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Evernote Lays Off Most of Staff, Triggering Fears of Closure

12 Jul 2023 7:08 PM | Anonymous

I have been a big fan of Evernote for many years, mentioning the product many times in previous articles in this newsletter. (See https://eogn.com/Sys/Search?q=evernote&types=7&page=1 for an index of the many articles where I have mentioned Evernote.) Sadly, the product appears to have fallen on hard times.

I have become disillusioned with Evernote over the past year or so for several reasons and am now considering switching to a different product. 

The following is a brief article published in the Slashdot.org web site at: https://slashdot.org/story/23/07/10/2318212/evernote-lays-off-most-of-staff-triggering-fears-of-closure:

"Evernote, the note-taking and task management application, is triggering fears of closure after its parent company Bending Spoon laid off most of the company's staff and announced plans to relocate all operations to Europe. Thurrott reports:

Most of the company's "operations will be transitioned to Europe," Bending Spoons CEO Luca Ferrari told SFGate, due to the "significant boost in operational efficiency that will come as a consequence of centralizing operations in Europe." As a result, most of Evernote's staff in the San Francisco Bay area and Chile has been laid off and those offices will be closed for good. 

"Bending Spoons won't confirm how many Evernote employees it laid off, but Ferrari claims all is well. "Our plans for Evernote are as ambitious as ever," he said. "Going forward, a growing, dedicated team based in Europe will continue to assume ownership of the Evernote product. This team will also be in an ideal position to leverage the extensive expertise and strength of the 400-plus workforce at Bending Spoons, many of whom have been working on Evernote full-time since the acquisition."

I am now looking at alternative replacements for Evernote. One that looks appealing is Joplin, a freeware open source product that seems to have a lot of enthusiastic users.

Question: Do you use Joplin?

If so, would you drop a comment at the end of this article describing your satisfaction (or dissatisfaction) with Joplin? I certainly would like to know and I suspect quite a few other readers of this newsletter would like to know of your experiences as well.

Joplin may be found at: https://joplinapp.org/.


Comments

  • 13 Jul 2023 4:09 PM | Anonymous
    I DID export my Evernote notebooks to Joplin, which was easy! Alas, Joplin only supports Joplin Cloud, or DropBox, or OneDrive for syncing across devices. Though the Joplin app itself is free, Joplin Cloud is not. I wish Joplin supported Google Drive!
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  • 15 Jul 2023 5:28 PM | Anonymous
    Thanks for the article. I've used Evernote for a very long time. I looked at Joplin. It looks good, I'm a fan of open-source projects, so I installed it and did some initial tests. My only concern is that there is no built-in OCR support for PDF files. Given that this is one of the biggest selling points of Evernote, it is a little disheartening. To be fair there are some plug-ins and extra steps that can be taken to add this type of support to Joplin, but the amount of effort required for all of my existing 'notes' at this point seems daunting.
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    • 16 Jul 2023 9:56 AM | Anonymous
      —> My only concern is that there is no built-in OCR support for PDF files.

      There is a work-around to that, although it adds another step. There are several web sites that will convert PDF to DOC or other file formats at no charge. U use the on at https://tools.pdf24.org/en/pdf-to-word but I know there are others as well.

      You could first use another web site to convert the PDF to DOC (or some other format) and then import that new file into Joplin.

      Admittedly that is extra work (an extra step) and isn’t ideal. I’m not really recommending it but simply pointing it out as a way to accomplish the same thing at no cost.
      Link  •  Reply
      • 17 Jul 2023 12:17 AM | Anonymous
        There are two different issues here. The first is putting OCR within the PDF files. I already have a process that does that. I also have programs and tools that will attempt to convert PDF files to Word Documents. Since most of my scanned PDFs are not originally from a word processing application, the results of trying to convert a PDF to Word (or some other format) are almost pointless. Thanks for the suggestion, but for my use case, it will not really buy me anything.
        Link  •  Reply
  • 22 Jul 2023 6:16 PM | Anonymous
    I exported all my Evernote notes to Joplin, but I didn't like that it dumped all jpgs from the articles and pdfs into a separate folder. Other than that, exporting was seamless. It was fine, but I wasn't sold on it. Zoho Notebook is also touting easy exporting from Evernote, but I haven't used it. I'm using Obsidian, but the mobile experience is not flawless. I miss Evernote's "everything, everywhere" universal easy access.
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