Wanderling Reborn

I ended up getting the paid version of Readdle's Scan Pro, thanks to the tip from @PinkElephant. So, now, I have pretty much all of them It has two big advantages compared to other scanning software I've tried: 1) It is as good as TurboScan in producing a readable B&W document from a color document with some text on colored background. Most other apps struggle to get readable B&W text in these areas. It's almost as fast as TS in automatically capturing multiple pages and defining crop areas. Unlike TurboScan, though, it has OCR. 2) It is the only scanning app that I know of which allows going back and editing scanned pages at any time. All other apps save the edits at some point after which they are no longer reversible. These two points make it my #1 choice now. It also has two disadvantages: 1) It does not add itself to the iOS Share To functionality. There's really no good reason for it in 2021. I contacted Readdle but got a canned "we'll think about it" reply. 2) The ability to save workflows is OK but not as good as what's provided by some other apps; e.g. I can add a personal Onedrive account, but not a Business one. This is a minor inconvenience.

Cloud-only is not the solution, it only takes one data loss incident to realize that. The best approach is to combine cloud storage with local backups. And at any rate, the issue is not cloud vs desktop, the issue is with performance.

Have you actually used a Mac before ? I was going to buy a MacBook but after my daughter got one & I got a chance to use it for a while, I realized I didn’t really like it all that much.

Let @gazumped correct me if I am wrong - I haven't used this functionality in a longtime - but if you don't have any attachments in your Onenote notes, I think the simplest way would be to export them to PDF or Word format, then use Evernote's folder monitoring (I assume it's still available in legacy?) to automatically import them into Evernote. If you download Onemore add-in for Onenote from Github, you should be able to select multiple pages and get them all bulk exported as individual files.

I disagree. If you are using an open source Office suit strictly for personal needs, sure. If you are a student working on a project with others, or if you are trying to quickly edit a work document on a home laptop, or you run a small business and need to use a customer specified template, you will very quickly run into formatting incompatibilities, even before you deal with macros. Been there.

Whether or not EN is a “superior” notetaker depends on personal preferences, learned habits, workflows, and having an intimate knowledge of the platform vs a cursory knowledge of competition. I wouldn’t be *that* categorical. From the simple business point of view, EN seems to have taken the path of squeezing more money from the existing committed users as opposed to trying to grow their user base. Which is not a sustainable long term plan.

There’s no 1:1compatibility. Libre Office is fine for personal use, but if you collaborate with others professionally, it’s not fully compatible. It’s somewhat compatible.

The recent note feature is available, it just works differently depending on the version and platform. On iOS, the most recent notes are shown in the Today widget. In W10 version, there’s a “history” button under the search button. And in the Desktop version, there’s no “Recent” command but there’s a free Onetastic Calendar add-in that shows what notes were edited on what day (which imho is a superior way of implementing the Recent or History view). But back to my point - it is not Evernote, and nothing else will be a direct replacement.

The way you describe your use, I think Joplin would work great for you. My wife still uses and loves Evernote. (Although she expects me to organize and clean up her records...). She just dumps dozens of tidbits of info into it, with a fair amount of PDFs and web clippings, so it works great for her. She’s been complaining about v10 issues, but not too much. I’ve gone back to OneNote, I use it extensively at work and developed some workflow and brainstorming techniques using it, that also help me in personal life. There’s no one-fit-all solution.

I’ve tried this approach for a few years. It works great if you mainly use desktop, and don’t care about inserting attachments into your notes. I could live without attachments, but the biggest issue I kept running into was that there simply wasn’t a way to quickly start a new rich text / word note on mobile - the word processors are set up for document editing, not fast note creation. It would attempt to load the last document on start, it didn’t autosave or auto name the document using the title, and no handwriting. It just took longer to quickly jot things down. Plus there’s a lot of small conveniences offered by dedicated apps, that I missed.

