I've been an avid Evernote user since the beginning (one of the first few thousand users). I use it to record all sorts of ideas, thoughts, notes, reminders, research, and references.
One year ago, my girlfriend was using Evernote (on my suggestion) to write her travel journal on our trip to Southeast Asia. I saw her note sync a bunch of times (the iOS app shows a little blue arrow when it's uploading). But one day she opened it and the note was gone. I contacted support but they couldn't do anything. (They offered her a year of free Premium service and "apologized for the inconvenience".)
Since then, I've stopped recommending it to people because I don't want to feel personally responsible if they lose notes too. I also have a tinge of doubt every time I record important information. My biggest worry is Evernote quietly losing a note, because once I record something in Evernote I typically push it from my internal memory.
On top of that, their iOS app is incredibly slow. When I want to quickly jot an idea down, it's very inconvenient.
I've started using SimpleNote lately, which is far faster, but I don't know to what extent I should trust it to keep my data safely.
As a paying user for years, I've had Evernote lose data many times -- sometimes important, irreplaceable data that I hadn't yet had time to back up elsewhere.
Evernote is some of the very worst software that has ever survived more than a few months on my computer without being deleted. Horrible show-stopping crash/data loss bugs are the norm, and have been increasing steadily as they add feature after feature with apparently no quality control at all.
Fundamentally, the job Evernote does (for me, but I assume also for most users with thousands of notes) is too important to delegate to a halfassed vc-backed startup that flies its engineers economy and has never heard of an integration test.
But replacing it isn't yet possible. It syncs across all platforms I use, does OCR of everything in both Japanese and English, including handwriting and text in photos, works out of the box with all my paper document scanners... There's just nothing else on the market (or if there is, PLEASE TELL ME!!) that does all that.
So Evernote hasn't lost me as a customer, yet. They've seemingly made a spectacular effort to do so, but... Life without Evernote would still be, on balance, more painful than with it.
But life with it is indeed pretty fucking painful, too.
I remember the day a year and a half ago when I went out apartment hunting in a new town, looking at my notes on apartments in Evernote's Android app. It was a complex note, with lots of text in deep hierarchies of bullet points. At one point I tried to edit it, and after a few visual glitches, the text of the note disappeared. Then it synced, and there was no undo or history option in the app as far as I could tell.
I was able to get the note back by driving back to my hotel, retrieving my laptop where the note was cached, and opening Evernote while offline to ensure it wouldn't sync and wipe out that copy. Pretty frustrating. I've learned some tough lessons about cloud services and free stuff.
I really hope Evernote's take-away from this is that they need to scale back development on all their auxiliary stuff - hello, food, whatever, as well as all but the most critical feature requests, and focus as much as possible on making the core experience bulletproof. I would _hate_ to have to give up Evernote, but like others here, am extremely apprehensive about the possibility of losing data.
One stop-gap they might be able to implement quickly would be a scale-up of their version control. They could throw money (storage space and bandwidth) at the problem, increasing the number and frequency of revisions stored. Certainly not as good as preventing loss in the first place, but reliable versioning would help minimize catastrophic loss in the meantime, and would still continue to be valuable once things are more stable.
Phil: "We have independent teams building all the different versions. They compete with each other to see who can make the best version. They steal each others idea and they leap frog each other. We don’t have consistency as a goal. There is no goal to make different versions of Evernote consistent with each other. Cause I think what happens if you make consistency a goal, you wind up achieving it though mediocracy. Like you achieve consistency by having everything equally crappy."
<http://thisweekinstartups.com/thisweekin-startups/phil-libin...
When I heard Phil talk about this at SXSW (as part of his talk about making Evernote a 100-year startup, I believe), I thought it was neat. But I wonder if this strategy is undermining reliability.
This exactly! Right now, I am a premium user as well but their iOS apps are way slow. I remember that there was a time when their iOS app used to stutter during rotating animation on iPad 4th Gen (most powerful iOS device a year back!).
The other thing is that there is no true Evernote alternative. I have iOS and Windows devices but I travel and internet is flaky sometimes. There's nothing that will store all my images, screenshots(Skitch), handwritten notes (with OCR!) and use it natively across platforms!
