The synchronization remains … cumbersome (to be polite).
The annotations are flattened.
The synchronization is limited (no Google Drive, Dropbox, Onedrive …).
The biggest innovation in MarginNote is not that it gives one place to annotate, research, and create study cards. I can do this sequence already. Granted, I must use two or three different apps, and granted by combining the three into one tool, MarginNote has overcome a technological hurdle. But that is not innovation.
The biggest innovation in MarginNote is that annotations can be tagged. AFAIK, this is only also possible in LiquidText. Interestingly, LiquidText also suffers that its annotations are flattened on export (and that it plays even worse with importing standard annotations from other apps).
The minute that an annotation app appears that allows tagging on its annotations and that overcomes the three limitations (stable sync, open export to other apps, and multi-cloud support), MarginNote and LiquidText will become two lone-standing apps on their own island. By example, with the new app, I will be able to annotate with tags, export to DevonThink, and compile the tagged annotations there. Or I can export to a mind map format, import to MindNode, and play with the tagged annotations in an app that is designed from the ground up as a well-structured mind mapping tool.
I applaud this effort. However, you have a product that cannot talk consistently, robustly, and routinely to the rest of the outside world (i.e. it does not sync well) in all its various languages (i.e. it can only access one of the wide range of cloud storage formats that exist), and what it says when it does talk cannot be understood by anyone else (i.e. its exported annotations are flattened). How far will your vision really take you looking ahead in the real world?
I fully agree with your arguments. But I would like to object that it depends on the expectations and perspectives of the processing possibilities of MN. I use MN to structure my PDF texts in a first step. And MN is ideally suited for this, I believe.
I use RoamResearch to further process the information structured with MN. I can recommend RoamResearch because it was created for processing and networking (scientific) information.
Because: How should MN “talk to the world”? Or do you expect MN to be able to talk perfectly to your world? What can be meaningfully done with comments if they are not “flattened”?
For me, MN is a powerful and useful way to structure and annotate PDFs. No greedy subscription solutions, no outrageous prices and no attitude to rob users.
BUT: Sync is a joke and should urgently be made available for Google Drive, Onedrive, etc.
Here’s a real-life example from me that demonstrates why I consider it crucial to not flatten PDFs on export.
I was reading some PDF materials the other day and need to reference another book I finished ~5 years ago. I searched for the book and found it in DEVONthink, but soon realized a large portion of my annotations hold little value to me now due to my limited understanding of the material when reading it for the first time. But because I made those annotations in GoodReader, a robust PDF reader I once relied on which did not flatten my annotations, editing those annotations 5 years later is a trivial task.
All the tools at the core of my workflow do not use a proprietary file format. In the case of PDFs, I can create / edit / delete annotations in DEVONthink or PDF Expert knowing my works are future-proof, i.e. future me will be able to edit them when, not if, he disagrees with present me.
MarginNote offers a unique workflow not easily replicated otherwise. But until I can export my data in a non-destructive way, I have no other choice but to regretfully avoid it.
With all due respect, I don’t think you have understood what I was talking about at all. When I said “[MarginNote cannot] export my data in a non-destructive way”, I wasn’t talking about the synchronization process, I was talking about how it flattens all my annotations into the documents and consequently preventing any means to edit those annotations in the future, thus “destroying” my documents.
As I demonstrated above, programs that adopt the PDF standards (rather than a proprietary database like MN does) don’t even need to export. When I’m using programs such as GoodReader, DEVONthink, PDF Expert, PDF Viewer etc, I can store thousands of PDFs in them and never worry about exporting because they never convert my documents from PDF to a proprietary format in the first place.
I feel like our discussion is going in circle here. By “not exporting”, I have effectively surrendered my data to vendor lock-in. The whole reason I was asking for unflattened export in the first place was to avoid lock-in.
I have PDFExepert on my iOS devices, but ever since being in an office that has a subscription to Adobe Acrobat, I have not really used PDFExpert.
For more “academic use” what other PDF programs for iOS (or Macs) should one consider besides PDFExpert and Acrobat? I have GoodReader 3 (or whatever the older version is; not the current version).
I’d like to know too. I’m pondering over purchasing MarginNote for both Mac and iOS, but would be fine to hold out until version 4 comes out depending on when it does.
This 3 years after this post. Yes, the dev are still making empty promises, they still haven’t fixed the sync issue, and they don’t care about customer feedback at all.
It depends on how you are using MarginNote. Halfway through my first paper I realised I was too dependent on the tool. Nowadays I might use MarginNote for some quick single document analysis but my synthesis is done in Obsidian. It’s canvas isn’t as ‘automatic’ as MarginNote but I get closer to the material and have found that my understanding of the material is improved.
So, the question is: if you are combining all of MarginNote’s features including the study mode then replacing that will be quite complicated. If you have original writing in MarginNote then that also will be complicated. It entirely depends on how deep you have gone.
As an aside, I’ve pretty much replaced MarginNote in my workflow with DEVONThink, Obsidian and BookEnds (which I’m tentatively trialing as a Zotero alternative).
Honestly this post is pretty old but the fact that people are still commenting on it shows how relevant it is.
The customer support is pretty trash and issues that’ve been repeatedly addressed here for years have been ignored or given the same meaningless responses.
And here I was thinking someone would be sharing some more workflow software ideas.
So as not to disappoint, I recently came across this video. In it, the presenter describes using Obsidian to build a quote book. This is something I used to do in MarginNote but I’ve since altered my workflow (as described above) and have been looking for a good way to manage quotations. This doesn’t obviously serve as a substitute for all MarginNote features (nothing really does that) but it might be useful for someone who tracks quotations.
If you are a student you can easily get student discount, after discount it’s really cheap. Its a one time purchase but you will only get the subscription in one device.
But from my use, handwriting experience in liquidtext is very bad and I have reported this to dev team but they don’t have a fix for this.
