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Evernote and Curio
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Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Feb 29, 2012 at 09:50 PM
dan7000 wrote:
>>> But the actual app is very primitive by the standards set by Zoot, DevonThink and
>many others.
>
>Those of us who like to mess around with software appreciate the
>powerful features available in programs like Zoot, InfoQube, and Ultrarecall. But
>if the general public valued those features, then those programs would be commercial
>successes. It seems to me that Evernote has made a strategic decision—likely
>informed by market research and focus groups—to appeal to the most possible
>customers by keeping its feature set simple and focused.
So you’re saying Evernote is the software equivalent of a Big Mac. :-)
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Feb 29, 2012 at 11:49 PM
Stephen Zeoli wrote:
>Okay, Evernote is free
>and what it does do it does remarkably well, so I’m not complaining. But there seems to
>be a lot of un-met potential here. All of which is my long-winded way of saying I don’t
>think there is anything for Windows that works with Evernote even in the limited way in
>which Curio does.
I believe that there is a reason for this beyond Evernote. As a Windows Evernote user I’ve often been jealous at Mac users for getting useful new features first. Things like blog.evernote.com/2008/05/11/evernote-for-mac-just-got-better and automatic syncing of edited attachments. But I understand that it is the Mac system itself which facilitates Evernote’s interconnection with other programs such as Curio, through cross-application standards.
Similarly, a brief look at the the Desktop+Web section of the Evernote Trunk http://www.evernote.com/about/trunk/ (wonder why these two are supposedly in the same category? read on) will show that most offerings are web applications.
I believe the first answer to both ‘injustices’ above is opportunity, in this case the ease of development: it is much easier for developers to forge interconnections at the web server level than at the level of desktop software, just as it is easier to forge interconnection in the Mac system than in Windows.
For example, an obvious candidate for manipulating Evernote items would be a mind mapping program like MindManager. Yet Mindjet—who I don’t think are short of development resources- have chosen to only make the link to Evernote via their web offering, Mindjet Connect.
And this brings us to the second reason—motive: why would a developer want to link their product to Evernote? Marketing their product to a new audience would be an obvious answer, and it is clear that Mindjet wants to promote Connect, whereas it has no need to promote MindManager which is the leader in its category.
As to why Evernote haven’t done their interface better themselves, I believe that the answer may lie in any of the factors below, or a combination thereof:
- Their strategy is very focused (as pointed out already); they are in the memory business, not the production business.
- Their strategy isn’t focused at all; just look at the trunk and at the buy-outs they’ve done.
- The underlying engine isn’t as versatile as they would like us to think; it took them years to provide the ability to copy an item, believe it or not.
- What they provide IS their idea of better.
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Feb 29, 2012 at 11:56 PM
P.S. By the way, if you do have a lot of Evernote content, you might want to try out this service http://topicmarks.com/ which supposedly helps you make sense of it. A sort of “data mining for the rest of us”.
Posted by Daly de Gagne
Mar 1, 2012 at 12:27 AM
Steve and Hugh, I agree with you both.
Evernote took a strategic decision to create cross-platform functionality, and I believe as part of that decision, decided to place less focus on various aspects of information management many of us take for granted.
For example, something so basic as being able to highlight text is missing. When I brought this to the attention of the EN CEO by email, he replied straight away that in the next major version that would be included.
Having said that, EN is one of a handful of program which allows one to have more than one note window open, something I find very handy.
Also, EN has probably the best ability to capture web clips and full pages.
But in terms of metadata capture and linking it is still pretty limited.
I hope that with its great market success, EN’s developers will use its revenues now to focus more seriously on information management per se.
Daly
Stephen Zeoli wrote:
>Hugh wrote:
>>It remains a bit of mystery to me that the developers behind Evernote
>have not yet quite given the
>>software the top-notch functionality and UI that the
>financial resources available
>>to them might justify. It has also largely had the
>field to itself for quite a while,
>>although Microsoft, Apple and the likes of
>Dropbox and others have gradually been
>>encroaching upon its territory. Perhaps
>the effort to make the software
>>cross-platform has been all-absorbing. Perhaps it
>has lacked competitors.
>
>I couldn’t agree more with Hugh. Evernote’s
>synchronization of multiplatform versions is astoundingly well done. But the
>actual app is very primitive by the standards set by Zoot, DevonThink and many others.
>And the Trunk service that was announced with great fanfare has not produced a whole
>lot of useful partner applications—at least in my opinion.
>
>Okay, Evernote is free
>and what it does do it does remarkably well, so I’m not complaining. But there seems to
>be a lot of un-met potential here. All of which is my long-winded way of saying I don’t
>think there is anything for Windows that works with Evernote even in the limited way in
>which Curio does.
>
>Steve Z.
Posted by WSP
Mar 1, 2012 at 01:00 AM
My personal wish list for Evernote would look something like this:
(1) The ability to highlight text.
(2) The ability to assign a color to the background of a note. (I hate brilliant white backgrounds; they’re hard on our eyes.)
(3) The ability to modify the default paragraph style; I use 14 pt Georgia in Evernote, and the line-spacing is uncomfortably tight.
(4) The ability to create a tree hierarchy, either within Evernote (another optional column on the left?) or through a linked program.
I understand the view that Evernote can’t please everyone, but I think these are fairly simple requests. It’s not as though I were yearning for a complicated mindmap or a sophisticated to-do system.
I’ve been patiently hanging around the edges of the Evernote world for a long time (and in fact use EN for certain limited purposes), but I see no indication that my fantasy list above will ever be realized. My grumpy conclusion is that EN is now devoting its time and abundant resources to things like a food app (I notice that the management there has been oddly obsessed with photographing wine labels for many years) and cute little games that can be played with the iPad cover.