Tag: Evernote

Turtl — Another Open Source Alternative Evernote

Turtl is one of a number of apps that is trying to be an open source, private and secure alternative to Evernote. Evernote’s recent missteps on user privacy have really driven interest in these, but whether or not they are viable long-term remains to be seen.

Turtl promises data that is encrypted in such a way that only the user has the ability to decrypt it,

Turtl takes your password from when you sign up and uses it to create a cryptographic key. It uses this key to encrypt your data before storing it anywhere on your device or on our servers. Neither your password nor your key are ever stored anywhere. This means that only you and those you choose to share with can read your data.

As well as a commitment to privacy,

Now is a very important time in history. Every aspect of our lives is moving into the digital world faster than we realize. We use apps like Dropbox or Evernote because of their convenience, but in doing so we sacrifice our privacy. What data isn’t sold to advertisers or stolen by hackers is carved up by government surveillance. The only way to keep private data private is to either not put it online at all or encrypt it. Encrypting your data can be a big pain. The tools are difficult to learn and one mistake renders all your work useless.

Turtl has a github repository with its code, as well as a Trello board the devs use to track development.

For now, I’m sticking with Evernote, but it is good to see so many alternatives springing up.

About That ‘Upgrade’

A couple months ago — after seeing numerous positive reviews and references to it online — I started using note-taking app Evernote. It’s a cross-platform program that is pretty cool for notes and is designed to sync notes across multiple installs via the Internet (sort of like a note-taking app bundled with Dropbox). So I can access all my notes from any of the numerous computers I use or from the web if I’m at a friend’s house, etc.

It’s pretty slick so far, though we’ll see how well it scales when I’ve got 10gb of notes.

Anyway, the app is free and lets you sync up to 40mb of notes over the Internet per month. Evernote’s business plan is to sell premium plans. Currently there’s only one such plan which is just $5/month and lets you sync up to 500mb of notes over the Internet per month (to make it clear that means this month I can add up to 500mb of notes to my notebook and have it synced, then next month another 500mb, etc. Traffic to keep all the notes in sync across machines doesn’t count against that total).

There’s nothing to stop you, however, from just using Evernote to keep a local notebook on a single machine, and apparently quite a few people do this. So earlier this month Evernote released an ‘update’ to make local notebooks less useful,

Server-side recognition

In this release, we removed client-side image recognition. This means that images will now be processed on the Evernote servers, and not locally on your Windows desktop. We have a number of reasons for doing this. Mainly, it’s to provide you with better quality recognition. Up to now, whenever we made tweaks and improvements to our recognition technology, we were forced to tie that change to a Windows release (and a lengthy QA cycle) in order to ensure consistent results. By moving all image processing into the cloud, we can be much more aggressive in improving our recognition technology, which benefits all Evernote users.

This change also decreases CPU and RAM usage, which allows Evernote for Windows to run faster and more reliably on a wider range of computers; and it’s a much smaller download –down from a hefty 56MB to a svelte 21MB.

This change does have one significant side-effect. There will no longer be image processing in local-only notebooks, but we feel that this is a good long-term tradeoff.

Riight — with machines these days, saving that 35mb on the executable download will be a major factoring affecting adoption.

Most of the feedback to the announcement was extremely negative, noting that removing local image processing appears to be a business decision to drive more people away from local notebooks and into the premium plan. As one commenter put it,

To be honest…not really buying the change. There are reasons for keeping notebooks offline, and the image recognition feature is probably one of the best features of evernote. Would it not be possible to have a seperate version in the client that only works on local notebooks? and update it only when u make new releases?

I think most of us with local notebooks won’t mind an “old” recognition feature because I’m pretty happy with what it dones as it is already.

I don’t mean to pick on Evernote here. In fact this sort of marketing spin when companies decide to do something to increase revenue is so common that it’s almost hard to notice it anymore. It’s almost like speed limits — we’re so used to breaking them and/or seeing them broken that it’s actually surprising when someone actually adheres rigorously to them (and speed limits are often like EverNote’s upgrade — they are frequently set lower than a rational cost/benefit analysis would arrive at in order to maximize revenue from tickets and other secondary interests, such as alleged energy savings, etc).

The weird thing about Evernote is that they don’t take their monetizing efforts very far. For example, I currently pay $5/month for a 500mb/month quota. I would probably be willing to go up to $15/month for a 1.5gb/month quota, but nope — the only options are the free 40mb/month and the $5 500mb/month quota. I can’t buy more than that 500mb quota at any price. Strange.