Of course this kind of thing won't happen but maybe it says something about the optimization pitfalls of our economy.
Of the tech economy, perhaps. Or perhaps that's what you meant by "our", this being a tech site.
A huge amount of the workforce is engaged in work that doesn't change much at all. Construction workers, skilled labor like service plumbing or mechanical maintenance, engineering, retail work, etc. It's fairly optimized and if it changes, it changes in reaction to something or because new technology opened new opportunities. Really, it seems like mobile and web applications are the most stuck into this loop of having to add something new. An emacs users who used it 25 years ago could still use it today.
For companies that don't produce physical goods, this would actually be somewhat doable..
I knew the rewrite was going take a lot longer than they were saying, both due to common sense and because there were conflicting goals from ceo and cto.
I went to the ceo and made a case for a back up plan, myself and a few others could continue on the old busted version; bug fixes and minimal enhancements only, insurance if you will. I really thought about buying it but had no way to finance anything like that. CEO didn’t bite and was in process of selling the company to a PE firm.
I left when the new version finally shipped with half the features and twice the bugs. The PE installed CEO wrecked the sales org and sales never recovered.
As a side note, a foreign firm had pirated a much older version 10 years prior, rebranded and was #3 with it in that market.
They compete by having a larger library.
But before you get too smug, the idea of going to Redbox to get a physical disc is not exactly cutting edge compared to just clicking on a button and renting a movie on demand from your cable provider/Apple/Amazon/Google/Vudu.
I’m lazier than I am cheap.
But honestly, most of my movies fall off the back of a truck onto my Plex server.
And I was just giving you hard time about being smug.....
I find it fascinating that this is core idea that made Netflix so successful, they just rely on much lazier customers than you!
It doesn't need to be the only product or have the most users it only needs to be functional and make enough money for it to be worthwhile except with vc funding it has to constantly chase growth and returns.
It does make you start to question why you are paying for a service whilst locking yourself in when the rug can be pulled at any minute.
I think markdown is the most future proof technology for the moment because you can just use pandoc to convert it or most note systems will accept markdown as an input format.
I'm not sure how tags would work in markdown, I guess you can create links manually but that's not really what you want.
- Web clipping. Evernotes browser plugins are pretty darn good here.
- Notes with attachments (images, PDFs, etc.). Some of these are mixed-media notes, where text, images, and/or file attachments are mixed to create a comprehensive document about some topic. Others are "pure" attachments, e.g. "store this PDF where I can retrieve it by search".
- Note taking. This, in isolation, is the easiest.
- Note syncing, mobile and desktop. This gets a bit harder.
- Search. Let's be clear, this was the first and biggest killer feature of Evernote. Notebook and tag organization are important, but rather than just providing direct hierarchical/taxonomic organization, they're largely there to support search with user-defined search facets.
I'd also love good Markdown support – that's one of my most-wanted features from Evernote in the first place.
The dropbox text editor works 'ok'. It's not great, but it's clean enough that I can edit my markdown notes and they'll be synced with dropbox.
Requires a rust compile of the code in the plugin, but once that's working it works well.
That said, it's really good at filing and searching. I'd highly recommend trying it long enough to look past the UI to its capabilities. I'd hate to be without it now.
Never mind random apps, what about socks? [1]
- intuitive UI: lets me see 1) raw markdown syntax or 2) formatted preview... no weird in-betweens
- sync to/from mobile, with preview & edit support
- markdown support with nice preview and support for code (similar to github style)
- search
- support for folders (and potentially tags, if I ever find a good use case for them)
- pdf export
- no subscription model
- Bear: confusing preview/editing mode
- Evernote: no markdown
- Ulysses: subscription model shift
- Standard Notes: confusing/buggy UI
- Quiver: poor mobile support
If I was going to suggest something for longer-form writings (e.g., journaling, blog posts) and you find that inadequate, I've heard good things about iA Writer[2].
Have you tried diigo.com and it's apps? I highly reccomend it to everyone looking for Evernote alternative, especially for web clipping and organizing.
I've been exploring alternatives, but so far nothing has stuck. Last time I looked at OneNote it seemed promising, but the lack of tags (seriously?) was a showstopper. DevonThink Pro was interesting, but the Mac experience and UI is archaic to the point of being unusable IMO. Esp. the way that DT bakes a really terrible styling onto imported Evernote notes.
I'd love to hear migration success stories from those of you who've moved on.
(1) One example: Want to create or modify a table on the iPad app? Nope. Baffling.