Thoughts on iOS 8.16.365986 (2018 / 9)

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

Thanks for producing a great-looking app that is, overall, a real pleasure to use every day. I am sure you are hard at work on the next update. Here are a few thoughts I have. Some of them are bugs I’ve reported, and some are just thoughts. It’d be great if you could keep some of these in mind. 

1. Offline Search

Sometimes it works. Most of the time it doesn’t. I am a premium member, my data is downloaded for offline use, and I have synced. Searches that ought to turn up dozens of notes turn up nothing and the app tells me I need to connect to the Internet. What is the point of paying for premium and offline access to my notes if I am just getting a message to connect to the Internet? I can manually find my notes, so that is something, but I think it’d be nice to have online search back. Make it so

2. Creating a Note from Photos

If I only select a few notes and create a photo, everything works fine, but several (like 20), just causes the process to fail. It’d be nice if this didn’t happen. 

3. Thumbnail Images

Some PDFs get one, but most only have a gray image. It’d be nice to have a thumbnail view of some kind.

4. Search Hits in Images

It’d be nice if we could search inside of a note and have search hits displayed within images. Doing a search of every note will highlight the terms, but doing a search within a note won’t. You can guess what I have to do to find something — leave the note, do a search of everything (using advanced search grammar) and then check inside the note. The feature is already there, but access to it only comes from outside the note. 

5. Relevant note suggestions

Sometimes there. Sometimes not. It’d be nice to have some consistency, especially with notes that clearly are related to others. It’s not really a bug or a feature request. Rather, it’s a request for more consistent application of an existing feature.

6. Photo / Scan

The app (and Scannable) are really nice to use, in general, but to be honest, they don’t do as well as other apps (Readdle’s Scanner Pro, for example), and this has a dramatic impact on the accuracy of OCR. I’d like to use the app and Scannable more, so please improve their quality.

6.  Devices

I can see that four devices are using my account, but when I go to see what those are, nothing appears. Is this a bug? Is this how it is supposed to be? Please take a look.

[CalS 5,280]

All the above plus the app has become extremely slow to display note content, even for offline content. 

[BrightHomesRE 31]

@GrumpyMonkey, you have valid points and I hope they are addressed, especially the offline sync and the gray image displayed as a PDF.

[DTLow 5,736]

5 hours ago, GrumpyMonkey said:

dramatic impact on the accuracy of OCR

I wonder at the quality of Evernote's OCR processing, done at the servers.  It also includes images and handwriting which is a plus.

The big name OCR products are expensive; I just use a cheaper alternative (PDF OCR X)

Overall, I'm not able to rate the products on accuracy;  they all seem adequate for my use.

[CalS 5,280]

3 hours ago, DTLow said:

I wonder at the quality of Evernote's OCR processing, done at the servers.

There are issues.  I have an open trouble ticket based upon search results not being up to par on IOS version.

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

On 9/26/2018 at 9:19 PM, DTLow said:

I wonder at the quality of Evernote's OCR processing, done at the servers.  It also includes images and handwriting which is a plus.

The big name OCR products are expensive; I just use a cheaper alternative (PDF OCR X)

Overall, I'm not able to rate the products on accuracy;  they all seem adequate for my use.

I think the OCR is fine (in comparison, for example, with Adobe Acrobat Pro). But, when Evernote takes poor photos / scans, the quality suffers. Garbage in, garbage out. On the same phone, other apps are far superior, and this results in better OCR. The problem here is not in the OCR, but in the app (Scannable as well).