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.

At some point in the coming months you'll have to as it will break at some point (due to server changes only supported in latest version).

I've switched to Keep It, which has an import function for Evernote (preserving tags), so migrating doesn't take long.

I've used EN since 2009 and thus have a long history with it. I recommended it to many people in all those years. I have had many thousands of notes in it, so I think I'm a heavy user. I don't want to prove anything. I have no expertise in a lot of areas, but do have some knowledge in few ones, one of which is development. I'm developing since 1983 and have seen a lot of toolsets. I once also looked at Electron and walked away quickly from it. It's very tempting to use a cross-platform like this. It will save you a lot of time. But if you want to create an app that is excellent and provides a good user experience then the only way to do this is going the native route. At my work I *have* to use several Electron and/or web based apps. I hate it. It's embarrassing that I need a PC with 32GB to be able to work a bit comfortable, because: Teams uses between 800-1200 MB memory. Visual Code uses between 600-1000 MB memory (for editing a 2KB html file ....). Opening a 20MB XML file takes 1 minute to load. Power BI starts with 1GB memory and after an hour or so working it raises to 15GB-20GB (not a typo) to work with 200MB of data. Etc. At home I use a Mac and can choose what I want, so that's only native. Opening a 20MB file takes 3 seconds to load in the native BBEdit. Native apps also give you the native look-and-feel and are well integrated with the OS. If I work on a Mac I want apps that behave like a Mac app. Same on Windows. You may see this as a lecture or see me as someone who wants to prove something. Whatever. I just think EN made a big mistake and I just don't want to use a note taking app that uses 1,2 GB of memory (after an hour or so when you have opened several notes). I hope that EN is doing well and I hope that its users, those who stay with it, are very happy with it. But I'm out.

You're clearly not a developer. Otherwise you would know that apps are sandboxed and thus apps can't really see what other apps are using or doing. I don't know what SystemGuard does to show a figure, but it clearly can't know it. 47MB can't be right, unless you believe it. As said EN v10 uses Electron which in itself uses Chromium, and that doesn't fit at all in 47MB. That was my last "lecture" for you. Good luck.

I surely hope that you'll continue to have a good experience. The only thing I wanted to say is that native is always better, simply because it doesn't have the overhead that web apps have. Native = less memory, fast, real iOS look-and-feel and less battery consumption. Web apps are great for (some lazy) developers, but not for users.

That's disk space, not memory. I don't know if you're a programmer, but you could run it in a simulator and watch the memory usage. It's using a lot, meaning that iOS will, at some point, have to close other apps from the background, which means that the overall user experience is less optimal. It's not a rule that's in all cases right, but if you see an app that's over 100MB then often it's a web app. In comparison, Keep It is 38MB.

Electron can never use less memory than a native version. Impossible. Electron uses a number of helper processes, that you'll to take in account. Add them all up then an Electron app uses at least 500-600MB, without doing anything. That's because it's a web app that needs web technology: Chromium, Node.js and some other JS library. For example the Postman app (for testing API's) also uses Electron. If you install it fresh, without anything loaded, it uses 600MB, which will rise to 1,2-1,6 GB easily when you're actually start working with it. I can't think of any Electron app that performs ok (= not too much memory, fast as native, not sluggish). That includes Electron apps like Visual Code; compare this one with SublimeText or BBEdit for example. Big difference. Imho ....

Nope. It has to do with the fact that the new EN isn't a native app anymore, but instead a web app that isn't (and can never be) fully integrated with the OS. I never had this problem before, until v10 arrived. The background activity is still the same as it always was in iOS. It just looks at how active you are with the app. If you use it a lot, the background fetch will be done more frequently.

For what it's worth: I'm in the process of migrating to Keep It, which is fully native on iOS and macOS, and you'll notice that. In the past weeks I hesitated a lot, because I've used Evernote since 2009. Today I did try to convince me to stay with Evernote. I worked with it for an hour of so. The memory usage at that point was 1,5 GB. Yes GB!. Also I added tags to some notes, but those notes weren't in the result when I searched for that tag. I've said it before. The new Evernote is made with the notorious Electron toolset. What you get is a web application in a native shell. Evernote is an excellent example to show people why native is soo much better in every way. Today I'm finally going to migrate all my notes to Keep It and then close my account. Bye Evernote, I loved you until the new CEO messed it up.

Not related to this topic, but can you explain to me why your username ends with “kkk”?