This. I'm always particularly annoyed by the tech support when I've tried to submit bug reports. One time I found a reproducible bug in the Chrome Clipper and even offered a possible explanation/solution for what was happening and the person first insisted that it wasn't happening. I couldn't believe he was telling me what wasn't happening on my screen when I was looking right at it. I pay for prime so next requested to be put in contact with a developer to submit a bug report and was denied. Finally like the author they asked me for activity logs which I also refused to fork over because they seemed too personal so instead I just put up with a buggy clipper. I wish they focused less on selling socks and more on the software. [https://www.evernote.com/market/feature/socks?sku=SOCK00106]
Where I work, we have fans that have asked us for branded apparel. We have to tell them that despite multiple reqeusts from customers, we don't sell them. Your criticism on "focusing on socks" is one of the reasons we haven't done so, despite the fact that nearly all of the "socks" work would be outsourced or, at least obviously, not done by engineers.
I've been a paying customer almost from the start. Unfortunately, as Evernote has expanded, it's gotten less and less useful for me.
Their web clipper is great, the best around IMO (especially since Clipboard folded), however there's no way to exclude those clipped pages from search, so after using the clipper for a while, searching for just about any phrase is mostly irrelevant results. Ideally it'd be possible to filter by source or have default searches to exclude certain types of content.
Another example of this is that I have a well-curated and geotagged Travel Notebook (this was actually much harder than it should have been since their geocoder is picky and you can't really massage it). I'd love to be able to see these notes on a map, but the "Atlas" map view that Evernote provides doesn't let you filter by notebook (or anything really).
Evernote does a great job of making it fairly painless to capture notes and despite the author's problems, has generally worked well on syncing everything. It's never done a good job for triaging/filing/finding or organizing notes though, and it seems to simply get worse as you use it more (and with each redesign). Evernote seems to want to encourage you to put "everything" into it, but as you do, it becomes harder and harder to get what you need out of it. Honestly, I'm baffled at how the Evernote devs/designers use it.
>Unfortunately, as Evernote has expanded, it's gotten less and less useful for me.
This has been my main complaint with Evernote. When I first found the software it was merely a way to capture notes, URLs, etc. As it keeps expanding its feature set and trying to make the tools more useful it keeps getting worse and worse.
I'm a premium Evernote member, but I've also had lots of problems.
The iOS app is slow and clunky. I hate using it. It crashes all the time, especially when I'm trying to take snapshots of a document with many pages (and all previous snapshots simply disappear).
The desktop app is better, but they really could improve the writing experience. Pasting HTML blobs is impossible, and so is formatting my notes the way I want (I use TextExpander for sanity).
Evernote is great when it works, but they really need to fix their stability and bug problems.
As an iOS developer this pains me to hear. It's not rocket science to make a stable highly dependable app. I don't use Evernote or know anything about how they do things, but I track all of our apps' crashes on a daily basis (lately almost none) and do extensively performance testing before release. Our QA staff is awesome and lets nothing get by them. I don't understand how other companies can't do this as well. Our apps are complex, have a complex mobile API on the server side and do ecommerce. So I really can't understand why this is so lame.
While this post must be pretty distressing for the Evernote team, their response time is pretty impressive! Within a couple hours of this post being published, Phil Libin has already contacted him. See the edit at the end of the post:
"Update: Evernote CEO Phil Libin contacted me and we spoke about the issues described. He apologized, saying the post rings true and that there is a lot of work to be done both on the application and service fronts — and that he hopes my impression will be reversed a few months from now."
If you store data in a format that's not future proof, using software that's not open source, then you don't really get to complain when your data disappears. Especially if you're not storing the files locally and making regular backups.
FWIW, on OSX Evernote stores everything locally in a future-proof format.
They use a directory tree, with one directory per note. Each note has HTML file, all supporting files, an "enml" version of the HTML file (i.e. a HTML-like XML document), and XML documents containing character recognition data.
The local indexes are in lucene format. (Specifically clucene.)
You will also find a sqlite3 database with additional metadata.
If you store anything you care about in Evernote, I'd highly recommend backing this up. On OSX it will be in within one of these two directories, depending on which version you're running:
I think this is a direct consequence of how thinly they're spreading themselves out across multiple platforms. They have a native app for every mobile and computer platform, along with web, plugins for every major browser, and then the other apps - skitch, penultimate, clearly, hello, etc...
It truly is in the face of the "do one thing and do it well" mindset that many other companies subscribe to. It's a shame too, because I love Evernote. I truly do live in it... true to Phil's vision, my mind is thoroughly mapped out throughout my Evernote account.
But even putting aside these syncing issues, it's a really terribly-designed piece of software There are so many issues with it, UI-wise, that is just bugs the hell out of me. (See note below for an example of a feature designed badly).
Still, Evernote fills a need I have that unfortunately there is no other solution for. And while it's taking a long time, it is gradually improving. So I'm still hoping that, one day, Evernote fulfils its destiny and becomes as amazing as it could be.
