Evernotee: Whats Up?

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Oct 26, 2009 at 08:38 AM

I’ve been known to back the wrong software horse a few times (anybody remember Hyperclip? I chose it over UltraRecall in 2003, and about a year later it was gone) so don’t rely too much on what I’m saying for your own data. Do choose what you feel most confident with, which for many won’t be a program like Evernote with one foot on desktop and one on the cloud—potentially making it twice as likely to fail.

That said, I am a happy Evernote user. I upgraded to Premium more for stuff like PDF search and attaching any kind of file (what I wanted to do was attach .AMR audio notes) than for the capacity which I barely use. Notwithstanding, I like the excess capacity; it makes me feel that I’ll be able to do a lot more stuff in the future. When I joined Gmail, I couldn’t figure what to do with 2 Gigs of capacity; by now I’ve used about 70% of the 7 it has grown to, and will be upgrading to Google Apps with my team, giving us each 25 Gbytes to work with.

I was much looking forward to getting in Windows the kind of functionality I saw in Macs and in that respect the 3.5 beta is OK for me. I experienced the initial migration problems that everyone else did—and in this respect I can’t understand why EN didn’t allow for importing one’s existing local database as they do now straight away; after all, the format is the same, with only an additional file for image thumbnails which is automatically built. I actually took the risk and copied the database on my own, so I could access the data. It worked, and a couple of days later they gave instructions on the blog for everyone to do the same.

Of course the 3.5 is beta, which means that it still has bugs; I’ve found a few and posted them through the Technical Support form and promptly got a thank you reply. I no longer go through the forum but in rare occasions, as there it makes no difference that I am a Premium member—heck, I don’t often go premium in services, so I might as well enjoy it! Given the number of posts at the forum I think that Evernote are doing quite a decent job in replying.

At the same time, Evernote’s underlying SQLite database looks as sturdy as ever; I’ve never had data integrity problems, even after failed synchronisations.

3.5 has also been built from the ground up as a .NET application so it’s not surprising that it’s slower that 3.1. Still, it’s comparatively light compared to some other .NET apllications I’ve tried. In any case, there’s no turning back. It’s practically impossible for a software developer nowadays to remain competitive while offering native applications for different platforms. Sooner or later, most will opt for Java (Personal Brain, Concept Draw, Xmind) or for Adobe Air (many social media desktop applications). I’d say that .NET is a good compromise.

Overall, I’m happy with Evernote:

- I have found no better alternative to a capture tool accessible from everywhere.

- The fact that I can also access its actual database from everywhere is an added bonus that I have rarely used, but when I have it has been extremely useful.

- It was the first application that convinced me to use tags to organise information and I’m very pleased I did.

- I find its find-as-you-type functionality consistently fast, as my database is growing.

Therefore, at this point, the technical glitches are the least of my worries. My main concern is that their business model works, and it still needs some time before it becomes profitable: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/business/30ping.html?_r=1 and http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1890-the-bar-for-success-in-our-industry-is-too-low

That said, with 1.5 million users trusting their data to them, even if they fail, Google or Microsoft will probably buy them out.