Posted on 27/7/2017, 5:04 pm, by Colin Charles, under
Tech.
I use Evernote a lot. And I also love the read-it-later service Instapaper. When I power through my Instapaper queue, I occasionally like articles (though I mostly archive articles). When I like articles, they get saved to Evernote automatically, in full-text, parsed via Instapaper (so its pretty text and images, no junk ads, etc.).
What do you do with all the notes that accumulate in your Evernote inbox? Run the search: author:no-reply@instapaper.com. You'll find everything relevant, and you can move it to another notebook.
If for some reason it doesn't work, try running and saving this search on the web interface, and then sync, to execute locally on the Mac client.
Posted on 29/6/2016, 9:56 am, by Colin Charles, under
General.
I have been an Evernote user since February 2009, and I believe I found it extremely valuable and useful that I have dutifully paid $45/year for probably that long. Sara practically lives in the application on her Mac, iPad and iPhone. As of this writing, I have 18,198 notes.
Today they have announced changes to their pricing plans. For what I’m using, it would be $69.99/year, which is nearly a 56% markup!
I’m going to continue paying, but I fear many will be thinking about alternatives. The real discussions are at the forum which I encourage you to read. There are more alternatives these days — Microsoft’s OneNote (has an importer), Apple Notes is getting better, and so on.
There are still deficiencies with Evernote. Try exporting your scanned business cards as a CSV? Try two people editing the same document – you’ll notice locking. We’ve seen premium users go from “unlimited” to 10GB storage per month (not that I use all of that space). They’ve killed apps like Hello, Food. They’ve arguably made Skitch worse. They’ve once even lost data from Sara’s iPad – drawings from Penultimate disappeared. There was no resolution beyond the PNGs and JPGs I managed to extract.
If you ended up purchasing merchandise, like the Fujitsu iX500 ScanSnap Evernote edition or a Moleskine Evernote Smart Notebook you would have received points in your Evernote account. 10 points buys you a month, 120 points buys you a year – its unclear if this will change (it probably will), but I just spent 160 points to extend my Evernote account.
Phil Libin once talked about how Evernote would be a 100-year old startup. He also talked about how you turn loyal users into paid customers. He’s a big fan of Stewart Brand’s book, The Clock of the Long Now. Alas, he’s now a VC and there’s a hired CEO at the helm. Maybe we’ll get a Steve Jobs/Apple return moment at some stage. Till then, here’s to Evernote’s longevity.
Posted on 7/1/2015, 3:51 am, by Colin Charles, under
General.
Today I got a shock when I looked at Evernote 6.0.5 on Mac – I had all of 2 notes and 3 notebooks. I logged onto the web interface and confirmed that everything was there. I looked at the local data directory and confirmed the database was there. Something was wrong with the software.
Turns out this has happened since Evernote 6.0.1 – Evernote for Mac 6: Mac App Store Version – Notes Not Loading, Untitled Note or Slowness Issues.
The solution is to install the non-Mac App Store version. Which I did and it seems like all my notes are coming back. I’m glad this is the case, but can you imagine losing over 13,000 notes? As Evernote tries to be many different things (including having things like Work Chat – really?), it is clearly focusing a lot less on quality of their output.
I have a little over a year left to “switch to the cloud”, and I’m nowhere close to it yet.
Posted on 21/5/2009, 10:21 am, by Colin Charles, under
General.
I’ve been a big fan of Evernote for a while now, but have found it lacking in some areas: no Symbian Series 60 support for my mobile phone (yes, there is a mobile interface, but I’d like a native application), and no native Linux support (yes, there are workarounds through WINE, but its nothing like a native application).
It seems like the API is open. It seems like a real popular request to get this going on Series 60, and it seems like there may be wind of such a client, especially since they’re also doing stuff for the Android platform, but nothing concrete.
Does anyone know if this is happening? Failing which, maybe a Nokia Nseries Widget (WRT widgets) might be what I’m after (seeing this working on the N97 yesterday, I was truly impressed).
At this juncture, I need Series 60 support, more than I’d need Linux support. I don’t have plans on carrying an iPhone anytime soon, just to make good use of Evernote (which I must say, is impressive – full integration with the hardware, is very cool).
