Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

https://evernote.com/blog/evernote-next-move-joining-bending-spoons/

by taldo • 4 years ago

384 344 4 years ago

evernote.com

nathanaldensr• 4 years ago

How the mighty have fallen.

Who the heck are Bending Spoons?

graypegg• 4 years ago

Seemingly producers of a random set of mobile apps [0] including a video editor, a basic photo retouching app, and a fitness routine tracker.

As an aside, their site is also aggravatingly self-absorbed, at least as it seems to me. Copy about how "we create our own cutting-edge technologies" and "Impossible. Maybe." just hurts to read when they're talking about a 30 day fitness app.

[0] https://bendingspoons.com/products

brookst3• 4 years ago

30 days?!?!?

vxNsr2• 4 years ago

I just got the reference. Bending spoons, doing the impossible, like in the matrix. At least the name makes sense now.

delusional• 4 years ago

They also call their employees "spooners" and talk about how they "they share one thing in common: a drive to become the best person they’re capable of being."

Statements like "Are you ready to come join us in the Spooniverse? We saved you a seat." also make it sound a little like it's a cult.

With that being said, their goals seem admirable and they are scoring pretty well on some employee satisfaction inquiries, so it's perfectly possible that they are actually living up to their ambitions. A fitness app might not seem like a lot, but they may just be working their way up to something bigger.

martopix• 4 years ago

The only reasonably modern app developer company in Italy, I believe, for the little I heard. Considering the technological desert that is Italy these days, not bad.

nathias2• 4 years ago

evernote was one of the programs that trapped me, it took some effort to finally migrate my data (I'm now using md files/ obsidian for mobile frontend synced with syncthing)

netsharc• 4 years ago

I migrated to Joplin (with a Docker container on my NAS as the server), the Windows app has "Import from an ENEX (Evernote Export)" and I haven't noticed anything missing. I've noticed the few encrypted notes I had being migrated as garble though.

cianmm4• 4 years ago

The final thing that has me trapped with Evernote is the very good OCR for both images and PDFs. The second I figure out a replacement for that which works great on Mac and iOS I am gone.

gumby3• 4 years ago

On ios this is now baked into Notes.app

I use swiftscan because I've been using it a long time (same reason you use evernote) but the Notes scanner is pretty effective if Notes works for you.

skinnymuch• 4 years ago

I think there are different apps that do this. Devonthink does and imports Evernote however many say it’s a bulky app that does a lot. I don’t feel that way but I like Devonthink.

c0brac0bra• 4 years ago

I wish the UI/UX for Obsidian was better. It takes just long enough to search for a note that I want to edit that I end up just putting quick stuff in Google Keep due to its ease of use.

D13Fd• 4 years ago

Really? Search is instant for me on Obsidian, with about 4000 notes spanning 11 years. Maybe you had some kind of indexing issue?

ben10402• 4 years ago

I had a great workflow going on with Evernote and my ScanSnap. I'd scan mail and paperwork right away, and it'd be full text searchable in Evernote. Maybe once a week or so I'd go through the latest uploads and tag them or put them in folders.

It took me a while to figure out an alternative for this because so many of the note tools I had seen were focused on just written notes and not the PDF file use case.

I tried self-hosting Paperless, but that seemed like a lot of work too. When we're talking about my document archive here it's a lot of important files and I don't want to be my own SRE just to save myself $100 or so a year.

The best I have now is I upgraded my scanner to a new Fujitsu that OCRs and pushes the files into Dropbox, and paid Dropbox plans have full text search.

jdshaffer3• 4 years ago

I'm curious why you moves from ScanSnap (which I use) to a Fujitsu. Just time for an upgrade, or do you prefer some newer feature(s)?

I use my ScanSnap with OCR turned on and haven't had any problems, but I'm always looking for what will replace it when it finally died (still going strong at about 10 years or so, I think!).

fooqux• 4 years ago

I'm curious; what are the benefits of using syncthing over the git plugin, if any?

I understand if you already use syncthing for other stuff, but having the power of git for my notes is quite nice.

nathias2• 4 years ago

none, I just use it for other stuff too

kennend3• 4 years ago

I migrated to Joplin some time ago. Evernote was great but you could see them slowly trying to build that 'walled garden".

I'd prefer flat MD files and a fairly decent GUI. Joplin has zero hold on me and this is a great thing.

terlisimo• 4 years ago

Same, migrated to self-hosted Joplin recently.

I fired up EN at one point recently. Wanted to add a note in a certain category and it took me like 20 seconds to get to the point where I can type in the actual note text. It wasn't even connected to the internet and still the app was slow. 5-10 second pauses for something that should be done in a millisecond. Useless popups.

WTF were they thinking?

I mean, I know exactly what happened. Everyone who cared about having a good app has left the company by this point.

Anyways, I really like Joplin. Android app works fine. Desktop app works fine. It even has a TUI mode. Server side for self-hosting (webdav) was pretty straightforward to set up.

q-base• 4 years ago

Has Joplin become any faster? I tried the switch a year or two ago. The export and import went somewhat smoothly, but Joplin was so incredibly slow to sync that I ended up going back to Evernote. I do have many years of notes in Evernote, but it just took forever, both in initial sync but also opening on phone even after the initial sync. Something in their algorithm was just very slow back then.

gmoore• 4 years ago

I do miss the old Evernote. Many of the 'enhancements' over the last few years just get in the way of the main benifit of the tool.

tianqi• 4 years ago

Indeed. Thier every 'enhancements' makes me feel that they have absolutely no idea what their strengths are.

chillfox3• 4 years ago

Yep, if I could subscribe to the old Evernote then I would, but it's long gone.

horsawlarway• 4 years ago

Yup - it stopped being a functional note taking app. Which is the only reason I used it in the first place.

It used to just get out of the way and let me take notes in my browser with the comfort of knowing I could get them from anywhere later.

Now it's this horrible, janky app that tries to do too many things, shoves constant feature popups in my face, and isn't very good for taking notes.

I used it constantly 10 years ago. I don't use it at all today. I just loaded it up again to see if I'm missing anything -

It takes nearly 10 seconds to load on a developer machine on a gigabit internet connection.

It immediately asks for permission to send me popups

It tries to show me 7 different features on the home screen (notes/scratchpad/pinned notes/recently captured/notebooks/tags/shortcuts) instead of just fucking showing me my last note.

It takes multiple clicks to start a new note every time.

---

Basically - it's now worse than a physical notepad in basically every way.

isaacfrond• 4 years ago

I really liked Evernote. Yearly subscription instead of the monthly Netflix like prices that ever half baked app asks for these days. Integration amongst all my devices phone, table, various desktops. All nice. And no further dependency on Microsoft, Google or Meta.

Product development stalled a long time ago though. I do hope this thing stays in the air, cause I got a lot of notes in there.

pqs7• 4 years ago

Not stalled. They created Tasks, which I use every single day!

aNoob7000• 4 years ago

If tasks is their big accomplishment they are screwed. How about allowing you to change the default font on a note or a task?

I've been using Evernote for a while now, and I just don't get the pace of their development. Their changes seem almost incremental and take forever.

brookst3• 4 years ago

Same. It was ahead of its time and incredibly useful, then behind its time and useful, and now antiquated but still full of my important notes.

Do I have a loyalty club membership at that one hotel I stayed in halfway around the world 15 years ago, when I had a different email address? Evernote is the only place I can find out.

As soon as there’s a dead simple migration path to OneNote, I’ll have $50/year more spending money.

ghaff• 4 years ago

Though basically the same lock-in issue is what kept me from starting to put all my notes into OneNote years ago. Admittedly at this point, OneNote is presumably not going anywhere. But I still make the tradeoff to mostly keep notes in text files.

damontal• 4 years ago

It's up 79$/year now for personal accounts.

chillfox3• 4 years ago

Yeah, was my favorite app for a few years, I was even a paying subscriber, but then thy started pushing adds for some group chat thing and other random stuff. And the webapp became almost unusable after a redesign to this "modern" information sparse style where you have to hunt around and click an excessive amount of times to get simple things done.

I ended up moving over to Obsidian, and while I am not entirely happy with it, it's at least better than what Evernote has become.

dkarl3• 4 years ago

I'm using Obsidian and Inkdrop now. I need to download Simplenote. I'm also putatively trying Joplin and Notion, but they seem to be losing out; I need to try harder with them for a bit and then drop them if they don't catch on.

