What’s New in Evernote 5

http://evernote.com/evernote/whats_new/mac/

by benguild • 14 years ago

50 34 14 years ago

jvoorhis• 14 years ago

I love Evernote as a productivity tool, and I do have a few decent recipes buried within, but I have doubts about adding first class support for them (a la Evernote food), or first class support for this or that.

Evernote have done an amazing job of creating the core experience for creating, retrieving and synchronizing notes across devices. I don't know what lessons their product team has learned along the way, but I wonder why they are drifting away from their core strength.

ianstormtaylor• 14 years ago

I've never been able to get into Evernote. I think my problem with their approach to design is that they try to solve all of these random different use cases with random different features. And when you do that, you end up with a really fragmented app and features that never get touched by 99% of users. (Those Firefox heatmaps come to mind.)

On the opposite end of the spectrum is something like Trello or Workflowy. They decided on several core abstractions: cards for Trello and nodes for Workflowy. Then, as the user, you figure out how to bend those core components to fit your needs. And the product itself remains incredibly basic.

I realize there's also a danger in abstracting things away too far, but it just seems like the other direction degrades into feature chaos way too quickly.

guga31bb• 14 years ago

Seconding WorkFlowy. I started using it a couple months ago and haven't turned back since. I showed it to my (not very technologically savvy) wife, and she loves it too. It's great for sharing the mobile interface is nice, and I like how simple it is.

(sorry if this sounds like an advertisement but it's great to actually have a to-do list manager that I actually like)

veidr2• 14 years ago

I really love Evernote. It has absolutely changed my life for the better. Every single significant piece of paper in my life, be it physical (e.g., parking ticket) or virtual (e.g., airline e-ticket) in my life goes into a feed scanner which directly inputs it to Evernote, then into the shredder. It has spared a lot of cumulative hours of my life from being wasted on crap-work.

Having said that, the Mac app totally SUCKS. Big time. It abruptly loses the cursor and keyboard focus so you can't type. It sometimes pauses for a looooong time. It crashes. Outlining is buggy. Keyboard shortcuts buck the standard Mac conventions. It has egregious design flaws, including completely wrong/insane behavior for the basic functionality of creating a new note (Cmd-N opens an insanely huge bloated master-detail view of all your notes, search field, notbook list, multiple toolbars, and activity monitor, requiring that you find the new untitled note in all that crap, double click it to open the new note in a note window, and then close that bloated behemoth (necessary even if you don't mind a huge unnecessary second window being open, because several editing operations cause crashes when two views on a note are open simultaneously)).

It is one of those apps where the actual function is so beneficial/important that you deal with the app itself being a total piece of crap.

So I look forward to a major new version, although pre-announcing software that isn't available is annoying, and there's not much in this post to indicate whether or not the severe problems with Evernote 3 have been fixed in addition to adding all the glitz.

jwr• 14 years ago

I tried to use Evernote, many times. I tried hard. But I just can't — there are seemingly minor problems with the Mac app and the iOS app that just make it unpleasant and annoying to use it on a daily basis.

I now keep my PDFs in Yep, other notes in Yojimbo, and suffer those apps' limitations — I still prefer them over Evernote.

Also, my trust in the company did not improve after I saw what they did to Skitch. A great app was basically ruined. So, until they hire a decent usability & UI design expert and start seriously improving the usability of their apps — I'll wait.

veidr2• 14 years ago

I understand. I also prefer the UI of Yep or Yojimbo (or any of a bunch of other programs).

However, the cloud-tastic fact that all my notes are available everywhere outweighs the interface problems for me. (Even though I desperately would like a better UI.)

The thing about apps with UI problems like this is that users can overlook the flaws at first, if the app is really useful. But with time, if the program is something you use every day, one comes to develop a deep-seated dislike, almost a hatred. Or at least I do.

Therefore, I am inclined to try out every single would-be Evernote competitor, where if their software didn't have such sharp, sucky edges, I would not have time to do that. This is why I think making shoddy software can be really harmful to a company in the long term, even if it is presently popular and successful. If something else came along with the key features of Evernote wrapped in a less sucky package, I would jump ship instantly.

