A Positive Post - I've Returned

[MrEvernoteMcGee 11]

I've been using Evernote for years. Unfortunately, with the price increases as of late I've had to create new accounts so I can apply a student discount each year. To me, the service is worth every drop of its $45 a month, but I just couldn't justify spending $90 on it here in Canada. Especially not when Office is about the same price and you get so much more bang for your buck. Anyway, while I may appear as a relatively new user here, I've been on this forum for I don't know, at least five maybe seven years.

I was using Evernote to house notes for school, work, and personal use. This is because I went back to school taking online courses while working a full-time job.

Now that I am done school, I thought I would give another system a try and see if I could ween myself off Evernote. I had been using Bear for a couple of months on iOS and my Macs at home, and OneNote at work. OneNote is pretty good - and I do share notes with coworkers...I will continue to use it in that respect. But there are a few things that drive me nuts about OneNote too.

1) Having to sync individual notebooks - it's not one big, beautiful sync package like Evernote. I don't want to have to remember if I saved one Notebook on OneDrive and another on the network drive at work.

2) Annotating documents and images doesn't work for me. It's great that I can highlight a document and take notes, but the minute I move objects in the note around, the document moves while all my markups stay in place -- they're two separate layers. I much prefer Evernote's "stay where I put you" approach.

3) The "type anywhere, just not here" editor. It's a free editor in that you can click anywhere, but too often it wouldn't let me put the cursor right where I wanted. Likewise with saving attachments. It wouldn't let me save the icons in a row, and it would jostle them around the screen at random.

So while I left for a bit - and even posted a story about it on this forum - I'm now back. I've been given some additional responsibilities at work and the thought of annotating PDF's in OneNote was enough to make me reconsider. Then I remembered how superior the web clipper is to anything else on the market and how I'll be researching a vacation soon and I realized, I have to come back.

Bear is good on iOS, but still not quite up to par with the features of Evernote. For personal use it makes total sense, but for heavy documents and business use, not so much. Especially in a Windows environment ? Great app though.

There may be troubles in the front office, and they may still be trying to figure out how to monetize the thing properly, but my god - even with it's faults it's just SO POWERFUL. I hope they can turn it around, and I hope they sort everything out. I also hope there's a way to do that and still offer premium for the more reasonable price of $45 a year. At that cost it's an absolute no-brainer -- at almost $100, even guys (and gals) like me who appreciate what it can do, well - we have to think long and hard about it's value at that point, powerful as the app may be.