Notion looks great, and I've been hoping to migrate it. There are two big problems.
One is the migration path from Evernote. If you look at all the current notetaking apps, none of them seem to have capitalized on the fact that there are lots of unhappy Evernote users out there who would kill for a smooth, painless migration path. Instead, these apps ask you to export your Evernote notes as HTML, something which Evernote only lets you do for a single notebook at a time. I have lots of individual notebooks, so this would take forever. Plus, you lose folders and images this way. Why not just write a small app that scrapes the whole Evernote database? Last I checked, it's an SQLite database!
The other is the lack of offline search. This isn't a dealbreaker, but it seems pretty suspect for an app like this. Losing cell service completely is one thing, but shouldn't it be "offline indexing first" anyway? Obviously it has all my notes synced at all times. I want the search to be lightning fast even if I'm on a slow connection.
It seems like "attachments" (files like PDFs, and also images) are not stored offline, either. In the iOS app, clicking on a file or image brings up an S3 URL inside an embedded web browser.
The database is evernotes internal structure, and can change. The HTML at least is their official export and somewhat stable. I bet when you search on github you will find some scripts converting the database into html. But for a company it might be to much hassle to maintain such a tool.
This should be the bread and butter of a company like this, no matter how much hassle the technical implementation details are. In today's world, getting people to bootstrap a completely new app with content is a very hard ask. Want customers? Have great onboarding.
A company has always thousands of imporant tasks which they should do. But ressources are limited, so most of them simply can't be done. This task here is nice on paper, but in reality just a minimal enhancement over the existing solution.
One is the migration path from Evernote. If you look at all the current notetaking apps, none of them seem to have capitalized on the fact that there are lots of unhappy Evernote users out there who would kill for a smooth, painless migration path. Instead, these apps ask you to export your Evernote notes as HTML, something which Evernote only lets you do for a single notebook at a time. I have lots of individual notebooks, so this would take forever. Plus, you lose folders and images this way. Why not just write a small app that scrapes the whole Evernote database? Last I checked, it's an SQLite database!
The other is the lack of offline search. This isn't a dealbreaker, but it seems pretty suspect for an app like this. Losing cell service completely is one thing, but shouldn't it be "offline indexing first" anyway? Obviously it has all my notes synced at all times. I want the search to be lightning fast even if I'm on a slow connection.
It seems like "attachments" (files like PDFs, and also images) are not stored offline, either. In the iOS app, clicking on a file or image brings up an S3 URL inside an embedded web browser.