[HN Gopher] Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons ___________________________________________________________________ Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons Author : taldo Score : 224 points Date : 2022-11-16 14:23 UTC (8 hours ago) (HTM) web link (evernote.com) (TXT) w3m dump (evernote.com) | dotcoma wrote: | Any idea of how much Bending Spoons paid for Evernote ? | baron816 wrote: | 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 wrote: | Seems unlikely they'd spend that whole round of funding on | one app. I bet it was much, much less. | floatinglotus wrote: | Another lesson from Evernote: if your primary business is digital | (ie software) don't make a corporate strategy of selling physical | things (notebooks). | ericd wrote: | Can we all please go back to buying stable desktop software | without continuous upgrade nags, now? | izzydata wrote: | But without software as a service how will companies expand | indefinitely until they bust? | awill wrote: | 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. | oblio wrote: | > 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. | asah wrote: | haven't heard of Notion ??? | lazyasciiart wrote: | Bear was Apple's number one app for 2016 - it's Mac/iOS only. | pqs wrote: | Will Evernote be around in 14 years? | [deleted] | bayindirh wrote: | Why not? | awill wrote: | Selling to Bending Spoons isn't a success story | floatinglotus wrote: | You haven't heard of any of these? How are you even on HN? | J/k. | grammers wrote: | Ulysses is great, I'm glad I found them as well. | bigtones wrote: | 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. | bayindirh wrote: | 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. | rurp wrote: | > 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. | bayindirh wrote: | I'm talking about their current iteration and roadmap so | far. Previous iteration had its fair share of issues, I | concur. | codalan wrote: | The previous issues were bad enough for me to drop | Evernote as a paying customer. | | I would get notes that would not sync correctly, forcing | me to resolve it by hand. Even after doing that, it would | still have sync conflicts. This was core functionality | that just didn't work. | | During this time, they were busy jamming in features I | definitely didn't want or need. Every release would be a | slower, buggier version of its previous incarnation. | | It was during this time frame that a lot of people jumped | ship. The app was so bloated and buggy by that point that | even OneNote seemed like a viable option. | | It didn't help that Evernote made it as difficult as | possible to get your notes out of their system. It took | several download attempts to successfully get my archive | out of there. It might have also been due to the large | number of people leaving their platform. | | The handwriting was on the wall when they started selling | knick-knacks on their website. Things like Evernote | branded Moleskine notepads and dress socks. It's like | they completely abandoned their core competency and went | off in some left-field marketing direction. | | It's a real shame, too, because Evernote was an amazing | app when it first came out. | | I'm giving org-mode a spin these days on my desktop. Need | to figure out if there's a way to sync/view it on my | Android device, but I'm getting kind of tired of dealing | with all the different, proprietary SaaS note taking | services that go to shit after a few years. At least with | Emacs and org-mode, that's one less thing to deal with. | throwaway675309 wrote: | 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. | bayindirh wrote: | They tried to be "everything and the kitchen sink for the | enterprise", and failed, not because of the features they | added, but feature disparity between platforms, and some | reliability problems. I was doing my Ph.D. when they | debuted chat, and it was useful. | | Similarly, I miss their presentation mode for the notes. It | was extremely useful, and the output was very pretty, too. | | However, after the CEO change and rebuild, they really | found themselves. I'm a pro subscriber, and the value they | add into my life is immeasurable. | ace2358 wrote: | 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. | tomjen3 wrote: | 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. | ddbb33 wrote: | Still upset when Evernote lost my lecture notes when I synced | after turning off WiFi to save laptop battery (back in 2010) | riffic wrote: | roam, obsidian, logseq, etc so many new or really interesting | players in this space. | d--b wrote: | Don't know... These guys already made a fortune. Maybe they | just don't give a s** anymore. | sedatk wrote: | 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. | boh wrote: | 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. | renewiltord wrote: | What does leverage mean here? | oblio wrote: | Debt. | renewiltord wrote: | Right, that's the usual meaning, but it's quite unusual | for software companies to be debt financed, isn't it? | SaaS companies usually go the venture route AFAIK. | TheCoelacanth wrote: | Leverage is probably the wrong choice of word, but VC's | growth expectations make your average loan shark's | interest rates look downright reasonable. | pclmulqdq wrote: | Leverage is a fine choice of words. In financial terms, | debt and equity are not that different. Particularly VC | equity, which can have some debt-like qualities to it | (liquidation preferences, etc.). | | Also, many startup investments use debt instruments like | convertible notes instead of direct equity purchases. | im_down_w_otp wrote: | I assume it means something more like burn rate and product | roadmap "debt" leverage than the normal technical financial | meaning. | | It's easy to get yourself as a founder into a situation | where you're trading fundamentals for next-round narrative, | and a lot of times that's that can be the deathknell. | smcleod wrote: | Evernote was still decent enough before the ditched the native | app for a dreadful Electron webframe. | _jal wrote: | 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. | pbowyer wrote: | 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. | smcleod wrote: | Yeah I completely brought my quite powerful machine to a | halt at the time, it would eat up resources like all | Electron apps do - and I'd hate to think of the potential | security exploits with a Electron / unsandboxed chrome that | formats clipped websites and attachments etc... - not good. | eastbound wrote: | 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. | nathanaldensr wrote: | How the mighty have fallen. | | Who the heck are Bending Spoons? | martopix wrote: | 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. | graypegg wrote: | 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 | delusional wrote: | 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. | Manjuuu wrote: | In some parts of Europe they still try to look cool | behaving like if they were some hip company from Silicon | Valley. Depressing stuff imho. | brookst wrote: | 30 days?!?!? | vxNsr wrote: | I just got the reference. Bending spoons, doing the | impossible, like in the matrix. At least the name makes sense | now. | ChrisMarshallNY wrote: | Isn't spoon-bending a "hoaxy" magic trick? | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoon_bending | seti0Cha wrote: | Yeah, maybe to young people that means "doing the | impossible" but to me it means "tricking people into | thinking you're doing something impossible" or "scam" for | short. | whoopdedo wrote: | Even in the modern usage the principle is to recognize | that it's all an illusion. No spoons are ever actually | bent in The Matrix. | offtotheraces wrote: | 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... | paxys wrote: | 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. | Karunamon wrote: | 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. | Manjuuu wrote: | > 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. | tqi wrote: | https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/plans.html | Manjuuu wrote: | Completely different type of applications, I remember an | old thread on twitter about one useless wallpapers app | being sold for that kind of money. And it was not the | only one. It's a business model. | paxys wrote: | Not sure what "useless wallpaper" app you are talking | about but I just took a look at | https://bendingspoons.com/products and everything there | seems pretty useful and well designed. | Manjuuu wrote: | That minuscule subset is well designed, yes, the rest | decent BUT some of them with in my opinion predatory | pricing in many cases, $9/wk to download some wallpaper | or some sleep noises app. But yes, they are not the only | ones doing it. If you are interested search on the | appstore among the boatload of apps they have. | paxys wrote: | Okay well you should be able to link to a single one | then.. I still can't find any examples of how this | company is fraudulent. | svnt wrote: | 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. | Manjuuu wrote: | 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. | nneonneo wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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? | Manjuuu wrote: | > is $10 a WEEK. | handoflixue wrote: | 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. | unixhero wrote: | I for one released on simplenote.cpm for my noting needs | techky wrote: | I still hate that Evernote bought Skitch. Really wish the new | team would revive it or sell it off to an interested dev. | egypturnash wrote: | 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. | staticman2 wrote: | 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. | egypturnash wrote: | 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". | thefourthchime wrote: | 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. | TremendousJudge wrote: | 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. | alexjplant wrote: | 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. | crossroadsguy wrote: | Apple Notes might do a lot of things or do them well, but | seamless sync is not one of those. | egypturnash wrote: | 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. | ravenstine wrote: | 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. | Kye wrote: | The lack of export functionality without a Mac kept me from | using it. | | edit: HN won't let me reply so... | | That sure is a lot of trouble just to grab a copy of my | notes. This is something I do often enough that I don't | want to have to go through _two_ MFA prompts, and then | another when the process is done. Not acceptable. | jazzyjackson wrote: | Like most apple software, it only considers users who are | totally bought into the ecosystem. I hardly know what you | mean, "grab a copy of my notes", all my notes are copied | to all my devices, as long as those devices run Apple | Notes ;) | packet_pusher wrote: | You can bulk export all your Notes through | appleid.apple.com. They can come down as text files, or a | JSON, I believe. I just went through the process recently | to migrate notes into Joplin. | mananaysiempre wrote: | FYI, HN probably does let you reply (unless you've | tripped the rate limit, but in that case it won't let you | edit, either), it's just that in deep threads you need to | either wait a bit or do it from the