Note: Example of a badly deigned feature: tagging support is crazy-bad - you can tag things, and you can even organise tags into a tag hierarchy - except, no you can't, because it's only supported on some platforms. And the "support" for it is purely visual - selecting a "parent" tag doesn't auto-select the child tags, so it is basically no help. So let's go to solution 2, which is to tag things with a prefix, like "History\Middle Ages" and "History\US". But now, their generally awesome tag-completer will be annoying, since it will force you to type "History\" before getting to the point. So lets reverse tag it, like "US (History)". No, that wont' work, since you can search tags by prefix (e.g. search for anything with a tag starting with "History") but not by tag suffix. Even though, through the UI, you can do this, you can't do it with an actual search, so you can't select these tags.
So I've never used Evernote before, but after reading this article I decided to try it out since I know a lot of people who swear buy it. My first time user experience was awful... I immediately started creating test notebooks, test notes, etc just to get a feel for how it worked. Within seconds the app was freezing on me every time I tried to delete something (this was on a brand new iPad Air). I had to either rotate the device or put the app into the background in order to unfreeze it. This is a common scenario and I can't believe there isn't quality control for that. I'm a developer and I understand not having time for edge cases...but freezing on delete? I can repro it 100% of the time
I consider myself an informal evernote evangelist, but honestly, I kind of agree here. The new Safari web clipper is all sorts of buggy (and sometimes messes with websites and navigation).
And yes, the OS X client is quite slow and bulky. And I really don't appreciate not being able to resize the window to half of my screen (1440x900) size.
Hopefully there's an OS X client overhaul on its way?
Funny you should mention the web clipper, as I've been uninstalling it from all my browsers. It kept on inserting half-rendered HTML into random webpages I would visit.
I have been a loyal Evernote premium payer since 2009, and using it even longer. For a long time I recommended it to friends but since have stopped. I have developed some concerns with it over the years.
1. Fear of data loss... it's probably the largest part of my mistrust of all these dang cloud services that want to control/own me or otherwise lock me into their service. I run a 99.999% uptime, extreme scale, SaaS business across multiple active/active data centers, I know exactly what it takes. It’s incredibly hard to do, and I don't trust anyone at a rapid growth company to do it right. In the ever constant scheduling battle between features and doing it right, features frequently end up winning, especially in consumer focused SaaS business with meaningless SLA’s. My Evernote library is clearly much much more important to me than it will ever be to Evernote. No amount of marketing spin will ever lead me to believe otherwise. This really is my own hangup though. At some point I may just get over this. To their credit, I have only ever lost a few notes in the 4-5 years I have been using the service.
2. Tight lock-in (the cynic in me always says it’s clearly engineered this way) to the platform, frustrating process to export my notes to another tool. This is a problem across the industry. Everyone playing the lock-in/stickiness game. Portability is key. A simple text export of my notes would go a long way to make me happy. I really don’t want html exports of my text notes.
3. Security of their cloud service...frankly, I don't trust anyone and wish I could store my evernote data on my own; self managed; self encrypted; shared storage platform. 2 factor was a nice step in the right direction. Self managed encryption keys is when I will stop whining about it… I understand this makes a lot of things hard, and am willing to forgo some features to get this feature.
4. Lack of reasonable support for Linux. Evernote is now the single sole tool keeping me from dumping my Mac and moving to linux... Yup, note-taking is that important to me. I have tried nevernote, everpad and the like, but they are still pretty weak. I understand this isn’t Evernote’s problem and Linux is a very small market, but its a big deal to me.
5. A frankly lousy text editor. Seriously, I keep expecting this to get better, and it just never quite gets there. And don't get me started on tabs and indenting. I often edit notes in mac textedit and then copy them into evernote. Not because TextEdit is great, but because its predictable and just works. I'm not looking for advanced features here.
6. Strange as this may sound (I may be using the tool wrong), I really hate marking things off my list like at the grocery store. It takes so dang long to mark off a list while pushing a shopping cart and fumbling with a phone. I now print my list out and cross things off with a pen because its so way less frustrating... This may be an edge side use case, but still... the phone apps (both droid and iPhone) are not wonderful.
I fully subscribe to the belief that I am a weirdo, and these are really just my perceptions and random thoughts. I have remained an active, albeit reluctant user, and at this point plan to stay that way for at least a little bit longer. I always used to joke that if evernote, things, and dropbox ever merged, I would happily pay double. These days though, I am looking to support my own stand alone instances of these types of tools without being tied to 3rd party cloudy services so tightly.
I agree with every single point you mentioned. You are not alone.
