GrumpyMonkey

Microsoft for the Mac is a huge improvement, and OneNote is getting better all the time. It's quite impressive if you consider that less than a year has passed since they released it. Excel is a little buggy, but it is a huge improvement on the decrepit 2011 Mac version. That thing was never good and only got worse over time.

Yeah. It is very pricey. They don't have casual users in mind -- that's for sure. For a power user with a lot of data, though, I could see its attractiveness. Another way to look at it is that money you spend on business or premium over the course of three or four years works out to about the same amount that you'd spemd during the life cycle of a Filemaker version. It's just that the cost is front-loaded.

Beedom? It's a random list of awful and great stuff with misinformation and no hands-on experience. You'd be better off looking at Wikipedia for a list of stuff to waste your time trying. For multi-platform support, in the case of power users, we keep circling back to the same thing: OneNote.That's the only viable option that has been mentioned so far, in my opinion. OK. Let's try talking about something else instead of lightweights like Centrallo or Google Keep. How about Filemaker? It's on the Mac, Windows, iOS, and the Web. It is, in my opinion, one of the most powerful personal information managers out there. Yet, there isn't a whole lot of buzz, is there? I've been using it for more than a decade now, but have only met a handful of people who have it installed on their machines. Why? Well, as a relational database manager, it is designed for working with lots of large data sets, and it is overkill for most folks. It's kind of like driving the space shuttle to work every day, and handles just about as well on curves. You'll want to set aside some time to immerse yourself in the world of enthusiastic FM users if you want to get a handle on it. But, with practice, I can see how it would be really helpful, especially for people looking to use Evernote as a CRM or database for their research. It's worth a think.

Roberta... thank you... interested to get some additional feedback from other EN Power Users! Appreciate the post! ~ Alan i think roberta is a diligent spammer, alan. she doesn't join the discussion except to promote her product. here is my response to her earlier spam. https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/66103-power-user-discontent-best-alternatives-to-en/?p=347299

Hi. Interesting thoughts. With a new CFO, I think they are headed for the long-awaited FPO, and will not be bought by someone else, but who knows what the future will bring. https://blog.evernote.com/blog/2015/03/05/evernote-welcomes-cfo-jeff-shotts/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+EvernoteBlog+%28Evernote+Blog%29 I don't think we are stuck on dissatisfactions here. We are looking for a tool that meets our needs and it isn't working for us. I don't have a burning desire to use a Caterpillar back-hoe, because it doesn't meet my daily needs, but I recognize the value in it, and I wouldn't discourage anyone from investing in the company. In this case, I think Evernote is a wonderful product, it meets the needs of a wide variety of users, I recommend it to lots of folks all the time, and I think it has a lot of potential. I think they'll be just fine without me or other "power" users, so the complaints here aren't really about the company's viability. It might well be (as I often say) that Evernote ought to ignore us and focus on something else -- I'm not in the company and I don't know what they talk about for their goals. However, some of the issues I have raised for my particular use case aren't with the editor. The editor is just fine for my needs and it has been since they began way back in 2008. My problem is with security / privacy, and without robust encryption options (zero-knowledge encryption of notebooks?) I cannot use it for my professional life. I imagine doctors, lawyers, researchers, company employees handling any intellectual property (nearly everyone), and others would also benefit from such a feature. The fact that few other competitors have it (none in the cross-platform space) doesn't make it any less desirable as a feature. I'd urge Evernote to make it a priority, but I think it might take a Sony-like hack of someone (Evernote, Google, or Microsoft) to make this happen. As for VCs, I doubt encryption warms the cockles of their hearts, but telling them that the encryption will enable entire industries (the health industry, education industry, etc.) to use the service (tens of thousands of potential business users) might pique their interest

LOL. Good luck with your 1 GB power users. Oh, and if you want to know about their security policies, they recommend you email them to ask. Hahaha. It may be a great service, but I don't think it stacks up well to Evernote, and it certainly has a long way to go with its policies. Haven't we already covered this app? I think Roberta needs to provide us with more compelling reasons. https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/66103-power-user-discontent-best-alternatives-to-en/?p=314882

if you're using the cloud, it's gonna be tough to beat evernote. for all platforms, onenote is probably the best alternative.

Indeed. They won't be indexed, because syncing the content would defeat the purpose of the encryption used to keep it private. Notice, though, that the titles are visible. If you use informative titles (I recommend YYYYMMDD + keywords) then it is pretty easy to navigate even thousands of notes without needing to actually view the content.

Congratulations! It is great to see someone who takes security / privacy seriously developing an app that will help all of us protect our data. I've followed the development of this app from the initial idea all the way to its current state and I think it looks like a major breakthrough that will help all of us. I'm looking forward to trying it out! However, as a warning to everyone, this is a beta product, which means you are likely to encounter problems (that's why they call it a beta), so please be sure to back up your data just in case. Actually, you should always be doing this! http://www.christopher-mayo.com/?p=962 The more people who test it out and provide feedback, the better the app will be, and if there is something in particular you want to see for your use case, the beta stage is a great opportunity to make sure your voice is heard.

