Escaped to Keep It

Just saw the interview with the CEO on Youtube. Some quotes: EN is programmed in Javascript. Javascript is just like any other program language. Me: Yeah right ..... You can do anything in Javascript. Me: Yeah right ..... It's not because it's programmed in JS that it's a web app. EN 10 is not a web app ..... You run a web app in a browser. Me: and why is it that in the "native app" you can open the web tools? Javascript = web technology. And why is it that it looks exactly the same on all platforms? He also thinks that users want the same UI experience on all platforms. NO: on iOS I don't want it to look like an Android thing. Evernote is doomed with such a CEO.

Which is because they're all the same web interface packed in a "native" container. If they call this a native app, then all websites are native, because they're also running in a native container (= the browser). I'm now using Keep It on Apple's ecosystem and OneNote on Windows. Luckily I don't need to share them between Apple/Windows, so that's not a problem. Keep It is great and OneNote is surprisingly good. Both are truly native, but you'll never know what Microsoft will do one day, because all their new apps are also web based.

Yep. That's what I also did; move on. I was a big promotor of Evernote, because I really liked it a lot. Sadly, a new CEO arrived and made a terrible mistake to rewrite it as a web app. Very dumb decision. The best thing they could do is drop it and go back to the native code base. If you do it wisely, it's not that hard to maintain multiple native targets.

That's also Electron based, but it seems to be better.

Did you totalise all related EN processes (especially with "render" in its name)? Did you use the app or did you used EN in the Chrome browser. The app is basically the Chromium browser part plus libraries. So if you tested in the browser then the same in the app would be about 98/150 + 400. But yes, the memory usage mostly gets high when using attachments like PDF's.

Wow, that's high. That is with more than 2 tabs open I guess ....

Problem is that Electron start with a reasonable "small" memory footage of 500-600MB. But when you start working with it several browser rendering processes are kicking in which will then quickly raise the memory usage. In my experience, with not very heavy usage, the memory usage will go up to at least 800MB - 1,2GB (totalling all related EN processes). That is an Electron problem, so you'll see that with every Electron based app like Nimbus, Postman, Visual Code, Notion, etc. Knowing how Electron works this isn't solvable, whatever you try. Same is for overall speed experience and CPU usage. I'm experiencing very high CPU numbers, especially when the browser rendering is doing its work. I'm guessing you made a typo, because Chrome uses at least 300-400 MB with no sites open; not just "2-3K". If you have a lot of memory, like 32GB, then maybe you don't mind. But maybe you should also have a CPU with many cores to overcome the speed problem. I started programming in the 80's. In those days you just made an effort to make apps as efficient as possible. In those days you had quite some powerful apps that run more than ok in 1MB of memory. Nowadays they just say: buy a more powerful computer. Maybe I'm an old grumpy person, but I'm happy that I can still choose fast and efficient apps made by developers that do care. Those can be found mostly in the Apple eco system. That's why I did migrate to Keep It. I did have a fun ride with EN, until v10 came .... NB: I do keep following the discussions. If Evernote would revert the Electron app and continue working on the native version, then I'll coming back. But that's a dream that will never happen.

Be aware that Nimbus is also an Electron app, so it also uses a lot of memory and, in my experience, will be slow in many occasions.

I've moved to Keep It, in which searching is very fast. Never more than 1-3 seconds; mostly 1. I'm surprised that you claim that OneNote is slow in searching. In my experience search is also very fast in OneNote. Why can they be fast? Because like Keep It, OneNote uses local storage and both are native apps.

Did you really took an effort to try Keep It? Did you really read the post of Chris_W? You can nest deep; up to 9 levels or so. Formatting text is in the toolbar of the editor and making it bold is via the well-known (???) short-cut Cmd-B. For export, do you know of the Services menu? Have you looked at the file menu? Just be honest, you're clearly not interested in Keep It, otherwise you would have made a serious attempt. Which of the 23 points in Chris_W's post can you do in Bear?

Well, I don't agree about the "decent software". The reason that Microsoft is doing well now is because they are more and more concentrating on services like Azure. The software that they now create wouldn't pass the quality check of, let's say, 10 years ago. Nowadays their software is less native and more Electron based, resulting in apps that are clunky, slow and memory hogs. If I work in Visual Code, Outlook, Teams and Power BI al together my memory usage for these four alone is around 15GB (!). With native apps this would be around 2GB.

Didn’t know that :). Keep It keeps surprising me.

Yes, Keep It and Bear is only available for Apple. Bear is working on a web version, but they’re saying that for 1,5 years already. I’ve looked at Bear extensively myself and therefore can’t understand why you think it’s much better than Keep It. Keep It can do everything that Bear does and much more than that. Or maybe you like markdown; yes that is something Keep It doesn’t have.

True. But what I (also) meant is that whenever the app would stop working, you always have access to all your notes. Also you could easily edit the notes/files outside Keep It if you want. The “same title” issue can be explained by the fact that notes are saved as separate files in iCloud storage using the title as its filename. You can’t have files with the same name in the same folder Regarding version history: an other user already clearly answered that for me I just saw. You can just use other backup solutions that offer version history, like Time Machine or IDrive backup.

About iCloud: what I really like is that it uses plain folders and files for its storage. So you can open your content outside the app if you want. No lock-in.