I really hope Evernote's take-away from this is that they need to scale back development on all their auxiliary stuff - hello, food, whatever, as well as all but the most critical feature requests, and focus as much as possible on making the core experience bulletproof. I would _hate_ to have to give up Evernote, but like others here, am extremely apprehensive about the possibility of losing data.
One stop-gap they might be able to implement quickly would be a scale-up of their version control. They could throw money (storage space and bandwidth) at the problem, increasing the number and frequency of revisions stored. Certainly not as good as preventing loss in the first place, but reliable versioning would help minimize catastrophic loss in the meantime, and would still continue to be valuable once things are more stable.
Phil: "We have independent teams building all the different versions. They compete with each other to see who can make the best version. They steal each others idea and they leap frog each other. We don’t have consistency as a goal. There is no goal to make different versions of Evernote consistent with each other. Cause I think what happens if you make consistency a goal, you wind up achieving it though mediocracy. Like you achieve consistency by having everything equally crappy."
<http://thisweekinstartups.com/thisweekin-startups/phil-libin...
When I heard Phil talk about this at SXSW (as part of his talk about making Evernote a 100-year startup, I believe), I thought it was neat. But I wonder if this strategy is undermining reliability.
This is the worst idea ever but it explains a lot. I had not heard this before, and it's enough to make me hedge my bets and start trying to export notes into mmd files in nested directories (which one cannot do at present with stacks) and use Mavericks tagging.
I would definitely call this an anti-pattern for cross-platform software.
This exactly! Right now, I am a premium user as well but their iOS apps are way slow. I remember that there was a time when their iOS app used to stutter during rotating animation on iPad 4th Gen (most powerful iOS device a year back!).
The other thing is that there is no true Evernote alternative. I have iOS and Windows devices but I travel and internet is flaky sometimes. There's nothing that will store all my images, screenshots(Skitch), handwritten notes (with OCR!) and use it natively across platforms!
Not to mention the app UIs change every week. For example yesterday they added smileys to Skitch. It is utterly frustrating that every time I open the Evernote app or Skitch app to use it, the button I am looking for has disappeared and another button has taken its place.
Does any Evernote alternative have OCR? That's the only feature keeping me using it.
I'm an Evernote Premium user, but I convinced my wife not to start using it because of this apparent misallocation of resources. I've had data loss within the (slow) core app, and the editor frustrates me; thus I find it kind of frustrating that as near as I can tell, most of the development effort is focused on very marginally useful features.
One stop-gap they might be able to implement quickly would be a scale-up of their version control. They could throw money (storage space and bandwidth) at the problem, increasing the number and frequency of revisions stored. Certainly not as good as preventing loss in the first place, but reliable versioning would help minimize catastrophic loss in the meantime, and would still continue to be valuable once things are more stable.