I'm very glad to know that other loyal Evernote Premium users are also experiencing these pain points. The forums seem to be mostly inhabited by diehard evernote preachers and most everyone else has no idea what the service actually does (which is very understandable — evernote is a tool with a TON of intended use cases)
Hello! Evernote employee here, I first wanted to say thanks for posting. Its always good to hear from our users directly. I've been at Evernote for a while and it is still weird to see us show up on HN.
Anyways, I enjoyed your comments wanted to give my personal opinion & point of view for at least points 1 & 2.
1. You're right that scaling is very hard. If you want a closer look at it, we have a tech blog that even I can read and understand. https://blog.evernote.com/tech/
Perhaps the most reassuring thing I can say is that Evernote runs on Evernote. Err... maybe this is more clear, Evernote (the company) runs on Evernote (the service). We eat our own dog food as they say, which means I've lost count of how many water cooler conversations turn into "there's something weird that Evernote's doing on my computer..."
2. Our Mac and Windows apps let you export your notes into HTML (including resources). Both these apps run natively against local files so you could export if you were offline or if for some reason our service was down. We try to compete by making a great app and a great service. In fact, we don't make money unless we've done a good enough job for you to upgrade to Premium. It seems like your main concern is that your text-only notes export to HTML instead of plaintext, which is a fair point. One of the nice things HTML is that there are third party applications that can convert from HTML into a number of other formats, so we're relying on that if you want your notes in RTF or as a .txt or something else.
I agree with all your points. It's why I've used Evernote less and less over time. As for point 6, if you are on Mac/iOS, Clear App is a great way to handle the list issue when you are actually in the store.
I tried Evernote a couple of times and always thought it was very weak especially when I couldn't even make a todo list. A good text editing experience is just just head-slappingly essential in a freaking note taking app.
I'm surprised that no-one has mentioned google docs. It has been continuously improving over the years. The features are very hacker friendly:
- cross platform
- proxima nova font (yum)
- in doc scripting interface
- external api interface
- stores a version history
- top drawer real-time collaboration
- searchable set of drive files
- very reliable
Definitely very hacker friendly. My only complaint is lack of a good offline mode across all platforms but when online it ticks my boxes.
I'd love to see a private controlled answer to these services - some kind of owncloud-box with apps for various mobile platforms. F/OSS server software so I'm confident in it, and then paid/closed everything-else.
Then again, the challenge is that hackers love to hack, so we'll put up with kludgy mashed-up solutions instead of a nice one-stop-shop of convenience. Meanwhile, layman users are perfectly happy with the lock-in of modern webapps.
Self managed encryption keys is not "hard" any more than any other secure web service. I can't imagine why you think that this would have any effect on features other than from a cost benefit perspective.
Linux support is fine, if you're willing to accept HTML5 and JavaScript executing who knows what in your browser.
If evernote can't make a good text editor with HTML5 and JavaScript then it proves that apps in the browser is a dead end. Text editor is basically, the "cost of entry" and if an entire team focused on that single feature can't deliver it after years, well... I'm not really surprised given the state of JavaScript (collectively ruined by Mozilla's lack of resources and Google's ill will) and HTML5 (collectively ruined by nobody giving a shit about the language before their own interests).
Given the crumbling of infrastructure of the web, I'm kind of surprised anyone still uses the internet at all for anything more important than facebook and tabloid news. Maybe nobody does?
I'm an evernote user too. I use it's very basic free account and I never had any problem. But I to edit notes rarely and don't depend on it.
However, given your level of expertise not finding a note-taking solution, seems ridiculous. Doesn't feel like a real problem. I never understood how a note-keeping application can attract that kind of money Evernote does, but then again there are many things I don't understand.
However, given today's tools, taking notes can be done using any level of encryption, privacy you need. Seriously, that's not a big problem for a tech savvy user.
ps. Caring about privacy (at that level) and using cloud services, other than Owncloud hosted in a server you alone have physical access is silly :-)
Yeah. I lost substantial data in their web client.
All developers know that feeling when using an app: you're dealing with something a little half-assed. Evernote has always had that feel for me. Switching over to something else, preferably based on flat files using something like Markdown, is on my to-do list.
I use OneNote on my Nokia 925 Windows Phone, my Surface Pro, my laptop, and my workstation. All the data is synced in SkyDrive. I've got a lot of data. Global search is instantaneous. The application is extremely reliable. I save cut and paste snippets from the web. Stack Overflow answers with my personal annotations; anything. Images and sound files are extremely easy. I can record a meeting and take a few notes (by typing or using the stylus on the Surface) and later I can search on the string to find the note. If that note was taken 40 minutes into a 60 minute meeting I can click and get the .wav file to play that bit of the meeting. You can use OneNote on the other platforms as described in this article.
