E-NoteForum

Yup. I'm so tired of seeing the satellite dish icon flash blue whenever someone in a shared notebook changes a note. I don't care when someone changes a note, and it's annoying to have to keep clicking it to turn off the blue highlight.

 

I like that Evernote takes the initiative to put in new features and streamline functionality, but I hate when they do it in a "This is the right way, and everyone will agree and use it like this" way. I'm sure there are people who really like the shared notification, but it should have been added with an option to turn it off or to customize the toolbar so that people can still use the program they pay for in the way they want.

 

Evernote doesn't always know best, but they implement features like they do. Ugh.

And while we're at it, why be so mean to our designers?

See above.  We've been asking for this stuff for years.  I can point you yo a thread I started I would bet 2 years ago on this issue.  People are tired of not being listened to and not being able to use EN in a meaningful way on the most widely available tablet in the world.  This is a garbage app and that needs to be said. A new person needs to be hired to head the iPad development so this can be fixed.

I'd stop short of saying it's a garbage app, because it's certainly usable. We should focus on the areas where it comes up short, because it certainly has some well-documented shortcomings that users have been complaining about for years and which there's no excuse not to fix.

By the way, let's just stop to drink that in: YEARS. That's an eternity in software design. Just look at apps like Yelp or Reeder or Instapaper, which constantly iterate on the user experience and get better all the time.

But as you say, this is a feature that has been requested for years, which invalidates dlu's entire "be nice to us, we really do listen and we really do care" post (which simply isn't backed up by history). I agree that whoever is heading up iOS development needs to be replaced; name another app where the Android version is consistently better than the iOS one.

Yeah, not much stock in user posts which is why we bother hosting a user forum and why employees read and respond to posts...

Also, you seem to think that our devs lounge around willfully witholding features from you. I assure you that's not the case. And while we're at it, why be so mean to our designers?

Hosting a forum and posting content-free replies doesn't mean you're actually taking action on user requests. Hell, giving people a place to post is a great way to let them blow off steam even if you do nothing with the information.

I don't think that the devs "lounge around willfully withholding features." I don't know where you got that idea, but I've certainly never said that.

My assertion, which is backed up by years of being an active poster and beta tester, is that Evernote developers don't properly value user feedback on the forums and aren't influenced nearly enough by what users are requesting. That's a very different accusation; it's an indictment of priorities and quality, not effort.

Saying that the developers are actually withholding features makes zero sense, and I'm frankly offended that you think I'd make such an idiotic claim (which I never have, by the way). No software developer does all the work for a feature and then decides to hold it out of a build just to irritate users. I'm surprised you'd even suggest that, as a customer-facing employee of the company.

I'm not being mean to your designers. Any designer worth his salt knows how to take criticism. I'm not making personal attacks. I don't call them names, threaten their families or make offensive accusations. I do question their values and feel that they make poor software design decisions.

Attack the idea, not the person.

I think Evernote's iOS developers make bad usability decisions. Many of them, like the lack of a list view, are actually objectively bad if you look at the literature on user interaction design and cognitive processing.

So again, I'm not going out of my way to be mean or negative. But at a certain point, user frustration boils over when developers continue to make poor decisions.

I'm a paying customer who has given you guys hundreds of dollars over the last few years. Evernote is an integral part of my life, both professinally and personally. I'm not some guy on the sidelines offering uninformed opinions, I'm a guy with a lot of software design experience who pays a tiny portion of your salary.

For that, you can accept some strongly-worded feedback that is provided for no other reason than to improve the product that you wake up every morning to work on.

We know you are a longtime user who has helped improve the app by reporting at length about issues. As I recall, one of the main ones involved editing on the iPhone. The developers listened, and solved it, right? I know it took some time, but I got the sense that rich text implementation was a tough process last year.

Wouldn't you say the devs listened and released an excellent app for the phone? I think most of the complaints here concern the iPad. From my point of view, it could be much denser in terms of information displayed, but it is a step in the right direction to have nice new features like recent notes and stacks.

It's not perfect, to be sure, but I do think the developers are listening and moving in the right direction towards a better interface. They've got it right on the iPhone, and now we have to start tweaking the app. I'd say this is to be expected with any UI overhaul.

Yes, the iPhone text editor issues were eventually solved, but it took at least nine months longer than it should have, and I went back and forth with Evernote customer service and QA people for months while they couldn't repro simple bugs that I went into excruciating detail to describe. This is all behind the scenes, via premium support tickets and uploaded notes, etc. I didn't just rely on forum posts, I engaged fully with every channel available to me, and it was still four or five months before support was even able to say "Oh, thank you, now we see the issues and can reproduce it in-house and will start fixing it."

