Feedback on Leaving - New Version and Arbitrary Bobbins Changes

[acedashdog 5]

I’ve been a satisfied customer for 12 years. Now I’m not, and I’m cancelling my subscription, and here’s why.

I statrted using notes with my first Handspring Visor in 97, and when that went away and Outlook Notes became inadequate in 2011 I leaped to EN with joy. It was great, I loved it, I recommended it everywhere, I registered it.

 

That continued until recently. Then you produced a new version and abandoned any bugfixes or support for the old one but declined to have Check for Updates so much as tell the user they needed to manually install the new version. I mean, really? How clumsy and amateurish!

 

The new version has a Home screen that you loudly claim ‘everyone asked for’. What actual percentage of your user base actually asked for that? It is clunky, awkward and massively slow. I assume that it is why the whole app is now grindingly slow on entirely adequate hardware. When tickets were logged asking if the new feature could be disabled the responses were very dismissive. We peasants are supposed to be grateful.

 

Add to that the arbitrary degradation of the features. 

 

Any application that can edit text on a GUI has access to the system fonts of that GUI. That’s kind of the point. From MS Word down to Notepad, it’s standard. But you rip that out and leave us stuck with half-a-dozen crappy 3rd party fonts nobody has heard of. On top of which, while making the forms of the software waste more screen space, you arbitrarily replace all our font size settings with 16, ridiculously large. Even more ironically, this forum does allow access to the PC's system fonts!

 

All of a sudden Ctrl-A (Select All in the entire Windows Universe) is reinterpreted in your insular view as “Select 100 notes”. I take a weekly backup by exporting everything to .htm and adding it to my backups; this is now not possible.  Ticket logged; after one (uselessly incorrect) response of “you can do it this way” I was told “that’s how it works. You can use the old version but it will be taken away at some unspecified time so don’t”. Personally, I suspect this is a blatant cripple to stop people migrating off an application rapidly becoming unbearable. Well, tough, it didn’t work. 

 

Which brings me to money grab. Before I realized there was a new version, I started getting popup ads on EN urging me to “register for Premium”. As I’ve been paying for 12 years I assumed this was a fault. After two tickets I was told it was because I was on the legacy version. I updated one PC to that, and they still come up. Then I was told this was “just a short campaign for Jan”. Feb now and they’re still coming up. It emerges that you have added a layer of paid subscription and removed several features to that for half again the money, before bothering people with popups to force them up. I expect popup ads on free software. I DO NOT expect and WILL NOT TOLERATE them on something I have over the years paid very nearly a thousand quid for. Completely unacceptable.

 

I was prepared, just about, to live with the fact that my language is not supported. I logged a ticket for this and unsurprisingly was met with bemusement that there were people using the software that were not Americans. It supports some of the most obscure languages in the world, but not actual English (as opposed to ‘American English’). 

 

Your support folks are responsive and do their best, but they clearly have a script and have been told not to deviate from it. If he KB doesn’t help, they just want you to go away and stop asking. 

 

Well, there we go. I am. Customer lost and recommendation amended to “Don’t use Evernote”. I confidently expect you to ignore this feedback and continue to do just what you want, how you want, rather than what your users want. Good luck to you. 

[PinkElephant 8,174]

Well said …

The forum is user2user. To tell EN use the feedback function or issue a support ticket.

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,977]

I've been a satisfied customer for 10 years, and I'm renewing my subscription when it falls due, and here's why: it works well for me, better now than the old version ever did, and I like the look of it. Since we are other users here, not Evernote staff, we can't weep and gnash our teeth at how badly we've failed @acedashdog. But we can express our opinions too.

4 hours ago, acedashdog said:

Any application that can edit text on a GUI has access to the system fonts of that GUI. That’s kind of the point. From MS Word down to Notepad, it’s standard.

But which GUI would that be? Windows, Mac, Android, iOS? How should Windows' Copperplate Gothic Bold be rendered on Android? I also chafed at the limitations of the fonts in v. 10 early on, but I've come to accept that in a broadly cross-platform app, this is necessary for consistency of display; that's kind of the point. And since Evernote is not a desktop publishing app, it hardly needs to have every formatting capability possible. I hope they add some more fonts, but I find that I can take notes, and even distinguish particular parts of notes, with what there is now.

[acedashdog 5]

11 hours ago, Dave-in-Decatur said:

I've been a satisfied customer for 10 years, and I'm renewing my subscription when it falls due, and here's why: it works well for me, better now than the old version ever did, and I like the look of it. Since we are other users here, not Evernote staff, we can't weep and gnash our teeth at how badly we've failed @acedashdog. But we can express our opinions too.

But which GUI would that be? Windows, Mac, Android, iOS? How should Windows' Copperplate Gothic Bold be rendered on Android? I also chafed at the limitations of the fonts in v. 10 early on, but I've come to accept that in a broadly cross-platform app, this is necessary for consistency of display; that's kind of the point. And since Evernote is not a desktop publishing app, it hardly needs to have every formatting capability possible. I hope they add some more fonts, but I find that I can take notes, and even distinguish particular parts of notes, with what there is now.