I'm not shilling for the Redmond entity but I always do find it hilarious that a very superior software product can hide in plain view and all the "think different" people can't even see it.
A while ago we were discussing an interview with Evernote's CTO about security (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6881992). He basically argued that fundamental security measures (like properly encrypting passwords) are okay to do as an afterthought once the product is out the door.
If Evernote takes the same "features first" approach to reliability, redundancy etcetera, that would explain a lot.
I do lots lots lots of paper notes. I even make my own notebooks according to my system which evolved a lot over past 5 years.
Since 2008, I am making my yearly Evernote migration attempts. So far, Evernote is not any close to the paper notebook + smartphone camera duo. On every account excluding possibly search, it is inconvenient, complex, slow and less reliable.
If core HWR functions of Evernote will be available as an one-button app in my phone (like Camera), that will be a really strong value proposition to me.
Otherwise, the value of notes depends on being within immediate reach (ideal: on the wall, open on the table). Every additional tap, click or wait-one-second halves the value of it.
Navigating a complex unreliable app, paying for it and worrying about privacy/reliability/bugs altogether makes it less than helpful for me, hence a no-go.
> they said I should check the App Store release notes, which routinely includes the ambiguous line “bug fixes”
The trend of putting just "bug fixes" or "performance improvements" into release notes drives me mad. Your users are not stupid. They know what bugs there the app has and will be happy to know if those specific bugs have been fixed.
"Performance improvements" is equally lame. It could mean that you cleaned up some code and now a function call is 0.05 seconds faster without any visible user benefit. Tell us how the app is faster.
HTML5 apps are sometimes sold on the promise of being able to update themselves without going through an app store review, but you would also lose the standard way of delivering release notes unless you build that functionality yourself.
I totally relate to this note on two levels, one as a user and having Evernote go wacky on me and just flat out lose something it used to have saved, and two as an engineer having worked on systems that were not designed but instead evolved at the hands of people "getting things done."
The latter aspect is the most intriguing because if Evernote is in fact evolving and not designing, they are vulnerable to being out executed by someone with good design principles. I sometimes wish I could look inside their system and see how it is put together, and sometimes I worry about what I mind find there if I did.
[+] [-] GraffitiTim|12 years ago|reply
One year ago, my girlfriend was using Evernote (on my suggestion) to write her travel journal on our trip to Southeast Asia. I saw her note sync a bunch of times (the iOS app shows a little blue arrow when it's uploading). But one day she opened it and the note was gone. I contacted support but they couldn't do anything. (They offered her a year of free Premium service and "apologized for the inconvenience".)
Since then, I've stopped recommending it to people because I don't want to feel personally responsible if they lose notes too. I also have a tinge of doubt every time I record important information. My biggest worry is Evernote quietly losing a note, because once I record something in Evernote I typically push it from my internal memory.
On top of that, their iOS app is incredibly slow. When I want to quickly jot an idea down, it's very inconvenient.
I've started using SimpleNote lately, which is far faster, but I don't know to what extent I should trust it to keep my data safely.
[+] [-] veidr|12 years ago|reply
Evernote is some of the very worst software that has ever survived more than a few months on my computer without being deleted. Horrible show-stopping crash/data loss bugs are the norm, and have been increasing steadily as they add feature after feature with apparently no quality control at all.
Fundamentally, the job Evernote does (for me, but I assume also for most users with thousands of notes) is too important to delegate to a halfassed vc-backed startup that flies its engineers economy and has never heard of an integration test.
But replacing it isn't yet possible. It syncs across all platforms I use, does OCR of everything in both Japanese and English, including handwriting and text in photos, works out of the box with all my paper document scanners... There's just nothing else on the market (or if there is, PLEASE TELL ME!!) that does all that.
So Evernote hasn't lost me as a customer, yet. They've seemingly made a spectacular effort to do so, but... Life without Evernote would still be, on balance, more painful than with it.
But life with it is indeed pretty fucking painful, too.
[+] [-] farnsworth|12 years ago|reply
I was able to get the note back by driving back to my hotel, retrieving my laptop where the note was cached, and opening Evernote while offline to ensure it wouldn't sync and wipe out that copy. Pretty frustrating. I've learned some tough lessons about cloud services and free stuff.
[+] [-] tempestn|12 years ago|reply
One stop-gap they might be able to implement quickly would be a scale-up of their version control. They could throw money (storage space and bandwidth) at the problem, increasing the number and frequency of revisions stored. Certainly not as good as preventing loss in the first place, but reliable versioning would help minimize catastrophic loss in the meantime, and would still continue to be valuable once things are more stable.
