The thing that has disappointed me about Evernote forever is their complete and total lack of Linux support. This is a product that has Palm Pre and Windows Mobile clients but for whatever reason has decided that developing a Linux client isn't worthwhile.
A recent Hacker News poll of OS used day-to-day, Linux finished second in frequency behind Mac OS: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=687267 . People who do dev/database/IT work frequently need snippets of text like IP addresses and passwords and API keys and this sort of tool would come in handy for us. But a lot of us run Linux as well. Even ignoring the nerd market, Linux is increasingly run by regular people on their netbooks.
I guess the reason I don't get this is that tech savvy folks seem like a great market to go after with your software, as they tend to be very influential in their social networks' decisions as well.
Apples and Oranges, I know, but I use and love Dropbox in large part because it works with 2 of my 3 computers. On the other hand, Evernote runs poorly on my mac and can only be accessed via the web on the others. I actually use dropbox now as I would evernote, by keeping .txt files in my dropbox.
Does this even matter in this context? It appears that Evernote provides all the platform specific software for free, the Android app is listed as free in the Market. The service is free no matter what platform you use, and the ability to "go premium" doesn't have a condition for platform either. There are many Linux users who pay for on-line services, like Evernote is. Flickr pro accounts would be one example, and there is no flickr provided uploader app (which are free on other platforms too) that runs on Linux.
The chance that Linux users would or would not pay for software have nothing to do with the lack of a native, supported client for a specific platform when all the other platforms are provided for free. The choice to build software you're going to distribute for free for your userbase should be based on the platforms the userbase is using, not if they would pay for something that you aren't going to charge for anyway.
As a Linux user I use evernote through the web interface primarily for web clipping, and it works quite well in that respect. For notes I need cloud-available I just write them in whatever and then put them either in toodledo or google docs/zoho.
I definitely agree there is no perfect one ring to rule them all solution. Not sure there is for any OS.
Evernote is even worse on Mac. I've been using Journler (http://journler.com/) because it's too much of a hassle to keep my stuff in OneNote on a separate partition, or run VMware.
I wish there was a OSX port for OneNote, which I think is the most usable not taking software I've ever tried.
A first-year CS undergrad student can write an editor with better formatting than Evernote on OS X. I don't mean to be snarky but it's terrible to see EN have so much potential only to be excruciating to use.
I was pretty impressed with the app when I tried it a while ago, but was immediately turned off by the lack of secure uploads for the free version. That, and the $45/year cost and the complete inability to import / export anything means it's a lock-in tool designed to get them more money, not to improve my workflow. This is all in spite of several postings I've seen of the owner claiming to strongly support open standards. Put your money where your mouth is, and just maybe I'll believe you, instead of your application doing everything possible to show the opposite.
A lot of applications could learn a thing or two from the design, and the OCR is impressive. But it's an expensive lock-in, and I'm not touching it any more.
If you're hiring more than one person with investment money, then I give your company 1 year before you have to reorganise the company. You have 3 people already, add one more engineer and optimise your resources. Hiring more is going to be money wastage.
From someone knee-deep in the iPhone world but with zero experience in the Android world, could you perhaps let me/us know how many downloads and/or unique users a "#1 note app on Android" equates to? I'm genuinely quite curious if it is worth my time to get into Android and well, the more data points on usage numbers the better! Thanks.
The metrics Google gives you are a bit coarse, you only get total downloads and active installs. Not sure if this translates to unique users, iTunes Connect is so much nicer in this regard.
Google Market publicly give out your download numbers in brackets, 50-100 downloads, 100-1k downloads, 1k-5k, etc.
We have two apps in the 250k+ bracket.
We've been on Android for over a year and the last few months have been insane. The day of the Droid launch we saw our traffic triple, and things seem to be picking up steam since then.
Feel free to email me at [username]@snaptic.com or hit me up on GTalk [username]@gmail.com
We love the Android platform and it would be great to have more folks building on it.
Is the 250k+ bracket for a paid app or a free app? I have a free app that is top 10 in its category, and we have 1700 downloads a day on iphone - so it would take me 150 days to reach 250k, or 5 months. How does Android compare?
The strange thing is, my typical evernote usage rarely involves me actually writing notes myself. I always find myself spinning up a dropbox'ed tiddlywiki for fleshing out ideas and in general using a pen and scrap paper for temporary notes.
Instead I use it as a place to clip anything I read online and find useful/interesting. It is like using a bookmarking site that keeps a copy of the article in case the original vanishes and is searchable beyond the titles. For being sort of a permanent searchable extension of my brain's memory it works really well.
