Good bye WizNote, hello Nimbus Note

< Next Topic | Back to topic list | Previous Topic >

Posted by Mirce
Jan 26, 2017 at 11:31 AM

Just wanted to share with the fellow crimpers my recent experiences with two online information management tools - WizNote and Nimbus Note. I hesitated a long time to transfer my info collection grown in the last 10 years to an online PIM, I preferred (and mostly still do) to have my stuff locally available (MyInfo, Scrapbook, MyBase). However, as I want to have my info available on all my devices (PC, Android phone and iPad), manually synchronizing those devices became to cumbersome, plus the mobile part was for the most part Read-Only (export of the base from PC in PDF or html format).
I looked at WizNote, was quite impressed by their eco-system, and finally started to transfer my info to that platform, using the free account. Luckily, I didn’t get to far before the thing happened that I fear most with online services - a sudden change in their business model. One day I opened the PC app to transfer some data to it, when I was greeted with a message saying something like “Your trial period will expire soon…you will not be able to upload any new information from ....” Has anybody else with a free account encountered such a message?
On a sidenote, their Android app is kind of misbehaving. It starts itself as a service (or whatever this is called in Android) and wants to communicate with various IP-addresses, even if the app itself is not started.

Either way, after this episode, I decided to check out Nimbus Note. Quite frankly, I didn’t expect much, but after initially using just the web-editor, I was amazed by two facts:
1. The speed of the editor: It is like the “database” is locally, and not online. Compared to OneNote Online, it is blazing fast, on the same internet connection.
2. The note editor has the biggest function set of all the online editors I tested - bold, italic,underline, strikethrough,highlight, font color, clear formatting, insert image, insert link, indent, alignment, insert horizontal line, and TABLES.

Afterwards, I tested the Android app and the iOS app. Both are very close to the web-base experience, but the biggest plus for me is the way synchronizing works - you can define the normal sync - where only the note headers are synced, and the text only after you select the one one time. But you can also choose full-sync, which downloads all the notes to your mobile device. Afterwards, you can disconnect from the internet and use your base normally. I am not aware that any other of those online solutions offer this kind of sync (One Note Online surely doesn’t, Evernote - didn’t figure out which articles are kept locally, and up to which amount).
Nimbus supports tagging, and organization by folders (and subfolders, which is also quite rare with online PIMs).

The biggest drawback of Nimbus so far is the Windows application, which is somewhat buggy and has some issues with copy & paste from other applications. But the dev team is very active and helpful, so I am confident that they will sort it out. The free account is limited to 100 MB uploads per month and has also some restrictions regarding the size of notes and attachments (you can attach files to a note).

All in all, I am keeping my fingers crossed that I won’t discover an obstacle down the road which would prevent to use Nimbus efficiently.

Anybody else using this app? I’ve seen a thread here from 2014 which started about Nimbus Note, but was “hijacked” by a discussion about Evernote and other alternatives. Am I missing something obviously wrong with this application?

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Jan 26, 2017 at 12:05 PM

I tried Nimbus Notes a couple of years ago and was impressed. I didn’t commit to it because I was already relying on a few other note services and couldn’t see the real need of switching. At the time NN didn’t seem to do more than Evernote. But now it will be worth another look. Thankyou for the details of your experience.

Steve

Back to topic list