Some Reflections on Evernote and MyInfo

Posted by WSP
Aug 12, 2011 at 09:13 AM

Like many of the rest of you on this forum, I’ve played around with various note-taking programs through the years, and I thought it might useful (certainly to myself and possibly to others) to take stock of where I stand right now.

I was an early adopter of Evernote, when it was still a Windows-only product, and was an enthusiastic user of it for a couple of years. Then one morning I woke up to discover that a new version had been released that was not exactly an upgrade; the program had been seriously dumbed down in order to make it run on various mobile platforms. To make matters worse, the new CEO of Evernote, Phil Libin, flippantly remarked that he saw his customer base as the “lazy slobs” of the world, and “power users” became a term of thinly-veiled sarcasm in communications from the EN staff.

I was baffled by all of this, but I tried to limp along with EN for a few more months, until I finally had to admit to myself that I couldn’t continue without some of the now-missing features such as smart folders and internal links. Libin (who seems to be a very charming and charismatic figure, incidentally) kept making clever-sounding pronouncements about an external brain and remembering everything, and there was much excited talk about popping photographs of wine bottle labels into EN, but none of this seemed to have much to do with my life. I’m *not* trying to remember everything. I’m a writer/scholar, and I am constantly taking notes from published sources and unpublished documents, trying to organize and make sense out of those notes, and then attempting to synthesize this complex material into a new text. Increasingly Evernote seemed to be an excellent program for storing data but not for organizing it (or at least not organizing it very well).

So I launched a search for an Evernote substitute, and I finally settled on MyInfo. At first it seemed far less flexible than EN, and I missed the lively community on the EN forum. What worried me even more was that although MI had been around for a long time and had a reputation for steady (if sometimes slow) development, it seemed to be the work of one fellow in Bulgaria. That made me a bit nervous. What if he were to lose interest? What if he were to be hit by a bus? On the other hand, could one solid, reliable programmer in eastern Europe be any worse than a slightly manic company in California that seemed to have gone crazy over smartphones and snapshots of wine bottles?

I laboriously moved most of my old notes into MyInfo and have been happily using it ever since. Petko, the developer, has proven to be responsive and helpful (but I confess I still sometimes have irrational anxieties about the state of his health), and MI has a lot of features that have come to seem indispensable to me. And it also offers a clean, attractive interface: it simply *looks good* on the screen, and that’s important to me, because I use it regularly every day. I now rely very heavily on the custom attributes (especially the dates, since my writing is mainly historical, and occasionally I want to organize all my notes chronologically), the cloning, the hoisting, and the cross-linking (which works down to the paragraph level). Above all, even though I admire Evernote’s brilliant system of tagging, I understand now that I need a tree hierarchy for my notes, because that is just the way my brain works.

I continue to use Evernote for information that doesn’t require a high level of organization (travel notes, for example), but for any data of real complexity—i.e., a large body of notes for an article, a book, or a lecture—I always fall back on MyInfo. I realize there are other choices available (Zoot and Ultra Recall tempt me in my more susceptible moods), but MyInfo does the job for me nowadays, supplemented by Evernote for all the random bits of information that float through everyone’s life—or when I feel like a lazy slob.