lapse.

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At risk of sounding like an Evernote apologist, I'm going to repeat a question I asked to another commenter elsewhere in this thread:

Why do you consider it a "nightmare" to get your data out of Evernote? You can select one, several, or all of the notes in a notebook and export them in either HTML or XML format, with all metadata (tags, etc.) and embedded media included. That seems pretty good to me, and it's certainly easy. If you wanted something more sophisticated, Evernote on the Mac has exceptionally complete support for AppleScript, so you can code up whatever kind of fancy extraction you need.

I'm not asking to be argumentative; I've always considered Evernote's support for extracting data to be pretty darn good, and clearly superior to many competitive apps/services, so I'm curious to know what additional functionality you would require before you'd say it's not a "nightmare" to extract your information.

If I put plain text into a note, I'd expect to get plain text out. You put plain text in, and you get something that still have to extract the text from. That isn't what I'd consider "pretty good".

My point doesn't apply so must just the plain text. It's everything. You put it in in source format, and you get .enex out. It's not so cut and dry.

Going in, it's one step. Coming out, to get it back in the same format you got it... it's multiple steps, and manipulation with other tools.

I use DEVONthink too for the same reason. The only thing DEVONthink lacks is cross-platform support. It's a pity that it's not available on Linux or Android.

To be fair, it lacks a lot more than that when compared to Evernote. Evernote is a bundle of great ideas, done horribly catastrophically badly.

1. Evernote has dual-language OCR of PDFs and images (and a few others crappy formats that normally shouldn't be used like .docx, .xlsx, etc). That's a great idea. DevonThink doesn't even have Japanese support (their licensed OCR only supports Western languages).

2. Uh... OK god dammit that is really the only feature that keeps me using Evernote's horrid apps. Shit.

OneNote has 0CR from images. It works fairly well.

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