I said that Joplin is great for simple text notes. Pictures and PDFs are not simple text notes. Joplin is not for me, because I need more than simple text notes. If someone takes text notes with an occasional photo or attachment they don't expect to do much with, Joplin is fine. That said, I think there is a way to OCR PDFs and pictures in Joplin using a plugin. I have not investigated this in depth, because at this moment, Joplin simply does not work for my needs, and OCR is just a small part of missing functionality that I consider essential for my needs. And to be honest, neither does Evernote. It's hard to objectively say "service xxx is better than yyy" because everyone has different needs or habits. Joplin is near totally useless for me, but it's a godsend for other people. Evernote stopped working for me a while ago, but for many people, there's nothing better - either because it is what they need, or simply because it is what they are used to and nothing else will ever match, because nothing else is exactly the same.

For simple text notes, Joplin is indeed great.

I wonder if 200 million is the number of active users, or total number of accounts. I know that in the past 12 years, I’ve created at least 4 separate accounts that I can recall - tried once, forgot about it, then a year later created a new account.. then created another with work email... then created a new one when I ran into issues and wanted to start from scratch... I suspect that the actual number of active users is more like half of that.

H There are tags in any application with search. They are plaintext tags. Use any uncommon letter combination before your tag, and you’re all set. e.g. qqAct for action, qqCar for cars, qqFollowUp, qqTax, qqUtilities etc. Then make a search for “qq” and get a list of all tagged records, or search for a particular tag. An added advantage is that these tags can be added both to the note title and to the individual text lines. And they can be used across multiple apps - you can tag an email, a note, a spreadsheet, and find all records using Windows Search or Spotlight. This way, you can use tags in any app or service, and they will be useful even after you move the data to another service.

Both @Vidalia and @isthisme are absolutely correct. Yes, the ideal best way is to have your data reside in individual files in common document formats, and use the built in OCR capabilities that most cloud storage providers offer. I’ve done this for a couple years. Yet I am coming back to using a note / data management wrapper, for the simple reason that there’s just no good fast common format notetaker for mobile that has things like quick new note, auto save, handwriting recognition, or OCR in embedded PDFs or images. When I need to quickly snap a few photos, mark them up, and save a note that I will later edit on my Windows laptop, Word for iOS takes too long because I have to name and save the file - it’s a word processor, not a notetaker - and Notability is great except for the later editing part. Really, Evernote / Onenote / what have you are mainly needed due to mobile - at least in my view. If I was only using the laptop, Word would suffice just fine.

Those who want a direct replacement of Evernote, should stick with Evernote. The same goes for pretty much any other note taker save for uncategorized plaintext notes.

Well, back around 2009 I actually actively went out of my way to get Evernote working on my Windows Mobile phone - with no shoving. Back then, it was probably the only really useful service of its kind, and after a while I did not mind paying what then was a reasonable subscription fee. OneNote back then sucked even on Windows Mobile, and the only other service I kind of liked was Springpad, but they didn’t last. EN certainly had momentum.

But most people don't see Evernote as a Dropbox, they see it as a note taking / information organizing tool. And looking at Dropbox... I can get the entire Office suite (Excel, Word, Powerpoint, Outlook) + 1TB of storage for $50 a year under MS' HUP that most people whose employers use O365 would be eligible for. Dropbox has something like 15 mln paid users and its revenue growth is slowing down and about half that of MS (with about 200 mln paid O365 accounts) and both are way behind Google. Dropbox has the same issue as EN, it doesn't have good conversion rates from free to paid (IIRC theirs was something like 3%) and is overpriced. I also doubt that the majority of paid Premium EN users are "mid-level managers, freelancers and small business owners". Some of them are, of course, but the majority are just private individuals getting EN for themselves. EN business plan was not exactly a shining success, to date. Them surviving MS' free offering is due to timing. During the high point of Evernote (2009 to 2013 or so) Onenote was not a serious competitor - it was forgotten by MS' own marketing, obscure, and unavailable outside of Windows (or available in a severely crippled form). Back then, Evernote was the name everyone talked about, it got tremendous exposure, and built a large user base. I bet that the majority of current paid users had first started with Evernote five or more years ago. By the time MS' got more serious about Onenote (which they still don't market too well), Evernote has already grabbed its chunk of loyal user base. And once you really get used to a specific product, it's easier to pay what was then a reasonable subscription price, than to change to something completely different with its own share of issues. I agree, nobody's winning on features alone, but it's hard for EN to win on features + price without making that combination far more appealing.

