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Evernote as a "web app"? A place to vent..


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(Maybe people can vent here instead of filling up the comments about a search video with worry about Evernote's direction)

First, Evernote has announced some goals, but not exactly how they are going to get there. And they have released a Windows only beta of the new technology, which I haven't seen, not being a Windows user. There is also a new Evernote Web, but I don't know if that is using the same new technology that the Windows beta is using.

And we don't know what the "new" technology is, though it appears to be Electron, or something similar that allows multiplatform development using web based tools. There are pros and cons to Electron if you search the web. There are a number of apps that use Electron, the two I'm familiar with are Notion and Simplenote. Notion is no speed demon, but Simplenote is. Notion doesn't work offline so well, but Simplenote does.

For me, while things are in beta, I'm not going to get too excited. I really think it is important for Evernote to unify their various platforms, so I'm hoping the new strategy and tech work out. It all depends on the implementation. But we can't judge the full implementation until we see it. Missing features in a beta doesn't mean they will never show up. 

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39 minutes ago, ObviousBob said:

And we don't know what the "new" technology is, though it appears to be Electron

Citation for this? They're currently using CEF for the editor engine in current applications, as far as I know; certainly for the Windows product.

Note that I have't seen the new Windows beta either (as opposed to the standard Windows native application's beta track versions), so I don't have any sense as to how that's working. 

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43 minutes ago, jefito said:

Citation for this? They're currently using CEF for the editor engine in current applications, as far as I know; certainly for the Windows product.

Nothing to cite.. I said we don't know what technology they are using, but as many other posters have speculated, it appears to be web based (so one code base works everywhere) and Electron is used by a number of existing apps as a way to accomplish this. This thread is based entirely on speculation, maybe I should have been clearer. We won't know for sure until Evernote tells us.

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7 hours ago, ObviousBob said:

Nothing to cite.. I said we don't know what technology they are using, but as many other posters have speculated, it appears to be web based (so one code base works everywhere) and Electron is used by a number of existing apps as a way to accomplish this. This thread is based entirely on speculation, maybe I should have been clearer. We won't know for sure until Evernote tells us.

OK, fair enough. I haven't seen speculation about Electron, but I know for a fact that Google CEF (Chromuim Embedded Framework, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_Embedded_Framework) is being used now. Actually, after a quick web search, here's an article on the relationship between Electron & CEF: https://electronjs.org/blog/electron-internals-building-chromium-as-a-library. Interesting, but probably doesn't shed much light on the Evernote situation.Note: I'm not any kind of expert on this stuff. Developer, yes, but in a different world altogether.

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Of course, there's this: 

Money quote:

Quote

2. No one ever said anything about making Evernote a web-only experience.  Just because we demo a set of improvements to search on web (which is the least adequate search experience, btw) doesn't mean this is the only thing we are working on.  In a series of videos that may well have a lot of episodes by the time we're done (depending on the response we get, I guess), we judged it to be a reasonably approachable initial subject for a first video.  Why?  It's relatively easy to understand.  It's visual.

3. Following up on #2 above, we are NOT planning on eliminating Windows and Mac versions of Evernote with local stores, nor Android and iOS versions with local stores, etc.  Being able to use Evernote whether online or offline is a major feature/benefit and in a million years that's not going away.  Of course, having a local store would be even better if sync was fully robust.  Working on that.

Nothing about any new technology, not that that matters much, at least to me, except as curiosity only.

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30 minutes ago, jefito said:

Money quote:

My main concern, which was not addressed here, is concerning the possible loss of local (non-sync'd) notebooks ... not local (offline) storage.  I will admit it is an extrapolation based on my experience with the preview versions and what I saw in the video.

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1 hour ago, s2sailor said:

My main concern, which was not addressed here, is concerning the possible loss of local (non-sync'd) notebooks ... not local (offline) storage.  I will admit it is an extrapolation based on my experience with the preview versions and what I saw in the video.

You're right -- that's not explicitly addresses. I think there's be a lot of unhappy people with that decision, if they made it,  Some might be mollified if they also offered encryption on notes and/or notebooks. My sense is that they wouldn't eliminate local notebooks, but that's not based on anything by my (fallible) intuition, so it's be good to get that clarified.

 

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1 hour ago, jefito said:

Some might be mollified if they also offered encryption on notes and/or notebooks. 

I'm in this camp.  I'm sure local notebooks are a thorn in development's and support's sides.  It would make sense to include everything under sync/server control BUT the only reasonable substitute, IMO, is zero knowledge encrypted notebooks.  That has its own set of tradeoffs, so we'll see how this plays out.

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Regarding local notebooks, I previously posted this:

I know it isn't a 100% guarantee, but I'm pretty confident in the response from the lead. We understand the importance of local notebooks to a subset of our users.

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28 minutes ago, Scott T. said:

Regarding local notebooks, I previously posted this:

I know it isn't a 100% guarantee, but I'm pretty confident in the response from the lead. We understand the importance of local notebooks to a subset of our users.

Yes you did, and jeez I'd completely forgotten that you had followed up with a response.  Thanks for the reminder.  I won't stir the mud up on this one again ... but considering I forgot once already, no promises 😀

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