Not a farewell after all

[Stathis 98]

Howdy everyone,

Following up my Is this a farewell ? post a couple months ago, I thought it would be nice to share why after wasting a gigantic amount of time, I am back in EN. 

Applications I tried to migrate too

• OneNote
• Synology Note Station
• Bear
• Obsidian
• Joplin
• Drafts
• Notion

Also, I would like to outline my use case, so readers understand what I am looking for in the note taking app

• [Personal] Bills & Bills’ payments
• [Personal] Family’s documents
• [Business] Meeting notes
• [Business] Clients’ information and notes
• [Business & Personal] Knowledge base
• [Business & Personal] Saving web articles

OneNote

I was very close at transitioning to OneNote, but I eventually decided not to because of the difficulty finding staff and the crippled tagging system.

What I liked:

• The iPad app, including its free hand annotating capabilities
• OneNote notebook databases are stored files
• Notebook > Sections > Pages give an extra depth of organization
• Ability to write anything wherever on screen, endless canvas
• Integrating options

What I didn’t like:

• Migration tool didn’t work
• Could not find my content
• OCR not supported in attachments
• Crippled tagging
• Microsoft ribbon
• Sharing only available with a Microsoft account

 

Synology Note Station

Really awesome functionalities, being a proper Evernote copycat. It also has a tasks feature, that EN just introduced ! Despite not ending up in it, I am keeping it as a local backup of EN, sadly this includes manually exporting and importing notebooks.

What I liked:

• Self-hosting
• The ability to create parent/children tags
• Part of the Synology ecosystem, meaning all my backup strategies apply to my notes too
• All functionalities I need

What I didn’t like

• Limited shortcuts, very hard to discover
• Attachments were not inline, but hidden in a popover
• Tasks could not be viewed in a summary, but again hidden in a popover
• iPadOS app doesn’t work, it is crashing
• The app has a lot of annoying glitches
• 0 integration options

Bear

What an awesome app. Beautiful, amazing organization -only by tagging- system, full markdown support, amazing exports. Still keeping it as a markdown composer, but not as a note app.

What I liked 

• The UI
• Tagging
• Archiving
• Full markdown support
• Export to html

What I didn’t like

• Deployment; The app is using a sqlite database syncing to iCloud
• Just a markdown editor after all
• No OCR to attachments

 

Obsidian, Joplin, Drafts & Notion

Won’t make the comparison, because I didn’t use the apps a lot. Mainly, I didn’t like the UI. I am keeping that Drafts app though, because it offers unlimited (no joking) integrating capabilities

Why I came back

While testing the other options, EN fixed its abysmal performance to a point that it is -almost- functional and introduced the Tasks feature, offering a functionality I need.

The most important reason why I came back though is experiencing the hard way that keeping a lot of productivity apps is the biggest productivity killer. EN is far from great, but it is a one app fits most for me. Keeping 1 app ended up being my most important criterion, so came back to EN.

Why I am frustrated, again

• Cannot create 2 filtered notes snippets in dashboard, because I am not paying the highest tier !!
• Cannot add 2 calendars, because I am not paying the highest tier !!
• iPad app is still crippled, including a frustrating issue where while being in a client meeting, EN locks my editing capabilities while writing in a note !!!!
• Only Google support for calendars and documents
• Tasks is great, how about focusing in other functionalities now that aren’t

That’s it, from my experience transitioning is a painful and time consuming process and I strongly recommend analyzing the transition app a lot before moving forward. Most important thing to avoid is keeping multiple productivity apps, ending up in a situation where you don’t know what to use for what, searching where you saved what and struggling to find a way to integrate where most note taking apps are still crippled at that section. It’s sad for EN, because it was the most integrated app a decade ago.

Happy note taking !

 

[PinkElephant 8,111]

Thanks for sharing, with a lot of well observed details that make or break workflows.

I want to point out that thought: Before moving in, always check if moving out is an option. Many alternatives look less great after checking and trying their export feature !

[gazumped 11,665]

Welcome back!  

Been there - got that T-shirt:  I've had many (many!) experiences where I moved from one app to another because of some temporary perceived benefit - only to find that my original provider had continued to plod onward and had either fixed the issues that annoyed me or introduced the feature that seduced me away in the meantime. 