You’re probably correct. At any rate, the right thing to do would be to grandfather the existing paid accounts into the old pricing structure, at least for a couple of years, while simultaneously removing features in the free Basic plan and introducing Plus and Premium at new prices. But it may be indeed that the urgency to show immediate cash flow improvement was just too great. I still think that Evernote, in its current form, with its current pricing structure, and given the competition, is not well positioned to grow their paid user base. Time will tell.

MS never had a plan to crush EN entirely. Actually, they never had a plan for Onenote at all, until recently. Onenote was their red-haired stepchild, never really receiving the marketing attention that other products were getting. For a decade, it would be automatically installed on millions of desktops, yet most of these users didn't know what it was, why it existed, what it could be used for. Heck, most probably didn't even know they had it. The push to promote the use of Onenote is just a few years old, and even now, MS is still very bad at marketing it. As to oligopoly - Evernote still seems to think they are a monopoly, judging by their pricing plan. Either that, or they are deliberately giving up on attracting new paid users in order to maximize current revenue, even if it's not a sustainable long term plan.

Not sure about Scanner Pro, but Genius Scan allows you to pre-set encryption password for a scanned PDF. So I can quickly scan a document and automatically send it to a cloud location or service already encrypted and password protected. I am sure that there's many other apps with similar capabilities. And the beauty is that I don't have to be in any particular physical location to use it.

Evernote however doesn't have a luxury of doing this with a free product that's preinstalled by default on tens of millions computers running MS Office, thus already getting a massive exposure advantage from the start. Especially now that MS is making a major push tp promote Onenote to educational institutions, which means millions of students would be required to use it (and develop attachment to it via learned habits). Evernote's paying user base is heavily composed of people who joined it many years ago, when it was all the rage and the major player in then still underserved market. Things have been quite a bit different for quite a while now.

Nearly doubling the price without adding any features, making Evernote the most expensive of all competing apps in the market, while already having problems attracting new paying customers. At the same time, they announced the change in their strategy - the new emphasis on expanding into business market as opposed to consumer market. I suspected back then that the pricing change was an effort to maximize current revenue at the expense of those existing users that were deeply committed to Evernote, even if this meant not attracting as many new users willing to try the service, in order to use the new revenue to finance the business-oriented expansion. I, and quite a few other users on this forum, believed that to be a mistake - it would have been extremely hard to break into an already saturated segment, the competition for business accounts is much harsher than in consumer space, and even if they could land major corporate contracts, Evernote doesn't seem able to provide the level of support these kinds of accounts require. I believe that the time proved us right - their business expansion did not really happen. In the meantime, they got hooked on that extra cash coming from their longtime loyal paying users that were willing to pay the highest prices in this market segment, and they can't risk reversing their pricing strategy to make the service more appealing and more competitive to bring in new users. They are stuck.

To be fair, while MS does give plenty of warning, and usually provide a very generous grandfathering period, they still don’t listen to their customers any more than Evernote does. Although they did reverse the course on retiring Onenote desktop, but I suspect it was due to the corporate pushback. IMHO, to understand that V10 rollout, the very first thing to consider is the CEO tenure... he was hired almost exactly two years prior to v10 release. A new CEO hired to fix things at a struggling company gets a free reign in his 1st year, and all of the issues can still be blamed on his predecessors or pains of enacting change. He must however show results by the end of his 2nd year, if he wants to prove that he was the right choice. I think that’s where the rush to roll it out before the end of the year came from.

I'd love to hear about the wunderweapon that they have in their secret arsenal that will bring the new paying customers into the most expensive service on the market that still, in 2021, doesn't support some fairly common features that their free or cheaper competition provides. (E.g. encryption). They had long term problems doing that with their "legacy" product, that honestly was more featured and less buggy. Agreed. They are a content / data management service with notetaking features. They are not a notetaker (not the best one, anyway) and they are not a business suite, regardless of how badly they want to become one. As such, they are still competing against a host of free, freemium, and paid offerings, most of which are way cheaper and just as feature full (lacking in some areas and winning in others). They are losing long term members who were deeply attached to the service and willing to pay the price for it. Time will tell if they will attract enough new paid members to make up for this. Personally, I think they took a wrong turn a few years ago.