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Evernote2 replacement
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Posted by Hugh
Aug 2, 2010 at 09:40 AM
I suspect that from the moment Evernote’s developers raised significant amounts in the money markets, their company became a different kind of beast with different kinds of priorities from the mostly small outfits that tend to cater to the CRIMP-suffering community.
Posted by Daly de Gagne
Aug 2, 2010 at 02:39 PM
I agree with the concern of basic features which are missing from EverNote - and they have been told plenty of times about it.
When people like me get to cantankerous and repetitive in making the point, the EN forums have a few self-righteous, flag-waving cheer leaders with such thoughtful names as Curds ‘n Whey - oops no, wrong story - I meant to say Burgers ‘n Fries, who pounce all over you. I got so fed up with that routine last spring that I wrote directly to the CEO complaining of how EN had thrown us Windows users under the bus, was missing basic features, and then how we were getting smeared on the forums by people who didn’t see anything more for the program than was already being offered.
He was actually quite responsive, and assured me some good changes would come down the road soon. I think there are some improvements, but it is time for a program with such a good multi-platform base, and, on Chrome anyway, one of the best clip to the cloud extensions I have ever seen, to get serious about how information is handled.
The irony is that I do not think any program has ever been as well positioned as EverNote is now to make significant strides in increasing its ability to handle the functionality so important to CRIMPERs and others.
EN has move beyond the phase of integrating with all known platforms - it was a good strategic move in money terms and in terms of developing the technology. Now with its Trunk feature, EN is encouraging integration with various other programs, such as NOZBE, a cloud program I use and recommend for GTD. Some of the Trunk examples are pretty lame, but EN to its credit has opened it up in a way few others have - the NOZBE integration is neat, because it allows you to show specific EN notes related to projects and next actions.
The irony to much of this is that when I first corresponded with Eric Somer of ADM seven years ago, in the days before we spoke of the cloud, he had a vision for ADM being the basis for what he called a world wide outline - and he was thinking in terms of shared information and data in the cloud. I still maintain that the best outliner for Windows was ADM, and that had it continued no one would be able to touch it today. If I ever win the multi-million lottery in Canada, I will find Eric and invest in ADM.
I would love to see a cloud version of Surfulater because Neville, its developer, does understand information handling needs, and is much more open to suggestion and innovation in a timely manner than developers of such programs as UltraRecall and MyInfo.
Anyhow, I digress.
And with my Mac laptop being set up by the wonderful folks at Staples - the super-box store with the small shop feeling (my local Staples is phenomenal) - Omni-Focus and DevonThink will change my perspectives.
Cheers,
Daly
Hugh wrote:
>I suspect that from the moment Evernote’s developers raised significant amounts in
>the money markets, their company became a different kind of beast with different
>kinds of priorities from the mostly small outfits that tend to cater to the
>CRIMP-suffering community.
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Aug 3, 2010 at 08:01 PM
Daly de Gagne wrote:
>in Now with its Trunk feature, EN is encouraging
>integration with various other programs, such as NOZBE, a cloud program I use and
>recommend for GTD. Some of the Trunk examples are pretty lame, but EN to its credit has
>opened it up in a way few others have - the NOZBE integration is neat, because it allows
>you to show specific EN notes related to projects and next actions.
Daly, thanks for the heads up on NOZBE; I had singled it out some time ago as one of the potentially useful integrations of Evernote but hadn’t really tried it.
Posted by MadaboutDana
Aug 4, 2010 at 12:27 AM
Thanks for the thoughts on Evernote, everybody - I stopped using it a few months back, even though I like many of the features very much.
But I have discovered a few really interesting alternatives. First, the little-known author of AM-Notebook (itself a very professional outliner supporting rich-text notes and simple spreadsheet-type entries, as well as mindmaps, contacts and calendar entries) has also produced an elegant offline web-page reader called Local Website Archive. While the free version does have certain rather annoying limitations, it’s still very powerful. And the Pro version is exceedingly powerful. Both versions are also very stable - I’ve moved over to this solution from Surfulater simply because the latter has a nasty tendency to crash, and Local Website Archive also has a very reliable full-text search engine. Best of all, it integrates with AM-Notebook…
No, I don’t know Martin Aignes personally (you’ll find all his software at aignes.com), but he’s quick to respond to queries (I asked him about wordcounting, which AM-Notebook doesn’t yet have, and he got back to me very speedily).
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Aug 6, 2010 at 06:56 AM
MadaboutDana wrote:
>First, the little-known author of AM-Notebook (itself a
>very professional outliner supporting rich-text notes and simple
>spreadsheet-type entries, as well as mindmaps, contacts and calendar entries) has
>also produced an elegant offline web-page reader called Local Website Archive.
Thanks for the heads-up on Local Website Archive; a significant advantage over other products is its Opera support. If I knew about it a couple of years ago I would have bought it straight away. Now, however, I have moved to Firefox for most of my work after much frustration—not by Opera itself, but by the significant number of websites which will identify non-popular browsers and refuse to even make the effort to serve them. (The “Please update your browser” sort of message)
>I’ve moved over to this solution from Surfulater simply because the
>latter has a nasty tendency to crash
As mentioned earlier on in this thread, I trusted Surfulater with my MBA data over almost three years and, as far as I remember, it never crashed. In sharp contrast, Brainstorm, my other main tool repeatedly collapsed under the weight of my data. I would suggest that the tendency that you noted has some particular cause, and as such is worth further investigating. In my experience, whenever a program that is considered reliable has crashed on my PC, this is related to system issues, and these will tend to manifest themselves elsewhere too.
That said, I know that a couple of past Surfulater updates have addressed some very specific stability bugs, which I myself had never come across. However, the most important thing for me is that even when Surfulater was closed irregularly—e.g. by a hard reset following PC freeze by some other program- I never lost data.