Bugs and Other Critters

[piz333 2]

I've been an Evernote user since 2010. Gotta tell you, I was looking for a replacement before v10.5.1 arrived. It still isn't great but before v10.5.1 the v10 releases were disasters. I bet you had an entirely (or mostly) new development team for v10+, didn't you?

I want to see this app work at least as well as v8.13.3, preferably better because that one wasn't great either, particularly the note editor. I'm applying my 40 years of experience in software design, where I was especially noted for my UIs, to v10.x. You have lots of problems in these versions, many of them serious. I'm able to limp by with v10.5.1 on my Pixel XL running Android 10, but it ain't pretty.

Here's what I've found so far:

2021-03-05  - 2021-03-07 (ticket submitted 2021-03-08)
Critical Bugs
•    Can't go from Evernote's internal web browser to the system default or other external one. This is not merely annoying, it's a privacy matter. I don't want Evernote (i.e. you, the one reading this right now, or anybody else at Evernote) to see what I look at on the web. Even if everything I go to is innocuous, it's none of your business.
•    Notes created from the 'New Note" button won't save.
•    Tapping 'Enter' at the end of one checkmarked line in a sequence of them doesn't merely create a new line,  checkmarked or not. It indents all the lines I  the sequence and changes the checkboxes to gray. (I think they're the old v8 checkboxes, having cleverly found a way not to be extinctified in v10. You know the saying, "Life finds a way." So do legacy app elements. [in Yoda voice:] Sneaky they are.) Also, checking the gray boxes applies strikethrough to the text on the line. Get rid of the gray boxes (and the indenting & strikethrough), the new green boxes are good.
•    New, blank notes open with only 'Start writing' in the note text, no 'or choose a template' and no template button. Deleting all the text in an existing note, OTOH, shows all those.
•    Popping the 'Undo' stack until it's empty, then hitting the check mark or back button, still counts an edit session as an update and changes the 'Updated' date of the note. Opening the editor, doing nothing, and closing it doesn't change the 'Updated' date. The former shouldn't either. The same goes for anything that doesn't actually alter a note's content.
•    After editing a note and returning to the main list, the edited note often shows the pre-edit content. Sometimes, if I open the note to edit it again, it opens with the old content as it I never edited it.
”Regular” Bugs
•    Every time I switch to another app, even if it's just a moment to copy something that I want to paste in a note, when I return to Evernote it relaunches as if I'm running it for the first time after a reboot. That's neither necessary nor sane.
•    Can't select text in the name field when renaming templates.
•    Can't select text when displaying but not editing a note. This was possible in versions before v10.
•    Sorted lists don't re-sort when something changes. Even a pull-down refresh doesn't re-sort the list, nor does re-running the search without closing the existing one first.
•    The 'Delete' & 'Cancel' buttons when deleting a template are in each other's places, i.e. their placement is not standard. 'Delete' should be on the right.
•    Notes sometimes appear blank in the 'All Notes' list even when they have content.
•    You must make fonts fully compatible between the handheld, computer, and web versions. That might be solved simply by making the handheld fonts built-in on the computer version (in addition to all the installed fonts) because they're already on the web version.But the font sizes are also a problem - they don't match. A 16 point font on Android is a 12 point font on desktop. This causes major annoyances.
These are all in the note editor:
•    It used to be possible to have images inline with text. Bring that back. (For example, I made little box/arrow icons like you often see on web pages to indicate that a link takes you off-site - Wikipedia is infested with the little guys - to do the same in notes. I can't have them inline any more, at least on Android, and that makes me sad. 😉)
•    Applying templates and reloading a note after saving removes some spaces if there are multiple spaces anywhere in the note. If I put multiple spaces in my notes, it's for a reason. Never change the user's content unless he tells you to.
•    Can't insert checkboxes in the middle of a line. Used to be able to and it was often useful.
•    Unlinking text in a note, doesn't.
•    When editing the note's title, the 'Undo' stack can never be emptied.
•    Can't select text on a line with a checkbox. The selection disappears as soon as I lift my finger. Can do such a selection if I start it on an adjacent line and extend the selection to the checkboxed line, but if I try to then move a selection handle so that both ends of the selection are on the checkboxed line, the selection disappears again..
•    Tapping "Enter" at the end of an empty bulleted line doesn't create a new bulleted line, it removes the bullet, "outdents" the line, and doesn't make a new line. If the line has text, it works as expected.
•    The 'Bold', 'Italic', and 'Underline' selections on the format bar rarely match the text at the cursor point.
•    Can't edit tables, such as inserting/deleting rows. And the default should be "fit to width" instead of the sideways scrolling weirdness, which takes a while to even notice. There should be no surprises in a UI.
Change Requests
•    The new "bottom-up" menus need to be changed to standard drop down menus. Don't get cute in UIs - it reduces functionality and impedes users. I see that you're trying to emulate MS Word and that's OK (if you must), but it's not going well.
Operating systems have UI standards for a reason and you shouldn't go against them because users will be surprised and likely confused by non-standard behavior. They'll at the least be momentarily thrown off every time they use an app with non-standard UI elements. People use apps like Evernote to get things done, not to be wowed by bells & whistles. Stick to business and save the cutesy for game apps.
•    The font used for the format bar is too big. The bar takes up too much screen real estate. (I use a keyboard called Smart Keyboard Pro, which can have a number row above the QWERTY row and a row of autocorrect choices above all. I need all the editing space I can get. Though it's a balancing act, always err on the side of taking up less screen space. These ain't 40 inch monitors we have here, no matter how big the emulators look on your developers' computer screens. Screen real estate is always more valuable than gold, or Bitcoin.)
•    Allow the color of checkboxes to be changed, like text.
•    Restore note selection and its associated actions in the main list and search results. That's an excellent feature for any app that has lists.
•    The 'Note Info' display should include the times with the dates it shows.
•    It would be nice if highlighted superscript characters would only highlight the characters, not also the space beneath them. Probably the same for subscript chars, though I haven't ever used them.
•    The font for note titles on opened notes is way too big. See above about screen space.
•    It would be nice to be able to put separator lines inside table cells. As it is, I'm using a row of dashes. ("Why do that when you could just make a new table row?" you ask. "Because reasons," I reply. The user gets to put whatever content he wants in a field unless there's an inherent or client-specified reason to prevent it, such as numeric-only or, perhaps, company ID fields.)
•    Specifically for the keyboard I use (as I said, Smart Keyboard Pro - don't know how popular it is but it has arrow keys and I can't live without 'em) and possibly for any other keyboard that has autocorrect: adding tables via "bracket" notation, e.g. [][][]x2, doesn't work, as the keyboard tries to correct "x2" before Evernote can interpret the notation. Don't know if you can get between a keyboard and its autocorrect but do so if you can. It would unsad the sad I mention above. 😉
 

[PinkElephant 8,104]

Issue a support ticket, or better one per item.

Because support will come back to you with questions, I found that more than 3 support tickets at a time are hard to handle.

You can use the „feedback“ feature build into the v10 clients as well - no answers on that channel.

[Daprofessor 0]

cant edit encrypted notes:

This makes ever-note useless to me

I need to be able to edit encrypted notes.- will look for alternatives

I don't need to pay for inconvenience and workarounds

Also- Its also annoying that it wont hold may verification for "30 days" despite having a button for such- just annoying