I've been an avid Evernote user since the beginning (one of the first few thousand users). I use it to record all sorts of ideas, thoughts, notes, reminders, research, and references.
One year ago, my girlfriend was using Evernote (on my suggestion) to write her travel journal on our trip to Southeast Asia. I saw her note sync a bunch of times (the iOS app shows a little blue arrow when it's uploading). But one day she opened it and the note was gone. I contacted support but they couldn't do anything. (They offered her a year of free Premium service and "apologized for the inconvenience".)
Since then, I've stopped recommending it to people because I don't want to feel personally responsible if they lose notes too. I also have a tinge of doubt every time I record important information. My biggest worry is Evernote quietly losing a note, because once I record something in Evernote I typically push it from my internal memory.
On top of that, their iOS app is incredibly slow. When I want to quickly jot an idea down, it's very inconvenient.
I've started using SimpleNote lately, which is far faster, but I don't know to what extent I should trust it to keep my data safely.
This happened to me early in Evernote's rise with a very important note. I don't know, shame on me for trusting software I guess? I kept using Evernote for awhile, but gradually I fully transitioned to OneNote which fit my graduate school needs a bit more, and ultimately became more pivotal to my life. I'm now one of the biggest OneNote advocates, a rarity for me with most software I like.
MS Word on OS X has very OneNote-like features, just choose the Notebook view. I haven't used OneNote proper in a very long time (2007?), but notebook view Word 2011 does automatic lists and you can even doodle.
You can use the web-app version of OneNote on OSX. There is also a third party client called outline (http://outline.ws) which now supports writing to OneNote files.
I love it! It's one of the things that keeps me using Windows. I think its just too heavy for casual users and mobile support is meh. But it's not the kind of software I'd use on a mobile device really.
Exact same thing happened to me last week, took notes on a one hour video, clearly saw the online app sync on multiple occasions, after closing the note, only the first 15 minutes of my content was saved. Incredibly irritating.
I dislike hearing software described using broad adjectives like "bulky" without supporting analysis. Does this mean it contains features you find useless? (Which ones?) Do you find the interface unintuitive? Or does it run too slowly? One person's "bulk" or "bloat" or "cruft" is another person's key feature, so it seems to me it is important to specify what exactly the bulk consists of. Without more detail, it's akin to an ad hominem.
1. iOS: App has always been slow! Syncing takes time(should be seamless), animations hang up in between and there is sometimes seconds of gap between a tap and result. When you search, it takes lot of time (I have iPhone 4S and iPad 4th gen, same on both, so not a device issue!) A handy feature is document mode for taking pics but it chokes on multiple images. Many times, it crops images randomly and throws them out of order.
2. Windows: Features and apps are not well thought out. They have Skitch for screnshots but it sends screenshots ONLY to default notebook. I want to keep them in a different notebook but it won't let me customize. The editing is very hard and you can't paste HTML text reliably. Windows client has many good shortcuts for sure, but it also has unusual behaviour like tab not taking you to next relevant field (enter a note title, hit tab, suddenly you have selected the notebook!)
3. Web: Web clipper has improved in latest version but still has lot of issues like not syncing PDFs and images(happened twice to me, had to manually copy image). Going to PDF (Chrome) and then Saving it will not work. It will sync indefinitely. But right click the link and boom, it syncs!
While I appreciate the features, they are bulky in the sense that sometimes, they get in the way and don't let me take notes quickly. In fact, I have setup a different app(Drafts) on both iPad and iPhone to take notes in Markdown and then save to Evernote, saves me from lot of headache and data is never lost as it is at different places.
The Fetchnotes site is so slow I migrated away from it before it even loaded. I went back to see what SaaS app could possibly have such a slow website and components were trickling in one at a time.
Hey! Alex from Fetchnotes here — we actually JUST released a new web app that is way faster. Check it out and let me know if it's still giving you trouble: www.fetchnotes.com
Sometimes you'll get hosed because of the attachment upload limit, which does not degrade gracefully. Originally, it just logged that you couldn't sync. When they did add a notification, it was something along the line of "sux2bu [ok]".
I know the Mac App Store and download versions are different (never install the MAS version, just add the download version to your puppet setup.). As the Windows and iOS versions are obviously different as well, I have this feeling there's a bunch of #ifdef hell in their builds that doesn't get tested well before releases.
Their iOS app has always been this slow. However, sync across platforms is quite important to me. So, I have set up Drafts for fast note taking and shortcuts to send notes to relevant notebook.
Since notes are saved in Drafts as well, there is very low chance of losing them. Plus, Drafts has markdown support!
I am sure you'll find this setup better for notes!
One year ago, my girlfriend was using Evernote (on my suggestion) to write her travel journal on our trip to Southeast Asia. I saw her note sync a bunch of times (the iOS app shows a little blue arrow when it's uploading). But one day she opened it and the note was gone. I contacted support but they couldn't do anything. (They offered her a year of free Premium service and "apologized for the inconvenience".)
Since then, I've stopped recommending it to people because I don't want to feel personally responsible if they lose notes too. I also have a tinge of doubt every time I record important information. My biggest worry is Evernote quietly losing a note, because once I record something in Evernote I typically push it from my internal memory.
On top of that, their iOS app is incredibly slow. When I want to quickly jot an idea down, it's very inconvenient.
I've started using SimpleNote lately, which is far faster, but I don't know to what extent I should trust it to keep my data safely.