comment's page[1]. | | [1] https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news- | undocumented/blob/m... | steveBK123 wrote: | Same for me. It does about 90%+ of what I'd ever need, it | has rock-solid sync across all my devices, I can share | notes with my wife without her having to sign up for a | service and download an app, etc. | | Not to mention that it avoids me onboarding to some | unprofitable note taking tool that will languish until it | gets stripped for parts. | | There was a midtwit meme about productivity hackers vs "I | just use apple notes" guys like this too haha. | ravenstine wrote: | That's awesome that it syncs that well, though one of the | reasons I use it is because I can specifically opt out of | the syncing and keep everything offline. I use Notes to | jot a lot of things down, and that can mean some very | intimate/private thoughts, and I've come to distaste | having those thoughts floating in the digital ether. Most | note taking apps don't seem to allow you to work entirely | offline, and if they do, they still phone home a lot and | harass you to sign up for an account. | podviaznikov wrote: | small nit pick. Apple Notes have support for nested | folders:) But agree with the rest. | mehrzad wrote: | 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 | CharlesW wrote: | 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... | kjs3 wrote: | Could be worse. Wait till they start selling advertisers access | to data-mine your notes. | dhimes wrote: | Would some of the open-source alternatives fit the bill? | Something like SimpleNote? | egypturnash wrote: | 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 | bitwize wrote: | Org-mode, yo. | selykg wrote: | I've yet to find a reasonable mobile version of org-mode. | Which is, frankly, a non-starter for me personally. 90% of | the time I am probably referencing something from my notes | when mobile, but I need those notes to: | | 1. Be accessible an up to date 2. Easily searchable, and to | do so quickly 3. In the rare case that I need to take a | note, it is best if I can do so easily and have those go | back to my computer quickly and painlessly so I can do what | needs doing to get that into the system better. | | Org-mode simply does not do this well in any of my | experience with it. It's fine if all you're doing is taking | notes on a computer, but as soon as you add a mobile device | to the mix, it goes belly up for me. | bitwize wrote: | Orgzly doesn't fit the bill for you? | koliber wrote: | I was in the same spot in January of 2021. Did some exploring, | and settled on Notion. I love it. | Obscurity4340 wrote: | Kye wrote: | 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. | dools wrote: | Ever-ishNote | jshaqaw wrote: | Evernote is still the only product that meets my workflow needs. | Hope they don't mess it up. | etempleton wrote: | 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. | akisd wrote: | I have also tried to find an alternative to evernote and i | settled to Joplin for now. | brycethornton wrote: | 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. | rxyz wrote: | 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. | MrZongle2 wrote: | 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. | dang wrote: | Related ongoing thread: | | _Why Evernote failed to realize its potential (2021)_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33626047 - Nov 2022 (143 | comments) | nathias wrote: | 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) | c0brac0bra wrote: | 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 wrote: | Really? Search is instant for me on Obsidian, with about 4000 | notes spanning 11 years. Maybe you had some kind of indexing | issue? | kennend3 wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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. | ben1040 wrote: | 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. | netsharc wrote: | 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. | TheCraiggers wrote: | 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. | nathias wrote: | none, I just use it for other stuff too | cianmm wrote: | 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. | skinnymuch wrote: | 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. | gumby wrote: | 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. | cianmm wrote: | Do you know if Notes performs the OCR on files that [are | imported over from Evernote?](https://support.apple.com/en- | us/HT205793) I have many hundreds (maybe low-thousands) of | PDFs and images that I need to be able to access once in a | blue moon, but when I need them Evernote's OCR makes it | easy. | | I guess I could just try it out with a subsection of notes. | cianmm wrote: | I've imported a bunch of PDFs and various image formats | and it doesn't seem to be scanning them. I'll check back | later in case it's a feature it does in the background. | gumby wrote: | I think you have to scan directly from notes. | Lendal wrote: | On iPhone, Notes is excellent. In a browser on icloud.com | it's terrible. I need it to work in a web browser because I | do software development on Windows. Notes is not an option | until the browser version works just as well as the mobile | version. For now, I can use Notes for personal but not for | work. | nashashmi wrote: | 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. | frans wrote: | 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! | gmoore wrote: | 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. | horsawlarway wrote: | 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. | tianqi wrote: | Indeed. Thier every 'enhancements' makes me feel that they have | absolutely no idea what