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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*
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.
Note taking is one area where "mobile first" is a good idea. The best note taking device is the one you have with you. And most of the times, it is a mobile device.
And unfortunately, most note taking apps are terrible on mobile. In particular, the only app I know does hand drawing correctly is Squid/Papyrus, but it is the only thing it does well. Mobile phones take pictures, have a touchscreen you can draw on, but they are terrible for text input, and yet, most mobile note taking apps rely on the latter.
Still, "mobile-first view into a powerful cloud-enabled productivity environment" doesn't sound good. The problem is data entry, not the "view", the "cloud" or the "productivity environment".
Note taking is one area where "mobile first" is a good idea. The best note taking device is the one you have with you. And most of the times, it is a mobile device.
And unfortunately, most note taking apps are terrible on mobile. In particular, the only app I know does hand drawing correctly is Squid/Papyrus, but it is the only thing it does well. Mobile phones take pictures, have a touchscreen you can draw on, but they are terrible for text input, and yet, most mobile note taking apps rely on the latter.
Still, "mobile-first view into a powerful cloud-enabled productivity environment" doesn't sound good. The problem is data entry, not the "view", the "cloud" or the "productivity environment".
I half agree with this, but I think you're missing the GP's point. I agree that making it easy to jot down notes and get the information out of one's brain and onto a more permanent form of storage is something mobile devices are good at, and I agree that the mobile versions of most note taking apps could stand to use a bit of improvement.
However, what I think was the original point, is that while mobile devices are great for taking notes due to their availability, desktops are great at helping to categorize that data based on their ability to show lots more data at once, and alter the display of that data to allow for greater amounts of categorization.. In the broadest of strokes, the most optimal system would be one where the mobile UI is optimized for data entry and the desktop UI is optimized for metadata entry (e.g. tags, categories, pages, links, consolidation, OCR, and so on).
The problem is that giving each platform a means to utilize its strengths is incredibly difficult to do; such a task would land the product in one of three categories:
1. The low-density, few-controls "mobile first" UI that wastes massive amounts of space on a 24" monitor and has so few controls as to lack the ability for users to customize.
2. A high-density, highly-customizable UI on a mobile device that's impossible to navigate or pick particular controls, or ending up with multiple sub-menus that make the mobile version unfriendly to use.
3. A schizophrenic UI that is optimized for both, but ends up being foreign to the end user when they switch between platforms, making it seem like almost two different products.
Good UI design is hard, and the unicorn, 'just right' UI, if it ever is properly conceived, is undoubtedly going to die on the table of the first committee meeting.
No, that's the bullshit line they use for cameras. The best note taking device is paper and pen/pencil. A runner up is a real keyboard. Behind that is dictation you later transcribe (or have someone else transcribe). You also have your digits and your asshole with you all the time. Why isn't sticking your finger up there then smearing shit on your forearm the best note taking device? (Hint: It's not because poop smells, it's because the usability and the end result is awful.)
As far as handwriting recognition goes, old blackberry devices, older tablets, the fucking Nintendo DS, etc. had it down great. It's not the device, it's the clowns making shitty software and trying to reinvent the wheel as an afterthought to MOBILE FIRST fluff and AGILE DEVOPS wankery.
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.
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?
Doesn't that depend on the kind of notes you're taking? I'm an Evernote user and I can already tell you that text notes are a minority of the notes that I take.
What's in my notebooks? One has a large number of what are effectively bookmarks. If I see a device I want to buy on a webpage I clip that page and put it in one of my Evernote notebooks. If I see a book referenced in an article I look up that book and clip the page from Amazon or B&N in a notebook of books I might want to by. My granddaughter sends me a picture of her basketball schedule (via messenger, of course) and I throw the picture in a notebook I keep for schedules.
I do have text notes. One is my not a bucket list. Another is a list of all of the states and countries I've visited. I've a list of all of the Dr. Who DVD's I own (So I can pick up ones I'm missing if I see then at a store which still carries DVDs) I don't make those lists on a mobile device. I make them on a computer, but read them on mobile device. I use to keep a shopping list too, but Google's shopping list has been superseding that since I can have my assistant add things to the list and then ask "her" to read me the list when I get to the store.
From my point of view for finding and reading notes mobile is the most important interface (though the PC has to be good too). For creating notes a link in my browser that easily lets me clip pages to Evernote is vital as well as the ability to easily send pictures, pages and such to Evernote from mobile. I need to be able to search and read on PC too, because from time to time I want to be able to clean out my old notes and reorganize things.