A Review of UpNote

UpNote is a fantastic dedicated note taking application. Here is my review.

[@SeanCottrell]

Great review. Well structured and detailed.

[@effectivefaith]

Glad you liked it!

[@Marpiet13]

I do not understand why you only have 384 subscribers. You are doing a good job.

[@effectivefaith]

That's really kind of you to say. I think these take time.

[@user-sv4zn6xc6t]

I really like how you divide your evaluation In the functional and technical aspects, and how the functional is a scale of usability and the technical is a pass/fail.

[@effectivefaith]

Thanks. Some things, like the speed of the app can be considered more on a scale but it's my view that when it comes to speed we will all have a minimum viable threshold.

[@petepaxton5109]

Well after I found out there is no drawing, voice, email to note, or even reminders, I asked for a refund and got it. The developer informed me these features will never be considered or implemented.

[@effectivefaith]

Fair enough. Those aren't things that I will ever use or in need in a notes app.

[@vcab5319]

Hi Chris!!! So i'm a little desperate at this point with Evernote. Could use any advice from you. Yesterday as i was ready to export out all of my notebooks, EN crashed down, logged me out & hasn't allowed me to access my account since yesterday on any of my devices. Apparently other users are experiencing a similar issue but their team has never been more unresponsive. I have over 11,000 notes on that account. I had a backup done back in December so that means i can retreat some of them. However, the biggest file, the notebook i care the most about, weighs about 400+MB cause up til that backup i'm sure it contains a little over 6,000 of those notes & i know Upnote doesn't allow files over 20MB. Is there away you would know about accessing this NB? At least for now, since i can't currently log into my EN account to export it on a different way. Perhaps compressing it without losing data? Tried running it on Apple notes but it's the same issue. Thanks for any help, i'm feeling hopeless, i fear i could have lost 5 years worth of notetaking but EN has never been this sketchy & distrusting :(

[@effectivefaith]

That is a real pain and I am so sorry this has happened to you. I recently read that a few days ago, bending spoons laid off the remaining 98 staff that came over with Evernote so there are now no original Evernote staff left. I suspect this is why the team are unresponsive. If I understand you correctly, you have an old backup of the notebook you want but it is too large to import to UpNote and you cannot log in to Evernote in order to export it in several smaller .enex files, is that accurate?

[@vcab5319]

@@effectivefaith thank you for taking the time to respond, I deeply appreciate it. Yes that’s correct, the file is too big to import into Upnote & no I’m afraid I won’t be able to log into my EN account in order to “downsize it”, at least not anytime soon.

[@effectivefaith]

I have an idea or two that I am working on at the moment. It is not my best - but I think it might work as a possibility to consider. Once upon a time I used to use an app called Nimbus notes. I stopped because it wasn't always reliable and they went in the team productivity platform direction and jacked up the price... Anyway - their free version will import .enex files of any size (I have an old one I found that was 475mb) and it seems to be importing fine. If you have clipped html emails to Evernote, then Nimbus doesn't import these very well, nor Evernote Tasks, but most normal notes seemed to import nicely. In the past, you could batch export notes as separate html files on the free version using their desktop app. Currently my import has uploaded and 245 of 1498 notes have been imported. Once that is done, I will see if I can export as HTML - that can then be imported to UpNote. The other idea is the same but using Notesnook. I've never tried this before but it is importing my notes MUCH faster, it's nearly done. The downside is that the free version will only export in .txt and you need the premium for exporting in html. There is a free trial but I think that involves you paying with a 30 day money back guarantee. You might be able to pay for just a month though which is just £4.27 in UK money. I will let you know.

[@effectivefaith]

Right - here is my best possible option. Notesnook has already finished importing the .enex and exporting the notes as a .txt file. It was a 475MB file and the exact note count was 1490. Nimbus notes has only imported about 400 of them so far. They look better in Notesnook than they do in Nimbus notes, though both have a slight issue with html emails that were clipped to Evernote. However, it's hard to be certain of this as many of the notes here have been imported and exported over the years through Evernote, OneNote and Nimbus notes....Basically it tries to cram everything into tables within tables for some reason. I'm importing the exported .txt file into UpNote right now and it is working pretty well, with the obvious limitations, for normal notes. With a subscription and importing as .html, I think it would work even better. For the more complicated notes, like the ones with tables and html content, the .txt file format obvious is just coming through as gibberish. This is mostly as the images haven't come through but get replaced by incredibly long codes. If you exported out of Notesnook as html, this wouldn't happen I do not think. If you don't want to go this route, I googled online for converting .enex to .html and there are some programs that do it, but they are all developed by individuals and available on places like Github to download and install and I cannot vouch for their effectiveness or their safety..... Hopefully, Evernote will sort itself out and you can get back in and export the notes in smaller files.

[@francisgigot6416]

Hello... I suggest you test the Joplin application to import your ENEX notes in Markdown format... I exported 10000 notes with this software in Obsidian... PS: I don't know how to put a link in a comment , just type Joplin in Google and you arrive on the site...

[@ashishbhateja]

1. Unrealistic pricing 2. Several small friction points , which add up 3. Forced downscaling of images 4. File size restrictions to 20MB I’d be careful using this as my main app

[@effectivefaith]

Thanks for your comments. No app is going to be perfect for everyone. As for pricing, I agree that the current plan cannot last if the app grows. What friction point do you have? Personally I wouldn't use a notes app for photo storage, I'd put a photo in for reference so it wouldn't matter so much to me if it was downscaled. The images in my notes are fine for me size wise. The file size limit hasn't really been an issue for me yet, but I can see where that might create friction for others.

[@lukec2226]

The deal breaker features are really up to individual preference. I am tempted to migrate to this from evernote The only real concerns I have are the webclipper is pretty awful, and the lack of e2e encryption. I see they have over 100k downloads in the android store, so upnote is really gaining momentum. I don't understand why they don't charge a bit more and hire some more developers.

[@christiandevos9468]

No OCR in pdf attachments

[@effectivefaith]

I know. To be honest though, I've never used it in other apps

[@BDV000]

Worried about security withbthis app.

[@effectivefaith]

What's the specific worry?