UpNote - Escape from Evernote｜幫助Evernote難民出走的佛心軟體
Started using it only for the ability to painlessly import Evernote ENEX, keeping Evernote tags (in two ways). Also, for good measure, its multiple export format choices: markdown, html, PDF, etc.
(2023-12-03) Started paying a super affordable $0.99/month to use it. After a while, I may consider buying its onetime lifetime license for just $30 (price for the U.S.; it's each cheaper in Taiwan).
Quick verdict: 4/5
Pros
Preserving Evernote metadata and tags like no other tools can
- Affordable: $1/month or $30 onetime purchase
- Though a cloud solution, exporting all notes for local backup is fast, robust, and can be set up at regular intervals.
- Turns Evernote tags into two styles: hashtags (most universal) or its own notebook name
- Upnote not only preserves metadata like creation time and modification time (and tags), it even makes sure the markdown files generated today (2023) have the creation time and modification time that mimic the original times (e.g. 2013)! Thank you so much!
Cross links between notes
- Using the [[ syntax, a linked note has info back into the linking note.
Cons
Search has become slow, sometimes painfully so
Previously unnoticed, search sometimes takes more than 5 seconds to get any results. This feels like an eon compared to most tools. The silver lining is I have not found the search results to be unreliable (false positives or negatives).
Search does not support regex like Obsidian
The web clipper is less powerful than Evernote's
The clipped content is usually quite complete. But it may miss certain headings or user names (attributions), strangely. This may be a problem because in a forum or post, knowing where one's comment begins and ends is as important as the comment itself. This problem is observed mostly in complex posting structures e.g. Facebook and Reddit. For simpler articles, such as the bilingual New York Times articles (English and Chinese translation), it is perfect.
Not free, though quite affordable ($0.99/month or $30 for onetime, lifetime buy-out)
I finally gave in and paid $30 to buy it end of March 2024.