tony10000

It is also interesting to note that Ian Small has not tweeted since Sept 16th.  I think that is highly unusual given the volume and velocity of negative feedback.

They could have someone from the company (for example, Ian Small) get on these threads and explain what is going on, what the roadmap looks like, and provide a bit of reassurance.  They could also take a look at the Notion Help and Support page if they want to see what a communicative and responsive company does.  Not that hard.  

(And by the way, the "hundreds of millions of users" statement is a bit hyperbolic.  The vast majority are freemium users who may not use the app very often if at all.  Evernote definitely has a customer engagement problem).

See:

https://www.profitwell.com/recur/all/evernote-tradeoffs

The lack of communication and support is certainly troubling and totally unnecessary for a company the size of Evernote.  I believe that this may be a last ditch effort to salvage the platform and it doesn't seem to be working too well.   That is why I exported all of my data and moved to Notion.  I still have my stuff on EN for the time being and am watching closely to see what happens.  However, things do not look good.

6 hours ago, chronistin said:

As for importing notes, be careful. Notion does auto detect tables and takes them over to their own format - this butchers some notes like emails sent in html format and similar stuff. 

I really like notion, have been using it for some time now. But for my purposes, it is not an EN replacement. No way to store all data locally, no API (yet) and therefore no way to automate things, no indexing of document / image content. 

My solution is to store all of the data I need offline in markdown format and access it with the Atom Editor.  Atom is also an Electron app...in fact Atom Shell became Electron.

I just export the folders I need from Notion, rename them, and set each one up as a project folder in Atom.

It reads the markdown files just fine and has a very good directory structure.  The search function is decent.  

You can also export as HTML and open in a browser.  It creates a directory page with all of the files and links to each individual page.  Very slick!

12 minutes ago, CalS said:

I get the why.  Just not sure of the method.  

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.... I worked for a company where we tried a similar thing with commercial application software, same apps running on different devices.  It was a cluster which was abandoned.  Since then tech has definitely improved.  The core issues haven't changed much though.  🤷‍♂️

Electron seems to be a dominant platform for SaaS web apps.  Visual Studio Code, Slack, Skype, Discord, WhatsApp, Pexels, Notion, Wordpress, and now Evernote all use the platform.

18 minutes ago, CalS said:

Okay.  Point of all this chaos on the forums the last couple of months is that old EN did not have these issues which has generated a WTF response from some not oft seen premium users.  For some of us EN was a one stop shop as a personal data, task, whatever hub. 

Saying Electron is slow is not new news.  Any web server based product is slow relative to a local app.  If they can somehow make the client side dominant in search there is hope for speed.  Function, well that's fully in their hands.

They obviously made that decision for economic reasons.  They could not afford teams of devs to support Mac, Windows, iOS, Android, and the web.  Electron runs everywhere with a uniform code base.  Welcome to the world of SaaS web apps!

3 minutes ago, CalS said:

Yup.  EN and the rest of us are dealing with the consequences of their development platform decision. 

Maybe the device of choice in this new world order should be a Chromebook or equivalent.    Maybe x years out when we have 10G and ultrafast servers.  But today, not so much.

That is why I am using Scrivener as an alternate app for stuff I need to have available locally.  It syncs to Dropbox and it is blazingly fast.

4 minutes ago, CalS said:

Yup, so responsiveness is an issue with V10, hence I am sticking with 6.25.1 for now.  Speed and the myriad of missing function hopefully to be replaced.

There is some optimization that can be done, but you will still be limited by the Internet and their servers on the Electron platform:

https://www.electronjs.org/docs/tutorial/performance

3 minutes ago, eric99 said:

Yeah, and even with disconnected network, notes are processed at 1 note per second (adding tags, move etc) !  So, the servers are not the only problem. This is an extremely slow (first) implementation, it must be possible to optimize this for sure...

Electron (and the Atom editor) are not known for blazing speed since the are running  Node.js on Chromium.   They will never be as fast as compiled code.

8 minutes ago, CalS said:

Most access is through the servers now so responsiveness is an issue.

That is because it is now running directly from a web browser (Chromium) rather than downloading the data and accessing it on your computer.   So, you are totally dependent on their servers and your Internet connection.

8 minutes ago, eric99 said:

Talking about SQL Lite, do you know that it is still used in V10 or is there another technology  to cache the data locally?

