It looks like EN is off to a bad start in its latest policy changes. I am linking to their blog as there are too many articles about it to link to.

https://blog.evernote.com/blog/2016/12/15/note-chris-oneill-evernotes-privacy-policy/

Good luck EN,

--Ken

Thanks.

I read the policy when Evernote sent a note to users last week or so. It's so convoluted that there's no reason to expect Evernote won't be reading and "evaluating" user data.

But, really, is there any reason to expect anyone in industry or government gives a whit about privacy?

For years, now, I've never put a single personal thing into Evernote. It's a clipper bucket for articles and clipping segments of web sites, and does OK that way.

I've been gradually pulling out of Evernote for a while now. This will only accelerate my exit.

Evernote CEO: "We recently announced an update to Evernote’s privacy policy that we communicated poorly, and it resulted in some understandable confusion."

Translation: "We thought we could slip these changes past our users without them bothering to read them."

Evernote just sent out this new message revoking their previous policy changes:

"Evernote recently announced a change to its privacy policy and received a lot of customer feedback expressing concerns. We’ve heard that feedback and we apologize for the poor communication.

"We have decided not to move forward with those changes that would have taken effect on January 23, 2017. Instead, in the coming months we will be revising our existing Privacy Policy. The main thing to know is this: your notes remain private, just as they’ve always been."

I ask you, is the OutlinerSoftware.com forum powerful or what?!

Happy holidays!

Steve Z.

Unbelievable isn't it. Do a bunch of guys from Evernote just make this stuff up when they head over to Starbucks for coffee? "Hey dude, let's water down our privacy policy." "Good idea, let me write something on my phone while we're waiting." Privacy policies have far ranging, legal, governmental / regulatory implications. You don't just go "oh, never mind".

The last statement I saw from Evernote said they had scrapped the new security policy, and now had a provision that users had to "opt in" if they agreed to having staff see their notes.

EN says their new policy is related to developing machine learning capability.

And therein is probably the major reason for hooking up with Google because of its capability with machine learning.

Daly

Paul Korm wrote:

Unbelievable isn't it. Do a bunch of guys from Evernote just make this
stuff up when they head over to Starbucks for coffee? "Hey dude, let's
water down our privacy policy." "Good idea, let me write something on
my phone while we're waiting." Privacy policies have far ranging,
legal, governmental / regulatory implications. You don't just go "oh,
never mind".

Paul Korm wrote:

Unbelievable isn’t it. Do a bunch of guys from Evernote just make this
stuff up when they head over to Starbucks for coffee? “Hey dude, let’s
water down our privacy policy.” “Good idea, let me write something on
my phone while we’re waiting.” Privacy policies have far ranging,
legal, governmental / regulatory implications. You don’t just go “oh,
never mind”.

__________________________________

Yes, it would seem to be unbelievable, but then that might be what was intended.
Maybe they wanted to take the focus of public attention off of their unfortunate pricing policy and at the same time establish a new privacy policy.
One way to do that might have been to do exactly what they have just done, where the initial privacy was merely a straw man put up for public shock/horror, intended to be downgraded as it has apparently been, after they had ostensibly "had second thoughts".

When talking with Evernote marketing, I'd advise people to keep both hands firmly in their pockets.

Larry Kollar wrote:

I've been gradually pulling out of Evernote for a while now. This will
only accelerate my exit.

What software are people here adopting as an alternative to Evernote for cross-platform, muti-client/synced web clipping, PDF tagging, and notetaking?

I would love to ditch EN but I don't know of a suitable alternative for what I use it for. Sure there's OneNote but if there's one company I trust less than EN...

Anything out there other than OneNote that does the following:
- Full-text search of notes, web clippings, and PDFs
- tagging
- iOS, Android and Windows clients
- decent web clipping (web pages don't look mangled)
- Synced in some way - cloud or otherwise - so I can see my iOS notes in Windows and vice-versa.

It seems like there was a lot of competition in this space 10 years ago, but lately everyone just gave up because EN and ON had captured the market. Would be great to see a startup launch a secure alternative that included all of the above capabilities

[As an aside: I don't see this privacy policy issue as a big deal. I suspect every cloud service we use, if it is not zero-knowledge, allows staff to look at our data when necessary for technical reasons. EN just made the mistake of making this explicit instead of implicit.]

dan7000 wrote:

What software are people here adopting as an alternative to Evernote for
cross-platform, muti-client/synced web clipping, PDF tagging, and
notetaking?

I've managed to avoid both Evernote and OneNote for now. I don't have a single 'bag' for everything. Some plain text notes and URLs go into WorkFlowy (using the "Clip to WorkFlowy" extension in Chrome), which syncs across all my devices.