[+] [-] lmuszkie|12 years ago|reply
When I heard Phil talk about this at SXSW (as part of his talk about making Evernote a 100-year startup, I believe), I thought it was neat. But I wonder if this strategy is undermining reliability.
[+] [-] ishansharma|12 years ago|reply
The other thing is that there is no true Evernote alternative. I have iOS and Windows devices but I travel and internet is flaky sometimes. There's nothing that will store all my images, screenshots(Skitch), handwritten notes (with OCR!) and use it natively across platforms!
[+] [-] gmu3|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bagels|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lhl|12 years ago|reply
Their web clipper is great, the best around IMO (especially since Clipboard folded), however there's no way to exclude those clipped pages from search, so after using the clipper for a while, searching for just about any phrase is mostly irrelevant results. Ideally it'd be possible to filter by source or have default searches to exclude certain types of content.
Another example of this is that I have a well-curated and geotagged Travel Notebook (this was actually much harder than it should have been since their geocoder is picky and you can't really massage it). I'd love to be able to see these notes on a map, but the "Atlas" map view that Evernote provides doesn't let you filter by notebook (or anything really).
Evernote does a great job of making it fairly painless to capture notes and despite the author's problems, has generally worked well on syncing everything. It's never done a good job for triaging/filing/finding or organizing notes though, and it seems to simply get worse as you use it more (and with each redesign). Evernote seems to want to encourage you to put "everything" into it, but as you do, it becomes harder and harder to get what you need out of it. Honestly, I'm baffled at how the Evernote devs/designers use it.
[+] [-] TarpitCarnivore|12 years ago|reply
This has been my main complaint with Evernote. When I first found the software it was merely a way to capture notes, URLs, etc. As it keeps expanding its feature set and trying to make the tools more useful it keeps getting worse and worse.
[+] [-] elbenshira|12 years ago|reply
The iOS app is slow and clunky. I hate using it. It crashes all the time, especially when I'm trying to take snapshots of a document with many pages (and all previous snapshots simply disappear).
The desktop app is better, but they really could improve the writing experience. Pasting HTML blobs is impossible, and so is formatting my notes the way I want (I use TextExpander for sanity).
Evernote is great when it works, but they really need to fix their stability and bug problems.
[+] [-] coldcode|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] temuze|12 years ago|reply
"Update: Evernote CEO Phil Libin contacted me and we spoke about the issues described. He apologized, saying the post rings true and that there is a lot of work to be done both on the application and service fronts — and that he hopes my impression will be reversed a few months from now."
[+] [-] Alex3917|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dunham|12 years ago|reply
They use a directory tree, with one directory per note. Each note has HTML file, all supporting files, an "enml" version of the HTML file (i.e. a HTML-like XML document), and XML documents containing character recognition data.
The local indexes are in lucene format. (Specifically clucene.)
You will also find a sqlite3 database with additional metadata.
If you store anything you care about in Evernote, I'd highly recommend backing this up. On OSX it will be in within one of these two directories, depending on which version you're running:
or[+] [-] AJ007|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Touche|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AVTizzle|12 years ago|reply
It truly is in the face of the "do one thing and do it well" mindset that many other companies subscribe to. It's a shame too, because I love Evernote. I truly do live in it... true to Phil's vision, my mind is thoroughly mapped out throughout my Evernote account.
[+] [-] grimlck|12 years ago|reply
And see Dropbox as an example of something which supports every major platform WITHOUT losing data losing bugs.
[+] [-] timmm|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benrapscallion|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edanm|12 years ago|reply
But even putting aside these syncing issues, it's a really terribly-designed piece of software There are so many issues with it, UI-wise, that is just bugs the hell out of me. (See note below for an example of a feature designed badly).
Still, Evernote fills a need I have that unfortunately there is no other solution for. And while it's taking a long time, it is gradually improving. So I'm still hoping that, one day, Evernote fulfils its destiny and becomes as amazing as it could be.
Note: Example of a badly deigned feature: tagging support is crazy-bad - you can tag things, and you can even organise tags into a tag hierarchy - except, no you can't, because it's only supported on some platforms. And the "support" for it is purely visual - selecting a "parent" tag doesn't auto-select the child tags, so it is basically no help. So let's go to solution 2, which is to tag things with a prefix, like "History\Middle Ages" and "History\US". But now, their generally awesome tag-completer will be annoying, since it will force you to type "History\" before getting to the point. So lets reverse tag it, like "US (History)". No, that wont' work, since you can search tags by prefix (e.g. search for anything with a tag starting with "History") but not by tag suffix. Even though, through the UI, you can do this, you can't do it with an actual search, so you can't select these tags.
