Revising some thoughts from a recent chat with a longtime friend…
In agentic AI, it helps to think of it more as declarative programming than as prompting. While agents rely on prompts, they also perform multiple operations and follow a declared path.
There are also architectural considerations for organizing and orchestrating agents by purpose, capability, access, trust, and cost.
“But that’s just my opinion. I could be wrong” – Dennis Miller
This is a sequel to Will UpNote replace Evernote?
I don’t make new year resolutions, and if I did, I wouldn’t pick procrastination as something to work on because I know I would end up putting it off. Like this post, that would have been great to finish right when I thought of it and even better to push out with the flood of New Year’s resolution posts like how to get organized and reduce unnecessary spending, both of which UpNote has helped me with. So, here we go (and I guarantee I will also procrastinate editing before posting).
First off, rather than a big conclusion, that would be much shorter for you and much harder for me (one of my favorite quotes is “I would have written a shorter letter, but did not have the time.”), I am going to share my (mostly) raw notes that I posted on my original blog post as comments to track the journey.
And here is the TL;DR – I made the switch from Evernote to UpNote driven more by my annoyance with Evernote (specifically, Evernote under Bending Spoons) and less by being enamored with UpNote. But, while there are a few features I miss from Evernote, now that UpNote has become part of my daily (almost hourly) life, I do find that most of the user experience is happier (especially now that I have added many keyboard shortcuts to muscle memory), and the support is so incredibly superior as to be no comparison.
Since no one ever comments here, I feel free to do my addendums in the comments for now (until I break this up into a series?).
While the cheaper side of me really wanted to use a monthly subscription to try out the Evernote to UpNote migration and only commit to the lifetime after trying it out, the time management side of me won out because
“You can switch from a monthly subscription to a lifetime upgrade from the Premium screen (go to Settings ? Premium). The app will first ask you to cancel your existing subscription to avoid being charged twice, and then let you purchase a lifetime upgrade.”
(https://getupnote.com/support.html).
The migration is fairly easy, (though not so much if you want to experiment like I did).
I first imported with the option to turn tags into notebooks. The resulting layout was a flattened hierarchy, which means I have to recreate (and finally reorganize) my tag hierarchy.
I was curious if using tags instead of folders would be more suitable, so I deleted all of the notes to re-import again. This is when I discovered there is no mass delete for notebooks, only their contents. Well, I would use them again anyway, so I wasn’t too annoyed.
After re-importing with the tag-to-tag option, I realized that since I couldn’t bulk delete notebooks, this would leave me with the too-tedious-to-consider process of moving notes to notebooks individually (in Evernote, across 3 notebooks, I currently have ~3k notes).
I thought I would be clever and try re-importing the same notes with the tags-to-notebooks option with the hope that it would recognize that everything was a duplicate and just put them in notebooks. Alas, I just wound up with duplicates of every note, half with tags and half in notebooks.
UpNote, if you are reading this, you should offer an option to create both tags and notebooks (at the same time) when importing!
So, I deleted all the notes again and imported as notebooks. I do like the ability to create my own notebook covers (on Windows 3.1, I had icons on folders because that’s the kind of childish nerd I am). And I really like the ease of finding notebooks to link to notes. It reminds me of how easy Evernote was to use when it was a note organizing app and not an investment vehicle.
Continuing my transition description, I have only migrated my personal notebook from Evernote, leaving my work notebook for later. The work notebook has more notes (~1400 vs ~850), which partly informed the choice. Another difference is I use my phone more often for personal notes than work notes, so this gives me more opportunities to note how it works across devices. My initial observations is that search is much faster in UpNote, which can be attributed to the smaller amount of content. But the key thing for me is how Evernote change the home screen from what used to be notes with links to other features to a list of the other features where I have to first select notes (the only function I use!) and only then can I start using the app for its primary purpose. In UpNote it opens directly to the notes, and that changes in notebooks and tags do not change the sorted order of last updated (as some recent changes in Evernote do).
If the visual representation of your current tag hierarchies in Evernote are numerous, complex, and important to you, migration is going to be disappointing. Even if you select for the imported tags to be converted to notebooks and to import into a notebook, the result is that all of the notes are imported in a flat list in the selected notebook and all of the tags become notebooks at the root level without their prior hierarchy.
If I were in a rush to move, this would be a deal breaker for me. Fortunately, I have a little over 3 months for this migration, and the re-creation of my hierarchies and cross tags (notebooks in UpNote) is interesting, even fun at times…so far. A couple thousand notes to go, so we’ll see…
One features from Evernote that UpNote could benefit from is drag-n-drop for the notebooks. Yes, they are tags in Evernote, but since UpNote doesn’t have a tag hierarchy, UpNote Notebooks are feature parity to Evernote Tags. I do like being able to customize the notebook covers in UpNote (used to do that to folders on a Windows 3.1 desktop), but drag-n-drop is a much more practical feature, especially for those of use migrating. The click, select, select, click process is fine if one doesn’t organize much but gets really tedious with 100’s of folders to re-organize after migrating.