their strengths are. | chillfox wrote: | Yep, if I could subscribe to the old Evernote then I would, but | it's long gone. | rvbissell wrote: | 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. | [deleted] | isaacfrond wrote: | 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. | tomjen3 wrote: | 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. | pqs wrote: | Not stalled. They created Tasks, which I use every single day! | aNoob7000 wrote: | 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. | seti0Cha wrote: | Recently their development pace really picked up. | Unfortunately that was due to them replatforming as an | electron app. Development speed improved, but the app | itself felt sluggish and I had really started to hate it. | chillfox wrote: | 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. | dkarl wrote: | 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. | brookst wrote: | 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 $50/year more spending money. | damontal wrote: | It's up 79$/year now for personal accounts. | ghaff wrote: | 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. | benfrancom wrote: | Reminds me of Derek Sivers how he keeps all his writing in | plain text, always, everywhere. https://sive.rs/plaintext | | Edit: Apparently he posted this on HN 8 months ago: | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30521545 | [deleted] | fairity wrote: | 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. | rrreese wrote: | 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. | dkarl wrote: | 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.) | dpedu wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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 | dpedu wrote: | 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. | whalesalad wrote: | 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 wrote: | Bending Spoons is based in Milan so you would be at an | aperitivo sipping a Negroni or spritz with not so loud music :) | c-smile wrote: | 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 wrote: | The GUI is giving me Windows XP Plus! pack throwbacks, thank | you for sharing. | egypturnash wrote: | Hey, thanks for your hard work making a great tool that I used | for most of a decade. | [deleted] | dahdum wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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 wrote: | And socks! | | https://www.aivanet.com/2013/09/evernote-gets-physical- | why-a... | codalan wrote: | Moleskine notepads. But hey, it was more reliable and quicker | to use than their software offering. | j-bos wrote: | Welp, guess it's time to finally cancel the subscription and move | to Obsidian. | xablau wrote: | "At Bending Spoons, we create our own cutting-edge technologies | and products." | | https://bendingspoons.com/ | awinder wrote: | 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 wrote: | I didn't realize you could acquire a company just by bending some | spoons... | [deleted] | skilled wrote: | Is that an announcement or a marketing jargon dictionary? I had | forgotten this app even exists, but I can see why. | Nursie wrote: | 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... | ergonaught wrote: | Result being that today I'll migrate everything out of Evernote | and cancel my subscription. | | That sucks. | [deleted] | rodolphoarruda wrote: | EN (happy) customer since 2014 here. I just hope the acquiring | company won't kill it. | calabaza222 wrote: | I use paper & pencil. Works fine :D | criddell wrote: | 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... | idlewords wrote: | _gets checkbook ready_ | SergeAx wrote: | 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. | mehrzad wrote: | 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. | steveBK123 wrote: | 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. | mehrzad wrote: | Apple Notes unfortunately does not let you export notes with | the images attached, not always relevant but it really hurt | me once. | gumby wrote: | 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. | irrational wrote: | 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. | Manjuuu wrote: | If you want to delete your account: | https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/360056549574-Per... | hirundo wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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 wrote: | Is there some way to link to those photos via URL, or | something like that? | lazyasciiart wrote: | Pretty sure OneNote does this, I don't know how the bulk move | experience would be though. | abathur wrote: | Yeah... same boat. Photographed my notebooks and put them in. | Sigh. | steve1977 wrote: | On macOS, Devonthink | mblevin wrote: | 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 wrote: | > 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! | [deleted] | pyrophane wrote: | 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? | squarefoot wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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... | fairity wrote: | 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? | kjs3 wrote: | 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. | fairity wrote: | 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. | notfried wrote: | 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. | vxNsr wrote: | Bending spoon's website is 100% bloat so that doesn't bode well | for a revitalized Evernote. | jef_leppard wrote: | 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. | matchagaucho wrote: | #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 (?) | etempleton wrote: | 