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Making Notes Beautiful


anthonyr

Idea

My biggest problem with Evernote for years has been that it just looks ugly. The reason is I can not format notes how I'd like. 

I would like the capability to:

  1. Add universal margins to notes in settings.
  2. Change universal line height to all notes in settings.
  3. Add Headline functionality and formatting to notes. Making things bold to define a headline is ugly. I'd like headlines to have different font sizes and line height.
  4. Create a non-distraction environment for when I am writing. In other words, remove the top bar that tells Notebook, Tags, Dates, etc. if I want to format the note, it can show up if I hover my mouse over a certain area of the note.

PLEASE take a tip from the Bear app at bear-writer.com. They are doing formatting and clean writing environment wonderfully. It's simply beautiful over there. The problem is they don't have the power to share notebooks with other people--so I stay with Evernote.

Please Evernote focus more on what you are known for: NOTES. Please stop creating new features and products--there's enough! You're getting away from what you started this company for--to have a great notetaking environment! It's beginning to get bloated and ugly compared to the way newer note-taking/writing apps are innovating. 

I'd love to stay with Evernote forever, but it's just not pleasing to my eyes!

 

For context, attached is a side-by-side screenshot of an identical Evernote note and a Bear note.

Screen Shot 2017-11-01 at 2.13.06 PM.png

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10 replies to this idea

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FYI, not everyone uses EN as a note taking tool.  It also works great as a repository for all kinds of non-note stuff where you can search and find easily.  IMO, search is the tools strength.

So, no issues with adding more formatting capability, but not until current editor issues are redressed and not at the expense of a UI which slows down the search process.  Simplicity can be nice, but it can also take longer to get things done in simple environment, vis a vis, the current web version versus the original.  FWIW.

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3 hours ago, CalS said:

My biggest problem with Evernote for years has been that it just looks ugly. The reason is I can not format notes how I'd like. 

I agree with @CalS

The Evernote editor is adequate for basic notes and I use dedicated editors for serious work

There are many features not included in Evernote's editor but this is not stopping me from making "Beautiful Notes"

I say use the editor that best fits your requirements.  Evernote plays well with Office/iWorks documents and most apps can export to a pdf file

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Again, Evernote began as a notetaking app. That's how it was when I began with it years ago. I hope everyone can agree that it looks and feels bloated with all the features.

It used to be simple. Now it's not simple anymore.

If a UI isn't usable, then the attention to simplicity doesn't matter. I hope you don't actually think I want to sacrifice usability just for prettiness, did you?

Both are completely possible.

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This is one of those eye of the beholder things, a sliding scale of usability and simplicity.  Not going to be any 100% right answers   Most recent example EN just simplified PDFs on Windows and it is now harder for me to do what I used to do.  Wrong kind of simplify, for me anyway.  

So yeah, my history is more simple or more complex equals more time.  My EN use case is more paperless and my version of GTD,   I have very few "notes" per se, less than 5% of 35k notes, most of which are phone call logs   Second brain stuff, not notetaking, so not as concerned with a clean canvas.  If they want to make it optional, fine with me.  

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4 hours ago, anthonyr said:

I hope everyone can agree that it looks and feels bloated with all the features.

"Bloat" is an imprecise word. So exactly which features would you remove from Evernote as it is, and why?

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5 hours ago, anthonyr said:

Again, Evernote began as a notetaking app. That's how it was when I began with it years ago. I hope everyone can agree that it looks and feels bloated with all the features.

It used to be simple. Now it's not simple anymore

Evernote is my digital filing cabinet.  That's more important to me than "notetaking"

There are so many apps available for creating content.  I pick the best one that best fits the requirements; for example Word/Pages for word processing, Excel/Numbers for spreadsheets, Notability on my iPad ...

You started this discussion with a list of features too be added to Evernote; and now you're saying Evernote is bloated.  This seems like two different discussions

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34 minutes ago, lucasneumann said:

The web version looks so much better. I hope they bring the web look & feel to the notes on mac

Can you provide some details on what you  prefer with the web platform?

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12 hours ago, lucasneumann said:

The web version looks so much better. I hope they bring the web look & feel to the notes on mac

The web client lacks a huge lot of functionality that the desktop clients have.  I would never trade that functionality for whatever look and feel improvements there are in the web client (and honestly, I can't name any). Regardless, the look and feel of the application is not related to the actual topic here (making notes beautiful).

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