It took 3 weeks to finish re-organizing my personal notebook and a notebook from a former job in UpNote after importing them from Evernote. I used UpNote for all personal notes during that time as well.
To summarize my thoughts and experiences so far:
In the negative column for UpNote:
However…
I really will miss the reminders and being able to email notes to myself for follow up through my in-box, and I expect that UpNote will eventually add these features. And I am not looking forward to a month of re-sorting a decade of content when I bring my work notebook in. In fact, if Evernote had stuck to the $49.99 per year, I would have dealt with the mobile UX going down hill to keep the features and save the work. But Evernote went from supporting users to supporting investors, and Bending Spoons just wants users to bend over and pay even more for AI features that are available one window away for free, so I will not be renewing my subscription next year, ending almost 20 years of customer loyalty.
I still need to turn these comments into the Part of this post. Meanwhile, ran across an interesting read today that leads to the need for a note app, though for the use case given One Note would be sufficient: https://fev.al/posts/work-journal/?utm_source=tldrnewsletter
Forgot to mention: The idea of importing back into Evernote isn’t supported by either app. Reminds me of portal platforms back in the early 00’s when they were all proprietary to lock customers in, then later in that decade they all started using “open” standards, which resulted having proprietary formats that would fit in those standards. In this case, both will export to HTML or Markdown but the outputs drop all of the organization.
Crossing my fingers that UpNote gets the long ride Evernote has had.
I reviewed the FAQ page about security. For a non-technical person it can be very confusing. For a technical person it is still confusing. I truly don’t think this is intentional.
To summarize:
There are two key questions whose answers are relevant…
UpNote stores data on the Firebase server (which is a service provided by Google). The Firebase platform is certified to major privacy and security standards and fully supports the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). Firebase encrypts your data in transit using HTTPS and encrypts your data at rest. You can learn more at https://firebase.google.com/support/privacy. We also take great care to ensure that your data is secure and only you can access it.
and
End-to-End Encryption (E2EE) is an advanced security method for encrypting and decrypting data and is designed to protect highly confidential information. Due to the complexity of implementation, UpNote currently has no plans to support E2EE. If you wish to store sensitive information such as passwords or credit card numbers, it is recommended that you use a password manager application specifically designed to encrypt sensitive information.
The gist of which is that the data is not encrypted on your devices. This is a bit of nit-picky difference but worthwhile to note that the weak link in the chain is how you manage security on your device. There is also the bit about UpNote developers being able to access your content. They are up front about that, and also up front about storing private data in secure manner, like a password manager.
In Evernote, tags exist as a flat hierarchy, with the nesting only being at a visual level. For example, if I have a tag Misc and then move it to be under Foo, I cannot create a tag under Bar named Misc. While UpNote also manages tag in a flat hierarchy, Notebooks are truly nested, so I can have a notebook named Misch under Foo and a different notebook under Bar also named Misc. I can then cross reference between notebooks using a tag such as #reference. This is much more how these things work in my head. Your mentalization may vary.
I love the Collapsible Section feature in UpNote. I often used Evernote for presentation notes. The first annoyance in Evernote was when they added wide margins, making it impossible to have both my notes and a presentation on my desktop at the same time. I would use a tablet or my phone to make up for this problem until I eventually got a 35″ monitor (not for that purpose, but a nice bonus point for the monitor upgrade).
Not only can I size the UpNote window to any width I want, I use the Collapsible Sections to make it easier to scroll through the content based on each slide. The keyboard shortcuts are nice touch, too.
Finally parting shot at Evernote: In preparation for closing my account I went to delete all of my notes. It would be useful if it gave some error message that the default notebook couldn’t be deleted. I eventually figured it out, created a new notebook, and set it as default. Still, 1000 notes wouldn’t delete when deleting the notebook. Finally I had to delete at the note level, which is limited to 100 at a time. Hey, Bending Spoons, it is all the friction to standard note management tasks that drove me away from 21 years of use. Making the final steps as difficult as possible helps to reinforce my decision.
Oh, and then when I actually cancelled the subscription I first had to confirm again (acceptable), then scroll through a huge list of features that I was losing (annoying but predictable), then give a reason from a list, but only ONE reason (ridiculous) and then was finally offered a discount of 40%, which if they had offered that in response to any of my complaints over the last two years I may have accepted, but having just spent two months migrating to UpNote, wasn’t going to happen.
