(Archived) Evernote v. 'Project Book'

[Dudds 0]

Hi.  I've used Evernote for around three years now - and it now forms a central part of my online life.  However, I have just heard a radio interview with the CEO of Project Book stating it's product is 'more available' should 'your current provider disappear'.  Does anyone have experience of ProjectBook.io - and are his claims correct?

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

Hi.  I've used Evernote for around three years now - and it now forms a central part of my online life.  However, I have just heard a radio interview with the CEO of Project Book stating it's product is 'more available' should 'your current provider disappear'.  Does anyone have experience of ProjectBook.io - and are his claims correct?

Hi. There is a nice overview of what it does, and where the company sees itself going here (http://www.macworld.com/article/1167989/new_ipad_app_projectbook_merges_note_taker_with_task_manager.html). I'm intrigued, and I might try it someday, but there are a lot of deficiencies (as you would expect with any new product) that make me wary. It is only an iPad app, so that limits its usefulness, but most importantly (as far as I can tell) they have no terms of service. In other words, you give them your data and they can do whatever they want with it. I'm not too keen on that.

To address your question about portability (ability to move content in and out of it), I see no word anywhere about how content is to be exported / imported. I hope they will make it clearer how they store data (if they do), and how much control we have over our data (if we have any). After all, it may well be that once it is in there (like Apple Notes) the only way to get it out is to copy/paste it out. Even then, they might decide to hold onto that data. Who knows? They apparently have no TOS. Who doesn't have a privacy policy or terms of service agreement these days? To see them without these basic documents gives me the impression that they are not taking our privacy and data ownership seriously.

I doubt they will beat Evernote in terms of portability or trustworthiness, because you can export all of your notes out of Evernote into HTML format (one of the most universal ones available) any time you want (it takes me about 2 minutes with several thousand notes) and you can import most major formats into Evernote any time you want as well. Evernote is pretty clear about how much they value your ability to have control of your data (http://blog.evernote.com/blog/2011/03/24/evernotes-three-laws-of-data-protection/), and this is something I think makes them stand out from the competition.

[Dudds 0]

Excellent.  Many thanks for taking the time to reply.  I don't need much convincing to stay with Evernote.  Long may it continue.