Tag: evernote

So Long Evernote

I’ve been an Evernote user for many many years and despite looking at alternatives nothing struck me as good in comparison. That’s despite the product starting to get worse, not better, in recent times. The chat/commenting service was of no interest, the related searches were of no use and I found the overall tool getting slower with time.

I stuck by Evernote as I was a premium user and I had so much invested in the platform. I was used to how it worked and a lot of my content over the last few years was almost trapped within it. Exporting from Evernote was poor and basically in a proprietary Evernote format.

This year though a couple of things changed. Firstly Evernote tweaked there prices so I’d be paying more going forward. Secondly, Apple Notes improved and also offered a way to import Evernote content as did Microsofts Onenote. There also seemed to be a lot of grumbles in the many podcasts I listen to about what Evernote had become and how viable was it’s future.

So a few weeks ago I migrated a chunk of content from Evernote to Onenote and Apple Notes and gave each platform a try. Both sync services worked well and I’ve had no issues with searching. In fact both have been speedy in comparison to Evernote, all with much the same accuracy. One Evernote feature I did miss was saving a webpage into Evernote. This was a one click action that saved a great representation of the page forever in Evernote. Neither rival service offers this so I rely on Safari’s ‘Export as PDF’ on both Mac and iOS to save out a PDF which I can then store in Onenote and Notes.

After trying the two tools I’ve plumped for Apple Notes. The Onenote front end is pretty clunky and I preferred the simplicity in Apple Notes. So I’ve moved all my notes and stored content to Apple Notes and it’s fully synched across all my devices. I’ve also deleted everything from Evernote and shutdown the account. So long Evernote.

So I save a little bit of cash and I’ve got a slightly faster but simpler notes service and one which I’ve got more confidence in over the next few years. Next on the list is photo services. Flickr has been my goto online photo service for years but like Evernote, I’ve no confidence in it going forward. So I’ll be looking at 500px, Google, Apple and Adobe’s services and maybe Smugmug. I’ve got a day emotional tie with Flickr and so much content there…this will be a difficult one.

Evernote

I’ve been trying out Evernote for the last couple of weeks and thought it was time to share an opinion or two. Since moving to Mac I’ve relied on Yojimbo for my note taking needs. It doesn’t just take notes but also store images, pdf’s, secure passwords and links. It also sync’s across mac’s. So what does Evernote offer?

Mac Client

At it’s heart Evernote allows for the storage and searching of text and image based notes. Most impressive is that image searching isn’t just based on image title or tags but on the image content. Images are scanned by Evernote for text and not just of the typed kind. It can pick up hand written text and if you search for a word that it’s found the image will be returned with the search term highlighted. Very impressive and it scans the content quickly too. Notes can be typed in, copied in via cut and paste, snapped in via the helper app allowing you to capture a screen or by using the web browser plugin capture a web page. Every note can be tagged and created in different notebooks within Evernote. Each notebook has privacy options. The default is private but if you want to make a notebook available you can set it to pubic – this content will also be picked up by search engines. Another Evernote feature is that you can get at your content on any platform. Mac, PC, Web, iPhone and Windows Mobile. Searching on the web client produces the same result as desktop which is really nice.

Web Client

Synchronising between desktops and web has worked well so far and getting access on Mac and PC t same content is very nice. The windows client is more stable than the mac version and has a couple of extra features but nothing that get’s in the way of syncing and the same content everywhere.

So overall a very nice set of clients and a useful service. Adding ability to store pdf’s and making them searchable would be a very nice addition. I’d also like to see what the final cost of the service is going to be as it’s only free during beta. At the moment I’m using Evernote for mostly work related content and sticking with Yojimbo. It does more for me at the moment and it’s software I already own. However the ability to see notes on web, PC and iPhone could outweigh Yojimbo’s extra functionality. If anyone else want’s to try Evernote I’ve got some invites. Leave a comment or drop me a mail and I’ll sort you out.