I also use it to clip pages I want to read in the future into a 'ReadItLater' notebook; a replacement for readitlaterlist that won't lose my articles if the source vanishes and allows me to search things easily. Due to my hn/reddit/rss addiction the 'ReadItLater' notebook is tremendously valuable for me. I tend to encounter far more things I want to read then I have time to so my backlog is perpetually increasing. However if I am searching I still will get results from this list.. Honestly, sometimes it feels like I am sending myself messages from the future saying "Hey this article is relevant to something your doing. Now is the time to finally get around to reading it".
I don't have a premium account yet, but with GDC looming ahead I think I might spring for it so that I can take advantage of the searchable PDF feature. I would love to just dump all the pdf whitepapers I run across directly in rather than my current practice of extracting the contents.
As others have pointed out though, Evernote does have some major concerns that need addressed. The native clients are poor (luckily the web client is pretty good), they feel very 'walled garden' (open up, open up, an app ecosystem awaits you!), no linux client, and clipping web pages means settling for an uglified unformatted version.
I think it's astonishing how nearly everyone posting here seems to have some complaining to do about Evernote for some reason or another. Please try to put yourself in Evernote's shoes - provide a Linux version? For which userbase? Will they get 50-100k+ Linux users with at least 1k+ premium users to make it worth their time (compared to other platforms)?
Also, there are lots of unspecific complaints. It's great everyone can vent his anger and opinions, snark just doesn't really help. Does it help to just say "it sucks on platform x"?
How do you guys do your note taking? I'm surprised there's so many people. I'll probably be getting an ipad so I'm curious if there's any iphone experiences.
I don't really do that much "note taking" per se: for me it's more about recording ideas / quotes / so forth. On the go, I use a Moleskine like every other pretentious asshole out there, and at a computer I use Devonthink Pro: http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/movabletype/archives/0002... .
everything above that: 3banana - https://snaptic.com/corp/products/(but I'm biased as you may infer from my username vs the guy posting about his company above).
I use Notational Velocity and store the notes as markdown-formatted text files in a Dropbox folder. I can render them to HTML as needed for "pretty" viewing.
Note-taking software has continued to fail me by not including LaTeX support. I will not be taking notes without being able to format math. This affects Evernote and OneNote equally.
Yes, but the problem with this is that you can't just enter a stream of text. If I'm in a math class, attempting to take notes, I have to point and click on those apps.
With apps that support LaTeX, I can just type $, start typing math, and type another $ to go back to regular text. Sure, I'll have to type things like \int, but that's still faster than trying to find the integral button in OneNote.
I recently moved away from Evernote for this reason and the slow client. The one thing Evernote has is the websync and webclient but between Dropbox (latex in text files), Gmail and Google Docs I get pretty much the same functionality.
The funny thing is latest client is worse than the last client for Windows. Previous client was quite good actually, new one doesn't even look like a native Windows app.
I think they fall into "Let's rewrite this and make it better!" FAIL. You need to be pretty stupid to rewrite something that's actually working unless you got a great confident, team and time, and final client of them proves that they sucked, and now it's going to take them another 6 months to come up with something as good as their previous client.
When startups are going to learn to not to do obviously stupid like "OMG, our client is not good enough, instead of improving it, let's rewrite it, yay!" ?
Why do you say that? In theory much of their value is actually in the sharing/networking aspects. Since they control the backend service and the API, I'd say it could reasonably be a win for them to open source all of their client variants.
They already have an API and which is good. Because in products like this (without millions of admirer) open sourcing the application won't help.
They can open source the application but not add any new developers outside of the company (which wouldn't mean anything, other than good faith).
They can open source it and bunch of people might send stuff in an un-organized way, it never ends good. There are thousands of open source projects some serious usability issues because no one cares and it's hard organise people in open source projects and consistency is the key for usability. So open sourcing projects in this scale, %95 of the time won't be better than what it's.
I can't even recall one successful product that area.
Although publishing more document, samples etc. about API definitely helps.
A recent Hacker News poll of OS used day-to-day, Linux finished second in frequency behind Mac OS: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=687267 . People who do dev/database/IT work frequently need snippets of text like IP addresses and passwords and API keys and this sort of tool would come in handy for us. But a lot of us run Linux as well. Even ignoring the nerd market, Linux is increasingly run by regular people on their netbooks.
I guess the reason I don't get this is that tech savvy folks seem like a great market to go after with your software, as they tend to be very influential in their social networks' decisions as well.
Apples and Oranges, I know, but I use and love Dropbox in large part because it works with 2 of my 3 computers. On the other hand, Evernote runs poorly on my mac and can only be accessed via the web on the others. I actually use dropbox now as I would evernote, by keeping .txt files in my dropbox.