I'm being so picky because I used Evernote for ten years and could conceivably use my next choice even longer. I can't believe I used Evernote for over a decade and used it to create thousands of notes. What a shame they destroyed it.

rrreese• 4 years ago

I was using Evernote extensively back in 2008. It was a real tossup between Evernote and OneNote (which at the time wasn't cloud based and required syncing the files).

Then Evernote proceeded to cease all feature development on the main app. They where releasing food apps while the main product grew stale. Instead of making Evernote incredibly powerful, they didn't touch it and people left any of the dozen competitors that exist today.

dkarl3• 4 years ago

I loved the integration among all my devices as well. I think that's table stakes for note-taking apps. So often I jot something down at my computer and then walk out the door with only my phone.

However, their constant UI changes were maddening. The breaking point for me, which resulted in me now using several different competitors until I settle on one, was they decided that your cursor should start in the body for a new note instead of in the title field. I get that searching is supposed to replace every other single form of organization, but note titles are important in their interface, and actually really vital when searching! They got way out over their skis, discouraging you from adding titles when their own UI makes it a nightmare to have a lot of untitled notes. And it really was an effective nudge — after the change I struggled to consistently add titles even though titles are important for my workflow. I struggled between having a mess of untitled notes or applying constant discipline to fight the nudge, and I finally gave up.

That was just the straw that broke the camel's back. There were so many other fiddly UI changes that constantly forced me to learn new habits. I would gladly pay $30 per month (not kidding) just to have a version of Evernote frozen in time. I remember loving it for years starting around 2012 or so, then a few years of horrible quality problems that I wouldn't want to revisit, and then it was fine except for constant annoying changes.

I'll be paying my subscription until I settle on a replacement and figure out a workable export/import process to transition my notes to it (which I expect to be a struggle, based on the tools I've tried.)

fairity4• 4 years ago

Yea, I'm in the same boat as you. The notes I have in there are really valuable.

Curious, would you have been willing to become an investor in Evernote to avoid this acquisition? And if so, what order of magnitude? I'm curious why they didn't just do a crowdfunding campaign.

tomjen33• 4 years ago

I am honestly okay with development stalling, as I don't really have that many features I needed.

Except one: speed. Evernote is dog slow, whereas Apple Notes is fast. This is what killed my reason for subscribing to Evernote. Though it has far fewer features, I can press CMD+N and start jotting down my ideas/things I have to remember.

I have no objection to paying for good tools, but they are tools and must support me in what I am trying to accomplish.

whalesalad• 4 years ago

imagine being at the local tech happy hour and someone asks you where you work and you have to yell over the loud music "BENDING SPOONS, I'M A L3 SRE" ... "what?" ... "BENDING. SPOONS."

gnrlst• 4 years ago

Bending Spoons is based in Milan so you would be at an aperitivo sipping a Negroni or spritz with not so loud music :)

idlewords• 4 years ago

gets checkbook ready

j-bos• 4 years ago

Welp, guess it's time to finally cancel the subscription and move to Obsidian.

mehrzad3• 4 years ago

Interesting to see this now, I was thinking of switching to a new platform for tasks and notes because Evernote’s free tier is quite limited and Apple Reminders often doesn’t even show the correct reminder if there are multiple open. I was just reading about Evernote’s profitability last night.

steveBK1232• 4 years ago

Apple notes is rock solid compared to reminders

Reminders has been perpetually flakey, particularly around new OS releases and if your iPhone/Watch/iPad/Mac are in different states of latest vs non-latest OS.

mehrzad3• 4 years ago

Apple Notes unfortunately does not let you export notes with the images attached, not always relevant but it really hurt me once.

egypturnash5• 4 years ago

At long last, Evernote takes an Incredible Journey to be broken down for parts by its new owner. Can't get any more fucked up than it already has been, it went from being an important part of my daily workflow to a place of pain. The rewrite is part of why my last graphic novel ground to a halt, I was using EN to collaborate on scripts with my partner and it is just agony to use any more. I cancelled my subscription a few years back and really have not found anything to fill that hole. Every theoretical replacement is either a shitty sluggish web view, owned by a megacorporation I don't want to get involved with, or both.

Personally I think the best thing the new owners could do would be to dig up the pre-EN10 codebase, get it compiling again, and make that available. I would resubscribe in a heartbeat.

kjs33• 4 years ago

Could be worse. Wait till they start selling advertisers access to data-mine your notes.

thefourthchime• 4 years ago

I tried a few alternatives and landed on Apple Notes. It's blinding fast, and while it's not exactly feature-rich, it does everything I need while being seamlessly synced to the cloud and my devices.

ravenstine2• 4 years ago

I use Apple Notes because I realized that, for my needs, all the structure and organization that so many other note taking apps/services provide really just make things more complicated and isn't beneficial. Notes is simple, has one level of folders, and supports labeling. I'll almost never look at 95% of my notes again, but in case I do, I can just search by keyword and usually I'll find it.

My one gripe with Notes is that the search function really isn't all that great. Maybe I need to force it to reindex or something. I've found many cases where it doesn't find a note by a word that I know it contains. I really don't get why it seems that nearly all search functions are terrible in any given app. It would be nice if Apple improved the search for Notes, and it shouldn't be that hard to do given that it's just using SQLite under the hood.

CharlesW• 4 years ago

TIL Apple Notes supports Evernote .enex import. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205793 https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/migrate-from-evernote-to-ap...

TremendousJudge2• 4 years ago

I have a directory of .txts on my phone. There are nicer solutions but at least I 100% will never lose access to my notes since they're just files.

crossroadsguy2• 4 years ago

Apple Notes might do a lot of things or do them well, but seamless sync is not one of those.

egypturnash5• 4 years ago

I like a lot of things about it except for the part where I can't collaborate with my Windows-using collaborator.

"Make them use it on iCloud.com" is a non-starter, I don't wanna inflict a shitty web-app on them after fleeing EN mostly because it turned into a shitty web-app crammed into an app container.

alexjplant• 4 years ago

Everybody on HN seems to talk about what they use to "take notes". I personally use Trello as an organization tool for things such as my to-do list, checklists (packing for a trip this weekend, for instance), random thoughts and ideas, lists of music and movies people suggest, transcriptions of phone conversations, etc. Is this the same use case as when people talk about Evernote/Apple Notes/OneNote/org-mode, and if so am I a total weirdo for using a Kanban tool for this purpose? I've used it this way for almost a decade and the abstraction of boards of stacks of cards is very flexible and intuitive to me.

mehrzad3• 4 years ago

If you put multiple images in an Apple Notes note, it’s insanely slow and also it only exports as txt files so no images afaicr

dhimes• 4 years ago

Would some of the open-source alternatives fit the bill? Something like SimpleNote?

bitwize2• 4 years ago

Org-mode, yo.

egypturnash5• 4 years ago

I tried it and cannot recall why that one failed. It missed one of my requirements of

* must be a native app, not a shitty web app

* must be able to run on my Mac & iThings as well as my collaborator's Windows & Android phone

* must be able to collaborate with other people

* must be able to ingest a decade of Evernote gracefully

* that includes attached images and PDFs, I make comics

* must deal with actual rich text, markdown is nice for commenting on the internet but notes need more

koliber• 4 years ago

I was in the same spot in January of 2021. Did some exploring, and settled on Notion. I love it.

Obscurity4340• 4 years ago

If you're on Mac, try DevonThink

staticman22• 4 years ago

I don't understand why you wouldn't just use google docs or microsoft word to collaborate on a graphic novel? Evernote is not and was never a word processor.

The creators of the street angel graphic novel series said all of their ideas are in a google drive folder.

egypturnash5• 4 years ago

I don't like web apps and don't want my life in Google. Also I had been a paid user of Evernote for a few years already when Google Docs came out, I had already learnt that "if you're not paying for it, you're the product".

I'm not a fan of Microsoft, either. I've never had to swap Word documents around so that's not in my lie at all.

Evernote was on my computer, and on my phone; it's where I'd note down an idea when I had it, and since it was there I may as well just expand on it in there. When I'm doing solo comics then most of my notes in EN were collections of vague outlines, dialogue fragments, and photographs of scribbly sketchbook pages; actual writing mostly happened in Illustrator. It was easy to expand that to have a script sitting there in EN, since we were both already used to using it. Plus since EN is about keeping notebooks rather than files it's pretty nice to just have one place that holds all the various words and pictures related to getting from "some ideas we've kicked around" to "a script that I can turn into a bunch of Illustrator files on my hard drive".