I'm no expert on Workflowy, but I think it isn't going to do much for power users who will likely want to store a variety of files, use the app offline, and so forth. It's a cool web app, to be sure, but I haven't seen anything appealing for my particular workflow. It would be nice if Evernote (or a third-party developer) would make an interface as effortless, but I don't think I'd hold my breath waiting.

In the original post, the question was: "From the time you've taken to research, which applications are you finding to be the most VIABLE replacements or alternatives to EN for Power Users?" I think the general trend has been for folks to post note-taking or personal information apps that would be potential alternatives to EN, and I have been shooting down all of the ideas from the perspective of a power user Usually, my criticisms address the poor state of the alternative, lack of adequate privacy protections (sometimes, no policies at all), fishy practices, and the general insecurity of the "cloud," which Evernote is also built upon. If you aren't especially concerned about putting your stuff unencrypted into the cloud (this is my pet peeve), and just about everyone using Dropbox, email, etc. is not, then Evernote is one of the more secure options available; understanding, of course, that different people have different use cases. For access to your notes regardless of platform, I think the only viable alternative proposed so far has been OneNote. If you can settle for primarily plain text, there are some other options for multiple platforms, but it usually requires you to cobble together different apps and run them through Dropbox (for example, nvALT on the Mac and notesy on your iPad). If you are working only with OSX and iOS, I would suggest taking a look at DEVONthink -- a pretty amazing app, but one that is not (and probably never will be) on Windows. As Jefito said, it is cool that the company lets threads like this run on. In fact, though, I think that, for a lot of people, knowing the alternatives actually strengthens Evernote's case. For all of the complaints about its interface or whatever, just look at how innovative Evernote has been in this space. Until a few months ago, OneNote wasn't even available on all platforms. If you don't like OneNote (many of us came over from OneNote) and you need to work on multiple platforms, Evernote is probably the app for you.

Thanks for posting this. I imagine it will be a welcome alternative for people upset with some of the changes that have (or have not) been made to Evernote's UI. Alternote is an Evernote integration with fewer features, though, as I understand it, which makes it a great option for people who don't like some of Evernote's features (they might be absent from the Alternote UIX), but I kind of doubt a minimalistic UI is going to solve the problems of any "power users." In addition, third-party integrations gain complete access to everything you have synced to Evernote, so that might also be a security concern for some. If they have a privacy policy, I couldn't find it. For me, at least, it is not appealing.

That was one of many criticisms, and because my post on one of them was about half as long as his "long" article, I don't really want to go into any more details. After all, as you said, most tech articles are, in fact, neither comprehensive nor detailed. In that context, I have to agree that it is better than average. As far as large PDFs go, it's a pretty common thing in my experience, so not some weird edge case unsuitable for Evernote or GD. I just happen to have more than most people. I don't see GD as an especially appealing alternative to OneNote or Evernote, and Keep is no more appealing than it was when it first came out. I would suggest that power users could benefit from some combination of apps, but GD (kind of like Dropbox) is probably best seen as a place to put stuff, not an environment for note-taking or a PIM.

Here is a specific criticism (one of several that I have) of Mr. Walter's article. He does a good job of mentioning that Google only OCRs the first 100 pages of a PDF. Most people do miss this. What he fails to do, though, is dig a little deeper and give you the important information you need to make a decision. He is wrong about it being "like" Evernote. In fact, Evernote will not OCR the first 100 pages of a PDF that is longer than 100 pages (am I the only one that thinks this is suggested by his sentence?). It won't OCR it at all if it is over 100 pages (last I checked). This would seem to be a point in Google's favor. BUT, as several GD users have complained about to Google since 2012, Google will not index any pages past the first 100 of a PDF that is already OCR'd (Mr. Walter mentions this). Evernote will (Mr. Walter does not mention this). This is a big deal if you put a bunch of PDFs into GD expecting its "best-in-class search" to find what you are looking for. It won't. And, you have to dig around a lot to find out about this limitation (in fact, Google's CS folks had us jumping through hoops for a long time moving files in and out before the users digging around figured out the problem). As far as I know, Google has not addressed this issue. The devil is in the details. I'm not a tech blogger and don't get paid to research this stuff, but (judging by what he has said in his article) I have more knowledge of these services than Mr. Walter. If that is the case, it is difficult for me to be impressed by his effort. By the way, if you want to read more about this PDF thingy, see my posts in this thread on the GD forum. https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/drive/xxx3qtRbA2w/kzhV0dv7r9UJ [EDIT:] And, if you want a workaround for this limitation in Google Drive, textify your PDFs. http://www.christopher-mayo.com/?p=551%C2'> especially power users, need to know about services from multiple perspectives. A great blog post will provide plenty of workarounds and well-considered tips for usage in order to help us make informed decisions. Bringing together information we could have found on our own by Googling is definitely a helpful thing to do, but unless it is really difficult to find the information, it is not especially worthy of note. I wouldn't Evernote it I'll give him the benefit of the doubt, though, and say that a lot of the tech stuff is blather because they aren't given the time, resources, or remuneration to produce worthwhile reading. Maybe he has some great stuff to say, but these constraints keep him from including it. Whatever the reason, it isn't in-depth enough for me. Don't even get me started on security/privacy issues, including the security hole kerfuffle that GD had last year. GD is a non-starter for me, and I would recommend disgruntled Evernote power users (the audience in this thread) carefully research the other options out there before switching and finding out that they have wasted their time and effort. Or, even worse, have all of their content over the last three years handed over to the US government without their knowledge (a recent case involving WikiLeaks reporters). That brings us back to my encryption advice earlier in this thread, and my recommendation that users not put un-encrypted data into the cloud. In this sense, Evernote's local notebooks would be a far superior choice to Google Drive.

