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Some Reflections on Evernote and MyInfo
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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 I’m a writer/scholar, and I am constantly taking notes from published sources and unpublished documents, trying to organize and make sense out of those notes, and then attempting to synthesize this complex material into a new text.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.
Posted by Pavi
Aug 12, 2011 at 11:48 AM
Hi WSP,
You may have noticed that I just created a thread about UltraRecall. Like you, I was using a few tools, including OneNote, Mybase, EPIM to keep everything together.
However, putting in some time and effort to learn UR has me convinced that it replaces other tools very well, even if there are a few limitations. Integrating notes, documents (ie. PDF, docs), email & tasks (automatically sync’d to Outlook), web clippings, etc. with cross referenced search is incredibly useful.
Having said that, a few features could be added, such as:
- an attachments window
- ability to dock the keywords window
- multiple nodes open
- versioning
- better table support
Some of these are planned for the next release (from the information I’ve read on their forum).
I highly recommend that you give UR another look. I passed it over a few times because I thought it lacked some things that I needed, only to discover recently that due to the customization potential, nearly anything is possible. Now I am kicking myself as I have to move mountains of data from different programs/files/folders over.
Best, /Pavi
WSP wrote:
>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.
(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.
>
Posted by WSP
Aug 12, 2011 at 01:35 PM
Thanks for the suggestion. I keep a careful eye on Ultra Recall developments, but there are moments when even I feel a little weary of my note-taking-programs promiscuity. (Perhaps I could suggest that acronym, NTPP, as an alternative to CRIMP on this forum.) I downloaded a trial of UR a year or two ago, and my first impression was that it was tremendously powerful but rather nerdy in tone. What I like about MyInfo is that despite its hidden complexity, the surface is attractive and uncluttered.
Still, I’ll try to keep an open mind.
Posted by Daly de Gagne
Aug 12, 2011 at 01:53 PM
I am a user of MyInfo, and also one who likes it very much.
Petko is a very responsive, and really open to new ideas. Sometimes, I also worry about his being a one-person operation.
His openness has lead to speedy implementation of hoisting, and the current ability to have more than one window open at a time, although at this stage the second window does not have editing capability.
I think MyInfo offers the ability to combine folders in the tree and tags in a good way.
One feature I’d like to see is the ability to have different column sets for different groups of folder within the same file.
I’ve emailed Phil Libin a few times, and found him to be responsive in terms of getting back to me quickly. The Evernote dumbing down upset quite a few people, but the program has retraced some of those steps, which is good.
A deal breaker for me is that the program lacked highlighting. I brought that to Phil’s attention, noting how important that can be to information workers, and he said straight away it would be added.
A lot of my reading involves PDFs, and so now I am using Mendeley for that.
Web clipping - my favourite is Surfulater. I’ve used Springpad because of its cloud capability - it is a possible EN replacement. However, it does not keep web metadata the way Surfulater or EN do. It can take one back to the specific web page a clip is made from, but it doesn’t show the specific url. So for citing purposes, it is necessary to go back to the original page. I’ve advised Springpad of this problem, and expect they’ll deal with it soon.
EN took a real gamble a few years ago, and it paid off for them big time. However, as a result, they pissed off a lot of their original users and, it seems, their development team still don’t realize fully all that serious information users require to make their work easier. In the process of trying to explain, there have been some nasty exchanges on the EN forums, often involving people who hide behind pseudonyms (easier to snark if no one knows who you really are).
Surfulater is a program to watch. I have watched Neville develop it over the years, and have great respect for his creativity and openness. He is, I believe, considering cloud capability for Surfulater - lack of cloud is why I used Evernote. However, I now have Surfulater running on my two computers, with data files in Dropbox - and that is sufficient cloud for my purposes. It works well.
Daly
WSP wrote:
>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.
>
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Aug 12, 2011 at 05:31 PM
Daly de Gagne wrote:
>I am a user of MyInfo, and also one who likes it very much.
>One feature I’d like to see is the
>ability to have different column sets for different groups of folder within the same
>file.
>
FWIW, Zoot has had this ability for the past decade.
I have licenses for Zoot, UR, and MyInfo. I admire MI a lot, but its features are redundant to other applications I rely upon (OneNote and PersonalBrain). I tried swithcing to UR during Zoot’s doldrums, but I have just never warmed up to it. Zoot, it seems to me, is superior in its flexibility and ease of organization. Zoot is not without its short comings. I do find the editor in UR better than even the new version of Zoot. But in terms of collecting information and being able to organize it as necessary, I don’t think Zoot can be beat.
Steve Z.