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Perhaps, but setting aside the philosophical point, Evernote was nowhere near "done".

Their 'new' client software (Electron-based, of course) never even achieved feature parity with their 'legacy' client software. The mobile app wasn't exactly screamingly performant, to put it nicely. Really basic core use cases, like creating a note, typing in a title and some content, tagging it with a keyword, and saving it, required a lot more clicks than it seemed to me like it should. Hierarchical tags, while technically supported, seemed like a weird add-on that never got full support. And Penultimate -- their tablet-centric app that stored data in your Evernote account -- hasn't been updated in several years; I'm actually impressed it continues to work.

There's plenty of room where they could have built new features, if they'd wanted to. Off the top of my head, I'd have liked to see Markdown support instead of their quasi-HTML WYSIWYG editor (some versions of the thick client had a subset of Markdown-like syntax but others didn't). Penultimate would have been great if it had on-device OCR / handwriting recognition, or even just a way of tagging specific pages or page-regions with keywords.

I think there's a lot of room in the notetaking space. I'm still waiting for an app that isn't a glorified text editor or a drawing program, but also doesn't lock your data into some unparsable binary format or obscure graph database behind the scenes. I want to take notes, using a pen, on a tablet, that might or might not be text, and then I want to annotate the shit out of those notes and keyword them and cross-reference them, and I want the whole thing to be searchable and I want the handwriting recognition to not suck, and I want all of this to be encrypted at rest and in transit, and I want native clients for all major desktop and mobile operating systems.

So, yeah, I don't think notetaking is done quite yet.



One could argue that their legacy apps were pretty close to done though. If they'd just maintained them rather than switching to the current garbage, they'd probably have a lot happier customers now.


They partly broke hierarchical tags with the rewrite. If you have a tag hierarchy a.b.c and you put a note at a or b, it will not show up in the tag list. That ruined my main organizational tool.

And the limited depth of notebooks has always been just wrong, which is why I use hierarchical tags.




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