It was shocking; I honestly don't think QA was testing the App Store builds on retail devices, their results were so different than mine (and those of forum posters). Just QA 101 stuff that there's no excuse for failing on.

I'm a software developer myself and have been one for well over a decade. I know what it's like to have vitriolic users and to have trouble tracking weird down bugs, but the ability of Evernote's support staff to respond to clear repro steps has been astonishingly poor in my experience. Just look at the thread on the passcode bypass bug that's been a legitimate security issue for almost four months now (http://discussion.ev...e-security-bug/) ... it's clear that Phil doesn't even understand the issue in his post ... which is a month and a half old now.

Yes, the iPhone app is pretty solid and the iPad app is moving the right direction, but mother of mercy is that movement glacial. For a company with this level of funding it's mind-blowing how slow their progress is and how poor their practices are for usability design.

Nothing we're complaining about here is rocket science. A list view is a no-brainer. Just look at every other iPad app (barring the iPad's Music app, which is much-derided all over the internet).

People other than me have asked a fundamental question in this thread that I think is critical: do Evernote developers actually use the product in a real-world environment? I fully acknowledge that most users aren't as critical as forum users and don't have as much experience in software design, but that's no excuse to not always try to make things better. Great software comes from a relentless desire to perfect your product, and while Evernote iOS has gotten better over time I don't feel there's a level of urgency that indicates a true desire to perfect the software.

Just look at the Android client as a contrast.

As a member of the beta program I've seen first-hand that even beta testers are treated only as that: beta testers. Developers don't respond to or react to feature suggestins from beta testers any more than they do for forum users. Every time a beta comes out you yourself post 20 different feature requests, and the only things that are ever addressed are bugs, not feature or usability improvements. And hey, that's their choice. Beta testing isn't product design, and I can understand Evernote's position that beta testers are there to find bugs, not to change features on products that are already in a release cycle.

But if people who have expressed interest in improving the product and have taken the time to participate in pre-release software testing can't make any level of impact on feature decisions at all, why would you think that lowly forum users would be able to influence the developers?

Anyone who's followed this forum for any amount of time knows that Evernote doesn't put much stock in user posts. They stick to a "we know what you want better than you do" attitude and ignore consistent requests like those found in this thread. Just search to see how long stacks on iPad were requested before the Evernote devs deigned to implement them. Or check out the year-plus of detailed posts on how awful their rich text editor was before they finally made it usable (by acknowledging that they couldn't do it themselves and switching to Apple's built-in solution).

This is the one app that makes me wish I was an Android user, as the iOS app is bizarrely a second-class citizen.

Anyway, I'm just posting to let any new users know not to hold your breath. Perhaps Evernote iOS will turn a corner, but honestly I'd advise just getting used to the card view, because remember: Evernote's designers (assuming they actually employ any) know what's best for you. So stop getting yourselves so confused about what you think you want and just take what they give you. If we get a list view within a month I'll eat my laptop (I originally typed "three months" there, but I figured if I made it a really aggressive timeline the Evernote devs might get around to it in the next year).

So I know how Grumpy Monkey uses list view. Does anyone else have an example of their use case or work flow or title structure?

I don't really have a consistent title structure for my notes, I just want a list view so I can see more of my notes on-screen at one time. I don't have a lot of image notes, so the card view is incredibly wasteful in terms of using the screen space efficiently. It's also much faster and more natural to read a sequential list from top to bottom than it is to to have to go left-to-right and top-to-bottom on a screen of cards.

This isn't just an Evernote thing; cards are inefficient everywhere. It has to do with visual cognition and how the brain works, not just an aesthetic preference.

For example, try to find a specific album on your iPhone's Music app, which uses a list view, and then do the same thing on your iPad, which uses a card view. The iPhone is *significantly* faster because you can lock your eyes on one spot and see one piece of information at a time. All entries slide through one spot, making it much easier to scan since you're scanning on one axis, not two.

With cards you constantly lose your frame of reference because if you're looking in one spot you're only guaranteed to have 1 out of every 4 entries go through there, so you have to keep pausing and looking side to side, which slows everything down.

You can repeat the same experiment in Instapaper, which offers both a list view and a card view. Toggle between them to see which one is faster and easier to use. It's the list view 100% of the time.

In fact, the Instapaper app would be a great model for a list UI in Evernote. It has the title in bold, with a snippet of text or imagery. It takes up about 80% of the horizontal screen space, with a bar on the left for buttons and settings.

Come to think of it, I started using Instapaper as just another example, but honestly I think it would be a massive improvement if Evernote pretty much copied that list view. It would be nice to reduce the size of the text snippet so that more articles fit on the screen, but any one-axis sequential view is better than the 2D grid, which looks nicer but is far slower and less intuitive to use.