It is all Electron DB and everything is stored in a local data cache.  More info on Electron here:

https://www.electronjs.org/docs

4 hours ago, eric99 said:

It is interesting to know that EN V6, which is perceived sufficiently responsive, was already written in javascript and based on Chromium as well (CF3).

I don't think responsiveness is the issue as much as the feature set.  And version 6 uses several technologies including Chromium, SQL Lite, HTML Tiny, libxml, Open BSD, libwebsockets, etc.   Evernote 10 and Notion are a different beast entirely.  Just look at the file structure.  

3 minutes ago, Tamagotchi said:

Thanks. Yes, I have read a bit about Chromium but did not appreciate this connection. Makes sense.

Yeah. it basically is a derivative of Chrome apps...and the Atom editor.  I believe it was originally called Atom shell.

2 minutes ago, DTLow said:

While the Legacy product continues to function, I'm content (Mac user)
and have no reason to join the increasingly despondent crowd

Different strokes for different folks...if you are content and it works for you, no need to change.

1 minute ago, eric99 said:

Interesting, is there a way back from notion to EN? Does notion have .enex export?

No exex export.  Options are PDF, Markdown+CSV, and HTML.  It would be easy to get any of those into EN.  

By comparison, the current EN only offers ENEX export.

Communication is essential.  I see a lot of discontentment and very little communication. People vote with their feet.

3 minutes ago, ArjenC said:

I fully understand you.
Made the same consideration months ago.
Tried to embrace Notion, but failed. Hope you will have a better experience at Notion.

So far, so good.  I was on a monthly plan, so easy enough to switch back.  I still have EN installed and will monitor their progress and direction.

1 minute ago, ArjenC said:

I've tried Notion...a couple of weeks/months... but it is not made for productivity. Way too many distractions and options to be productive.
It is a great tool, but Evernote is better (version 10 hopefully soon) for productivity and second brain.

You don't have to make it complex and pretty like many users do.  

I just transferred my data from EN and navigate from the bar on the left. 

I created my favorites and am happy with the results.  

EN and Notion are more alike than different since they are both running on Electron.  

Notion has much better communication with its customers and I like their roadmap.

As I said, YMMV

Electron is Node.js running in a Chromium shell.  Electron facilitates the SaaS model.  Devs love it because they get monthly income and can avoid giving Apple a large cut of their cash flow.  

I was on a monthly subscription.  I canceled it and moved to Notion.  Works for me.  YMMV.

4 minutes ago, avevers said:

How many notes did you migrate @tony10000? And how are you finding search?

 

Some interesting new developments in Notion announced this week.

I have less than 1700.  Search seems to work OK, but I really don't access archived stuff that often and everything is is in a well defined folder structure.  So, no worries for me!

Made the switch to Notion, exported my EN data, and switched back to EN Basic.    Seems to be working great thus far.

54 minutes ago, rob24hrs said:

Are they Russian coders? Nimbus was looking promising but alarm bells going off......https://discussion.evernote.com/forums/topic/111887-go-take-a-look-at-nimbus-note/?do=findComment&comment=522360

Alarm bells?  Their HQ is reportedly a tech hub here in Cleveland.   From a Twitter convo with them:

21 minutes ago, aashish108 said:

It's the closest but still feels rough. 

Importer does not import 100% of enex in some cases. Its kinda minor but there has been some major instances. 

Sometimes slow performance than even new Evernote. 

Non-hierarchical tags means a long list of tags. 

New Evernote dark theme beats Nimbus's. 

A lot of tools support Evernote import from enex files. Not with Nimbus which exports to html or pdf. So feels like more of a lock in? 

Transferring notes to another workspace is buggy, slow in Nimbus. 

Nimbus web clipper on chrome has a lot of bad reviews compared to Evernote. 

You can't share a folder to a specific email. You can only make a folder totally public or make. It public and password protect it. I prefer Evernote's model of sharing. 

Nimbus Note doesn't sound that great from what I am reading.  I would also worry about the "lock in" and future of NimbusWeb.  So, I will stay put and see what happens as I adjust my workflow.

I am seriously looking at Nimbus Note.   It is the closest product that I have found to EN and the pricing is much lower.  Has anyone switched to it and what have your experiences been.  Just curious.