Evernote's slow descent

(this was originally a FaceBook post, but i summarized it here because i keep having to go back and reference it)

i’m not sure what’s more annoying:

  • Evernote’s slow descent into unusability
  • the lack of a clear alternative

what’s my evernote use case?

i use it for meeting notes and just need to search for things so i can pretend like i know what’s going on. the issue is mostly around their recent push to webify all of their apps; and now the recent iterations of mobile apps have removed the ability to cache a notebook/stack locally, which kills a lot of the functionality since often you need to look something up but you don’t have reliable network. at least there’s still legacy desktop versions which seem to work ok, but the direction does not bode well if i have to stay on deprecated software.

alternatives explored

Notion

  • i would love to move to Notion or at least try it out, but it hasn’t been able to successfully import more than a couple of notebooks (and specifically the work one i really need) so that’s not useful yet

OneNote

  • i mean i even looked at moving to (gasp) OneNote. but it won’t let me import my notebook into my corporate OneNote account because i already have too many objects/files in my SharePoint account? I can import it into a personal account, but then there is no way to copy import/export that into a corporate account. WTF MICROSOFT THIS IS WHY EVERYONE HATES YOU

Bear

  • comes highly recommended, unfortunately i’m corporately mandated to use a Windows laptop, so anything that is not cross-platform is out

Joplin

  • i think before i got sick i was futzing around with Joplin and was able to at least get my work notebook imported. it seems like a possible option; i don’t need native markdown access, but i guess it doesn’t hurt.
  • i think i was paused on whether to figure out if it was something i wanted to use first, or to figure out if getting cross-platform (including mobile) replication working. where do i want to waste my time?
  • also, this is why i’m happily willing to pay (expense) an annual fee

Obsidian

  • Obsidian looks upon extremely cursory glance to be a lightweight Roam? Interesting.
  • Mobile apps “coming soon”? COME ON

follow up

  • follow-up that no one else cares about: I wasted a lot of time trying alternatives last month.
  • I ruled out a lot of options including Obsidian (no in-line images? WHAT? it’s the 21st century already)
  • I finally focused on Joplin. I did get all of it imported and more or less working cross-platform. I then proceeded to muck all of it up trying to get encryption to work and ruined it.
  • So here I am after all of that still on Evernote.
  • Although just the other day it looks like they upgraded/fixed my corporate OneNote so I was able to import all of my Evernote successfully, but now I have to figure out OneNote which is weird and ugly sigh. And then I just realized that the Microsoft official import tool did bring in all of the notes I attempted, but it set the creation date of those notes to the date it was imported WHICH IS NOT AT ALL HELPFUL FOR 7+ YEARS OF NOTES