6.10.3.6921 (306921) Public (CE Build ce-1.39.4387) Broken Beyond Repair?

[AngieR 1]

Last night I read some of the feedback about this release.

It really seems fubar, and the more I use it, the more fubar it seems.

Do you people not have test suites you can run things thru to see if they work the same or have been broken?

I spent several hours last night trying to figure out why copy and paste from an Evernote doesn't behave properly when pasted into TextPad.

After downloading a tool to check out what's on the clipboard, it's clear that it's Evernote's fault. 

The handling of whitespace (blank lines, spaces, newlines) is totally bolloxed up.  I cannot even begin to figure out what's going on.  Sometimes the whitespace is removed. Sometimes it's expanded.  I'm suspecting it may have something to do with unicode and/or being compatible with other languages.  Someone probably saw something that looked inefficient and decided to "optimize" it -- thus breaking a number of things.  Or maybe seriously broken regular expressions (which is a shame, since there are so many very excellent and free resources for creating CORRECT regexes.)

(I spent a couple of years as an ace software qa engineer at Apple -- I know SOMETHING about quantifying bugs.)

And now, when I try to combine numbering and use the indent feature, that doesn't work correctly either.

And all the rest of the problems people noted, I have seen as well...
...slow paint of page when bringing it up...
...much delayed responsiveness...
...LOTS of "circles" waiting for, I don't know what.

This is the WORST update Evernote has ever released.

And to think of all the folks I've been raving about Evernote to.

From the outside, with over 20+ years of software development experience, it really looks like your software development & QA process is seriously messed up.  (Worse yet, I can imagine some software engineer is crowing about all the bugs they've closed -- meanwhile creating even more bugs in their wake.)

Seriously -- a robust test suite would keep you guys from creating the kinds of bugs that just should NOT be being introduced.

Be careful, or the free OneNote's gonna eat your lunch.

In the meantime, where do I find the past releases so I can revert to the last release.

(yeah, I am NOT a happy camper.)

Users -- be sure to backup your notes... locally. Export them. Export them all.

Again I ask: how do I revert to the previous version.  At least I will have some hope.

Off to lick my Evernote-inflicted wounds.

Angie

[gazumped 11,652]

Hi.  This is a mainly user-supported forum,  so 'we people' are guinea pigs in this too.  Best way to register your concerns is actually in the thread you probably read through -

... where the devs will be looking for feedback.  Evernote staffers get around to reading these posts eventually,  but there's no guarantee how long that might take.  You can also - obviously - register your disapproval or raise specifics with the support team on https://www.evernote.com/SupportLogin.action if you're a subscriber,  Twitter - https://twitter.com/evernotehelps if not.  They're probably a little busy right now,  so response times may not be quick.

Stepping back in Windows is pretty easy - just backup your current database folder (just in case) and then uninstall / reinstall the app. 

[Jon/t 1,275]

We can be hopeful that a version 7 is on the horizon which is a complete rewrite of what we've got which would point to why they're not bothering much with version 6....

Kind of agree with @AngieR, been working around software development myself for 20 years this development screams of either a very small, pushed team or a piece of software that is about to be abandoned. Shouldn't be releasing with this amount of bugs especially the lag.... fix the lag. Slow UI feedback to a user makes them think everything is worse than it actually is  

[CalS 5,280]

On 3/23/2018 at 6:16 PM, AngieR said:

In the meantime, where do I find the past releases so I can revert to the last release.

You can go to filehippo to get a recent version.  Folks seem to be going to 6.7 or 6.5.

[jefito 5,589]

54 minutes ago, Jon/t said:

We can be hopeful that a version 7 is on the horizon which is a complete rewrite of what we've got which would point to why they're not bothering much with version 6....

Very unlikely that they are doing a complete rewrite for version 7 (or at least any time soon). Complete rewrites are rare in the industry (which I'd figure you already know since you've been in the biz for 20 years). I think that a lot of what's going on is accommodating to the CEF upgrade that they did, so internal changes more than external changes. Meanwhile, version 6 keeps moving along (you can follow the beta in the forums here), slowly, from the outside, for the most part (but I like the new tables), but hopefully they can start focusing on the more annoying bugs that have popped up recently. And then onto Spaces for personal Evernote...

[AngieR 1]

Thanks everyone for your responses... very useful ... I backed up to the just previous GA version which worked "well enough" for my purposes (though still annoyingly buggy in places.)

Today that version unalterably crashed and won't re-start, so I came back and (finally) saw your responses, especially the versions that folks were/are backing up to.

And, in  the 6.11 release notes I found what probably was causing the problems:  handling of emoticons.

It's my understanding that the Unicode folks (with whom I had the pleasure of working with eons ago now) opened up new codepages to handle emoticons and thus opened the world to "another language" -- the language of emoticons.  My understanding is that this is the world of 4 byte characters, so that would explain some of the apparent errant parsing of simple 1 byte characters like newlines.

Thanks again!

Angie

[AngieR 1]

Just looked at the 6.11 thread. 

Looks like they are not learning their lessons.

All hail emojis.

I can see the biz school studies now:  how a one-great, well-beloved company crashed and burned in order to support emojis.

(BTW, part of my delay in responding to your comments before was the considerable delay the EN folks had in actually publishing my post.

Regression test suites would be so much more effective. 

There is the powerful free Selenium, many python libraries, and even automation software, like uBot, which could be used to quickly and easily used to run and validate releases.

I'm guessing someone created regexes to find the binary equivalent of whatever the indicator is for the start character for the emoji unicode page and did a search and replace - without giving any credence to character count (which now has to take into consideration OTHER 2 byte and 4 byte characters) and whether the user REALLY intended this to be an emoji or not.

It saddens me to see the comments about loss of data.

That, of all QA issues, should be a show stopper.

I had a stack of notes I took for watching various trainings (particularly, Sapolsky's excellent bio 150.) which are nowhere to be found now. Or at least search doesn't find them.