I LOVED their Food app. I have managed to keep an old Android device that still has the old Food app which I use as a recipe book. I can save recipes into Evernote and they show up in the Food app. Good stuff. But it’s gone.
The Hello App was also a very good app for a specific audience. If you have certain disabilities, or if you are caring for someone with certain disabilities, the Hello app was a godsend. But Evernote didn’t spin that off, of give it to the community, or otherwise do anything useful or helpful. They just shut it down. As far as I know, they didn’t actually MARKET it to disabled people, either. I feel like some idiot in management said, “We can’t market this” and didn’t bother to do the research to find out that they COULD market it.
I really like the way that Evernote works for capturing bookmarks and notes. I’ve been paying for it for a few years now. I’d love to use something Libre and open source instead, but I don’t know of any such project.
So um I just wanna point out that if you’re using Evernote on a desktop computer, it’s gonna be storing all your notes there. It doesn’t do this on phones/tablets - there’s preferences for exactly which of your notebooks it stores, which I think have some limitations for unpaid users - but unless you are one of those people who has managed to entirely abandon computers in favor of tablets, you’re going to have all your notes on your computer.
There’s also an easily-found “export” option. And Evernote will happily run without a connection to the net.
I’ve been a paid user of EN for most of its life, I will be sad if these changes mean it stops being updated to work on new OSs.
@Rory I’ve tried using Scrivener to write, I really have, it has so many neat features designed for Writing. But “Evernote is on every device” wins out over those for me.
Agreed. The whole point of the article seems to be that you must have a local copy, so don’t use EN. But for the few years I’ve used EN, I’ve always had the local copy on my PC. In fact, I consider that the primary, and the cloud version is the backup (which I can conveniently access on my iPhone or Fire).
I’ve been an Evernote user almost since launch, it turns out - for about half of that time fully-paid. I’ve embraced almost all the missteps - moleskine notebooks, Food, Hello, Skitch (but not the lifestyle merchandise). At the end of the day it is a reliable, versatile capture and retrieve system for lots of different types of info including meeting notes, scanned docs and research.
I’ve tried to leave many times for onenote and always come back because onenote is a think film of gloss over a very incomplete and unreliable platform, relatively speaking (no drag and drop in OSX or iOS? Wtf?). I still pay for EN even with a subscription to office 365 and an all-Apple workflow.
This post feels a bit reactionary. I agree that Evernote is clearly in need of refocusing; not unusual at this point in a company’s lifecycle I guess, and people have been talking about ‘the first dead unicorn’ for a couple of years.
At the same time, having lived through more than one, a 15% headcount reduction is not that dramatic or extraordinary (in the macro - for the 15% it is, of course).
The leadership change is more concerning and I think it will signal a major change in strategy for EN. I imagine a continuing refocus on business accounts, which will make me sad.
Whatever happens to Evernote, it won’t disappear with our data overnight. It’s pretty much inconceivable that the service will be shuttered without months of warning for people to download and export/migrate their data. One thing that keeps me with Evernote is its ability to share its data with other apps (you can migrate everything to onenote in three clicks, drag whole notebooks to Apple notes etc). If the time comes, we’ll have plenty of warning. ‘Get out while you still can’ feels a bit sensationalist at this point.
Right! Is going to ask exactly this. I just don’t understand these composit companies. Facebook employs 25,000 people. Where are all the amazing things they must be doing there?
I like Evernote, but I’ve never really used it as a “notetaking” app. Instead, I basically use it to gather documents (web pages, pdfs, and the like) into folders for future reference.
I totally concur with you Seamus. I never use a cloud service and run local auto back ups to a secure and encrypted USB drive with free tools. 7Zip is a wonderful utility. The real pain in the ass is for folks who use cloud services and have lost control of their data.
Totally agree re not trusting cloud. Fed up of software (Apple in this case) telling me to switch on cloud and enjoy access to my files wherever I am. Well, not if there’s no connectivity - and I do have access all the time because my local storage and computing devices are always at hand. Glad to hear I’m not that unusual (seems like it these days).
Having run a MacBook for 5-6 years and now also having a MacBook Air - either of which could be used at any time - I’m struggling with how to keep their local files in sync with each other - which as well as letting me use either at any time will also provide another full backup. Wondering about Syncthing. Anyone any other suggestions?
