Ever since this article appeared I’ve been trying Notes more and more because I’ve always had some dissatisfaction with Evernote and was wondering whether to renew my premium membership or not this year.
Recently I found a bug with the latest version of Evernote. It seems if you copy text from Evernote and then paste it (e.g. into a database, or BBEdit) it adds an extra linefeed. This didn’t happen before, and I was seeing weird things happen in my FileMaker database as a result, and it took a while to figure it out, but I traced it back to Evernote. I reported the bug to them, and they said they knew about it and were working on an update. Still waiting for that.
The same issue doesn’t happen with copy/pasting from Notes.
Then last night I created an Evernote note with some photos of the electric meters on the side of my house. I did this from Photos on my iPhone and expected it to sync right away with Evernote, but it wasn’t showing up for a long while, either on my Mac or at Evernote on the web or Evernote on my iPhone.
While waiting I tried the exact same thing in Notes and within about 1 minute it had synced to my Mac, where I added my text comments to the note, which also synced back to my iPhone right away.
I was about to contact Evernote support when finally, about 1 hour later, it did sync in Evernote. But the photos came in sideways!
I know there are limitations to Notes. There isn’t tagging, I don’t think. And I don’t know how well the search works yet. And it’s not cross-platform, though I am a Mac/iPhone/iPad user.
Notes also has advantages. If you have a Mac, iPad and iPhone you don’t have to pay to sync between all the devices. I was teaching it to my volunteer class for seniors that I do on Sundays. They all have iPhones and/or iPads. I was trying to move them away from paper notes on which they’e been writing all their passwords, etc. The scanning is super simple in Notes, and the editing of the resultant PDF scans works really well; you can add pages, delete pages, rotate pages, re-arrange pages, etc., really easily. And the sharing features for created documents works well. And the sync works great between everybody’s devices. I think in one afternoon I got everybody in my class to give up paper!
I might try moving to Notes and letting my subscription with Evernote expire and see how much I miss it. I still retain my Evernote notes in case I want to subscribe again after all.