Random web pages that I decide to keep get saved/printed as PDF (in Chrome) straight into Google Drive, which is cross-platform. I can use hierarchical folders, and while there are no tags, you can add comments to a file, and files and image content are searchable.

If a web page or file is relevant to some of my past or current projects, and if I'm not on my Windows machine, it gets emailed to my Gmail account (using "Send this link with Gmail" Chrome extension), and then processed later to end up in either Surfulater or ConnectedText (neither of which are cross-platform).

dan7000 wrote:

What software are people here adopting as an alternative to Evernote for
cross-platform, muti-client/synced web clipping, PDF tagging, and
notetaking?

Good question -- one I often ask myself. The solution for me is to turn to several apps.

I have gradually moved most of my data out of Evernote, but I am still using it for one big project: a literary website that my wife and I maintain (https://williammorrislibrary.wordpress.com/

For my archive of older research notes, I throw everything into OneNote; I also fall back on OneNote, incidentally, for family history material, because it is easy and fun to use, and it looks almost like an old-fashioned scrapbook on the screen.

For bibliographical references and links, I have adopted CintaNotes, which is probably too stripped-down to serve as a full-fledged database, but its tagging system works brilliantly for short citations.

Over a period of years I was immersed in MyInfo, for which I still feel a great deal of affection. It was always reliably stable and had probably the most attractive UI of any program I've ever encountered. But the pace of development has been sluggish (to put it mildly); I am now trying out a beta version of MyInfo 7, which looks promising, but there is still no indication of when that will be released. The new version will offer the *possibility* of cross-platform apps at some unspecified time in the future.

Lately I've also been playing around with RightNote. It's very similar to MyInfo -- probably more powerful but also less visually attractive. I'm afraid I find its menus cluttered and confusing. But it does the job efficiently, though it's available only on Windows. (While it does offer some integration with EverNote, the syncing seems too slow to be useful.)

Like everyone else on this forum, I fantasize constantly about the perfect app that would combine the strengths of all of the above. I assume it will never materialize.

dan7000 wrote:

What software are people here adopting as an alternative to Evernote for
cross-platform, muti-client/synced web clipping, PDF tagging, and
notetaking?

I've been playing with Google Keep for a while. Its biggest lack is a web clipper for desktop browsers right now, unless you're using Chrome.



t th

As a Mac user, I currently use Bear and Outlinely for general notes of all kinds. I run both on macOS and iOS.

Bear is ideal for storing short extracts from web pages, and for making long lists of tasks. Outlinely is ideal for monitoring and checking off project-related tasks, because you can fold them and take detailed notes. So I tend to use them together - Bear for the broad overview, Outlinely for specific projects. In principle Todoist would also be ideal for this, but I find Todoist (very) frustrating from a note-taking point of view. If only they would adopt full GitHub-style Markdown!

For storing PDFs I usually use Curiota on macOS, saving the files into a dedicated Soonr folder so I can sync them with my iOS devices if I want to (Soonr uses a selective synchronisation approach on iOS).

But I also use Notebooks for stuff I know I want to transfer between platforms. Sometimes I also use Dropbox, because I have a couple of folders in there that sync automatically with the excellent Documents on my iOS devices (formerly ReaddleDocs).

As mentioned, I use Soonr on both platforms, usually for transferring Office documents. I've experimented with Together and Keep Everything, but have found that I don't want to store entire databases of bulky PDFs on my iOS devices. I've just started to experiment with DEVONthink Pro on iOS, but haven't got very far yet.

There's a very nice summary of various iOS apps used in professional workflows on macstories.net, the website run by Federico Viticci, in his comprehensive summary of the iPad Pro used as a main workstation (he's almost entirely abandoned his Macs). There are a couple of very interesting apps in there, as well as a lot of useful info on automation. He too is experimenting with DEVONthink Pro. But what he writes on various Markdown apps will probably interest forum members more.

I like Bill's list, but I would tweak a couple things.

I like Bear (despite being rather critical of it when it first arrived), but it's whole page clipping doesn't work well with paywalled sites, even when logged in. It needs to learn that trick. Also, Bear does not capture Safari URLs with its clippings.

To get a clipping + URL I recommend DEVONthink (desktop) with it's "Take Rich Text Note" service that makes a nice note and grabs the URL for that page at the same time. Curiota (sometimes) does this. But my favorite is the Safari clipping extension for iThoughtsX -- it also grabs the text and URL. Using iThoughtsX as a note capturing hub is great because it offers so many ways to move that data on to other apps in other formats.

