Quote:
Originally Posted by taosaur
Well, I can sympathize there; I recently did a stint trawling through developers' press releases semi-professionally, and a lot of it was videos and text that seemed engineered (badly) to make the user feel good rather than tell us anything.
Still, I stand by the assertion that the manufacturer's or developer's page should be your last stop when researching something new, not your first. With free and 'freemium' software especially, the number one reason people visit the page is to click the download link. Any additional information presented is likely to be scant, laced with marketing, and/or written in insider 'developerese.' There are exceptions, but even then you're likely to get more and better information from a tech blog's review and comments, and/or users' how-to guides and how-I-use-it testimonials on personal blogs and forums. You'll generally get better, more digestible information from an informed third party.
That info can usually be found by searching something like "evernote review," and if you're seeing a lot of results more than a couple years old, maybe restrict results to the past year. Also, find a couple high traffic tech blogs that you trust and set up site-specific searches (very simple in Chrome and, iIRC, Firefox). Besides Lifehacker, How-to-geek, Mashable, and Ars Technica are all decent (again, a big strength is that they have a reasonably informed commentariat to confirm or call BS on the writers' reviews).
A site search of Lifehacker for "Evernote" turns up a fairly thorough overview from 2008, a link to all Evernote news where you'll see any recent new features, a link to user polls naming Evernote the favorite recipe organizing app and favorite note-taking app, and some reviews of their spin-off apps.
Here's a comment with several good ideas from the overview: |
Agree with your sentiments taosaur, but regarding a 2008 review of Evernote - it's capabilities now couldn't be compared to 4 years ago, as you'd know.
Hopefully they will do an updated Evernote review soon enough, eh.
Have to say that I got onto Evernote through Crackberry, obviously because I use BB products - and I've found their reviews to be pretty spot on.
Like you, I like to read around and try and assess what's what and what's not before I venture, even when the product is 'free'.