This is similar to how there are a lot of programmers who do everything in Emacs. You're already there all the time, and it may not be perfectly built for this, but you can do most of what you need in it, so why not?

If you want to be totally anal about doing it The Traditional Industry Way then you can use a complex word processor template adapted from screenwriting templates and deal with rigid page counts. If you are not working as part of an assembly line with distinct separations between Writers and Editors and Pencillers and Inkers and Colorists and Letterers then your script can a pretty casual thing with simple formatting, and Evernote can handle that just fine. Or at least it could before v10 threw all performance in the toilet for that shitty Electron rewrite.

Lately I have been vaguely fiddling with using Scrivener for roughing out scripts of short pieces, and really need to get my partner on this long-brewing GN still kinda trapped in Evernote to give it a shot. If we can get a decent sync pathway to bring the .scriv files between our disparate devices then maybe my dusty Evernote notebook exports will turn into a handful of Scrivener projects, along with the scattered notes in Joplin and Apple Notes that have happened since I finally said "fuck this abusive relationship with New Evernote".

yukinon• 4 years ago

How did you feel about Dropbox Paper?

reiichiroh• 4 years ago

“Incredible journey?”

gumby3• 4 years ago

Ah, I drove past their office just last week and noticed all the lights were out and the parking lot was empty.

At the time I assumed they'd actually gone under, but now I realise that that would have been the "there is no spoon" scenario.

vxNsr2• 4 years ago

Bending spoon’s website is 100% bloat so that doesn’t bode well for a revitalized Evernote.

criddell2• 4 years ago

I guess Phil Libin's plan to make a company that could last 100 years didn't quite work out.

https://www.businessinsider.com/how-evernotes-phil-libin-pla...

jef_leppard2• 4 years ago

I learned three things watching EN snatch defeat from the jaws of victory:

1) There is almost never a case for a total ground up rewrite of your core product. Just don’t do it.

2) Don’t abandon the users who made you successful in the first place. They’re the ones who advocate for you and get your foot in the door.

3) real time google docs style collaborative editing is table stakes for this software category. Build your V1 with it in mind. Otherwise you’ll have to do a rewrite later. See 1.

seti0Cha4• 4 years ago

Disagree on #3. Social & collaborative features are the bane of my existence. No I don't want to share all my scraps of information, no I don't want to let my friends know what I'm listening to, no, I don't want to publish product purchases I make to twitter.

I think a better #3 would be: decide whether your audience is individuals or businesses, then build for that.

jef_leppard2• 4 years ago

If you don’t want collaborative editing, don’t use it. I’m saying most users wanted it and started looking elsewhere when EN couldn’t deliver. It’s easier to add a lock on collaboration than to backfill later.

dkarl3• 4 years ago

I agree and disagree. I agree with you because I think they ruined a perfectly good product by trying to turn it into a "collaboration tool" that they could sell big corporate contracts for. On the other hand, I think collaborative editing could have been integrated seamlessly into the product without ruining or even changing the single-player experience.

btown2• 4 years ago

"Collaborative editing" is table stakes for a modern note editor because even in a single user scenario you will have the same user editing the same note from multiple devices with different levels of connectivity. The product needs a reputation that it will not lose its user's edits, nor will it make annoying branch-style merge conflicts. To do this right you have to treat the other device as an almost-adversarial actor. Unless you want "glitchy" to be in the first sentence people use to describe you.

SergeAx2• 4 years ago

I have this minset too, but I have one use case for sharing EN notes: when I write articles or short posts which needed to be approved or get an editor touch. I may use Google Docs for it, but there are too many downsides with them compared to EN.

chillfox3• 4 years ago

I agree about the general anti social feature sentiment.

Collaborative editing makes sense for business users (taking meeting notes) and not much for individuals. That said, the tech that enables collaborative editing is kinda the same that allows solid sync and picking up your note taking session on a different device seconds after you put down another, which is something individuals do benefit from.

I like being able to go between my laptop and desktop very fast. Currently with Obsidian and using git for sync it kinda sucks a bit as if I am not careful I get merge conflicts.

etempleton2• 4 years ago

The thing I learned was that maybe a small successful app or service can just be a small successful app or service and not have to grow indefinitely. At some point it seemed like Evernote became obsessed with growing the revenue / business and not making a better product.

cooperadymas• 4 years ago

In other words, they took VC funding.

hn_throwaway_992• 4 years ago

Regarding #1, this is now an often touted recommendation, even by folks like Joel Spolsky whom I greatly admire, but I'm not sure it's the right lesson. For example, I know that Google (at least in the 00s) rewrote huge, major pieces of their infrastructure multiple times and did so successfully. While I agree that broadcasting out a message of "We're going to stop the world and add no new features until we do a ground-up rewrite" is a bad idea, perhaps other lessons could be:

1. Don't write code that's such a spaghetti mess in the first place that you feel the need to throw your hands up and say "nothing can be done except a rewrite".

2. If you do need to do a major rewrite, make sure you have the ability to staff two teams - one doing the rewrite and another maintaining and adding new features to the existing product.

3. Kinda related to number one, but if you have well-organized code to begin with I find it's much easier to do a major rewrite in "sections" (though there are obviously difficulties with this approach).

asdajksah2123• 4 years ago

rewrote huge, major pieces of their infrastructure multiple times and did so successfully

I think that's different from a user facing rewrite. I suspect while Google did its infrastructure rewrites, users didn't notice a difference. Additionally, Google probably had the resources to continue delivering features to users while the infrastructure was being developed.

The problem with a front end rewrite is (a) things might break and users will notice, and (b) it's hard to deliver new features to users while the front end app itself is being rewritten.

bighi4• 4 years ago

4. If you're going to do the rewrite, don't take many years working on it, just to release a broken product missing lots of core features.

5. If you're releasing a broken product missing core features, don't take many YEARS after release to un-brake your product and build some of the missing features again.

tomjen33• 4 years ago

Spolskys point back then was that you couldn't stop the world, do nothing for two years and then come back with your rewritten product.

It was not that you couldn't rewrite part of the product here and there over time, and end up with something that is only the same as the original product in the way the greek ship was.

bighi4• 4 years ago

I think number 1 could be done, but not like Evernote did.

It's been what? 3 years since they released their javascript app, and they still didn't rewrite some important old features. Just last week we got back the option to start writing a note in the title instead of the body.

3 years!

I could write an entire Evernote competitor from scratch in 3 years, as a single developer (as a javascript app, not as multiple native apps).

And they STILL don't have reliable note-synching.

It took them too long, and their app is too crappy. But a GOOD rewrite would have worked just fine.

pqs7• 4 years ago

Why is it so hard to implement apparently simple features? This is surprising to me.

underwater• 4 years ago

A rewrite is not the same as a writing a similar app from scratch.

You need to worry about deciding what functionality to preserve, what to change, and what to throw away. Most rebuilds either fail because they skip this step and the result is inadequate for the job, or they do this step and get bogged down in the minutiae of locking down requirements, digging into edge cases, and stakeholder management.

goto112• 4 years ago

It is much harder to rewrite an existing product since you have to retain compatibility. If the old version of the app was crap then presumably the persistent data structures are also crap, but you can't discard them. So you end up building a compatibility layer or migration process, but in the end you have to support the same general data model as the old version.

matchagaucho• 4 years ago

#2 and #3 seem in conflict with each other.

I adopted Evernote for its ability to synchronize my checklists and notes across all devices. Collaborating with others was not an initial feature IIRC (?)

lucideer• 4 years ago

1) There is almost never a case for a total ground up rewrite of your core product. Just don’t do it.

I've espoused this before, but I've come around to moderating my take on this.

"Almost never" is an exaggeration. I agree that they "almost never" work, but that's not the same as there being no case (there's a difference between "should not have done" and "should have done differently".

After many years of seeing both play out (rewrites and decided-not-to-rewrites) I'd edit this adage to: "there is almost never a case to rewrite yourself" (for the individual) or "there is almost never a case to get the same team to rewrite" (for management).

I'm not saying that engineers can't learn from their own mistakes but if you wrote the software & you think it needs a scratch rewrite rather than a refactor, you're unlikely to have learnt enough within that gap of time to make the rewrite significantly better than a refactor.

The other reason for failure outside of the original architect repeating their same mistakes 2nd time around is outsourcing the rewrite. Wholesale outsourcing is an unbelievably inefficient & failure-prone way to build in-house software.

lazyasciiart3• 4 years ago

My moderated version: you are almost never going to do better at meeting the same goals with a full rewrite. Even when there is a good case for it, it is unlikely to work out.

hinkley2• 4 years ago

you think it needs a scratch rewrite rather than a refactor, you're unlikely to have learnt enough within that gap of time to make the rewrite significantly better than a refactor.