UpNote has become a seamless part of my computing life. It took me so long to post this follow up to the original article partly because I am more productive with UpNote, and partly because it is so smooth to use that I don’t really think about it…except on those rare occasions when there is an issue with an update, the last of which inspired me to finally write this post because of the quick turn-around for the fix as a new update, without any of the “do [some really annoying work around] until we can get to the issue”, which is pretty much the response I get from most vendors, and extra annoying because I include the work around in my support request.
Oh, and after you get your own license, be sure to follow the great user community at https://www.reddit.com/r/UpNote_App/.
“Most of you are dehydrated. Yes, you. Mild dehydration screws up your mood, your memory, your focus, your energy levels… so grab a water bottle and sip it throughout the day. And know coffee doesn’t count. It’s a diuretic, it actually makes you pee more. Drink actual water.”
If you hate my habit of parenthetical asides in my writing, I think this entire post qualifies as one, so scroll on my friend, scroll on…
I find it hilarious that I have a reputation as a hard worker, because I was constantly told as a kid how lazy I was. I remember reading a “Humor in Uniform” story in Reader’s Digest about a lazy soldier that kept getting transferred to the most difficult assignments his commanding officer could find. Once the lazy soldier was in the new assignment he would find a way to make the job easier, a talent that was clearly a mixed blessing. In that soldier’s memory, I do things like write all of my posts in my (currently) longest-running blog so that when I create back ups I don’t have to go to all of my posting grounds, only two (https://money.theitsolutionist.com is deliberately separate, and only on the same root domain because I’m cheap)
Anyway, back to the actual subject (which is actually related to my seques), which is how I start my day every day…but first, one more aside: This will be my first post on my new Substack publication “My TBR List”. And, of course, it isn’t about something on my TBR list. (total non sequitur, I have been planning a post about how ADHD may be contagious if everyone you live with has it). It’s about something I read every day. Coming back to the lazy soldier thread, I had Perplexity.ai do the writing for me. Which started as an exercise in laziness except I was also a bit lazy with the first prompt, so the following is the result of four prompts and re-learning the trick of first giving a generative AI a writing sample and asking it to describe the voice and tone, then incorporating that description in the post. I still don’t think it got that right, but the sentiment is there, and I have already spent way more time on this post than if I had just written it straight up (but would have missed out on all of the fun of coaxing Perplexity to do my work for me bidding.)
I don’t consider myself creative or artistic. The artistic bias probably goes back to school, where the requirement of an art elective ruined my chances at a 4.0 grade average (and exemplified by my Featured Image attempts, which even AI can’t seem to help me with).
The creative bias is that I usually can’t do it on demand. I’ve also learned that if you get out of your own way, creativity happens fairly naturally. This is similar to how Douglas Adams describes how one learns to fly. Anyway, one way to get over a lack of creativity and artistic sense is to let AI tools do it for you, and one that I find really handy for my handicap is PowerPoint Designer. (For those who think Designer isn’t AI, marketing is clearly doing it’s job, and perhaps missing the point, and here is proof— as long as the link is valid).
Personally, I don’t mind boring slides. I actually like have really basic slides where the purpose of the slide is for people to remember what we’re talking about when their minds inevitably wander. But, sometimes I am creating slides for other people, or need to meet the expectations of people with different opinions on the matter, so I need to make them a bit less boring, and designer is a great way to do that. One frustration I have with designer is that it so often gives me this message: 
Usually this can be fixed by simplifying the slide, i.e., remove the cool graphic you added and let it focus on the text. Or you can split the graphic and text into separate slides and then combine the results after the magic happens.
Oh, and one word of caution: Copy your original slide before letting Designer have its way with it, because sometimes the new formatting is no longer easy to copy and paste.
Back to the cool hack part. My second annoyance with Designer, after it apologizing for having no suggestion of how to improve my work that clearly needs improvement, is that it gives so few suggestions. This seems to have gotten worst, and I suspect it is because those data centers are saving cycles for the AI that the marketing folks are calling AI. Recently, it was only giving me four or five options, many of which were just minot variations on the themes, like this:
I wasn’t too thrilled with any of the options, but I picked one just to move on and make some progress. Maybe an AI image would spruce it up enough (in the end, it did). Being the paranoid person who has lost early versions that I wished I could go back to, I made a copy first. Usually, when I make a copy, I start working in the copy. But this time, for no particular reason, I went back to the original…where Designer was showing entirely new options based on it’s own modification:
It seemed I had accidently cracked the code to get more options, like in the good ole days before everyone was using these tools, too. Just to prove my theory, I tried repeating the process, and sure enough…
I didn’t really find an end to variations, though I admit that the quality of options generally declined, with an occasional interesting one coming up here and there. Full disclosure: this may have just been the raw material I started with, but that is back to my bias against my own creativity.
So, that’s my big discovery for the day. Well, there were really more, but I have to get back to “real work”, until this writing stuff actually starts paying some bills. Forward this to your friends (or enemies) if you would like to contribute to this hobby.
