I’ve never understood why anyone uses Evernote. Just use a folder with Markdown files. Or Obsidian. Or VS Code with plugins. Or EMacs org mode. So many good FOSS options out there (yes, I know VS Code isn’t FOSS but VSCodium is) that don’t lock you in. Hypocritical of me to say as an Apple user, but I hate when companies’ business models are to lock in consumers. Just make a better product that’s worth paying for.
this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2023
190 points (98.5% liked)
Technology
58061 readers
31 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
It's simple. The people using Evernote didn't care about being locked in.
Same shit will happen to all those people building their shit on the back of Discord.
At some point all the people who paid for it will want to see some returns, and suddenly it's costing you $30 a month to access your own content.
Obsidian is awesome. It won't meet everyone's needs, but I love the lightweight simplicity of it. But it's also extremely extensible with add-ons if you want to go down that rabbit hole.
100% agree. I personally haven’t got a use case that fits very well with it (maybe someday when I build a Zettelkasten), but I can see why the community loves it so much. Open source and a great library of plugins.
Edit: Turns out it isn’t open source and their terrible misunderstanding of open source doesn’t help.
Except that it isn't open source
Huh, I stand corrected. I’ll update my comment.
deleted
Is that very hard to do? Right click, save as html. Does obsidian only save references to files outside the vaults? I thought it made a copy of external files inside the vault too.
deleted
Evernote still exists?
I haven’t used Evernote since I discovered Obsidian. Combine it with the Git plugin, and my notes are backed up to a private repository and synced to all my devices. There isn’t a lot that Obsidian can’t do, with one plugin or another.
You can take it a step further with the live sync plugin.
You can sync documents and edits, live, to all your devices. Conceivably you can have multiple people working on the same documents if you so desire.
I store everything in a git repo but it's rather awkward when I'm making different edits and different documents or sometimes in the same documents on multiple devices and don't always commit my changes in good time.
Using the live sync plugin with a CouchDB on my local network (plus openvpn when not at home) means all my devices are automatically synced.
Evernote used “Subscription model”. It hurt itself in its confusion.
I was a paying customer and would not have been affected by this. But it seemed like a crappy move and I didn’t support it, so I ended my subscription. I’ve switched to Obsidian, which is significantly better.
Lol, tried them about 10 years ago, wasn't impressed.
They're still around, and think this is a good move? So many other, WAY better notebook apps.
MS OneNote works well on all platforms (except Linux!) for several years now, and blows Evernote away (it's my Achilles heel).
And now apps like Joplin, Obsidian, etc, are closing fast on OneNote (and even better in some ways), and can sync with tools like Syncthing.
MS OneNote lags 200-300ms on M1 pro CPU...
Ugh, Syncthing. I bet it works well for syncing between Linux boxes or even MacOS, but when I tried using it to sync between Windows and a couple of Android devices, it was incredibly clunky. I found it confusing and obtuse even though I've been a software engineer for over 20 years.
Rant over.
I keep hundreds of gigs in sync between 4 windows computers and about 5 phones, including iOS (on iOS it's Möbius). SyncTrayzor for Windows is really helpful.
It rarely has issues, when it does it notifies you of a sync conflict (it's always a result of me doing something that's bad practice, such as disabling sync for weeks on one device and making a bunch of changes).
Give it a try again. I especially recommend Syncthing-Fork for Android, it moves sync conditions into the individual sync jobs/folders. This enables me to have my DCIM folder sync to home, regardless of network or power conditions, so I never lose pictures, while allowing me to set my media sync folder (music, videos, etc from my home desktop) to only sync while on wifi, and other jobs to only run while connected to power and wifi.
Resilio is another great sync tool, works differently than Syncthing by using the bittorrent protocol. It has Sync-on-demand, which is great for grabbing media from my desktop from anywhere, Syncthing would only permit Syncthing the entire folder, with Resilio you can browse the share from your phone, pick files, and have it sync them right now.
I'd use Resilio more, just for that feature, but it kills memory on a phone because it keeps the sync database in ram when running, while Syncthing relies on files for indexing. So ST is my daily driver, and load up Resilio when I need to grab specific files.
load more comments
(2 replies)
Interesting, because my experience with it has been smooth, no problem at all. I let it running on my phone and laptop basically all the time.
Having used both OneNote & Obsidian extensively, OneNote is like a children's colouring book in comparison IMO.
Not that it's bad, it serves plenty well for most people.
Not an unfair comparison, though I find Obsidian overly complex/convoluted. But I think that comes with the territory when your design philosophy is very open extensibility and using standard document types rather than a proprietary binary format like ON.