We've been going through a bit of a patchy time (vague pun intended...) in the Evernote experience,  but it makes most sense to stick with it until you absolutely have no option but to change.

Thanks for the observations on the options - hope that will help others

[ObviousBob 140]

A couple of comments about Bear - I am running both Bear and Evernote in parallel trying to decide which to stick with.

I like the fact that Bear uses iCloud - the developers have no way to access my notes, and my experience is that syncing in quicker with Bear than with Evernote. Bear is a Markdown editor for sure, but can also serve as an archive - notes can contain anything you want as an attachment: image files, PDFs, links, web clips, or files from other apps, like Numbers spreadsheets.

But I agree that a weakness is lack of OCR of attachments. So I have to decide how important that is. For many, it may not be an issue, or only a minor one. So I have to weigh the advantage of OCR in Evernote versus the speed and UI of Bear.

One thing the two apps share is slow development. Evernote after almost a year, still doesn’t have all the functions of the previous version. And Bear has been promising a new version now for a couple of years, but hasn’t yet delivered.

 

 

 

[jdinatx 2]

Great thread and thanks for sharing.

My recent experiences with EN have, however, meant that I'm migrating to OneNote.  There are three things that have this happen:

1) Viewing on the iPad app of a web-clipped note.  These are unreadable as it only shows as a narrow column.

2) Offline notes doesn't seem to be working - ok, a new iPad, but this is seamless on a 40$ amazon fire.  Haven''t managed to get this going and don't want to simply select make all available offline.

3) The fact that you can no longer edit encrypted text within a note.  You have to make anew.  So seemingly stupid to enforce that by design (not a bug - I opened a service request for that one).

So paid subscription cancelled (it will run for a few more months, so more a statement of annoyance than anything else).  The big pain for me in using anything microsoft is the passwords / usernames.  For example, even though I have an office265 subscription, that's not a "microsoft" account.  Ridiculous, so I cannot share with that.

[Yiannis Miliatsis 1]

Great follow up article. Tried to get out myself, but the only app that was close to do it for me was TheBrain12. Visually appealing and full of features. Not at all good for sharing though, which is a must for me. 

[PinkElephant 8,111]

On 10/23/2021 at 11:56 PM, jdinatx said:

Great thread and thanks for sharing.

My recent experiences with EN have, however, meant that I'm migrating to OneNote.  There are three things that have this happen:

1) Viewing on the iPad app of a web-clipped note.  These are unreadable as it only shows as a narrow column.

2) Offline notes doesn't seem to be working - ok, a new iPad, but this is seamless on a 40$ amazon fire.  Haven''t managed to get this going and don't want to simply select make all available offline.

3) The fact that you can no longer edit encrypted text within a note.  You have to make anew.  So seemingly stupid to enforce that by design (not a bug - I opened a service request for that one).

Just 3 suggestions:

1) Just select the Web Clip, and tap on simplify (magic wand). It converts the clip into a reader style version, using the full screen and with better readability. And yes, the small width is a bug, hopefully fixed some day.

2) The download of offline content is limited by iOS, not by EN. iOS does not allow an app to stay active in the background for long, and it does not allow for battery intensive activities. The key is for the initial download to set autolockscreen to never, put the EN app into the foreground (active app), and let it run. Since you can do it in several steps during the night, it is not really a restriction. Connect the iPad to a charger while it loads the notes. Once the initial download is done, updates happen while using the app.

3) You can decrypt, edit, reencrypt. An alternative: Store content in an encrypted document, attach it to a note. Yes, a workaround, but depending on the app used it works on all platforms. EN encryption was always desktop only, and still is.

[Stathis 98]

On 10/24/2021 at 12:56 AM, jdinatx said:

The big pain for me in using anything microsoft is the passwords / usernames

I use and strongly recommend Bitwarden. 
 

1. It is free 

2. The paid tier includes one time passwords generation and it is so cheap for what if offers

3. It is the proper place to store passwords

[gazumped 11,665]

I'd endorse Bitwarden,  though there are plenty of other password manager apps - having an external resource to store passwords and secure notes is ideal for logging into anything,  anywhere...