Hacker News Reader

Comment by pconner | Hacker News Reader

Evernote (both the web and Android apps) is one of the buggiest pieces of "professional" software I have ever used. When I use it to take notes for classes, I have given up on using any sort of special formatting (bullets, bold, etc) because I've had all of my formatting completely discarded so many times.

View on HN

> use it to take notes for classes

Why not just use a pen and a spiral notebook? (Scan the pages in later.) They're:

1. lightweight 2. cheap as dirt 3. don't need a charger 4. battery never runs out 5. can drop it with impunity 6. nobody is going to steal it 7. not distracting to the guy behind you 8. no temptation to surf the internet during class 9. no user interface issues 10. no buggy software

I don't do this because then the text is not formatted. If I type something up, I can easily copy and paste it. For figures, maybe it makes sense, but not for large text files

why do you use it, if it's so buggy? Genuinely interested to learn more.

You know the answer - inertia and lack of a better alternative. The concept is very convenient and its core incarnation: transparent sync, mobile platform suppoert, presentation (wysiwig text formatting), textual data management (notebooks, tags), and retrieval support (sorting, search) are exactly what I want in a basic textual information management tool. Each of these things individually is available in a number of products, Evernote was one of the first to package them together by design.

Then they got VC money, and like so many companies, it all went terribly wrong. They get an absurd amount of money for a service that stores data and syncs it in a cloud (a generic concept better executed by competitors) and have to somehow generate revenue to meet this valuation. So now all kinds of functionality that the users originally didn't need or want starts accumulating in the application. This introduces bloat, bugs, and UI cruft. It does chat now (lolwut). I feel they have been deliberately fighting Zawinski's Law, but it will come, it's just a matter of time.

I would welcome any suggestions for another service that is basically what Evernote 2 or 3 was.

Have you tried Microsoft OneNote? http://www.onenote.com/

I can't believe no one's mentioned it yet in all these comments. I've been using it for 7 years and I've never lost data. The worst bug I've hit was the search feature has sometimes not reported every match across all notebooks correctly, but I haven't hit that since upgrading to the 2013 version. Everything's cloud persisted and cached locally, so if you're using it across multiple devices (I use it across phone, tablet, and 3 PCs) you should have plenty of redundancy. OneNote notebooks are single files, so you could map them to dropbox, but I've been happy enough keeping mine in OneDrive.

I use OneDrive because of its superior features over Evernote - fantastic outlining support (shared engine MSWord has been using for years), hierarchical organization (notebooks > tabs > pages > freeform sections), being able to embed arbitrary files, fast global search. Haven't used Evernote in a while though so maybe it's improved on these fronts.

I've been using the same OneNote notebook for 10 years with the same experience. Online syncing with the ability to save the notebook locally for backup. Great clients on the web and mobile.

Is it still Windows only? I work in a mixed environment of Android, Windows, OSX, and Linux.

There are apps for all platforms except Linux, but you could use the web interface there.

I'm using it on Windows (desktop version, not the app) and Android and it works pretty well.

Yep. The Metro app on Win8 has a very poor UX, but the desktop version (also available on WinRT) is fantastic.

The OSX native app seems to have parity more or less with the Windows one. I use it at work and haven't had any issues.

does anyone know were to find thos note notebook-files on yosemite? can't find it under /Users/aaaa/.Library/

It was the only synchronized multi-platform note-centric app I knew of, and I didn't bother to research other options. Once I started noticing problems, I was too used to using it, and although they are frustrating issues, they haven't been enough to completely drive me away from Evernote.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com