Thing 16: Notes
This is a cross-post between WordPress and Medium.
Having come of age with computing at a time when Microsoft were seen as the big monopoly power (eg during the ‘first browser war’), I have a muscle memory that makes me instinctively reticent about them. They may have significantly advanced the uptake of computing overall, but there was still a time when they were much more ‘the bad guys’ than anyone else.
Although I use several of their products to this day and find the Office 365 subscription I have access to through work particularly useful — the combination of the core Office suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) backed up to OneDrive and accessible from all my devices plus Skype for Business for real-time comms — that muscle memory remains of vainly holding back against one company having a monopoly on my working tools.
This is, of course, pretty hypocritical given that I have given over most of my computing ecosystem to Apple by choice for many years or that I make use of Google’s range of tools several times a day. However, who said that using computers meant ideological purity and completely avoiding all compromises? We educational technologists advocate for students to use mobile devices in learning for enhancing engagement, despite this resulting in many more faces down rapt in screens. We all use the internet itself, which is both the great information leveller and the world’s biggest surveillance machine.
Given the reservations I’ve historically had about Microsoft, this has meant that I’ve tended to steer clear of OneNote. I’ve used it in a previous job when asked to use it, and found it reasonable for the job of keeping, sharing and collaborating on digital notes. In my personal use however, I have avoided it and gone instead for Evernote as my tool of choice for digital note-taking.
Evernote had some of that new-tech-idealism early on — simplicity in design, syncable across multiple devices, great utility, and a CEO that said good things about his plans for his tech and his customers. I’ve been one of those ‘freemium’ customers that these companies trading in solely digital products need in order to grow at scale but who are often faced with ongoing attempts to convert them into paying customers. It’s an understandable business strategy for the company to take, and I’d no doubt try and do something similar with a large user base as a CEO myself, but as a customer I’d never found the need to upgrade my Evernote account to a higher tier. In order to keep their ‘long tail’, these companies also need to keep a significant number of their freemium punters too, and for the utility I got from Evernote for free, this has always been a role I’ve been happy to play.
Recently, I’ve had some of that faith in Evernote a little rattled. First up, they reduced the number of devices that Evernote could be installed on and successfully synced across down to only two devices. Also, earlier this year, I spent a lot of time writing something in a particular note that remained unsynced during the period that this reduction in usable devices was going on. When I lost the entire contents of the note (painstakingly written over many successive commutes) at the point of reconnecting the device to a wifi network, I lost the entire contents. Evernote’s customer service was admittedly exemplary in trying to get to the bottom of a problem for a customer that wasn’t paying for their products, but I remained disappointed to have lost the contents.
So, following an article about Evernote suffering a major bug that resulted in data losses as well, I put a call out on Twitter for alternatives to Evernote. I’ve long known that OneNote is the obvious one but for the reasons outlined above, I’ve avoided it. Apple’s own notes app gets progressively better with each turn of the development cycle and I also use that too, but aesthetically it still feels like the digital difference between writing on the pile of scraps of paper you keep near your desk against the nicely bound hardback noteboook you carry in your bag. Google have something too (Keep?), but given Google’s ubiquity these days, one perspective says that they have become the Microsoft of their day (yes, yes, I know that’s also a contradiction when extolling Apple products at the same time, who says I’m pitching for absolute purity here?). I try not to put all my eggs in one bigtech basket. Google have also stung in the past by pulling other free services that I’ve used or which have underpinned what I’ve been using, such as Google Reader for organising RSS feeds.
The thing that came back to me as an alternative to Evernote, of all things, was Zotero. I was told that Zotero was free, open source, ‘perfect for writing academic papers’, and that I could take notes in it as well. The two-way sync functionality that Evernote has comes with an iOS app called PaperShip, plus it also has Microsoft Word integration, as well as a supposed 300mb free of cloud backup.
Zotero had clearly come out of the academic and research community, so it had good cred there. On top of that, it had open source cred too, so that was another plus point. This post then is partly about trying Zotero as an alternative to Evernote and coming to a conclusion as to whether I want to switch or not.
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Evernote’s tagline is ‘remember everything’. So, what do I use Evernote for, in order that nothing is forgotten?
- typing text notes as I think, hear or read things
- drafting my writings
- copying and pasting content from other places/sources (email, web pages, social media, pictures from messaging apps, etc)
- taking pictures quickly, when passing something I’d like to capture (eg design ideas)
- scraping web page content via a browser plugin
- organising my notes across several themed notebooks
I prefer it to be installed across as many devices as I choose, though that’s obviously no longer an option. I don’t make much use of tagging or the collaboration features, but am aware that they are there/useful.
So, how do Zotero and Evernote compare, as a means of digital notetaking? I downloaded the Zotero desktop application, created an account online, and installed the PaperShip iOS app to find out.
First up, I tried saving the content of a webpage, which you can do quite elegantly and in a handful of different ways in Evernote. There’s a browser button for Zotero on the PC with options to save web pages ‘with or without a snapshot’. You can’t view the page directly within the desktop app (it only saves the metadata as well as any notes you add?), but a right click on a page in the library reveals a ‘view snapshot’ option. This opens an exact copy of the original web page in the browser, and is stored somewhere else on the hard drive than within the application. On the phone app, look in the Library and tap on the item to see the same thing.
I created a one-line note in the desktop version, noticing that there was a lot of standard formatting functionality available. It seems, however, that the only thing in the app that can be created anew is a journal article (which I assume is just the metadata, rather than the actual content). In the desktop version, I created a note as an attachment to the new journal article. The note was synced and findable within the document in the iOS app, but it was a bit hidden.
There doesn’t appear to be any way to take a picture with a phone and add it to a note or a document, a major factor in looking do an Evernote replacement. PaperShip is designed more as a document viewer (for Zotero and Mendeley) than as a means of creating content from scratch. For £7.99, it’s possible to unlock a PDF annotation function, a feature which is warmly reviewed in the App Store, but it clearly lacks comparable functionality to Evernote’s mobile app.
Zotero’s desktop application looks like a piece of open source software — fully functional but aesthetically lacking. Designers are perhaps less willing to give their time for free to crack UI problems than coders are with software builds. PaperShip is not developed by the same people as Zotero, so lacks visual continuity between the two. With Evernote, there’s a clear sense that whichever flavour you’re using — mobile app (whatever the device), desktop app, browser version, or browser plug in — you’re at least using the same product and that certain actions will have continuity across platforms.
I can see how Zotero would be great for managing references, storing academic articles and even perhaps writing notes for authoring articles. However, I can’t see it as a replacement for Evernote in the way that I use it as it’s too different and despite being feature-stuffed, it lacks so many of the things I’m looking for in a note-taking app.
For now, I’m sticking with the elephant.