Relentless Refactoring replaces the ship piece by piece while it's under way. If you are effective at it, you can effectively (both definitions) rewrite the entire app with few people being any the wiser.

If you are not good at decomposing a problem into digestible, coherent steps, then you are also lousy at Relentless Refactoring. If you can't decompose the problem, your top-down rewrite is statistically guaranteed to fail. Someone somewhere will get lucky, accidentally beating 1:4 odds over and over for 50 failure points, but that person will probably not be you.

The people who can Relentlessly Refactor don't need to ask for a top-down rewrite. They just get down to doing it. Therefore most of the people who ask for one are incapable of taking advantage of such permission.

Ultimately, the only people who ask for a top-down rewrite are the people who don't deserve it. They believe in do-overs instead of doing the hard work of removing obstacles. They believe in the Second System (without the attendant Syndrome), not in observing and adapting to new information as it becomes available. They have, in essence, trained themselves to continue to misbehave in the face of new wisdom. They will repeat that behavior during the rewrite.

ska• 4 years ago

unlikely to have learnt enough

There is an important caveat here - sometimes the original is rough not because you didn't know how to do it better, but because you were emphasizing speed and flexibility e.g. very early stage startup and you don't really understand the product here.

[see also, ship the prototype problem]

runlevel1• 4 years ago

A successful rewrite of a core product requires a mix of peers: Old blood, who know the wins and sins of the past, and new blood who'll bring a fresh perspective.

tqi2• 4 years ago

Was there any other company doing real time collaboration in 2008 (when Evernote launched)? IIRC that predates even Google docs, so I wouldn't consider that snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

kevin_thibedeau• 4 years ago

Google docs didn't exist when Evernote started. Their competitor was OneNote.

johnxie• 4 years ago

Agreed on point 3 for modern editors in 2022, as real-time collaboration and collaborative editing are table stakes today if you want to compete. But to give EN credit, when they launched (web 2008?) this was not the case, and a complete rewrite on point 1 could very well be necessary when the new CEO took over recently.

We started with OT [1] in mind for V1 of Taskade [2] with the intention to make our editor collaborative, but it was still a bumpy road before we were able to iterate on the product and speed up our dev cycle,. It continues to be a challenge to support the various use cases and customers, as improvements for offline editing, cross-device syncing, and recovery never ends.

This problem isn't fully solved and there are no perfect out of box solutions.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_transformation

[2] https://www.taskade.com

mizzao• 4 years ago

Notion still doesn't have (3) and I find it compelling enough to continue using.

(e.g. when simultaneously editing, text will randomly disappear from one or both writers)

dpedu2• 4 years ago

I used to work for a company that rented a portion of Evernote's HQ, in Redwood City. Nice office and location. Evernote eventually recovered and kicked us out. Just my personal piece of nostalgia.

greenburger• 4 years ago

You’re in luck that space might be available again. They moved out of that building several months ago[0].

[0] https://walkingredwoodcity.com/?s=Evernote&submit=Search

dpedu2• 4 years ago

Wow, that's quite the downsizing! Evernote at one point occupied all 5 floors of that building and their new HQ looks like a single level over retail shops. I guess it makes sense with the move to remote work.

dahdum• 4 years ago

I loved Evernote and was a paying subscriber right up until they changed their TOS to let their employees read all my notes to work on ad targeting. They backpedaled after a while but trust was lost, I cancelled immediately. I have no sympathy for their failure.

kar1181• 4 years ago

Similar experience here, it was a series of changes, none of which made my experience better and a lot of dodgy privacy affecting TOS updates that caused me to can my paid account.

They never really tried to re-engage me either, and have just continued on since then with a bare bones series of notes while I keep the critical stuff elsewhere.

Shame evernote was the first killer 'cloud native' app for me, the thing I couldn't do without once I had it.

lancesells• 4 years ago

I paid off and on through the years but for me it was when they started selling physical products and advertising them in the app. I can't remember what they were. T-shirts? Mousepads?

okuntilnow• 4 years ago

And socks!

https://www.aivanet.com/2013/09/evernote-gets-physical-why-a...

codalan2• 4 years ago

Moleskine notepads. But hey, it was more reliable and quicker to use than their software offering.

d_graeme• 4 years ago

That's horrible. It's the reason I'm still somewhat suspicious of a simplistic note taking app (Colornote) I use on my android. I oftentimes get the sneaky feeling it might be sending my (sometimes highly private) notes to a server somewhere in China, but the app is so simple to use that no matter how many time I decide to, I simply can't get myself to wipe and uninstall it

deafpolygon2• 4 years ago

This was right around the time I exited as well. They backpedaled, sure, then charged forward with it anyways.

awinder• 4 years ago

Looks like these folks raised a big round (for the first funding round no less) last month:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bending-spoons-raises-340-mil...

So fund-to-acquire?

jbaczuk• 4 years ago

I didn't realize you could acquire a company just by bending some spoons...

ergonaught• 4 years ago

Result being that today I'll migrate everything out of Evernote and cancel my subscription.

That sucks.

hirundo• 4 years ago

The only reason I've stuck with Evernote is because it scans all of my old paperwork and lets me search by the OCRed text. Without it, so many years of personal data would be locked in images I'd never have time to eyeball.

Please someone release me from this foul daemon by suggesting an alternative with this key feature.

bkishan• 4 years ago

If you port over those images to Apple photos, you can literally search the for the text right inside the photos app. It works pretty accurately for all printed text ime.

kevinmgranger• 4 years ago

Is there some way to link to those photos via URL, or something like that?

abathur• 4 years ago

Yeah... same boat. Photographed my notebooks and put them in. Sigh.

steve1977• 4 years ago

On macOS, Devonthink

lazyasciiart3• 4 years ago

Pretty sure OneNote does this, I don’t know how the bulk move experience would be though.

soundnote4• 4 years ago

OneNote and Amplenote have OCR built in. Images only, not PDFs, mind you, but it's there in any case.

ericd• 4 years ago

Can we all please go back to buying stable desktop software without continuous upgrade nags, now?

izzydata• 4 years ago

But without software as a service how will companies expand indefinitely until they bust?

Nursie• 4 years ago

Evernote came preinstalled On my second android phone, I think a Galaxy Note 2. It could not be removed and demanded to be allowed to update itself constantly.

I’ll never know whether it was any good, because it annoyed me from the word go.

If you’re a cool, tech-crowd oriented tool, for god’s sake don’t let Samsung install you as a ‘system’ app…

mblevin2• 4 years ago

The End of an Error for the world's most disappointing note-taking app.

I think part of the struggle here is that no two people can agree on what ailed them.

From lack of innovation for years, to an incomprehensibly bad rich text editor interface that broke all established conventions, to 0-60 from "zero monetization" to "monetize every time you even think about clicking a button", to a ground-up rewrite that put it on part with it's counterparts from 2012, etc.

It's almost like it's failure was overdetermined.

Fascinating case study in a journey from ubiquity to obscurity.

jjtheblunt• 4 years ago

The End of an Error

not sure if that is autocorrect, or a joke, or autocorrect making a pun from "end of an era" with "error" given the sentiment.

either way, it's funny!

hyperdimension• 4 years ago

Yeah, regardless of the two it is, I'm saving that for later.

offtotheraces4• 4 years ago

This is going to be a disaster - Bending Spoons is not a good actor:

“let’s talk about Bending Spoons’ business model. The basic concept is very simple:

- Find a solid app that someone else built and buy it from them (see Splice (acquired from GoPro) and 30 Day Fitness)

- Optimize the monetization of said app (by implementing from scratch or fine-tuning existing subscriptions), thereby driving higher lifetime value (LTV)

- Take that higher LTV and use it to bid on expensive ad inventory (on Google, Facebook, Apple Search) where you can acquire more users (aka drive more downloads) - i.e. leverage performance marketing for growth

- Convert those new downloads to paying users

- Massively ramp revenues and cash flow by combining the new users + the better monetization

- Use the new cash flow - plus the debt from those lovely Italian banks - to fund the next acquisition

- Lather, rinse, repeat

There is absolutely nothing wrong with this business model. What differentiates Bending Spoons, though, is how they do it.

Remini - Bending Spoons’ new app that the press is gushing over - is $10 a WEEK. And Splice, the app that started it all? That’ll set you back a cool $5/week.