[+] [-] chromejs10|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aroman|12 years ago|reply
And yes, the OS X client is quite slow and bulky. And I really don't appreciate not being able to resize the window to half of my screen (1440x900) size.
Hopefully there's an OS X client overhaul on its way?
[+] [-] RossDM|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bdwalter|12 years ago|reply
1. Fear of data loss... it's probably the largest part of my mistrust of all these dang cloud services that want to control/own me or otherwise lock me into their service. I run a 99.999% uptime, extreme scale, SaaS business across multiple active/active data centers, I know exactly what it takes. It’s incredibly hard to do, and I don't trust anyone at a rapid growth company to do it right. In the ever constant scheduling battle between features and doing it right, features frequently end up winning, especially in consumer focused SaaS business with meaningless SLA’s. My Evernote library is clearly much much more important to me than it will ever be to Evernote. No amount of marketing spin will ever lead me to believe otherwise. This really is my own hangup though. At some point I may just get over this. To their credit, I have only ever lost a few notes in the 4-5 years I have been using the service.
2. Tight lock-in (the cynic in me always says it’s clearly engineered this way) to the platform, frustrating process to export my notes to another tool. This is a problem across the industry. Everyone playing the lock-in/stickiness game. Portability is key. A simple text export of my notes would go a long way to make me happy. I really don’t want html exports of my text notes.
3. Security of their cloud service...frankly, I don't trust anyone and wish I could store my evernote data on my own; self managed; self encrypted; shared storage platform. 2 factor was a nice step in the right direction. Self managed encryption keys is when I will stop whining about it… I understand this makes a lot of things hard, and am willing to forgo some features to get this feature.
4. Lack of reasonable support for Linux. Evernote is now the single sole tool keeping me from dumping my Mac and moving to linux... Yup, note-taking is that important to me. I have tried nevernote, everpad and the like, but they are still pretty weak. I understand this isn’t Evernote’s problem and Linux is a very small market, but its a big deal to me.
5. A frankly lousy text editor. Seriously, I keep expecting this to get better, and it just never quite gets there. And don't get me started on tabs and indenting. I often edit notes in mac textedit and then copy them into evernote. Not because TextEdit is great, but because its predictable and just works. I'm not looking for advanced features here.
6. Strange as this may sound (I may be using the tool wrong), I really hate marking things off my list like at the grocery store. It takes so dang long to mark off a list while pushing a shopping cart and fumbling with a phone. I now print my list out and cross things off with a pen because its so way less frustrating... This may be an edge side use case, but still... the phone apps (both droid and iPhone) are not wonderful.
I fully subscribe to the belief that I am a weirdo, and these are really just my perceptions and random thoughts. I have remained an active, albeit reluctant user, and at this point plan to stay that way for at least a little bit longer. I always used to joke that if evernote, things, and dropbox ever merged, I would happily pay double. These days though, I am looking to support my own stand alone instances of these types of tools without being tied to 3rd party cloudy services so tightly.
[+] [-] aroman|12 years ago|reply
I'm very glad to know that other loyal Evernote Premium users are also experiencing these pain points. The forums seem to be mostly inhabited by diehard evernote preachers and most everyone else has no idea what the service actually does (which is very understandable — evernote is a tool with a TON of intended use cases)
[+] [-] dlu|12 years ago|reply
Anyways, I enjoyed your comments wanted to give my personal opinion & point of view for at least points 1 & 2.
1. You're right that scaling is very hard. If you want a closer look at it, we have a tech blog that even I can read and understand. https://blog.evernote.com/tech/ Perhaps the most reassuring thing I can say is that Evernote runs on Evernote. Err... maybe this is more clear, Evernote (the company) runs on Evernote (the service). We eat our own dog food as they say, which means I've lost count of how many water cooler conversations turn into "there's something weird that Evernote's doing on my computer..."
2. Our Mac and Windows apps let you export your notes into HTML (including resources). Both these apps run natively against local files so you could export if you were offline or if for some reason our service was down. We try to compete by making a great app and a great service. In fact, we don't make money unless we've done a good enough job for you to upgrade to Premium. It seems like your main concern is that your text-only notes export to HTML instead of plaintext, which is a fair point. One of the nice things HTML is that there are third party applications that can convert from HTML into a number of other formats, so we're relying on that if you want your notes in RTF or as a .txt or something else.
