Quicknote

[ha-kg 19]

When I have started Evernote 10, I have in the task manager the Evernote Icon. A click on it opens the Quicknote Menu. I want to avoid this.

The possibilities to config Evernote are very, very poor.

It is possible or have I to stay with legacy. 

Hartmut

 

[agsteele 2,946]

Right click, create a shortcut on the desktop to specific note or double click the program shortcut

[PinkElephant 8,103]

You can design a note to your liking, and export it to the desktop as ENEX file. Double clicking it will start a new note with your defined layout.

[kfreels 31]

This has been annoying me for quite a while as it makes no sense but should be incredibly easy for the devs to fix. I haven't been involved much on the boards over the years, but have been a user since 2010. (Yes, my profile says 2012...something I argued about and lost a long time ago because of a silly period of time in my life where I took 6 months off from life for a zen experience lol) I only revently got involved here because my user experience has been sliding rapidly and I'm concerned with the direction things are going. The new version of evernote seems to have been pushed out too early with an amazing lack of personalization capability which is simple disturbing. When things software is changed or updated, people expect that this usually means more features, more flexibility, and more personalization. What we received instead is a redesign with an unfamiliar feel - something that is hard for those with years of habits, fewer customizations, and less flexibility. The one thing that grew was the number of clicks and workarounds needed to accomplish the same tasks. Simply accepting this as the price of progress and/or saying that the problem is the actual users that aren't comfortable with change is a horrible way to handle it. This post is a perfect example of that. 

The proposed solution is a desktop link to a standalone note? 

Previously, one could right click the tray icon and select the following:
Open
Find
New Note
Clip Screenshot
Copy Selection
Paste to Evernote
Quit
And access a submenu to Start at Login, Sync in the background, configure shortcut keys, or redefine what the single left-click did when you clicked it... which let you choose one of the right click options as the single left-click. So in my case because of the work that I do, the left click assigned to screencapture appealed to me while my daughter preferred to have a left click on the icon create a new note right there without opening the app... sort of how the quicknotes work now but with clearly defined tags and although it would disappear beneath other windows, it was on the taskbar and could be brough forward with a simple click. One thing she would do in college was open a new note as a narrow panel on the right and copy details from things she would find researching  and paste them into her  note to consolidate her information for a paper or for study.....left, find what you want, copy, move right, paste. 

Now consider the "upgrade". For me, I load up several screens of various parts of the network showing houses, line of sight, etc. I'll have 6-10 windows representing difference parts of the network and need to take a screencap of each to send to a customer to explain a problem. A simple screencap won't work without editing because they don't need to see everything in my taskbar or what browser windows I have open as some might reveal personal information of other customers. Before, as I said, my left click was assigned to screen capture. So the process was: Click tab 1. Click evernote Icon, Click corner of page just above icon. Hold while dragging to upper left, release. Click the next tab and repeat. 3 steps per tab..... Now there's an extra step.  Just one...but then again, if I click the popup that comes up after I now have it sitting there ready to review. When I get done there may be 12 individual windows right there ready to review, edit, crop, save, whatever I need to do even if it means bouncing betweek a couple several times, it's easy. The new version shows a popup as well, but when I click it, it doesn't open a new window. I don't know what it does anymore. I just tried it in case it was a bug. Still doesn't. No one actually tested this? So I have to go into the app now and work with them. I see I need to crop them. Well, old version - TOOLS>CROP... done;. If there is something severely wrong with the image, I can right click, and open the image directly in photoshop or some other editing software. file>save and it's updated in evernote. WONDERFUL! But I can't even crop in the new evernote. It's not a function that's on the menu. I can open it on the main page into Windows snip and sketch or whatever it's called, but I can't choose Photoshop or any other app to edit in. And this is just a small sampling of the loss of capabilities....increases in time and clicks that it takes for me to do things. 
But then there's my daughter. She's grown and she has her own account. And for her, the process is even more bizarre. Where she used to have a note popped on her desktop by a single click on the tray icon that she chose a different setting for, that she could copy/paste things from a browser window on the left and a narrowed Window for a note on the right, it's become unusable for that purpose. The small box takes up almost 1/3 of the screen leaving a wasted inch to the right. It disappears everytime she moves away from it and to get it back she has to click the icon. Another alternative she tried was to put it straight in evernote but then that takes up over half the screen. The only thing close is to open the app (right click new note and right click open evernote both launch the full app but new note creates a new blank note. ) Then she can right click the new blank note and select the opton to open in a new window. Then she can resize it, but due to the menu can only resize it to about 1/3 the screen space making the material she's looking at on the left much smaller. 

