Trello is one on my list of tools used but later shelved. Loved it early on. Still like the “card” metaphor for some organizational tasks, as well as kanban boards.
Had a similar experience with Prezi. You could build very cool presentations with it and it was fun to play with initially. Agree on how the tool sometimes distracted from the message. I also decided that I was a slide guy. Sometimes you just gotta own your shortcomings.
I have used Evernote on and off, mostly on, for many years. Things did get very weird in the feature bloat / lack of support era. I do feel the new owners are generally trying to get things back on track. And I’ve got so much stuff in Evernote that I need to retain and don’t know where I could migrate it (and yeah, I’ve evaluated options for migration every 15 to 18 months for what seems like forever).
Could not agree more with you about Jamboard and Reader. At least Jamboard went away before serious dependency set in. But I’m still seriously pissed off about Reader. Google keeps showing cool labs projects that I’d love to try but every time I look at one of them I hear a voice in the back of my head saying “remember, this is google we’re talking about, you’re seriously not going to fall for it again are you?”
Trello may well be on the list if I redo this post next year. I used to run my life on it, but they've been doing crazy stuff with it since Atlassian purchased it, and they keep adding features while obviously not talking to any users. It's borderline unusable now.
Someone posted a fake tweet the other day about Google Keep being shut down and the social media platform just about melted down!
Yes. They're pretty no-nonsense, easy to share, easy to work with, no frills and no BS. And since I use a Google Workspace for all my writing and speaking stuff, it's well integrated into that ecosystem.
Agree on Evernote. It seems like one of the best lessons in how feature bloat kills highly functional tools. And yet no one in Big Tech ever learns that lesson, which I think is the central dynamo of enshittification. The tools aren't really made for us or with us in mind. When they work beautifully, it's a temporary condition intended solely to push adoption at the outset.
Had the same experience you did with Prezi. It definitely made some viewers feel nauseous. It also caused problems because it was made with always-on Internet in mind in an era when some presentation venues still thought slides were always and invariably a file on a thumb-drive that needed to be plugged into a non-connected laptop.
Good point about Prezi, I do remember being in a bind once when using it in a big conference center with no wifi -- there were such things as convention centers without wifi back in the day.
If there is any "tech company" out there that seems to get the lesson about bloat, it's Obsidian, which has remained steadfastly minimalist.
Trello is one on my list of tools used but later shelved. Loved it early on. Still like the “card” metaphor for some organizational tasks, as well as kanban boards.
Had a similar experience with Prezi. You could build very cool presentations with it and it was fun to play with initially. Agree on how the tool sometimes distracted from the message. I also decided that I was a slide guy. Sometimes you just gotta own your shortcomings.
I have used Evernote on and off, mostly on, for many years. Things did get very weird in the feature bloat / lack of support era. I do feel the new owners are generally trying to get things back on track. And I’ve got so much stuff in Evernote that I need to retain and don’t know where I could migrate it (and yeah, I’ve evaluated options for migration every 15 to 18 months for what seems like forever).
Could not agree more with you about Jamboard and Reader. At least Jamboard went away before serious dependency set in. But I’m still seriously pissed off about Reader. Google keeps showing cool labs projects that I’d love to try but every time I look at one of them I hear a voice in the back of my head saying “remember, this is google we’re talking about, you’re seriously not going to fall for it again are you?”
Trello may well be on the list if I redo this post next year. I used to run my life on it, but they've been doing crazy stuff with it since Atlassian purchased it, and they keep adding features while obviously not talking to any users. It's borderline unusable now.
Someone posted a fake tweet the other day about Google Keep being shut down and the social media platform just about melted down!
Do you mainly use Google Slides for presentations now? If not, what do you use?
Yes. They're pretty no-nonsense, easy to share, easy to work with, no frills and no BS. And since I use a Google Workspace for all my writing and speaking stuff, it's well integrated into that ecosystem.
Google Reader. It was such a good tool.
Agree on Evernote. It seems like one of the best lessons in how feature bloat kills highly functional tools. And yet no one in Big Tech ever learns that lesson, which I think is the central dynamo of enshittification. The tools aren't really made for us or with us in mind. When they work beautifully, it's a temporary condition intended solely to push adoption at the outset.
Had the same experience you did with Prezi. It definitely made some viewers feel nauseous. It also caused problems because it was made with always-on Internet in mind in an era when some presentation venues still thought slides were always and invariably a file on a thumb-drive that needed to be plugged into a non-connected laptop.
Good point about Prezi, I do remember being in a bind once when using it in a big conference center with no wifi -- there were such things as convention centers without wifi back in the day.
If there is any "tech company" out there that seems to get the lesson about bloat, it's Obsidian, which has remained steadfastly minimalist.