Yes. We read the same article by Mr. Walter. No. I was not as impressed as you were However, I do appreciate your linking to the article. Hopefully, it will help other users.

Thanks for posting the link. I ran across it today as well and was quite disappointed in the content. What a weak explanation of Google, especially with unsubstantiated claims about Google's search capabilities. Yes, it is pretty cool, but if the writer of the article is more familiar with the ins and outs of the service, it'd be nice to have that all explained for us. So much of the tech news these days is blather. I think they must have tight deadlines and little pay or something, because it usually doesn't even reach the level of "news" or even a decent "how to." As for Keep, and the link in the article, I can't say I am impressed. But, I agree with you. There is a huge amount of potential out there for Google. Personally, I have had poor experiences with Google's note-taking services in the past, I am not terribly enthusiastic about their vision for the future (especially in terms of privacy), and I have no interest in switching to it anytime soon. But, many major corporations (including three of the universities I have worked at) are buying into their services, so they are picking up momentum. By the way, lest anyone think I am just dismissing Google out of some blind affection for Evernote or whatever, I have an Android phone and I often have Android tablets, though none this year (I was hoping for a fast 10" instead of a slow 9"). Google gets a lot of stuff right, but it is still out of sync with my note-taking and PIM needs.

glad i could help spread my paranoia and distrust! i won't be leaving anytime soon

It matters where the servers are located because their physical location affects legal jurisdiction. US servers are under US laws and Chinese servers are under Chinese laws. Conditions in these countries might differ from the privacy / security expectations you enjoy in your country. If you think about copyright laws and other such restrictions on data that regularly affect everyday folks, you can imagine the trouble that could be caused if your data ends up in the wrong place, so it is a good idea to inquire into the location of the servers. As was mentioned, Delaware is a well-known tax-haven, and Nimbus Notes apparently shares the office complex with some major US banks, but I don't think anyone else claims to share the same office with the administrative staff of the business complex. That is what piqued my interest, though it may all just be a misunderstanding. The fact that it is unclear where NN is located is enough of a red flag to keep me away. Other users may have a different threshold for fishiness

Glad I could help, though I should stress that I am no expert in such things. I just happen to be rather concerned about security issues, and so I tend to focus on those when evaluating any service, and I am perhaps overly cautious when it comes to cloud services. I think my cautious approach is well-suited to my particular use case, though. I can imagine someone else with less sensitive data, or perhaps someone who is less concerned about losing control of that data, evaluating things differently.

Kuzma does look like a real person. And, when I plug his name in with Nimbus Notes, I get hits. He seems to be someone in Cleveland and a "leader" of two companies. http://www.f6s.com/kuzmasafonov Or, he is the co-founder with an email address representing several companies. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/everhelper I am not sure what his connection is with the business park in Delaware, though. And, if he has been in business since 2007, was he running his business while he was an MA student (I am a little unclear about when/whether he graduated from this university in Uzbekistan, or what his degree was)? With the scant data we have, it just doesn't add up for me to a legitimate service. Maybe he is a brilliant, wonderful guy. Obviously, he is creating some great stuff. But, he needs to get together with his "team" and sort this stuff out for us, because it looks just as fishy when we connect a name to the product. As some of you may know, I have been pushing Evernote to provide better security. It's not because they don't provide a lot already, but because I think (and many experts agree) that more encryption is needed by all cloud services. Certainly (in the doctor's example above), there are use cases that are entirely inappropriate for any cloud service without encryption, and Evernote has clearly stated that it is not (nor does it plan to be) HIPAA compliant. It's a good thing when companies explain to you the limits of their services. Unless it is hiding a great deal of security information, Nimbus Notes (and some others mentioned here) doesn't even come close to the security that Evernote has offered its users since the beginning. This basic security stuff, at least for power users, shouldn't be ignored.