Does anyone really think it’s appropriate to pay $10 a week for a photo editing app?”

https://open.substack.com/pub/impassionedmoderate/p/ryan-rey...

nneonneo• 4 years ago

The really key bit is right afterwards:

“There is absolutely nothing wrong with this business model… What differentiates Bending Spoons, though, is how they do it.

Remini - Bending Spoons’ new app that the press is gushing over - is $10 a WEEK. And Splice, the app that started it all? That’ll set you back a cool $5/week.”

In short, they buy apps, add aggressive and practically exploitative monetization, and ride the revenue stream until it dries up.

boole1854• 4 years ago

I must admit it's not entirely obvious why that business model makes them "not a good actor".

And what's with the snark about Italian banks?

Manjuuu9• 4 years ago

is $10 a WEEK.

handoflixue• 4 years ago

The issue is that people are at least somewhat "locked in" to whatever apps they're already using, so sudden major price increases are a bit extortionate: Either you pay us a bunch of money, or lose access to your data/workflow.

Prior to acquisition, one could reasonably expect Evernote not to announce sudden, shocking price changes, because they were trying to build a long-term brand. Now, suddenly, that's not the case.

This is made worse when the app doesn't do a good job of letting you export your data in the first place.

lioeters• 4 years ago

From September 2022:

Italian app developer Bending Spoons has raised more than 340 million euros ($327 million) from investors including Hollywood actor Ryan Reynolds and Kerry Trainor, the former CEO of video streaming platform Vimeo.
Bending Spoons, whose apps include popular video editing tool Splice and Remini, an image editor based on artificial intelligence technology, said the money could be used for acquisitions.
A source close to the company said former Google Executive Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt was among the investors. Other backers included Italian banks Intesa Sanpaolo and Banco BPM.

paxys3• 4 years ago

None of what you wrote makes them sound like a "bad actor". All of these are good things for a failing business. Why shouldn't a photo editing app be $10/week? If you don't think you are getting that much value out of it then don't subscribe. Yet there is probably a group of power users who will gladly pay that amount. Evernote needs to be catering to them, not the millions of users who will endlessly complain but never spend an actual dollar on their services.

Manjuuu9• 4 years ago

is $10 a WEEK.

Paxys. You probably don't have a clear idea of what kind apps he was referring to. There are no power users in this case.

svnt• 4 years ago

They are the abuser that benefits from the lock-in. Evernote has gradually made it harder and harder to export (50 notes per try, not everything makes it out) and now they exit to these guys.

It’s the worst of the post-VC models. Seems like they have been positioning for this for a while.

Karunamon2• 4 years ago

I see this complaint a lot and it never really made any sense to me. If something is a scam it has to do with the delivery or the advertisement of the product. But the pricing? No. It is not possible for the price of something by itself to render something a scam. If it costs too much it costs too much, this does not imply malfeasance on the part of the seller.

offtotheraces4• 4 years ago

This is a common response. unfortunately it doesn’t hold water: the average lifetime of a paid user of Splice is somewhere in the 7-10 week range (source is confidential).

What super users of editing products do you know that only stay 10 weeks?

None. What’s actually happening is Bending Spoons is exploiting the App Store’s ease of payment and dark patterns to trick unsuspecting users into enrolling in a super high priced subscription without their knowledge.

Manjuuu9• 4 years ago

Came here to write something similar, you did it better.

I will never accept that selling wallpaper apps or something with the same level of complexity for hundred of dollars every year is an acceptable business model.

sporedro• 4 years ago

sigh well it looks like I’ll be jumping ship to Joplin this weekend.

I’ve honestly lost hope in Evernote and just kept using it out of laziness to migrate, but I don’t like what the future holds.

presentation• 4 years ago

How dare they charge money for products they own that have value.

zild3d• 4 years ago

Does anyone really think it’s appropriate to pay $10 a week for a photo editing app?

Apparently yes, otherwise it would have just been a failed experiment and revert back to $X/month

Even if they charged $100/week I don't see how it makes them a bad actor. If the pricing/cancellation policies are deceptive then sure, but that is irrelevant to the price.

etempleton2• 4 years ago

on MacOS/iOS, Bear was the best note taking app I found. If you need cross platform capability and/or want free and open source I like Joplin a lot as well.

rxyz• 4 years ago

Bear was amazing but I dropped it because there's a lot of good enough alternatives (I use Craft right now) with more features and wider support.

Bear should have been ported to Android and Windows/Linux(browser version?) years ago.

akisd• 4 years ago

I have also tried to find an alternative to evernote and i settled to Joplin for now.

brycethornton• 4 years ago

I used Evernote for a decade before switching to Apple Notes a couple years back. It took some getting used to but now it feels seamless. I'd highly recommend it if you don't need anything too fancy.

MrZongle2• 4 years ago

I switched to Joplin a couple of years back and don't regret the move. Was able to import all my Evernote stuff as well, which was one deciding factor.

c-smile• 4 years ago

Yeah.

And enterprises of great pith and moment, With this regard, their currents turn awry, And lose the name of action.

Hamlet, William Shakespeare

I was employee #3 at original Evernote, when we were just implementing that brilliant idea.

Here is the photo of pretty much precise moment when Evernote was born: https://notes.sciter.com/2017/09/11/motivation-and-a-bit-of-...

What a memory, I really miss that atmosphere ...

vibbix• 4 years ago

The GUI is giving me Windows XP Plus! pack throwbacks, thank you for sharing.

egypturnash5• 4 years ago

Hey, thanks for your hard work making a great tool that I used for most of a decade.

approxim8ion• 4 years ago

Thanks for sharing! The state of application development is rather sad, that screenshot just conveys a feeling of speed and efficiency to me that is lacking in modern software.

pyrophane2• 4 years ago

I'm not familiar with Bending Spoons. Anyone able to give me a bit more context on what this will likely mean for the future of the product?

squarefoot2• 4 years ago

They became sorta famous over here for developing the Covid19 contact tracing app "Immuni" that was then adopted by the Italian Ministry of Health. Being a government project, they probably got a life-changing amount of money because of that. I can't comment on the quality of the app as i never used it.

https://github.com/immuni-app

CastFX• 4 years ago

Actually this is wrong. They did not receive any funds from the Government. There is an article in Italian with the words of one of the founders.

https://www.corriere.it/tecnologia/20_aprile_22/luca-ferrari...

Kye3• 4 years ago

Good thing I moved off Evernote years ago. I use Simplenote since it seems to be in good hands with Automattic. They use it internally, so it's not likely to go away.

calabaza222• 4 years ago

I use paper & pencil. Works fine :D

gertrunde• 4 years ago

I was a bit like "Bending Spoons? Who?", so I followed the link to their website and looked at the products page...

Then vast amounts of scrolling down that giant page of marketing fluff looking for anything resembling useful information. Then the tab got closed as "Meh. Not for me then."

Why must they make these pages pretend to be some sort of glossy coffee table magazine?

balls187• 4 years ago

There was clearly no rhyme or reason to their portfolio.

Basically the app store version of a private equity firm.

Manjuuu9• 4 years ago

I suppose that's what their target audience wants to see.

rusl1• 4 years ago

That's literally their business strategy, total bullshits. It's all fluff

fairity4• 4 years ago

Can someone educate me on the difficulties in raising money from your user base?

It seems like businesses like this should give fair warning to their users before transactions like this occur to make sure they don't have a better option than shutting down or selling out.

Evernote has tens of millions of paying users. It doesn't seem too far-fetched to believe that each user would fork over on average $50 (as an investment, presumably) to just freeze product development, fix bugs, and improve performance.

Put another way, I'm pretty sure Evernote could have raised hundreds of millions from their user base.

Why not try that approach? Are there regulatory issues that make it unfeasible?

notfried• 4 years ago

ICOs are technically a way, and scams aside which wouldn’t apply to Evernote if they would have used it, there is still a fair amount of legal ambiguity in doing it. There has been many voices pushing for creating a regulatory framework to allow doing what you are asking for.

kjs33• 4 years ago

Paying recurring for an app should make this problem non-existent. If $5/mo or whatever doesn't allow you to deliver a stable, performant product, then you need to reconsider your pricing or your business model. Evernote isn't a startup and they should have this figured out by now. And do not do a release that amounts to "look at this whizzy, non-core feature we've been working hard to add (see: chat) which means we didn't get around to fixing all the boring issues with the core product you're paying for"; that's just insulting. The only thing I imagine worse, if I'm already paying you money for the product, is for you come to me with "Oh...you want it to work? Fix the bugs and the performance? That'll be a $50 'investment'.". That guarantees I'm going to look elsewhere real fast, because fixing bugs and improving performance isn't a one-time thing and you'll be back to extract more from me at some random time in the future where your business decisions don't cover the next shortfall.

fairity4• 4 years ago

I'm imagining that $50 raised from 10 million people ($500m raised) would allow for an outright recap of the entire company, including bringing in new management that serves the users' best interests.