However, for me those key features are a.) one-step scanning paper to the cloud, b.) one-step print anything as PDF to the cloud, c.) API to get data out so I'm not locked in, d.) reasonably fast and robust search across hundreds of thousands of documents, and e.) Mac, Windows, iOS, Android, and web apps to interface.

So far at least, there's nothing else.

VLM2• 14 years ago

"there are seemingly minor problems with the Mac app "

Depressingly my solution was to uninstall the mac app and use the web interface. As a workflow its very much like my Palm3 from 1997, heavy editing and importing on the desktop and magically all my data is accessible from my little android phone when necessary. Its part of the eternal wheel of IT, there's nothing new under the sun in IT. If you loved your Palm PDA in the late 90s (I did) then Evernote is basically the modernized version.

stcredzero• 14 years ago

> I tried to use Evernote, many times. I tried hard. But I just can't — there are seemingly minor problems with the Mac app and the iOS app that just make it unpleasant and annoying to use it on a daily basis.

Evernote's persistent mediocrity might just be a significant factor in the coming tablet wars. Microsoft has Onenote which is excellent.

danek• 14 years ago

I have trouble using it for more than a week at a time. Evernote is great for saving full webpages and images and such, but I find the UI is terrible for basic note taking & the editor has so many bugs that plain text composition is a nightmare. I've since switched to dropbox + sublime text solution (mac & pc), and for iPhone, dropbox + PlainText.

larsberg• 14 years ago

The two biggest bugs/issues I've had with Evernote are:

1) The sync/merge sucks. Despite having a common baseline, if there's any sort of conflict (usually due to one of my machines "forgetting" to sync every 5 minutes), you just get two copies of head and have to do a baseless merge by hand.

2) If you're not subscribed to premium, the mobile app seems to actively remove notes that you had already downloaded if you're offline for a while. I got quite the surprise when I had planned out lots of day trips in Japan, switched between two notes to check on tomorrow's itinerary, and then got a, "you need to upgrade!" message for the one I was just reading.

It's also kind of sad that the iPad version doesn't have even basic handwriting input with OCR and text search, ala OneNote for tablet PCs from ~2002.

Bvalmont• 14 years ago

This looks great.

I always wondered why they never seem to highlight their best feature, which is the ability to search text in images or scanned documents. That has been a huge timesaver in the past. One day I'll put all my important documents in there.

zaptheimpaler• 14 years ago

I've never quite understood the point of Evernote. To Evernote users - what kinds of things do you use it for?

robmcm• 14 years ago

I second that.

It seems like it has lots of features and call do all this stuff, but no real direction. What is it?

I think they could benifit by having some use cases, hot to use evernote for receipts, evernote for ideas, evernote for shopping lists, that sort of thing.

jclos3• 14 years ago

As a PhD student, I use it to organize my research. Instead of having physical notebooks, I have virtual notebooks that I use to note and track the evolution of my ideas over time or when I need to write a report, because it syncs between my lab computer, my phone and my laptop. I also use the web clipper when I want to download and annotate a web page. I know that I could use a combination of free tools to do the same thing but I like having all of it bundled in the same package. The only big drawback is that they take my data hostage - I can't access it using a third party client (at least to my knowledge).

rrreese2• 14 years ago

In the windows version at least you can export your notes as html files.

cing• 14 years ago

Seconding that. I do computational research, so while I can't merge my code repositories with Evernote very cleanly, I can drag in just about everything throughout my day into Evernote to make a record. Also, the audio recordings are extremely cheap (storage-wise) so I tend to record most conversations and meetings I have. It's a vital part of my research and I don't even pay for premium.

rrreese2• 14 years ago

I can only answer how I use it, but here it is.

I take notes. Those notes sync to my work and home PC's my phone, my iPad and are available in a web app.

Those note can contain images and rich formatting such as tables.

I also keep my todo list in it, as notes can contain check boxes.

I keep my notes in hierarchical "Notebooks" (folders).

Finally I can search through all my notes.

All of the above make it a really excellent note app, not quite as good as OneNote but the syncing in Evernote is vastly better then OneNote's.