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. | bighi wrote: | 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. | pqs wrote: | Why is it so hard to implement apparently simple features? | This is surprising to me. | underwater wrote: | 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. | hn_throwaway_99 wrote: | 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). | bighi wrote: | 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. | asdajksah2123 wrote: | > 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. | hn_throwaway_99 wrote: | Google isn't the only example here. Heck, just look at the | transition from Classic MacOS to OS X. I definitely think | Apple would have been dead long ago if they said "A rewrite | is too expensive/risky, let's just incrementally improve | Classic MacOS". | | I guess my point is that there are right ways and wrong | ways to do ground-up rewrites, and the fact that a lot of | people do them the wrong way shouldn't mean the lesson | should be to never do them. | Kye wrote: | Replacing one mature operating system with another, which | itself was based on one even more mature, and adding | stuff is not quite a rewrite. That was more like how | Microsoft moved NT into its consumer OS. It was a bit of | a mess but had a clear payoff once everything was updated | or obsoleted. NT and BSD were both battle-hardened long | before anyone thought to put them in consumer systems. | tomjen3 wrote: | 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. | lucideer wrote: | > _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. | ska wrote: | > 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] | lazyasciiart wrote: | 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. | hinkley wrote: | > 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. | danrocks wrote: | I enjoy Relentess Refactoring as much as the next guy, but | one dimension here is that it is much easier to do in a | headless app (or in the backend) than in an app with a | major UI. At some point there must be a complete switch | from the old UI to the new UI, and that step is extremely | complex. It also invites a big rewrite, in an almost | irresistible way - "since we'll change the UI, let's just | do it from the ground up". | hinkley wrote: | The main lesson of the CI/CD era is that pain is | information and ignoring it until later just makes things | worse. | | "Let's replace the whole UI at once" and "Let's replace | the whole app at once" are bandaid-ripping activities, | and the point of ripping off a bandaid is to get it over | with before your pain receptors have a chance to tell you | what an asshole you are right now. I'm sure most people | have at least one experience, of their own or of someone | they know, where ripping off the bandaid took a chunk of | skin with it, possibly creating a bigger wound than the | bandage originally covered. | seti0Cha wrote: | 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. | SergeAx wrote: | 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. | dkarl wrote: | 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. | jef_leppard wrote: | 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. | hosh wrote: | The problem is that the effort to do collaborative editing | creates a lot of other problems. | | I want to be able to just start typing, on my phone. | Instead, I have to wait for it to sync. If I am in a place | with bad reception, that will take a while. It lags and | freezes, all in order to support collaboration that I do | not want. | | I want to add pictures. I want to add links to other notes. | I pay for a subscription to get bullet proof cloud backup. | Sometimes I want to share notes. I don't want to | collaboratively edit my personal notes with my private | thoughts and journal entries. | | Evernote stopped focusing on that. | | I might switch over to Muse. It was designed to be local | first and uses cdrt for sync. | bighi wrote: | Most EVERNOTE users wanted it? I sincerely doubt that even | 20% of Evernote users want that. | | People that want a collaborative Docs app already have | Google Docs. Evernote is mostly a "digital cabinet". It's | where notes and documents go to die (in a good way). | [deleted] | criddell wrote: | I think collaborative editing was a mistake. According to | Libin circa 2010, Evernote was supposed to be your second | brain. Letting other people edit my notes doesn't fit the | second brain model (IMHO). I wish Evernote had stayed small | and tightly focused on a personal product. | | Unfortunately, it's hard to sell to individuals compared to | businesses, and so that's where their focus went once they | had VC money driving the ship. | seti0Cha wrote: | In addition to what other posters said, there are | opportunity and maintenance costs. Building features for | use-cases other than mine puts me in the position of | wondering whether my use-case is part of the long term | vision for the product. I want a note taking app that | strives to improve at capturing quick notes. A document | collaboration tool that happens to work pretty well for | capturing quick notes is less likely to satisfy me long | term. | btown wrote: | "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. | tqi wrote: | 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 wrote: | Google docs didn't exist when Evernote started. Their | competitor was OneNote. | gertrunde wrote: | 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 wrote: | There was clearly no rhyme or reason to their portfolio. | | Basically the app store version of a private equity firm. | Manjuuu wrote: | I suppose that's what their target audience wants to see. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-11-16 23:00 UTC)