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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.
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.
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...