I know that other people scan documents into it, and that Evernote will OCR hand writing and make it searchable but that isn't my use case. You can also send emails, PDFs etc to it but once more I don't use this.

VLM2• 14 years ago

Multiplatform, sharable, exportable, background syncing GTD getting things done implementation. Basically a really elaborate "to do" system that puts all the complication into the system thus clears my mind.

If I had to do it over again, I could do it in google drive or dropbox but evernote always seems to have that one killer feature (out of the 100s of useless ones) that I just can't live without. Evernote 0.00001 would be a no brainer I'd drop it like a hot potato, but each user has a different killer feature they'd can't do without...

I also make one EN notebook per major project and upload "everything" into it as a centralized location. GTD events in the form of a note flow back and forth from my projects to the GTD system as required.

dasil003• 14 years ago

I just dump rich content in there that I want to search/access in the future, possibly from my phone.

I tried it for typing notes, but its strength is copy and paste, not formatted text entry, so I keep Notational Velocity for actual notes.

jeremyarussell• 14 years ago

I hadn't actually considered how much evernote might be useful to me if I used it like that. I think I might actually reinstall it.

murrayb2• 14 years ago

Bookmarks (migrated there after Yahoo sold Delicio.us and never have regretted it, all my are now full clips so I don't have to worry if the URL goes stale) Research & notes. Tips tricks and other miscellania eg how to do conditional formatting in excel Recipes Lessons learnt Scans of business cards that I might need but don't want cluttering my contacts Scans of 1 page manuals eg the instructions that came with the combo lock on the side gate

All of that and other stuff :) I use most of the features, the only thing I wish it did have is a Delicious style tag cloud to make navigating those tags quicker, and a native Linux client.

bravoyankee2• 14 years ago

Springpad http://springpad.com might be the best Evernote alternative I've seen, but they aren't charging money so I'm a little worried about their long term sustainability.

Personally, I can't seem to get into Evernote in a serious way. Springpad, probably.

moystard2• 14 years ago

Trying it out and since you mentioned it, I have a question:

Something I like with Evernote is that it is quick to edit a note while on Springpad it seems painful to do, especially if you want to follow your progress on a note/task using comments. I don't like the social comments as it does not seem to be effective, I would like to edit the note itself.

Any idea?

Leynos• 14 years ago

On the Android app anyway, clicking on the note text brings up the edit box.

bravoyankee2• 14 years ago

I haven't experienced any kind of friction when it comes to editing files. Springpad is intuitive for me, even on the iPhone.

lucian1900• 14 years ago

Every now and then I try out Evernote, but every time I stop because they lack a linux app. I wish they fixed that.

moystard2• 14 years ago

Have you tried nevernote?

murrayb2• 14 years ago

Agreed. I've had reasonable success with NixNote/Nevernote http://nevernote.sourceforge.net/

dade_• 14 years ago

For me, cross platform support and reliable backend are critical and these are two places where Evernote excels.

Evernote really needs to focus on app stability. For example, the current IOS app crashes constantly and has a glitchy interface. Over the years, feature growth has been very messy from a UX perspective so it is good to see they are working on a fresh approach.

I have been using Evernote since before it was a cloud app and I always loved the cross platform support with the same data file. Once it became a cloud platform, the broad platform support of mobile devices is truly fantastic: BlackBerry at work, personal iPhone and iPad, Linux desktop (Web app / email address to add notes), Windows 7 & 8 on VMware, and it works great on my Nexus 7.

Evernote is a key part of my workflow and daily life and I found my investment in time figuring it out has paid off immensely.

sabret00the• 14 years ago

For the longest time I've been looking for an Evernote alternative that is open source and able to sync my notes between Windows and Android (and desktop Linux) but haven't found one.

I really hoped that Mozilla would diversify and offer something in this regard. No such luck though.

sutterbomb• 14 years ago

Anybody notice how similar the promo video is to Apple's product intro videos? The tone, pacing and even language come across as strikingly similar - all they are missing is the stark white background.

codex• 14 years ago

I would use Evernote more if there were a private sync option, or even a local LAN sync option (which would be usable from my iPhone via VPN). I don't trust my personal data in Evernote's cloud, or any cloud.

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