Can any devs comment on this issue? When iOS 6 hits this will be a full-on security problem.

There's been lots of discussion on this feature among users. Most agree that it sucks to lose the cancel button. Evernote's devs don't care.

It would also help to provide additional information, such as whether this is an offline note on a premium account or a regular note. Maybe the pdfs or notes need to be redownloaded ... maybe the cache needs to be cleared ... maybe the device needs to be restarted ... maybe the offline notes setting needs to be toggled ...

It's unlikely that the same build has such different behaviors across users, so my guess is that it's something with how the pdf is attached to the note itself (offline vs online, etc). Just a guess, but more information always helps.

Could any devs comment on the loss of offline data when updating to 4.2.2, as reported here? http://discussion.ev...leted-all-data/

Just curious if it's a possible fix or just a coincidence showing that the problem is still there and premium customers still aren't getting what they paid for.

I just updated both my iPhone 4 and iPad 2 to 4.2.2, and I did not lose my offline notes. Just a data point.

For those who are also testing this, make sure that you go into your device settings and look at General->Usage to see how much space your Evernote installation is taking up.

This is important because when Evernote silently trashes your offline data the app will still report that everything's downloaded. You probably won't notice until the next time you don't have a connection, at which point it's too late to do a re-download. But General->Usage is reported by the OS, so if your install is showing up as having way less data than it should have then you've lost your notes.

Losing offline data is a pretty common phenomenon, judging by forum posts here. It's happened to me for unknown reasons many, many times.

I wonder if 4.2.2 has a fix in it that requires purging the cache and downloading it all again. I don't know that that's the case, and given Evernote's track record on this I highly doubt they've done anything to address the problems (which have been reported here for at least 10 months), but if the price of a fix is a one-time re-download, I'll take it.

That said, it's probably just a bug. :-/

According to the Mountain Lion preview page, Apple Notes is getting a pretty big revamp that will make it a much more viable alternative to Evernote. And since iCloud also has a web interface, Windows users will have access to their notes via browser.

Specifically:

• iCloud syncing across Mac, iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch and web
• Folders (i.e. notebooks)
• Search
• Images and attachments
• Fonts, rich text, bullets and lists
• Sharing
• Multiple accounts (hopefully a good way to emulate shared notebooks via custom accounts)

Everyone has different needs and different platforms, but given that I'm a Mac/iPad/iPhone user this sounds ideal. The features listed above are 100% of what I use Evernote for, so one of the first things I'm going to do next month when Mountain Lion comes out is do a feature comparison.

I've stuck with Evernote because, despite the fact that there are a number of frustrating issues that have lingered for 8-12 months without being fixed, there's really nothing else that compares to it fully.

Now that Apple Notes is getting a big feature boost and will receive focused support (as opposed to Evernote, which supports a ton of platforms to the detriment of most), my hopes are high that Notes will either be a valid, stable replacement for Evernote or enough of a competitor to push Evernote to significantly improve the performance of the iOS apps.

If the new version of Apple Notes in Mountain Lion works how the features page claims, I'll be moving my stuff over immediately and ditching my premium Evernote account forever.

My use cases are either:

• Starting a new note and deciding that I don't want it after all. This can be b/c I discard an idea when I take the time to write it out or because I decide that I'd rather make it part of an existing note.
• Making large-scale, destructive changes by accident. Evernote's text selection is wonky, and when you try to select a large block of text (for copy/paste, etc) things can get out of hand. You can accidentally delete huge blocks of text, or you could just try to copy/paste within the document and run into bad results due to the formatting issues still present in the app. In those cases, I just want to cancel and start over. No harm, no foul, let's try again.
• Making non-accidental changes that I just don't like. I can either shake my phone like an idiot to repeatedly perform undos, or I can try to select and delete the changes I've made, but sometimes you just want a do-over, even if you didn't mess anything up by accident.

The current way to deal with these is to either save your note with changes you don't want, laboriously try to undo the changes, or force-kill the app without saving (which many iOS users don't even know how to do). There's no credible argument for those being better options than a simple cancel button.

The cancel button on the iPad app works perfectly in all of these cases. What's the harm in simply adding it back to the iPhone app? It was already there, it already worked just put it back. There's room on the top bar.

Why remove a working, useful feature without a good reason? Can anyone argue that removing the cancel button made the app better?

This isn't even a question of how to implement a new design, it's just a request to re-enable proven, supported functionality.

If it were not for the real time syncing and desktop compatibility and ability to edit existing notes, I would have switched back to Awesome Note.

Oh, cool. I'd never heard of Awesome note, but it seems like a good Evernote alternative. Definitely gonna investigate it.

Looking at the site, it says that it syncs with both Evernote and Google Docs. It seems that those would provide desktop compatibility, right?