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New Evernote CEO Vows To Spend 2019 Fixing Note-Taking App's Long List of Problems (venturebeat.com)
Rather than serving up platitudes about innovation, the man charged with saving former unicorn Evernote says his priority this year is addressing the long list of user complaints. From a report: Despite some progress, Evernote continued to struggle last year, cutting 15 percent of its staff and losing many top executives.So what doesn't work? Lots of stuff, much of it very basic, new CEO Ian Small says: "Frankly, it's a bit disingenuous for me to try to get our most dedicated users all fired up about inventing the future of Evernote when exactly those same people are the ones who know best that sync doesn't always work right. Or that Evernote on Windows is a bit tired, and is missing features that are found on the Mac version. Or that each version of Evernote seems to work slightly differently, and exhibits its own unique collection of bugs and undesirable behaviors. Or that Evernote on mobile devices sometimes feels like a pared-down version of a powerful desktop app, instead of a mobile-first view into a powerful cloud-enabled productivity environment." Small says these problems have lingered for years and were well-known, but he didn't want to get into why they weren't fixed sooner. Instead, he promises the main focus of 2019 will be dealing with these and numerous other issues.
"...Or that Evernote on mobile devices sometimes feels like a pared-down version of a powerful desktop app, instead of a mobile-first view into a powerful cloud-enabled productivity environment."
Man, he went from zero to buzzword bingo in record time.
How does a company that makes a note taking app need hundreds of people? *head asplodes*
Someone thought they could run a company that does what my phone does out of the box... really? Taking notes and saving them to my google drive? Wow.
It's dead, and it's going to get deadder. The new CEO has the "mobile-first" cancer in his brain.
That's what happens when you only fix the p1 and p2 bugs and let the other ones sit in your bug tracker forever. Eventually the "little annoyances" grow up and are overwhelming.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I've used Evernote for years as part of my academic research, and I have hovered between paying for it and ditching it altogether. Every time I look into the premium version, it's clear that it's a boatload of money for features I will never use. On top of that, the "UX" gets worse and worse and it becomes less and less of a productive program, for example as they keep hiding the actual notebooks deeper behind buttons and menus. Sometimes, then, I think about jumping ship and switching everything over to OneNote, but it's hard to trust Microsoft with much of anything, and OneNote has lost data for me before.
Incipiamus, fratres, servire Domino Deo, quia hucusque vix vel parum in nullo profecimus.
Never heard of it.
Cool story, gramps? On the other hand, the product has hundreds of million of users.
Slashvertisement...?
If it was, it's a pretty poor one. Why would an advertisement contain stories about how the company has being doing poorly, laying off people and how the product is buggy and crappy?
Emacs + Org-Mode + Git + VPS
I can git clone my org-mode repositories (notes, personal wiki, todo lists, contacts, etc.) from my VPS and edit them in a consistent way across Windows, Mac, Linux, and BSD.
No solution for mobile but I don't do anything but text messaging, emails, and light browsing on my phone.
Works for me.
OneNote I used on an iPad and my desktop for a while, for a client.
However one day, it just started crashing on the iPad, on login. Reinstall - still crash. Wait a month for an update or two, still crashes...
I gave up at that point. I now use Notes.app for most things, I can have shared lists with my wife very easily, and It syncs well enough between desktop and other devices. It has just enough features...
I had looked at Evernote and even used it for a time, but it was too bulky for most of what I needed.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I liked EN a lot, but it appeared that the premium account is too expensive for simple thing like sorting notes. I haven't even noticed the bugs. Switched to OneNote and spent the saved money for buying Office 365 available to multiple home users. OneNote is a bit sluggish and not the best UX, but does the job quite well.
If you check their support forums, people had been begging for a "dark mode" setting literally for most of a decade. Users requested it over and over and over, and even came up with hacky workarounds to approximate it. Evernote would occasionally post some "we take feature requests seriously" platitude. But they refused this most simple request. I'd actually given up for quite a while and was using Sublime Text to take notes. Unfortunately, there's no iPhone app for Sublime to sync to; and I found myself in need of multiple-device solution so I had to go back. Even after Apple themselves finally forced the issue by creating a system-wide dark mode; Evernote dragged their heels for months, continuing to blast that awful bright white rectangle in our faces. Why? Who the hell knows? Some asshat at EN just decided that their personal preference should trump those of their users; eyestrain be damned.