A good point. But having a choice, or starting without one, is much preferable to having one and then having it taken away for other people's benefit

[acedashdog 5]

13 hours ago, PinkElephant said:

Well said …

The forum is user2user. To tell EN use the feedback function or issue a support ticket.

I did, posted this there too. But I thought it would be nice to put it somewhere someone might read it too

 

[eric99 986]

15 hours ago, acedashdog said:

I’ve been a satisfied customer for 12 years. Now I’m not, and I’m cancelling my subscription, and here’s why.

I statrted using notes with my first Handspring Visor in 97, and when that went away and Outlook Notes became inadequate in 2011 I leaped to EN with joy. It was great, I loved it, I recommended it everywhere, I registered it.

 

That continued until recently. Then you produced a new version and abandoned any bugfixes or support for the old one but declined to have Check for Updates so much as tell the user they needed to manually install the new version. I mean, really? How clumsy and amateurish!

 

The new version has a Home screen that you loudly claim ‘everyone asked for’. What actual percentage of your user base actually asked for that? It is clunky, awkward and massively slow. I assume that it is why the whole app is now grindingly slow on entirely adequate hardware. When tickets were logged asking if the new feature could be disabled the responses were very dismissive. We peasants are supposed to be grateful.

 

Add to that the arbitrary degradation of the features. 

 

Any application that can edit text on a GUI has access to the system fonts of that GUI. That’s kind of the point. From MS Word down to Notepad, it’s standard. But you rip that out and leave us stuck with half-a-dozen crappy 3rd party fonts nobody has heard of. On top of which, while making the forms of the software waste more screen space, you arbitrarily replace all our font size settings with 16, ridiculously large. Even more ironically, this forum does allow access to the PC's system fonts!

 

All of a sudden Ctrl-A (Select All in the entire Windows Universe) is reinterpreted in your insular view as “Select 100 notes”. I take a weekly backup by exporting everything to .htm and adding it to my backups; this is now not possible.  Ticket logged; after one (uselessly incorrect) response of “you can do it this way” I was told “that’s how it works. You can use the old version but it will be taken away at some unspecified time so don’t”. Personally, I suspect this is a blatant cripple to stop people migrating off an application rapidly becoming unbearable. Well, tough, it didn’t work. 

 

Which brings me to money grab. Before I realized there was a new version, I started getting popup ads on EN urging me to “register for Premium”. As I’ve been paying for 12 years I assumed this was a fault. After two tickets I was told it was because I was on the legacy version. I updated one PC to that, and they still come up. Then I was told this was “just a short campaign for Jan”. Feb now and they’re still coming up. It emerges that you have added a layer of paid subscription and removed several features to that for half again the money, before bothering people with popups to force them up. I expect popup ads on free software. I DO NOT expect and WILL NOT TOLERATE them on something I have over the years paid very nearly a thousand quid for. Completely unacceptable.

 

I was prepared, just about, to live with the fact that my language is not supported. I logged a ticket for this and unsurprisingly was met with bemusement that there were people using the software that were not Americans. It supports some of the most obscure languages in the world, but not actual English (as opposed to ‘American English’). 

 

Your support folks are responsive and do their best, but they clearly have a script and have been told not to deviate from it. If he KB doesn’t help, they just want you to go away and stop asking. 

 

Well, there we go. I am. Customer lost and recommendation amended to “Don’t use Evernote”. I confidently expect you to ignore this feedback and continue to do just what you want, how you want, rather than what your users want. Good luck to you. 

I'm a little bit surprised that you don't mention the hard problems. Don't you have permanent sync and performance problems, especially with your mobile device?  Do you know that your weekly html backups are useless because all links to your attachments and notes are broken and that note links are not supported in your ENEX export as well?

[bmcl26 499]

Been a subscribing member since 2011 and only dipped my feet in the water for the first several years, however, despite having an instant dislike for V10 when it came out, I think I was concerned about being taken out of my comfort zone with things moving to different parts of the screen,  This feeling only lasted  a few days though and I more and more began to like and embrace  V10.  I have to say since the introduction of Home, Calendar, Tasks and Widgets, my use of EN has increased exponentially and I now have in excess of 28,000 notes.    Is EN perfect, NO, but please advise of any software that is.  I may be lucky in not experiencing any real problems with Sync or Duplicate notes etc and if anyone is having these issues you have my sympathy.  Any problems I have had, and they are very rare, have been quickly cleared up though Support.  I upgraded from the old Premium Plan to the New Professional plan and even allowing for the latest increase which will apply on renewal, I consider it to be excellent value for money.

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,977]

10 hours ago, acedashdog said:

A good point. But having a choice, or starting without one, is much preferable to having one and then having it taken away for other people's benefit

By "other people" I suppose you mean people who use Evernote on platforms other than Windows. A fair point in that situation, but Evernote is designed precisely for cross-platform use (optionally by more than one person), and so indeed it might make sense for someone who is only in a Windows environment to use a different app to take full advantage of features available only in that environment.