(Archived) What's the deal?

[triglyph 0]

How odd that Evernote doesn't seem to be capable of importing notes from text files or the exported library of another application. I've used many note management apps and I've never seen one that couldn't import multiple notes.

Seems odd as a business decision — discourages people from converting over from Soho Notes, Yojimbo or Together. The only thing Evernote has going for it that the others don't is an iPhone app. The exception is Soho Notes which I used for years but which has become so buggy and balky from being over-engineered that I had to stop using it.

Also, the yearly subscription is way out of line for a small application like this that has competition you can buy outright for $39. If I use Evernote Premium for ten years (like I did with Soho Notes) that would come to $450; way too much.

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

The only thing Evernote has going for it that the others don't is an iPhone app.

Hardly.

Also, the yearly subscription is way out of line for a small application like this that has competition you can buy outright for $39. If I use Evernote Premium for ten years (like I did with Soho Notes) that would come to $450; way too much.

If you don't need the premium features, one can end up using EN every day for several years without paying a penny.

Sounds like you need to brush up on what Evernote can do.

[crispinb 8]

How odd that Evernote doesn't seem to be capable of importing notes from text files or the exported library of another application. I've used many note management apps and I've never seen one that couldn't import multiple notes.

Seems odd as a business decision — discourages people from converting over from Soho Notes, Yojimbo or Together. The only thing Evernote has going for it that the others don't is an iPhone app.

From a business point of view, for what it's worth, I think you'll find that 'import' facilities are driven the other way round. That is, a widely-used app will force *others* to import *it*. So it turns out that most note apps import Evernote *.enex files because the large EN user base is the one they want to capture. Try selling a word-processing app that doesn't import Word files!

Practically speaking, EN does have an extensive API, which enables this kind of thing to fill in functionality gaps. There's probably more out there if you search around.

Also, the yearly subscription is way out of line for a small application like this that has competition you can buy outright for $39. If I use Evernote Premium for ten years (like I did with Soho Notes) that would come to $450; way too muc.

EN is far from a 'small application'. It's a combination of hosted service with a growing array of clients for various platforms, including fully-hosted web app. Comparing this with standalone apps like Yojimbo is hardly to the point. Dropbox might be a fairer comparison, and it's double EN's price. Such comparisons are pretty hard because apps all have their own strengths (Dropbox does much less than EN, which makes it appear expensive, but on the other hand it's better-made, so does that make it good value?). EN seems inexpensive to me for what it offers.

[sterlingz 7]

Also, the yearly subscription is way out of line for a small application like this that has competition you can buy outright for $39. If I use Evernote Premium for ten years (like I did with Soho Notes) that would come to $450; way too much.

But an Evernote subscription is not comparable to these stand-alone apps because it includes desktop clients, mobile clients, a web client, robust syncing, cloud storage with backup versions, and APIs that allow all sorts of interesting integrations from other companies. Not to mention that you don't need to be a Premium subscriber to capitalize on most of these features, and you can jump back and forth between Premium and free without losing any of your data.

Prior to Evernote, I was a Soho Notes user, and I found Chronos to be one of the worst software companies I've ever dealt with. They were absolutely terrible, coming out with a new version pretty much every year, while leaving bugs in the previous version un-fixed. Every version brought more bloat, but it was often necessary to upgrade just to keep up with OS compatibility. Their syncing was horrific. I spent more money than I care to think about on that buggy software. Yojimbo is well regarded, but a quick look at reviews of their iPad app shows that they have a ways to go in the mobile space. DevonThink To Go (universal app for iOS) looks promising, but only syncs on WiFi which is a total dealbreaker for me - I gave up on Things for that reason. I will take your point that importing could be smoother - when I ditched Soho Notes, this was a stumbling block. I ended up leaving a lot of stuff behind.

I do have issues with Evernote's speed of development sometimes, but I am hoping for great things from the forthcoming Mac and iOS clients. I think Evernote provides decent value for the money, and there's always the free version if you don't want all the features. I'm extremely pleased with Evernote's rapid repsonse to the Firesheep threat, giving SSL access to all users rather than just Premium subscribers - it shows how much they care about the user base.

[No Name 0]

I'm extremely pleased with Evernote's rapid repsonse to the Firesheep threat, giving SSL access to all users rather than just Premium subscribers - it shows how much they care about the user base.

Is this documented somewhere?

Looking into Evernote SSL support and it looks like -- Free users get SSL for authentication. Paid users get SSL for all transmissions.

If this has changed, please reference the source of info.

[sterlingz 7]

I'm extremely pleased with Evernote's rapid repsonse to the Firesheep threat, giving SSL access to all users rather than just Premium subscribers - it shows how much they care about the user base.

Is this documented somewhere?

Looking into Evernote SSL support and it looks like -- Free users get SSL for authentication. Paid users get SSL for all transmissions.

If this has changed, please reference the source of info.

I don't think Evernote has made a formal announcement about this as the Mac client hasn't been updated yet, but once it is they will. Windows and web users currently have SSL protection though, as Dave Engberg said on this thread.

Dave, it probably would be worth updating the chart with Premium features to make this clearer. I think this is a point of confusion for folks.

[engberg 89]

2.0 uses SSL for all users, but that's still in Alpha. We don't want to change anything on our web site or make any announcements until all of the released versions of our software use SSL for everyone. That's safer than telling people that it's available(*) and then risk someone making an incorrect decision on one platform.

I think the full Mac release will probably be the right point to announce something and update the web site, since the other major platforms have been released and updated now.