[+] [-] jimwalsh|12 years ago|reply
http://realmacsoftware.com/clear
[+] [-] knitatoms|12 years ago|reply
It's multiplatform, written in Pyhon, easily extensible and a truly fantastic piece of software that is well worth investigating.
[+] [-] duncanawoods|12 years ago|reply
I'm surprised that no-one has mentioned google docs. It has been continuously improving over the years. The features are very hacker friendly:
- cross platform - proxima nova font (yum) - in doc scripting interface - external api interface - stores a version history - top drawer real-time collaboration - searchable set of drive files - very reliable
Definitely very hacker friendly. My only complaint is lack of a good offline mode across all platforms but when online it ticks my boxes.
[+] [-] asgeirn|12 years ago|reply
That means both that either both of us are weirdos, or a substantial part of Evernote's user base are in line with these concerns.
[+] [-] Pxtl|12 years ago|reply
Then again, the challenge is that hackers love to hack, so we'll put up with kludgy mashed-up solutions instead of a nice one-stop-shop of convenience. Meanwhile, layman users are perfectly happy with the lock-in of modern webapps.
[+] [-] LeIrony|12 years ago|reply
Linux support is fine, if you're willing to accept HTML5 and JavaScript executing who knows what in your browser.
If evernote can't make a good text editor with HTML5 and JavaScript then it proves that apps in the browser is a dead end. Text editor is basically, the "cost of entry" and if an entire team focused on that single feature can't deliver it after years, well... I'm not really surprised given the state of JavaScript (collectively ruined by Mozilla's lack of resources and Google's ill will) and HTML5 (collectively ruined by nobody giving a shit about the language before their own interests).
Given the crumbling of infrastructure of the web, I'm kind of surprised anyone still uses the internet at all for anything more important than facebook and tabloid news. Maybe nobody does?
[+] [-] atmosx|12 years ago|reply
However, given your level of expertise not finding a note-taking solution, seems ridiculous. Doesn't feel like a real problem. I never understood how a note-keeping application can attract that kind of money Evernote does, but then again there are many things I don't understand.
However, given today's tools, taking notes can be done using any level of encryption, privacy you need. Seriously, that's not a big problem for a tech savvy user.
ps. Caring about privacy (at that level) and using cloud services, other than Owncloud hosted in a server you alone have physical access is silly :-)
[+] [-] ethnomusicolog|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kennyledet|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pauljohncleary|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mkr-hn|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] niels_olson|12 years ago|reply
Puppet Labs?
[+] [-] mrmondo|12 years ago|reply
Please do let me know if you find something better.
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jdlegg|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simonebrunozzi|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wpietri|12 years ago|reply
All developers know that feeling when using an app: you're dealing with something a little half-assed. Evernote has always had that feel for me. Switching over to something else, preferably based on flat files using something like Markdown, is on my to-do list.
[+] [-] michaelcullina|12 years ago|reply
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2043415
I'm not shilling for the Redmond entity but I always do find it hilarious that a very superior software product can hide in plain view and all the "think different" people can't even see it.
[+] [-] bowlofpetunias|12 years ago|reply
If Evernote takes the same "features first" approach to reliability, redundancy etcetera, that would explain a lot.
[+] [-] gritzko|12 years ago|reply
Since 2008, I am making my yearly Evernote migration attempts. So far, Evernote is not any close to the paper notebook + smartphone camera duo. On every account excluding possibly search, it is inconvenient, complex, slow and less reliable.
If core HWR functions of Evernote will be available as an one-button app in my phone (like Camera), that will be a really strong value proposition to me.
Otherwise, the value of notes depends on being within immediate reach (ideal: on the wall, open on the table). Every additional tap, click or wait-one-second halves the value of it.
Navigating a complex unreliable app, paying for it and worrying about privacy/reliability/bugs altogether makes it less than helpful for me, hence a no-go.
[+] [-] oe|12 years ago|reply
The trend of putting just "bug fixes" or "performance improvements" into release notes drives me mad. Your users are not stupid. They know what bugs there the app has and will be happy to know if those specific bugs have been fixed.
"Performance improvements" is equally lame. It could mean that you cleaned up some code and now a function call is 0.05 seconds faster without any visible user benefit. Tell us how the app is faster.
HTML5 apps are sometimes sold on the promise of being able to update themselves without going through an app store review, but you would also lose the standard way of delivering release notes unless you build that functionality yourself.
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|12 years ago|reply
The latter aspect is the most intriguing because if Evernote is in fact evolving and not designing, they are vulnerable to being out executed by someone with good design principles. I sometimes wish I could look inside their system and see how it is put together, and sometimes I worry about what I mind find there if I did.