I agree it isn't ideal, but as a user, it's far better than allowing Evernote to get sold to someone whose goal is to raise prices and squeeze profits. Many Evernote users like me are in a situation where the switchover cost is several orders of magnitude larger than $50. So, the dynamics might look more like 1% of the user base investing $5000 each.

dang• 4 years ago

Related ongoing thread:

Why Evernote failed to realize its potential (2021) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33626047 - Nov 2022 (143 comments)

awill2• 4 years ago

They must be incredibly jealous of all the successful note taking apps (Notion, Ulysses, Bear, Craft). Evernote were first, and blew it. No other way to describe it.

I dumped Evernote when they restricted their free accounts to 2 devices. Ironically I'm now paying for Ulysses, money I might have give to Evernote had they not been so awful to early adopters.

ddbb33• 4 years ago

Still upset when Evernote lost my lecture notes when I synced after turning off WiFi to save laptop battery (back in 2010)

riffic• 4 years ago

roam, obsidian, logseq, etc so many new or really interesting players in this space.

sedatk• 4 years ago

I'd stopped using Evernote involuntarily because their 2FA recovery scenario was broken and I got locked out of my account despite that I still had access to my email. I moved on. I checked it again years later, and they fixed it, but never went back. Such small omissions can create a whole chain of losses.

bigtones• 4 years ago

I don't know that Evernote the company or it's management would be jealous - Evernote probably has more annual revenue than all of those app combined.

bayindirh8• 4 years ago

Actually, their experience is pretty pleasant and the product works very well after they have rebuilt their apps.

They don’t need to be jealous. Their relative utilitarian take on the matter is what makes them so unique and powerful in the market.

Yes, I love markdown, and Evernote just provides a slightly more powerful, WYSIWYG version of it. I neither want “everything and the kitchen sink” vision of Notion, and desktop centric view of Obsidian.

Ulysses and Bear are Apple first systems, and while I use Apple mobile devices, my ecosystem is much more varied, and Evernote accommodates all, with feature parity.

They are good and understated. Hope that I won’t need to move out after that acquisition.

throwaway675309• 4 years ago

A "Relative utilitarian take" is not how it would describe a product that tried to incorporate an entire chat app into it.

They had a relatively good product around v5X series and I left because they just started to fragment and add more and more non-notetaking related things at the expense of the entire product stability and core functionality.

rurp• 4 years ago

Their relative utilitarian take on the matter is what makes them so unique and powerful in the market.

Man this was not my experience at all. Granted I dropped Evernote quite a while ago, but for years they kept adding a kitchen sink of features that I didn't care about, while regressing at the basics like syncing and merging text notes across multiple devices.

They were maybe first company I experienced that blew up a really solid app I liked after raising a truck load of VC money and trying to take over the world.

ace2358• 4 years ago

Thanks for sharing your take. I dropped Evernote years and years ago. Like iPad 2 long ago. I feel like they were some of the early subscription services and probably copped a lot of my rage about it. I still hate subscription fees.

I would prefer to pay for my storage (or host my own) and have apps use my cloud backend. Every app running cloud server to sync all sorts of things has become too much for me.

I still rock 1Password 7 and use iCloud sync. I’d pay for the app but it’s free. I pay for iCloud storage.

Anyway I might give there new apps a look.

malermeister• 4 years ago

Ulysses and Bear are Apple first systems, and while I use Apple mobile devices, my ecosystem is much more varied, and Evernote accommodates all, with feature parity.

I think you can add Craft to that list.

Too bad, they all look nice, but I've completely left the Apple ecosystem.

If they don't have Android and Linux desktop apps, they don't really compete for the same market

zaptheimpaler• 4 years ago

Yes, I thought I was going nuts after seeing all the negative comments about Evernote here.

Personally, I started using Evernote seriously only a month ago after several years, and recently trying pretty much everything else (notion, obsidian, joplin, workflowy and 10s more..). So I don't have any of the baggage from whatever mistakes they made years ago.

It's been awesome. Very wide featureset like more than just markdown, web clipping, auto scanning & OCR, sketching support on iPad, tags and fully cross platform. I found every other application to fall short somewhere and just be too opinionated. Evernote is solid and powerful enough to support almost every usecase I have but not opinionated.

wyclif• 4 years ago

You know what, though? I've had a better experience with Obsidian because it's desktop centric. Trying hard not to be anecdotal, but I can't think of anybody I know that uses a note taking app that enjoys taking notes on a mobile device.

boh• 4 years ago

It's impossible to not "blow it" in the environment Evernote operated in. The default model for software startups was to leverage yourself to the hilt so can achieve some fantasy growth expectation VCs had for you. The growth requirements overextended the realities of a note taking app and so the product gets bloated in a desperate grasping for growth of any kind and the user gets pinched for every fee that can be forced on them.

Hopefully recent economic events will change the culture and more companies will actually factor in reality into their growth models.

renewiltord2• 4 years ago

What does leverage mean here?

TeMPOraL2• 4 years ago

Hopefully recent economic events will change the culture and more companies will actually factor in reality into their growth models.

How would it, and how would they?

The way I understand it, the growth model is pretty ultimately set in stone when a company takes VC money. It's a Faustian bargain - you get a big and cheap loan, at the price of aiming for "some fantasy growth", or dying in the attempt. Companies that want sustainable growth take loans from banks.

oblio2• 4 years ago

They must be incredibly jealous of all the successful note taking apps (Notion, Ulysses, Bear, Craft).

One point of anecdata: I haven't heard of any of those.

How do you define success?

Keep in mind Evernote was created in 2000 and the web version was launched in 2008.

I doubt any of the stuff in your list will be around in 14 years.

lazyasciiart3• 4 years ago

Bear was Apple’s number one app for 2016 - it’s Mac/iOS only.

pqs7• 4 years ago

Will Evernote be around in 14 years?

asah• 4 years ago

haven't heard of Notion ???

floatinglotus2• 4 years ago

You haven’t heard of any of these? How are you even on HN? J/k.

tomjen33• 4 years ago

Honestly, the goal with a free account should be to convert users into paying users or by making the platform more useful for paying users of the service.

If you cancel an account that didn't pay them any money, what exactly did they lose?

I pay for todoist because I love using it and the free account doesn't have a must-have feature (reminders). I could dump them and find something else, but I get plenty of value for the money I spend with them.

TeMPOraL2• 4 years ago

Honestly, the goal with a free account should be to convert users into paying users or by making the platform more useful for paying users of the service.

That's true for normal companies. Startups operate by a different set of rules.

If you cancel an account that didn't pay them any money, what exactly did they lose?

A user, and a potential source of future users.

For many startups, userbase growth matters much more than revenue, to the point they'll happily go negative on per-user profitability just to get more people on-board. Particularly those that aggressively pursue further funding ("actually making us profitable is something we'll consider after the next round") or an exit ("it'll be a problem for the sucker that buys us").

Yes, it is a source of a lot of pathology you see with today's software products, like products getting bloated with irrelevant pseudo-features ("oh shit, we can't actually make this sustainable; quick, let's try to extract all value we can from the userbase, and hopefully have something left after paying off the investors"), or getting acquired and shut down ("ha ha, we knew it was never going to be sustainable; we bought it to cheaply acquire talent and/or get you out of the way so you don't compete with our offering").

In every case, VCs and founders win, users lose.

d--b• 4 years ago

Don't know... These guys already made a fortune. Maybe they just don't give a s** anymore.

grammers• 4 years ago

Ulysses is great, I'm glad I found them as well.

smcleod2• 4 years ago

Evernote was still decent enough before the ditched the native app for a dreadful Electron webframe.

pbowyer• 4 years ago

In some ways the Electron app is better because there's more formatting options (code blocks, finally!) but most ways not. On my systems it's so slow to startup, and I don't have that complaint about other Electron apps.

_lqaf• 4 years ago

Ugh. Note taking apps need to be instant.

I care far less about the feature set than I do getting the whatever written down and out of my head.

