Comment by maire | Hacker News Reader

Comment by maire | Hacker News Reader

By coincidence I am moving off of Evernote right now. I broke down everything I used Evernote for right now to plan the roll off.

I largely use EN for the GTD system. The first GTD step is just capturing info. EN still does this better than any other tool.

EN used to be better at managing large data - but the last major release broke all that. For some reason they favored the new user over the power user.

Some of the things I used to use EN for are now baked into the OS. For instance, the latest release of MacOS now has text search on images. The rise of icloud also got rid of many of my use cases.

What I am doing now is putting files in files and notes in notes. I am converting some notes to files.

I took to heart the scalability issues in EN, and decided to run several note taking apps in parallel. After a while I will just pick a winner.

Sadly - I have not found a replacement for data capture. EN seems to be the only tool that converts email to a note. I might keep the free version of EN around for this task, but I am still looking for a replacement.

> EN seems to be the only tool that converts email to a note.

Do you keep the original mail format? As far as I can see (and I recall), Evernote just embeds the original mail and attaches an HTML copy as well (so you can view it).

The EN email note is somewhat kludgy. It was better before the last major upgrade. Before the last upgrade it was seamless to other EN notes. I suspect but don't know what broke.

BTW - they kept around the EN classic app because so many things broke. For a while I was going back and forth between the two.

The EN competitors want you to convert email to a PDF. One of the competitors said they would have to have an email server to convert email to a note. They said this is hard.

I am OK that it is hard for everyone except Apple. Apple does already have an email server. Why are they forcing me to convert the email to a PDF?

It's hard to do right, because the mail format has to deal with MIME types, and all kinds of ancient kludgy stuff. They send mail in multi-part, and you see the part that your mail client wants to render. Sometimes they send only html, sometimes you get text and html. Sometimes it's a an image embedded in the e-mail message.

On top of that every mail service wants to do something different.

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