Plus, they refuse to fix even the most simple bugs. Lately, I've had to fight with the damn thing to keep my plain text notes (With code snippets that get borked by bullshit unicode garbage characters like "smart" quotes, emdashes, and ellipses.) in plain text mode. I'll frequently add to an old note and lo-and-behold; Evernote switches back to "rich" text and Helvetica and "smart" formatting; no matter how many times I try to kill all that crap. Bug reports and support requests? Ignored.
The stink of it is, for what it is, Evernote is still unfortunately the best solution... hell... the only decent solution, really. But as arrogant and unresponsive as the company is; they're a prime target for some startup to come and do it better. I, for one, will not likely weep a single tear when they fall to their own hubris.
Imagine all the people...
You have to consider the resources required to operate a hipster-compliant infrastructure. Everything has to be in the cloud, everything has to be chopped into microservices and run in Docker (if you don't understand why, this can never be explained to you... just like Minecraft). Evernote cannot simply yum install mysql and be done with it. Listen... our man-bun coiffed lumberjack dressed team arrives at work on electric scooters carrying artisanal farm-to-table kale scones wrapped in unbleached fair trade waxed bakery tissue. Does this sound like the type of group that would do anything practical? Of course not! Therefore we will expend sprint after sprint retrofitting MongoDB to approximate the feature set of Google Sheets. Once that's done maybe we'll boot up our pirated copy of Windows Vista and look at those old bugs.
I didn't even know evernote was still around.
Because hundreds of millions of users for this useless retarded copycat service that mimics notepad.exe are dwindling eventually into millions.. then thousands.. then hundreds.. then dozens.. then none.
The 'Slashvertisement' element is their CEO vowing to fix his shitty notepad.exe program, so that more idiots actually pay for something that has many many many other free alternatives.
Did you not notice the company trying to save face and that their user base is pissed that their shitty notepad.exe copycat service is fucking useless? Yeah, we better put out some good press before we get down to dozens, gramps.
Just as Evernote began charging for the application, Apple beefed up the stock Notes application with matching features. A lot of Evernote installations got deleted at that point.
Fuck you, you peed in MY butt!!
- APK
Nazi faggot troll is a nazi faggot.
I was a light user of Evernote for years - IIRC, it's what I moved to after leaving my old Palm Pilot. I only used maybe a dozen plain text files. Eventually I started using Google Docs for larger documents that were shared and all that, and it just made sense to consolidate away from Evernote. Plus, I think they tried to start charging?
Gramps? More likely a kid, Evernote isn't exactly the newest software in the world.
Last time I used it, it had a UI right out of 1995.
Dear new CEO
I think of something interesting and want to write it down.
I whip out the "supercomputer in my pocket" (smartphone) and tap your app.
A blank screen is displayed for four seconds. A "busy indicator" is displayed for a further second, and then a view of the app, which finally becomes usable after another second or so.
*** It's a notepad app, running on a supercomputer. ***
WHAT IS IT DOING FOR THOSE SIX SECONDS? WHAT EDUCATIONALLY-CHALLENGED CODERS ARE YOU EMPLOYING?
I've just turned 50 years old; I can easily forget something I briefly thought about six seconds ago.
(But I still remember how to design software, if you need a hand.)
I was a Premium user on various devices and platforms. When they announced to change their privacy policy, I realized they had no clue how important and sensitive our data were. They disqualified themselves to be trusted - people wrote down their business ideas, plots of the next bestseller etc. in their notes. I went on to search for a self hosted solution and I am glad I did. I have been happily using Nextcloud on various devices and platforms. While I took care of my precious data, I also removed them from Google, Apple, Microsoft/OneDrive, Dropbox, Box. Since then, I have been keeping my address book, calendar, files, notes, fotos, music, everything in a Nextcloud instance. I moved the data of my family as well. We also use the XMPP chat feature built-in.
Funny little tidbit:
Note how the summary says they "*cut* 15 percent of their staff" but then "*lost* many top executives".
Of course, cutting some rabble is easy, but what really hurts is losing those other guys who helped making the past year such a success. Oh wait?
The understatement of the new yearâ"as evidenced by the rediculous amount of duplicate and triplicate notes in my Evernote