Isn't it great how conversations like this start with one theme -- Evernote privacy policy -- and evolve after a few posts into "my favorite things". I think Steve Z needs to update the definition of CRIMP to include "never gets bored looking, reading, and commenting on lists of favorite apps". LOL

Yo Paul,

Well, I don't know about paywalled sites (I don't visit them, ever), but Bear certainly preserves URLs from captured web pages. You're right that earlier iterations didn't, but the last couple of releases save the URL to the bottom of the captured web page. It's pretty consistent, in my recent experience, and is one reason why I increasingly save web clips to Bear. That, and if you click and hold the Bear button on the Safari toolbar, you can choose one of three different save options. That's cool! I should add that I tend to save text fragments or even entire web page "articles" to my various databases, rather than just URLs, but I do that as well.

Web pages are best captured to Curiota as PDFs, in which case it's a good idea to modify your print settings so that headers and footers are automatically inserted; this will preserve the relevant URLs, as well as dates/times etc. Curiota can also save the URL plus a brief description on its own (using the standard Share button, rather than the context-menu Print to Curiota function). The Curiota search function is very good (and fast).

I like DEVONthink, and in fact I use the very powerful search functions for several business databases, but I find it a bit too unwieldy for fast, day-to-day use. But it's an impressively comprehensive system.

And I suppose another reason we CRIMPers love rehearsing our lists of favourite apps is because we're constantly learning about new features in apps we thought we already knew. For me, that's always highly entertaining! Oh, and useful.

Cheers,
Bill

Bill -- you're right, the result depends on what one does. I usually use an app's services for clipping -- so the "Send to Bear" and "Add Text as Curiota Note" do not capture the source URL, while the DEOVNthink "Take Rich Note" service does. But, as you point out, Bear's toolbar clipping tool does offer the option to save the URL.

What software are people here adopting as an alternative to Evernote for
cross-platform, muti-client/synced web clipping, PDF tagging, and
notetaking?

I have experimented with http://myclibu.com/ and found it useful. It is currently in beta and free. The author is quite well known on this forum.

--

Andy Brice
http://www.hyperplan.com

Wow - my main takeaway from this thread is that I really need to get myself a Mac and lock myself in a room for a couple of weeks for some serious crimping :)

Re Clibu: I had tried it back in 2014 (my login still worked, and I saw my notes from then).

It is fast and has some great formatting features. No native apps but that's not a dealbreaker as long as the website works great on mobile browsers, which I haven't tried yet. No offline access, but for me that's not a dealbreaker either.
No sharing or group features that I can see. To me that's a plus - it shows that they are not getting distracted with team features when what I want is a personal knowledge manager.

However, I tried the Web clipper on a couple of sites and could not get satisfactory results. That's a dealbreaker for me. On the plus side, the web clipper interface is very full-featured - allows you to clip a selection of content and assign tags and notebooks and add additional descriptions right in the clipper. If the clipping worked better, it would be a serious contender.

Additionally, if Clibu wants to capitalize on the abandonment of Evernote, it would be great if they developed an Evernote import tool. But I realize that may not be worth the potentially very high development cost.

Is anybody using Nimbus Note?

https://nimbus.everhelper.me/note.php

Just for the record, Clibu has an offline version (Clibu op) which I've been using for a while. Not yet bug-free, but Neville is, as ever, very responsive to bug reports and feature requests.

dan7000 wrote:

Re Clibu: ..... No offline access

I tried it for a while about 18 months ago, liked the general concept, but found that the search function didn't work properly. However, the developer said they'd work on it, and seeing your post reminds me that I haven't given it a second chance. Hm. Another spectacular Christmas CRIMPing opportunity!

Tomasz Raburski wrote:

Is anybody using Nimbus Note?

https://nimbus.everhelper.me/note.php

Although looking at it again, I realise I already do more or less all the things I experimented with in Nimbus Notes in Bear.

The latter doesn't support alerts/due dates etc., but is so flexible otherwise that I prefer it to task managers.

One of the nicest apps that integrates with Evernote is Awesome Note, currently available on iOS only (oh, and maybe also on Android - I know Samsung included it on their Android devices for a while).

Unfortunately there are no signs of the developer producing a macOS desktop version (or any other desktop version). It's a very flexible app, not totally unlike OneNote or Outline+, but friendlier.

It's hard to resist an app named "Awesome".

Outline+ issued an update today on the Mac App Store that supposedly makes it easier to locate and import Circus Ponies notebooks. It doesn't. The update fails to recognize CP notebooks as CP notebooks. Typical for the buggy history of Outline+ -- promises are made, things fail and eventually get fixed, but not well.

MadaboutDana wrote:

One of the nicest apps that integrates with Evernote is Awesome Note,
currently available on iOS only (oh, and maybe also on Android - I know
Samsung included it on their Android devices for a while).

Unfortunately there are no signs of the developer producing a macOS
desktop version (or any other desktop version). It's a very flexible
app, not totally unlike OneNote or Outline+, but friendlier.