If you make we wait while you load a website's worth of js or phone home with surveillance data or whatever, I'm just going to delete you. I'd rather use a 1995-era Textedit or Notepad - they're instantly functional.

Just to make sure I maintain my curmudgeon's rep, I'll add - advertise AI and I'm also gone. I have zero need for assistance from a tripping robot to type in my work life.

bighi4• 4 years ago

Not only decent, Evernote was great before they ditched their native apps.

randerson• 4 years ago

Agree. But you can still download the legacy native apps.

https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/360052560314-Ins...

eastbound• 4 years ago

France here. I knew some Evernote developers and PO. They were blowing money and adding features like there’s no tomorrow. When there was indeed no tomorrow at Evernote, they used their unemployment benefits from our state and worked in parallel, which was legally dodgy and ethically out of the line. They created a consultancy which almost exclusively works on state-derived funding, a bit like half of science projects in USA depend on Darpa, except it was education money which they used to invent some AI model to find at-risk pupils that every teacher could qualify anyway, but you know, AI+education makes a sexy startup. They only got public funding and customers who themselves were publicly funded.

Such people are a dead weight on our society, sucking at education funds, not weighing the cost they have, and giving lessons to everyone.

Those guys will never understand how to provide a service that customers are willing to pay for.

jmathai• 4 years ago

Evernote has been in business (albiet, not growing) for 22 years!

I think we need to fast forward 10 more years to see how Notion is doing to make the comparison.

PhasmaFelis2• 4 years ago

I dumped Evernote when they spontaneously deleted half my notes from my desktop and their backup server and couldn't recover them.

Thank God I happened to have my most important note open on my laptop, which was closed at the time. I opened it, shut down the wifi as quick as I could so it couldn't update, and copied that note into OneNote, which frankly works better anyway. I will never trust Evernote again.

ghuntley• 4 years ago

They must be incredibly jealous of all the successful note taking apps (Notion, Ulysses, Bear, Craft). Evernote were first, and blew it. No other way to describe it.

Yup they did. Blew it when they didn't add 2FA. I emailed them repeatedly in the early years asking for them to add it citing risks of having all my information in a note taking application with poor security -> no replies. Then they got p0wned hard. Luckily I had my data out of their systems by then.

See screenshot of emails at https://twitter.com/GeoffreyHuntley/status/15930599365060894...

kritiko• 4 years ago

I just read a DHH blog on this that seems relevant because it mentions Notion:

Same deal with Notion. They raised a $343M Series C on Oct 8, 2021 at $10 billion in valuation.
These are all crazy numbers from a crazy time, and now the economic hangover is due.

https://world.hey.com/dhh/the-bubble-has-popped-for-unprofit...

scumola• 4 years ago

Maybe the acquisition will change the nummber of devices to > 2??

w0m• 4 years ago

I loved evernote ~10-15 years ago; used it for ~all personal stuff. Eventually it became more metered/locked down (I don't remember specifics anymore) and i moved to OneNote.

unixhero• 4 years ago

I for one released on simplenote.cpm for my noting needs

emeril• 4 years ago

I've been using resophnotes as windows client for simplenote for years (and the ios client if I need to look something up on the go) after evernote become terrible 10+ years ago

Nothing sophisticated for sure, but a little windows macro and I can make a new note for something with a timestamp sorted the way I want with one keystroke

plain text is underrated though I think they are more sophisticated plain text options now but I don't feel like importing my database elsewhere when my current solution works pretty well

further, for super ad hoc stuff, I just need notepad++ open with 100+ tabs using pleasantly little memory...

dotcoma2• 4 years ago

Any idea of how much Bending Spoons paid for Evernote ?

baron816• 4 years ago

Ex Evernote employee here. Someone else posted this: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bending-spoons-raises-340-mil...

Employee shares are (apparently) being priced next to nothing. My understanding while working there was that if the company sold for $300m or less, we’d get nothing. So, $340m sounds about right. It’s a fire sale.

driverdan• 4 years ago

Seems unlikely they'd spend that whole round of funding on one app. I bet it was much, much less.

dools• 4 years ago

Ever-ishNote

xablau• 4 years ago

"At Bending Spoons, we create our own cutting-edge technologies and products."

https://bendingspoons.com/

irrational• 4 years ago

I stopped using evernote when it kept having some sort of syncing issues and lost what I had written over and over again. Maybe they have fixed it, but I've lost any trust in them, so, I'm not willing to risk it.

nashashmi2• 4 years ago

I used to love Google Notebook. And then they shut it down. Evernote offered to take in that google notebook data and integrate it into their system.

Now evernote is being bought. I need to migrate my data out. Evernote was a great company early on. Not sure why they lost the race. But I think it has something to do with task managers, like trello, and heavy data collectors like database in notion.

nashashmi2• 4 years ago

Using notion to migrate my data out of evernote.

frans2• 4 years ago

These are mostly negative reviews of Evernote. Yet, I do like the product and I am yet to find a replacement that offers these must-haves:

* Multiple tags per note

* OCR/search on attachments

* Web clipping (full page and individual sections)

* Mail to Evernote (with attachments)

* Decent WYSIWYG

* Good scanning support ("scannable" app)

It did have its problems and did lose 3 or 4 notes due to syncing issues but today's web version is usable and the product seems stable now. I agree that the acquisition is probably not good news. So, if anyone knows of a replacement with these features, pls reply!

frans2• 4 years ago

I did some searching via [1] and it turns out amplenote comes closest to my requirements list.

[1] https://www.noteapps.info/apps

[2] https://www.amplenote.com/

deely3• 4 years ago

Hey, thanks!

soundnote4• 4 years ago

Amplenote and OneNote are pretty much what comes to mind with those requirements. Both OCR images, but don't do PDFs.

SergeAx2• 4 years ago

I am a many years paying user of Evernote. Startup time on Android became painfully slow several years ago. On Windows I just keep the app always open. Otherwise I don't see any benefit of switching to another app.

Manjuuu9• 4 years ago

If you want to delete your account: https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/360056549574-Per...

techky• 4 years ago

I still hate that Evernote bought Skitch. Really wish the new team would revive it or sell it off to an interested dev.

tomhoward• 4 years ago

I'm good friends with one of the founders of Skitch. He effectively got less than nothing for that sale. It was an acqui-hire with vesting stock valued in the several $million, but when he couldn't handle working in the big corporate environment at Evernote, he had to leave, and lost his stock with zero remuneration. He couldn't even pay off the debts he'd incurred over the years building Skitch. Terrible outcome for him, as well as the product. So sad.

rodolphoarruda• 4 years ago

EN (happy) customer since 2014 here. I just hope the acquiring company won't kill it.

rvbissell• 4 years ago

As much as I love (and still pay for) Evernote, I've just now realized that I haven't added to my collection there over 6 months. Without intending to, I seem to have largely switched to just saving websites with the "SingleFile" extension for Firefox.

floatinglotus2• 4 years ago

Another lesson from Evernote: if your primary business is digital (ie software) don’t make a corporate strategy of selling physical things (notebooks).

jshaqaw• 4 years ago

Evernote is still the only product that meets my workflow needs. Hope they don’t mess it up.

skilled• 4 years ago

Is that an announcement or a marketing jargon dictionary? I had forgotten this app even exists, but I can see why.

jdshaffer3• 4 years ago

I had enjoyed and even paid for Evernote for several years, until their "restructuring" and they dropped the export of everything but "Evernote Database"... I think they have since restored an export to HTML, but that always was the biggest problem for me... I want to be able to export (and backup) my notes in TXT or MD, not just HTML or their proprietary format.

No idea if they've since added in more reasonable export features, but it was a dealbreaker for me (a big plain-text fan).

pyrophane2• 4 years ago

Bit late to the thread. This is a hbit of a shame but also quite clarifying.

I had been holding on to EN as there is no app that does quite what it does quite as well. I liked being able to mix notes, to-dos, captured images, web content, etc, and organize it into folders. The fact that they are working towards a Linux client helped, as well.

What I didn't like was their prioritizing of features that were aimed at enterprise customers at the expense of everything else. The world didn't really need another collaborative text editor for teams with chat, and I never saw EN being anyone's choice for that.

It is a shame. Seems like yet another company that could have made a nice living for its employees by servicing their natural customer base but was instead destroyed by the ambitions imposed on them by their investors.

azinman2• 4 years ago

They took a bunch of VC cash. Like a lot. They’re going to want 10-1000x on that, and consumers are only willing to pay so much. Apple Notes and Google Keep sucked away most of the consumer market.

arczyx• 4 years ago

This is unrelated to the news, but does anyone here ever get unknown charge from "Google Play Bending Spoons"? It doesn't appear in the Google Transaction History, but my ewallet provider confirmed it was from Google Play.

