Plans for near future given the changes in Evernote free plan

[d1vanov]

It's official now, since Dec 4 2023 Evernote free plan would be limited to one notebook and fifty notes. It's quite unfortunate for users like me, previous free plan with monthly upload limits worked quite well for me given my not so intensive use of the app.

This raises the question what I'm going to do about this change and whether I'd continue the development of Quentier. Frankly, I'm not sure yet if I'd migrate to some other app for my casual note taking purposes but even if I do, I intend to continue the development of Quentier for now. I still have an ongoing project of rewriting the entire local storage and synchronization logic implementation and I want to finish it. Then I'd need to properly port Quentier to Qt 6 and then I wanted to rewrite the note editor as well. I'll also try my best to fix reported bugs. After all, even though Evernote crippled the free plan, Quentier is still usable for local note taking

Regarding plans for more distant future, I had an idea to introduce an alternative synchronization backend using some cloud storage but I'm not yet sure if I'd actually pursue this - it's quite a lot of work, doing it alone would take me years with my usual velocity.
I also have ideas for other projects which I'd been putting on hold for years trying to focus on Quentier. Maybe I'd re-evaluate the priorities.

[charlescanato]

And I thought they were already enforcing this limit through their official client, but not enforcing for API usage. Of course, at some time this would happen. Some sadness, as I like Evernote workflow, but at the end, this happens to services.

I have evaluated this scenario several times. Joplin, Obsidian and some other alternatives seem to be good apps and have an involved community, but... I just can't stand Electron applications. No. I already avoid Teams and Slack using their browser versions, which already make me go crazy when I see one browser tab is using 2GB RAM. I might be anticipating problems (since I didn't give them a try), but I've seen some reports of Joplin and Obsidian using 800MB, so... thanks, but no.

Back to Quentier and Evernote. I'm sure rewriting the storage is no easy feat. For allowing better cloud synchronization, it seems to me that the one-file-per-note model (I guess Obsidian and Joplin already use this?) is a good idea for "local mode", first leaving the sync of this directory structure to the user (and in the future, maybe doing it all inside the app). But a good idea is not necessarily THE idea, or even a feasible idea, I know.

I would like to make you more optimistic, saying that I'll be around for contributing, but right now I have zero dev level on C++.

Whatever your decisions will be, Dmitry, I'll be around, even if you come to discontinue Quentier.

[d1vanov]

Thanks a lot, Charles, it means a lot to read your supportive words 🙂

I also don't particularly enjoy desktop web apps - even if their performance is more or less okay, they don't follow the desktop theme and that alone is a big factor for me to not quite like them.

I had some thoughts about possibly making a new project converting Quentier into a sort of alternative Joplin desktop client, maybe even using the already implemented Joplin sync logic by calling it's command line client under the hood. But again it's going to take years of work and I'm not even sure I'd pull it off - building Quentier was hard enough through all the last years and I'm not getting any younger.

I also always wanted to write something serious in Rust and this language has quite a vibrant community so if I start something new in Rust (maybe with Qt/C++ UI part), it might have a chance to attract enough contributors to make the project sustainable and doable in reasonable time. It could on theory be the bespoke alternative Joplin client.

But anyway, at least for the upcoming months I intend to continue working on Quentier as it is to finish things that I wanted to finish. Then we'll see what the future holds.

[charlescanato]

Well, for now, time to create 500 blank notes and see if this trick will hold my use for some time, until there's a better way :-P