Plus OneNote is 20 years old now, was extended (after MS bought it) to integrate with SharePoint (maybe it was designed that way, I don't remember), so really is a 20th century piece of software. There are add-ons that greatly extend its capability (Onetastic, Gem, etc). So in a business environment the full desktop app with SharePoint is pretty impressive. To it's credit, I have 15+ years and gigabytes of data in it, and have never (knock on wood) lost anything, moving it across perhaps a dozen systems.
All that said... I'm moving to Joplin, lol. Trying to get away from dependence on apps I don't control (and I want a notebook that works on Linux too).
To sync to mobile devices, OneNote requires Onedrive (or setup your own SharePoint server, uggh). At least with Obsidian/Joplin, etc, I get to manage how things sync. And if I'm happy with the features in my current setup, I never have to change anything. Never know when MS will fuck up Onedrive sync, requiring a version of OneNote I can't run, or has issues.
I think OneNote is potentially a good middle ground between something like Obsidian and something much simpler like Google Keep, but for me it adds complexity without adding enough functionality to justify it.
For using onenote in Linux, I just made an app out of the web version in Epiphany/GNOME Web. It's not as smooth as a real app, but it's functional. I expect you could do it with Chromium too.
And here I was a sucker for using Simplemote this whole time. I missed out on my opportunity to get charged
Best thing about Evernote was its web clipping extensions... anyone use one that's as good or better..?
joplin
+1 for Joplin (https://joplinapp.org/) with Nextcloud / WebDAV for sync. I use the web clipper all the time.
Since no one has recommended, I would recommend Notesnook. Open Source app with Encryption. They are also planning to open source the Sync (afaik) part too.
Another option is AnyType.
Another option is Notion (not open Source/encrypted).
Standard Notes is a encrypted service alternative to Evernote. It's a mature product with more than six year in the market.
Standard Notes is decent. Very rough around the edges, but it does what it's told.
load more comments
(2 replies)
The article is from November 29 and the change is to take effect on December 4, which is a bit late for this post.
Dumb question, evernote has a feature to embed audio recordings within the notes, and, synced across devices
How could this be replicated with something like obsidian/rome/typora/notepad++/notion/something/joplin? any suggestions?
That's not a dumb question. Of the ones you listed I've only ever used Obsidian and Notepad++. I'm not sure notepad++ can do that, but Obsidian can I think. Obsidian has a core plugin (expansions made and supported by the developers that ship with the program by default) that allows for audio recording and embedding in your notes. I think that by default you have to go and turn it on in settings, but once you've done that you should be good to go.
No idea about the others but you can embebbed videos and audio on Joplin, or other types of files. For videos and audio it shows a player to play it, not sure if it supports all formats or what tough...
That said it doesn't have a nice recording button or similar I don't think so. You need to record with something else and then add the file on the note. Maybe a plugin adds something like that to record directly no idea.
Hey everyone. I own a Synology and run evernote on it. Can someone recommend a good note app that isn't Synology Note station that I can run on my Synology? I don't really want my notes on the internet so OneDrive is not an option. Thank you for your recommendations.
I use Joplin its 100% Foss and has multiple sync options
I think the markdown files are stored locally and on their cloud. I rather have it on my server. Thank you!
You don't have to sync it to their cloud you can sync it to your own actually. I use my bextcloud server to sync it and they have other options like WebDAV as well
Edit to add: they also let you self host the server they designed as well
Personally, I really enjoy Obsidian ( obsidian.md ), its been fantastic for my notetaking on my PC.
Now, I will admit I haven't tried it myself but it can apparently work on Synology, so that might be an alternative. Best of luck finding one!
Obsidian This sounds like a solution for me. I'm going to try and install it on my box. Thank you!
you can use logseq (opensource) on all your devices and sync the markdown-files with Synology Drive
Thank you. I'll check this out!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The notetaking app said that this change will be applicable for all new and existing free users starting December 4.
Going forward, new and existing Free users will have a maximum of fifty notes and one notebook per account.
These limits refer to the number of notes and notebooks a user can have in their account at one time: you can always delete unwanted content to remain below the threshold,” the company, owned by Milan-based Bending Spoons, said.
At that time, a spokesperson told TechCrunch that the notetaking app has “been unprofitable for years and the situation was unsustainable in the long term.”
While Ian Smalls, who was appointed Evernote CEO in 2018, managed to get the company to $100 million in recurring revenue, the app has fallen behind newer competitors like Notion.
For users who might want to look for alternatives, Notion, Microsoft OneNote and Zoho Notebook offer generous free tiers.
The original article contains 361 words, the summary contains 152 words. Saved 58%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Old news, they already have implemented it around 2 weeks ago. I moved to LogSeq, it's a bit more complicated than Evernote but it's a really good alternative. Open source too.
Don't forget to delete your account on your way out.
view more: next ›