Why are there still note conflicts? Is this 1999?

[Guru-Florida 7]

I've been an Evernote user for about 4 years now I think. Why do I still have to put up with note conflicts? I am *one* person. I am not ambidextrous so I cannot type on two computers at once so why is this a hard problem to solve? I am a programmer btw...so I mean this rhetorically...I know it's solvable. I use git every day and I get less conflicts with a team of developers editing the same files. I've seen countless upgrades with useless features and yet note conflicts are as bad as they were 4 years ago. Besides some visual differences I can't say the app has changed much in 4 years either. So is Evernote dead?

Forgive the rant, but I can't keep a simple "Buying a Home" checklist in sync between two computers. I would say there is at least an hour between when I check the list between devices. Many times I am just looking at the note and whoa wtf I get a conflict the next time I look at it. Did they not sync in the hour I left the computer idle? Is there not even rudimentary "these two versions are equal" check? How about a line by line comparison and just highlight the changed lines...or for once do a useful feature to the very core of the app and add some git-style smarts in there! How could conflict-free notes for a *single user app* across his devices not be a Priority 1 feature request?

 

Thanks,

Colin

[DTLow 5,736]

You're posting in a User Discussion forum.  
You might get a better response if you contact Evernote Support.   Contact Evernote Support Twitter @evernotehelps  

Which device/platforms are you using?

 

[CalS 5,280]

Rule of thumb is to sync whenever you enter/leave a platform.  This should prevent any conflicts.  

[Guru-Florida 7]

So what you guys are saying is, "Yes, it is in fact 1999. Set levers to manual." lol  

[DTLow 5,736]

4 minutes ago, Guru-Florida said:

So what you guys are saying is, "Yes, it is in fact 1999. Set levers to manual." lol  

I'm saying its almost the end of 2017, and I agree that its a good practice to "sync whenever you enter/leave a platform"

It works for me; I rarely get conflicts on note changes

[Guru-Florida 7]

But in 2017 I can have a conversation with my phone. I mean I can actually speak to it and it responds in a sexy voice! I can ask it the etymology of "Avacado" and it will give me an interesting back story. I can also take pictures/vids and they instantly show up on all my devices even my TV (I dont sync anything!) I take cell calls on any of my macs - whichever I happen to be on, I control my home from away, my coffee maker grinds the beans and brews itself. I drove an Acura MDX the other day...well actually, technically I didnt drive it...it drove itself! I was hands off. So if this is 2017 looks like...what's this talk about manually pulling Evernote's Babbage lever? 

I would give my left "Avacado" to not even need a Sync button in Evernote. I mean, ...Imagine! Not even having a Sync button in Evernote. Just take it out! Edit your notes and they instantly go where you go. I'll dance like Olaf in summer.

[CalS 5,280]

Well, if you make a change on your phone while it is set to only sync on WiFi while you aren’t around WiFi, and later you make a change on your desktop to the same note, you will end up with a conflict, no matter the year you live in.  You also run the risk if your sync settings are for extended periods.  

If on Windows go to options and select instant sync, 5 minutes for the interval, and sync on exit.  iDevices pretty much sync when you exit the edited note, provided the appropriate connectivity is there.  I haven’t had a conflict in forever, so it is possible without any particular effort beyond the settings, except on the rare occasion when one jumps from one device to another (aforementioned sync on exit/enter).

[jefito 5,589]

On 12/17/2017 at 1:02 AM, Guru-Florida said:

I can ask it the etymology of "Avacado" and it will give me an interesting back story.

It might even tell you that it's spelled "avocado". Look, you're a programmer. Git (or SVN, or whatever) don't auto-sync your changes to the tree; you need to do it automatically, and even so, auto-resolution of conflicts doesn't get them all (I run into this with some frequency), so that analogy doesn't quite match up. And resolving conflicts isn't as easy with Evernote as with the typical program sources that are frequently the main part of a development project: yes, ENML is text, but some of that represents binary content, so that makes things harder. All that being said, it would be helpful if Evernote had better tools for identifying the causes of conflicts and then resolving them. I don't run into conflicts very often (two accounts with shared notebooks across 4 devices), but when I do, they can be pretty puzzling to figure out what happened and how to fix it. Just looking at the notes may not help if it was the markup that changed. I'd guess that a semantic approach (rather than the common -- and easier -- line-based approach) would be useful, too.

Even so, I'm not going back to 1999, which was before Evernote was invented anyways. Evernote is just too darned useful to me right now, as is.

Anyways, I'll move this topic into a feature request forum, so that others can comment and vote on it.

[Guru-Florida 7]

9 minutes ago, jefito said:

It might even tell you that it's spelled "avocado".  

 

Haha! Good catch.

Quote

Anyways, I'll move this topic into a feature request forum, so that others can comment and vote on it.

Thanks Jefito. I'd appreciate the move to Feature Request area. I've calmed down somewhat. You make some fair points but I wasnt implying Evernote should follow Git exactly either, just that it is IMO pretty darn good at figuring out the basic conflicts on its own and I dont remember ever getting conflicts that are not legitimate.  I dont know ENML but if it's name means it's somewhat like html or xml then I would think the binary form of the parsed tree would make it somewhat trivial to do a recursive branch comparison where at least the common parts would not be duplicated in the conflict that gets appended to the end of the note and I wouldnt expect it to deal with binary assets such as images or PDFs either. Since I've gotten conflicts with no changes made I suspect that conflict resolution is simply a comparison of the last-edited date and if it doesnt match then it duplicates the two notes entirely.

[jefito 5,589]

4 minutes ago, Guru-Florida said:

I dont know ENML but if it's name means it's somewhat like html or xml then I would think the binary form of the parsed tree would make it somewhat trivial to do a recursive branch comparison where at least the common parts would not be duplicated in the conflict that gets appended to the end of the note and I wouldnt expect it to deal with binary assets such as images or PDFs either.

ENML: https://dev.evernote.com/doc/articles/enml.php. Yes, it's a lot like HTML (XHTML, more precisely).

I don't know what the criteria are for declaring two versions of a note as conflicting. I'd hope it wasn't based on something as naive as date of last update, but I can't recall that the details have ever been posted.