And this kind of nonsense is going on all over the place with literally hundreds of other use-cases. It's been well over a year since this rolled out and it doesn't seem that any of it is being addressed. They didn't bother to actually go study how people use it. They didn't try to understand that all those features and options weren't just developed and stuck there to make it look more complex. Each was put there to accomodate a small user group so they could have the "right thing" for as many people as possible. Now they've gone and alienated all except for the few that the new app really works for and substituted art work and pretty displays for functionality. Yes, it looks much more pleasing to the eye. But that doesn't make it an uber useful swiss army knife of a note-taking app. It makes it pretty. And pretty isn't going to make anyone pay money for a Utility. We need software that makes our lives easier, not harder. We need to accomplish more for less money and less time. 

I've sat here and read so many comments from veterans and support and the answers are always the same... "All you have to do is just click click clickity click click" and that's  not an answer. It's a workaround to accomplish something that could be done much more easily before and shouldn't require a workaround. 

I'm not here to bash Evernote. For over a decade they've made my life better. Made it easier to get more done in less time which provides more time to live. I don't want to gripe. I want to keep getting things done. I want new features that improve my workflow. Not prettier features that break my habits while taking more steps. And it needs to happen soon. Right now this huge chunk of people is using the previous version of the desktop which isn't being updated. This means no new securty patches. In time it will be deprecated. And if the new app isn't brought up to par before that happens, it's not going to be pretty. 

Fortunately there is still time. I know the codebase changed in this one to improve performance which is good. But my old version still works circles around it. This needs to be addressed. Other than that, they don't have to work from scratch. They have the recipe for preventing it in their posession. Just mimic the new app in the newer programming language and let us all get back to working instead of having to come to a message board and explain what they're doing wrong. 

[agsteele 2,946]

You're right that all we can offer are the ways of achieving the things you desire in the current version 10. Often this requires a different set of mouse clicks to the Legacy route. Sometimes more, sometimes just different. Personally I use keyboard shortcuts rather than clicks and these work pretty much the same old to new. Perhaps the keyboard will the option that works better for you.

[PinkElephant 8,103]

EN ran into trouble, each year deeper. The old, grown codebase could only be maintained with great cost, especially by sacrificing any forward movement just to keep all clients and the tools (especially the WebClipper) operational.

It plays no role how they got there (Management mistakes, laying off key personell ? Bad lifecycle management ? Loss of focus ?). Whatever - it was obvious it was a down spiral.

The cut with the old platform and switch to a completely new code basis was to undo this development and gain back the strategic initiative.

This has obviously worked: We have new clients, we have new features and a company running a release cycle on steroids. What we don’t have is feature parity in all aspects yet, and there are still persisting problems, especially with the Android client, plus a lack of performance observed by a number (but not all) users on all platforms.

My opinion: We can calm down a bit. Nobody should expect that a code base grown in more than 10 years could be completely replaced within 18 months of development plus a year of tending the released software. For everybody on desktop (where usually the heavy lifting takes place) there are the legacy clients still available - everybody can install and use them, if v10 does not (yet) support an individual use case. For most use cases v10 already does the job - maybe different, maybe in cases worse, in some other cases better than before.

About the Android situation we can only see and wait what gets fixed when. About performance I am sure there will be some advances by the app, and of course new equipment will replace some of the old one every additional day, month and year.

Without v10 we would still be discussing here in this Forum why nothing happens, and why even obvious bugs don’t get fixed. I think it really is better to discuss a new situation, even some new (!) bugs resulting from getting new software.