I’m not going to try to talk you out of Evernote. If you use the venerable application productively, good for you. I used it for a long time and it was fine. But, recent changes in the application caused me to look elsewhere for the satisfaction I was seeking. And I found it. I found Raindrop.io.
Here’s the thing. I was using Evernote for one thing. I would use the web capture add in to grab web sites, and store them in Evernote. This allowed me to keep copies of my “five free” articles in various newspapers, instead of being locked out on going back to an earlier find because I had arbitrarily or accidentaily clicked through on a sixth find. It allowed me to, essentially, keep track of bookmarks in a somewhat more useful way than bookmark management usually is. And so on. I didn’t do anything else with Evernote.
The way I would get back to the original web pages, after going through my Evernote notes to find stuff I had stashed, was to click on a web address looking thing that was always near the top of the page when viewing the Evernote rendition of said web page. But then, one day, I couldn’t find it, after an Evernote upgrade.
I should not that I was using the professional, paid version of Evernote.
So, I contacted tech support to find out where they had moved the link allowing me to get back to the original site. I found out that they had removed that feature and had no plans to put it back.
It seemed that I was in a “they took away my only reason to use this software” situation. I gave them some time … a couple of months … just to see if that particular tech person was pulling my leg, or just plain wrong. I also sent a message to the company suggesting the not make this change. But as far as I could tell, the functionality was just plain gone. I quickly add, it is impossible to believe they would not restore this basic function at some point, but it is clear that my main reason for using Evernote was not a priority for Evernote. The app, which I liked, really didn’t care about me at all, it turns out.
So, I started looking around. I went to those on line app finding sites. Like,”Replacement For.” I check out web site that reviewed apps, and looked around. Some of them were pretty straight forward, hones, clean. Some of them tried to leave viruses on my computer. But I persisted.
Finally, I found the app that worked for me. It is called Raindrop, and its main function seems to be to keep track of web sites. You can put it in your browser, and just like Evernote, it gives you a button ( a cloud instead of an Elephant) you press to save the site, and you can add categories (collections) or tags.
It also works instantly, where Evernote was slow. It works on Android, and I’m sure on other platforms. The main interface is via the web.
It is free. It is Russian, which should not matter but may to some. Don’t store your political emails in it.
There is a paid professional version, which is $3 a month. The pro version gives you nested collections, suggests tags automatically, has a duplicate finder (that will come in hand some day!) and a broken link finder. It stores images for you to the tune of 1GB of upload a month, and there is a cloud backup that uses Dropbox or Google.
It is actually less than $3 a month since it is $2.34 a month if you pay for the whole year. Those features will probably be worth it to me some day, but not just yet.
You go to Raindrop.io to find more and create an account. I recommend trying it out for a while.
I’m keeping my Evernote account but I cancelled the pro version. I may play around with it at some other time, to see if I’m missing some great experience with its features and functions that I’ve been ignoring. But I’m putting the web pages I want to save on raindrop.
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