Someone has asked about it in Google Play Help and got no meaningful answer https://support.google.com/googleplay/thread/159064766/help-...

hk1337• 4 years ago

If you didn’t know “Bending Spoons” was an organization, the title would come across a bit differently.

tzury• 4 years ago

a) Happy for Evernote and hope they have found a new home. This app was pioneering the realm and leading for quite some time!

b) Obsidian [1] simplified the zettelkasten [2], that anyone must give it a chance. Just like you must give Vim.

    1. https://obsidian.md/

    2. https://zettelkasten.de/posts/overview/

filmgirlcw3• 4 years ago

I was a paid Evernote user who didn’t use the service much but paid anyway, partially because I liked the company, until they raised prices in 2016 by like 40% for the premium plan.

I’m one of those whale customers that SaaS companies love because I’m fairly price insensitive and I often don’t have tons of usage or support needs. For a solid 5 or 6 years, I’d been giving Evernote $50 a year, even though I mostly used other services. But raising the price 40% (and neutering the free plan that was the only reason they had as many users as they did) was enough that even I took the time to cancel.

It’s a sad end to what was at one time such a good (if significantly overvalued) product, but the writing has been on the wall for 6 years.

OneNote is more than good enough for most people who want an Evernote sort of note system and for people who are more particular and want to pay, the new wave of single brain apps is just far, far better.

When Evernote tried expanding into food and all these other areas, that was a sign things were getting out of control.

I used to be mad about what happened to Skitch, but CleanShot has finally filled that void from me from back before Evernote neutered and abandoned it.

another-reader• 4 years ago

I opened up File Explorer I and I see I made a full dump of Evernote on 30 July 2019. I was a paying customer for a few years but decided at the time to dump it before it was too late.

To this day, the one thing I truly truly miss from Evernote was the web archive. They had the best at the time, and I have yet to see it matched.

So, it seems from the thread that I should give it a try again?

imwillofficial• 4 years ago

Remember when Evernote was the shit? Oh how the mighty have fallen

627467• 4 years ago

The main reason I never stopped using Evernote is that somehow I got "stuck" on a personal plan that never really got updated for at least 7 years.

I live in a high inflation country and right now I'm paying the equivalent of 0.75usd/year.

There's has been several moments through the years that I planned to at least backup my notes to another service but thought: I am paying, so surely I won't lose my notes?

ramraj07• 4 years ago

Hopefully you are backing them up now lol.

rfreiberger• 4 years ago

I used to be a huge fan of Evernote, but a few things made me look at other solutions. One issue is the capturing of code was automatically formatted and I was burned a few times keeping my code snippets for reference.

Been using Notion for a few years but I prefer the tree view and there's not many note apps that work well with this method.

lenova• 4 years ago

Everytime Evernote gets mentioend on HN, I love to promote my favorite replacement:

https://getupnote.com/

Right now, it's more of Bear app replacement than an Evernote replacement, but I feel like they're heading in the right direction.

RefSnow• 4 years ago

I used evernote for a long time. I migrated to Joplin seeking greater control and security. I use it to this day and never thought about going back to Evernote.

brailsafe2• 4 years ago

Wow, I'm sure I'm not alone in having completely forgot about Evernote after importing all my notes into Bear. They fell off my radar with such force that I literally haven't even thought of them in years, except for one moment months ago when I noticed their logo on maybe a physical notepad sitting in some old bookstore window. Other than that, I have not even seen the logo anywhere else. Like others, it was the device restriction, but also just terribly glitchy note editing/pasting etc.. Moving to Bear (which has also now stagnated pretty hard, but is still good) I was just stoked on the fact that editing was a smooth experience and it kind of got out of my way.

HuwFulcher3• 4 years ago

I love Bear but it's been a big disappointment in how quickly it ships features. They've been working on the web version for what seems like a few years now. If you're 100% in the Apple ecosystem it's great. I have an iPhone and M1 Air for personal use but my last 3 jobs have used Windows, being able to transfer knowledge across devices is a massive pain. I ended up switching to Obsidian due to that.

There must be a good reason for why its taken so long, they've created a solid app so it doesn't make sense that they dropped the ball on the web version.

brailsafe2• 4 years ago

Agreed on all points. I just happen to only use it on mac. My guess is that other things came up, or it just wasn't as lucrative as they were hoping. For most non-markdown notes I just use physical notebooks with satisfying Muji pens.

r2222• 4 years ago

Yeah it’s been extermely slow with the updates. The Bear 2.0 is currently on Mac-only beta but not yet open (unless you join their beta forum and ask for access), but even then, it doesn’t have the web app. I’ve seen the Bear team say that they did a full rewrite (in C++ I think?) so that it would be easier to implement the web app in future but who knows how many years in the future that is.

Vibgyor52• 4 years ago

For anyone looking for an INCREDIBLE note-taking app, check out UpNote. https://getupnote.com/

- Sleek UX/UI. It does not overoptimize there either. Just the right amount of perfect for me.

- Importantly, cross-platform: as someone on Android and Mac, it works seamlessly

- $24.99 Lifetime pricing. No subscription BS.

- Developers pay close attention to user feedback but they're also not dumping features there left, right, and center. Most updates are targeted at making this faster than bigger. (It is already fast enough)

- No "Social/collaborative" BS. I want my notes to be mine.

- Export capability to PDF, HTML etc.

Disclaimer: No, I have no affiliation with the product. Just a super-happy user who'd like to recommend this to everyone. I have tried many note-taking apps out there but this one really hits it out of the park

nathan_f77• 4 years ago

Thanks for the recommendation! I'm going to try them out now.

EDIT: I was able to export my main "Evernote" notebook into a 1.8GB .enex file, and have started importing all the notes into UpNote. It works well so far! I really like the Markdown editor, that's already a lot more comfortable to use. I will probably switch to this.

It's just a bit strange that importing notes from Evernote is a premium feature, so you can't even try it out properly before paying. There should at least be a free trial.

Vibgyor52• 4 years ago

Glad to hear you tried and liked it

crossroadsguy2• 4 years ago

There’s FOSS https://fsnot.es.

Looks quite flexible. Exports, iCloud Sync, Deopbox, can also have notes as a Git repo.

But big drawback — Apple ecosystem only. But since it syncs to things other than iOS I think other apps can be used on other platform.

Dev has made it clear he will not be able to develop for other platforms.

I have not used it a lot (still on Simplenote and exploring). It looks good and it’s open source so I thought one could check it out.

woofwoofwoof• 4 years ago

They were such a cool company to work for in the Valley when they started started.

deafpolygon2• 4 years ago

Looks like the acquisition is for the customer base and data (for AI training). Bending Spoons is leaning on AI tech and Evernote has both customers and data they need for training their AI.

pqs7• 4 years ago

That's what I thought and I don't like it at all. My private notes, being used to train an AI. I have boarding passes and alike in there, which probably have my ID card number. Then, an AI somwhere will print my private data. Yes, they try to filter these things out, but we know how hard this is, as we saw with GitHub Copilot.

amh999• 4 years ago

I'm adding here in case Evernote reads this thread.

I used to use Evernote extensively, mainly for web clipping, but also filing things away.

Nowadays I rarely use anything except the mobile apps, or the clipping browser plugins, but Evernote is essential to me for permanent filing which I can search at any time. I would be lost without it and am willing to keep paying for it. I'm sure other people want it for note keeping and I have no idea how well that works. What does work is their document/photo scanning app, which I use regularly.

A long time ago, the founder made much of the fact that my data was fully portable and provided the api details to enable me to export it out of Evernote completely. I think this is very important, especially for a company that may be seen as less viable for a while. I was disappointed, the other day, that I could no longer use Evernote's published query language to search using a boolean query. This may well be because the facility is now a pay-extra feature. I have to say that adding on little features and then asking users to pay for them is the worst thing when I am already a premium user! Please stop doing this.

That's my two penn'orth.

mvkel• 4 years ago

The biggest mistake Evernote made was not looking at how their customers used the product.

They insisted on this to emphasize privacy (fair enough), but never stopped to consider 1. If their customers even cared 2. How they would learn how the product they were building was actually used.

The result is a note app that tries to do everything good, so it does nothing well.

Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

Related Stories