A success story

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,970]

Please note: I am not denying anyone else's bad experiences with Evernote in recent months. I am not saying everyone ought to feel the way I do, or that Evernote is perfect. I just want to offer a story about something that worked in a complex situation, to go alongside all the things that should have been easy but didn't work.

In early July my wife and I took a trip from the USA to Australia. I'd been thinking about it for a year, because of a 3-day conference in Adelaide that I wanted to attend. There were complications due to some medical issues, but it became clear that there were compelling reasons for me to go to the conference, and for my wife to come along (because duh, when would we get to do this again?). Family and friends pointed out that if we were going to the other side of the globe, we ought to spend enough time to see some sights; and a friend younger than we are (not a small population) agreed to come along as a traveling companion.

To plan and carry out this trip I needed to keep track of a variety of things: the conference itself, including its scheduling, meals, and the paper that I ended up contributing to it at the last minute; air travel; visas and other travel/security tasks; packing for winter weather in July; medical matters; lodging in Adelaide and elsewhere; ground transportation in Australia; sight-seeing. I coordinated it all in Evernote. I had 25 notes related to all of these matters spread out in several notebooks, all tagged with one tag "to find them all." By using a headnote with links to other primary notes, which had links to further notes, and navigating with backlinks, I was able to keep track of everything, to update information as needed, and to find information when I needed to refer to it. I created and updated notes on an older desktop computer, a laptop, and an Android phone. Once my paper was written, besides a printed copy I kept a copy of it in an Evernote. Airline itineraries and visas were stored there too. I was able to do necessary updates while in Australia, using Wi-Fi where it was available, or else the data plan I'd purchased from Verizon (which, for one month, cost as much as my Evernote subscription for a year).

It wasn't flawless. I'm sure that during the introduction of the new syncing and Real-Time Editing in May I had problems with content loss and notes getting scrambled, and experienced the aggravation that anyone would as a result. Fortunately I don't think I had as many problems as some people did, and things did settle down by mid-June. Overall, it was a real success, and Evernote probably came in fourth or fifth among the reasons we had such a great, if exhausting, trip: our wonderful young friend and traveling companion; the kindness of strangers; our own good planning; what felt like divine intervention at some points; and Evernote. This leaves me hopeful that, despite the atrocious problems that do exist in current versions of the desktop, Web, and Android apps (I did all this before v. 10.59.5 arrived), Evernote can remain a highly functional tool, even in complex and less-than-ideal situations (e.g., airplane Wi-Fi).

[Jon/t 1,303]

Lovely story. 

Hope you enjoyed the trip. It's on my bucket list to spend a month watching cricket in Australia.

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,970]

To each his own! We spent our time out in the country and watching wildlife. And some wild surf off Victor Harbor and Kangaroo Island.

[Federico Simionato 1,023]

I'm very glad to read this. Yes, there have been hiccups during the RTE release, and yes, 10.59.5 was much more buggy than we wanted because we updated pretty important stuff under the hood. But with 10.60.4 and with a lot of work being done by the team on the backend, I am confident you can already see much better reliability. And hopefully that'll only improve in the future.