Where is Evernote located? I think we can all find that answer quite easily, if you don't know it already. Where are their servers? We know where the main ones are, and we know they have dedicated staff following strict protocols to maintain their security. Transparency is the foundation of trust. A company that does not even prominently display their physical address raises red flags for me. Why hide it? Does nimbus notes mention this address on their website? I sidn't see it there, but it comes up when I plug in nimbus notes and delaware into Google (thanks Wordsgood). 1521 Concord Pike, Suite 301Wilmington, Delaware 19803 OK. Delaware isn't a hotbed of tech development in my mind, but people have their offices all over the place for various reasons.It might be fine. But, how likely is it that they share suite 301 with the Brandywine Executive Center office staff? http://www.bwecenter.com/about-us/ I might be missing something here, but it looks fishy, like a copy/paste job. A simple mistake on my part or theirs? Maybe, but it is this kind of stuff that concerns me, because there should not be a question. The cloud is not some place in the virtual world but a physical location -- hard drives somewhere are gathering your data. You are asking them to put your data on their servers. Maybe they use Amazon or Dropbox. I can't even tell you that. Is it going onto the Dell in John's basement? Maybe. Who's John? I don't know. Not a single employee name is mentioned, so I just made it up. A quick search turns up no employee names, no business model, no physical address, no virtual address (a form on their website), and a blog encouraging doctors to store patient data in their service (almost certainly a gross violation of HIPAA). To my eyes, it looks like a terrible idea to use them for anything you actually care about. They may be entirely legit, and I am not making any accusations here. They simply look wrong to me, and that inexperience / lack of professionalism / amateurishness / fishiness raises red flags. This, despite having a really beautiful app.

This sure looks modeled after our familiar app. With "Eversync" service and more at http://everhelper.me. Another one is Alternote: http://alternoteapp.com/ Lots of these apps popping up! nimbus note shares the same domain as everhelper. what's their physical address? i don't know. is it wise to encourage doctors to keep patient records in nimbus notes? they seem to think so, though it would be illegal (and terrible advice even if it weren't) in the us. i cannot stress enough that users really need to be cautious about how they treat their data -- in comparison to nn, evernote seems considerably more trustworthy, even if we're only talking about transparency. just as a reminder, this is a thread for power users, and in that context, i am not criticizing nn, which may be a fine service, but when it comes to mission critical or large amounts of data, you really need to be careful.

Nope. No suggestions for getting stuff out of Zettelkasten, I'm afraid. If you can track down where it stores the files (perhaps using Finder), that might give you a hint. One of the great things about nvALT is that it puts everything right out in the open in a folder. There isn't any export out of it because your data doesn't go in anywhere. Brilliant. Christian experimented with a bunch of stuff for a while, I think. At least, that is the sense I got from his post here. http://christiantietze.de/posts/2014/03/baseline-zettelkasten-software-reviews/ Interestingly, he didn't write about Evernote, as far as I know. I suppose it would be pretty much perfect for him as long as he doesn't need markdown previews.

Hahaha. The Zettelkasten app. I always meant to try that, and I'm glad you've scouted the territory in my place. I downloaded it but never installed it, because I was doing just fine with Evernote and/or nvALT. I think Christian Tietze (someone who has helped popularize the digital Zettelkasten) also uses nvALT. The lack of portability in that app appears to be a terrible misstep by Daniel (I think it was written by one developer, right?), and that is exactly the kind of thing "power users" have to avoid, because we've got rather demanding use cases with lots of data.

exportability is included in the concept of portability -- the ability to "port" (import/export) or move your data in and out of an app.this is one of my most pressing concerns with any app. evernote, and many other apps i know of, can easily export notes individually. what problem are you having? I think plain text is the most portable, though Evernote doesn't have plain text, so .html is the default. You can then take those .html files and convert them to plain text. In the past, I have done this by running them through VoodooPad or nvALT. I was once given an AppleScript to do it, but I stopped moving my notes in and out of Evernote, so I haven't had a chance to try it. I write my notes using markdown, so the transition is generally smooth, with some weird spacing problems in past years, but nothing like that in recent builds. The nice thing about Evernote is that they built portability into it from the start. As I recall, though, Windows has a few more options (as usual), and you might want to consider exporting via your account on Windows if some of the options appeal to you. What app are you using that creates one big .txt or .html file? That sounds very odd. For example, with DEVONthink you can export using a bunch of different file formats, but it lumps everything into one file. Or, you can export using files and folders, which exports everything as it is (plain text if you are using that, other formats if those are what you have). Perhaps there is a setting we can help you find.