RIP Evernote, onto Apple Notes

I was an Evernote evangelist for 15 years and I was a paying user for 10 years. Evernote was ahead of it’s time. It was a notes app, freeform database, and web archive tool. It even had optical character recognition 15 years before any other mainstream app, meaning you could search the text within an attached image.

I used Evernote to archive web pages, recipes, birthday gifts, receipts, random songs on the radio—before cell coverage and Shazam were reliable. Even some goofy article my high school gym teacher wrote for the Manchester Hippo made it into my Evernote file.

The app was also system agnostic. It worked on Mac, Windows, Android, iOS, and the web. The Evernote clipper plugin even worked on Linux. I was an Android user for my first 6 years of being a smartphone user. I used Ubuntu Linux for over 5 years as my daily driver operating system at work. Being system agnostic was something appealing to me—and still is.

When I got my first job after college, I decided to upgrade to the paid version of Evernote, which was roughly $30/year at the time. The yearly rate slowly increased, but somehow I managed to remain grandfathered-in to a modest pricing plan. Evernote got reorganized multiple times, and more recently got bought out by Bending Spoons, a European conglomerate. The kicker is that they were going to force me onto a $130/year plan. Forget it.

I’ve been slowly drinking more and more of the Apple koolaid. Truth be told, I’ve been using Macintoshes since I was 2 years old. When I was 6, in 1999, my parents got me one of the original G3 iMacs. Mine was green ☺️ That computer also will go down in history as one of the best pieces of industrial design ever.

Enter Apple Notes. It was one of the first iOS apps in 2008, but it was quite crude, despite the kitschy skeuomorphism façade. The font was MarkerFelt if I remember correctly and the background looked like a yellow legal pad. I never really considered it a serious note taking app until more recently.

Fortunately over the years Apple has added nearly all of my beloved features of Evernote. Optical character recognition, tags for notes, folders, device syncing (only among Apple devices), a web app, etc. I’ll add that the tagging feature in Apple Notes is better than Evernote: anywhere within the note, you can just use # symbols just like a tweet. Apple Notes also works much faster than Evernote, which was starting to get pretty slow in the new versions. Only notable omission is that Apple Notes does not have a web page clipping feature. This was nice in Evernote, because often webpages change or eventually get removed. Oh well. That feature wasn’t worth $130 for me.

I used this fantastic utility on GitHub called evernote-backup to archive all my notes in Evernote, which really are just rows in a SQLite database. The Evernote archive files can be imported directly into Apple Notes. After that I was off to the races. Vivat Apple Notes.

How I browse the internet

Richard Stallman

Richard Stallman is an eclectic character in the software community to say the least. He founded the GNU Project, which lead to the development of the Linux kernel ultimately by Linus Torvalds in 1991. Torvalds is (quietly) a more significant figure in the history of computing, whereas Stallman is a colorful hippy. For those who don’t know, Linux operating systems power the vast majority of the internet and most back-end servers. The Android mobile operating system is a Linux distribution and iOS/MacOS is also Unix-based, which is a closely related predecessor to Linux.

Honestly, the most intriguing thing to me about Richard Stallman is not his contributions to computing nor his wacky political views but rather his website. Stallman is a prolific writer on his website, which looks like its formatting remains largely unchanged since the mid-1990s. To some degree, Stallman’s website inspired my own. At stallman.org, you can learn about everything from his views on gender neutrality in Spanish, to self-authored French poetry, to his love life. He even posts his former romantic personals listing. Oh la la.

Within the website there are a lot of gems but the page that I find funniest is where he describes how he painstakingly uses the internet.

I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. 

If you are a techy, the page will give you a good laugh. Stallman is against just about every useful mainstream website and piece of software nearly to the point of nearly being a luddite because many of these advancements are proprietary. I should not deride Stallman too much because I also am a big believer in free software, privacy, and largely abolishing intellectual property rights.

And now I too will describe how I browse the internet. For starters, I mainly use the Brave web browser, which is a privacy friendly, de-Googled version of Chrome. There are a number of websites that I find myself needing to use Safari for because Brave does too good of a job blocking active (tracking) elements in webpages. On my iPhone, I mainly use Safari out of convenience. DuckDuckGo is my primary search engine, but I occasionally run Google searches. DuckDuckGo conveniently has short codes for accessing other search engines within its own search box (e.g.: “!g” for Google, “!yt” for YouTube, or “!a” for Amazon”). This is particularly useful if you set your default search engine in your browser to DuckDuckGo. More recently, I’ve started to use a VPN, which can shield you from your internet service provider from tracking you. Not as useful against a state actor. For encrypted messaging, I’ve become a big fan of Signal, which I use on a daily basis with many friends. Despite privacy becoming harder to maintain, there is at least growing cognizance about the benefits of privacy.