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Evernote2 replacement
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Posted by NewZRoom
Jul 23, 2010 at 01:15 AM
Evernote, it seems, is a series of comprises to get online sync. Though I have to say having online access is incredibly useful. But it seems like they’re trying to make it harder and harder to like. I finally went back to Evernote 2. It’s a struggle to get things synced ... but it has the features I want.
Surfulater is very good (it even has a scrollable tape if you click on a folder), but it doesn’t seem as friendly for what I’m interested in. As someone once said: You can have anything you want, but you can’t have everything.
Posted by Daly de Gagne
Jul 23, 2010 at 10:33 PM
A few years ago when Evernote decided to provide synced cloud service and accessibility on virtually every platform a clear decision was made to throw loyal EN Windows desktop users under the bus - at least temporarily, they said, for a short time. But the short time went on longer than expected, and functionality removed from ver 2 never came back completely.
The result has been some great rows on the official forums. The company has continually said for us to be patient. I think we may soon see more Windows capability come back, but I doubt the days of templates in EN will ever return.
The company’s marketing wizards have also pulled a stunt which shows how little sensitivity or respect they have for the original, loyal EN users - they now date the age of EN from the time they put their head in the cloud and went multiplatform. I have called EN to task on this on three different occasions.
Having said all this, I now use EN as my main clipper - and I will be soon going to the Mac world so the mis-treatment of Windows users will be irrelevant to me.
Earlier this year I had some good exchanges with the EN CEO, which I found helpful.
But this business of lying about the product’s age, and putting off the the legitimate concerns of Windows users is a big turn-off.
Re the issue with Windows users - my take is that marketing and mutli-platform development needs take priority given the company’s strategic trajectory, and that this comes at the expense of fully developing EN as a sophisticated information manager. Hopefully the latter can become a priority again.
Daly
NewZRoom wrote:
>Evernote, it seems, is a series of comprises to get online sync. Though I have to say
>having online access is incredibly useful. But it seems like they’re trying to make it
>harder and harder to like. I finally went back to Evernote 2. It’s a struggle to get
>things synced ... but it has the features I want.
>
>Surfulater is very good (it even has
>a scrollable tape if you click on a folder), but it doesn’t seem as friendly for what I’m
>interested in. As someone once said: You can have anything you want, but you can’t have
>everything.
Posted by JasonE
Jul 24, 2010 at 12:15 AM
Daly de Gagne wrote:
>they now date the age of EN from the time they put their head in the cloud and went multiplatform.
My first thought when I read that was:
“They might as well. It’s a different application.”
They should have changed the name while they were at it!
In all honesty, I don’t feel bitter or anything at the folks at EN.
They are a for profit entity working to meet market need.
EN 3 doesn’t do it for me, so I am looking elsewhere.
JasonE
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Jul 25, 2010 at 07:34 PM
Just an additional word on Surfulater; it’s interesting how I missed the program as I use it extensively—the reason is that I started using it before it got its tagging capability and still do most of my organisation on items in it through the regular folder tree. For anyone who wants to see how the tagging feature works check out the original announcement here: http://blog.surfulater.com/2008/03/25/tagging-and-the-new-tags-tree/
I find Surfulater very powerful, reliable and intuitive, to the extent that I trusted it with most of my information on my MBA dissertation, and was not disappointed.
Among the reasons that I used Surfulater rather than Evernote—even though Evernote is my generic capture program- was the ability to link items to other items (via See Also…). This, and other non-exotic features are strangely missing from Evernote 3 (and also 2 as far as I remember); my favourite example is the non-ability to create copies of items, whether clones or independent ones (!) As I wrote at the Evernote forum “can you imagine an operating system where it is not possible to copy a file so as to work on the copy? Well, Evernote simply cannot make a copy of an existing note; why, I cannot fathom. I also cannot imagine how versioning can take precedence as a feature over it.” (http://blog.evernote.com/2010/07/14/the-evernote-trunk/comment-page-2/#comments)
Posted by critStock
Jul 26, 2010 at 07:57 PM
I agree with everything Alexander has said about both Surfulater’s virtues and Evernote’s completely unbelievable shortcomings in some respects. I don’t often copy Evernote items, but I have discovered a workaround, in case anyone needs to do this. If you export an item then re-import it, you will get a copy. (The creation date of the copy will be “now,” for better or worse.) It’s ridiculous that one should have to go through this process to make a simple copy, but at least there’s a way, for anyone who might need to do it. I’m still using Evernote as my default capture tool, because of sync and because it captures so well. I use Surfulater, but data lock is at least a big a worry as with Evernote. You can get everything out in html or mht (in both apps), but what is left can hardly be called a database.
Cheers,
critStock