(Archived) Cosmetic Feature Requests

[Casey 0]

The team at Evernote has been doing a tremendous job of adding functionality. Here are a couple of suggestions for bringing the appearance and visual appeal of Evernote up to the level of its functionality:

The green theme for the icons on the toolbar don't look that great on the Windows or Mac clients. The toolbar icons on Yojimbo and Journler look much better. (By the way, I do realize that green, white and grey is the color scheme for both the Evernote website and the web version of Evernote). It would be nice on the client versions of Evernote to have the option to choose one (or a few) alternative sets of icons. An example which many of you have seen already is this set of icons which have Apple's metal look at http://www.zeusboxstudio.com/blog/evernote-toolbar-icon-replacement. I have replaced the toolbar icons in Evernote for my Mac with those and they look good.

The more important, and very practical, suggestion I have is to allow for customizing the icons for each Notebook on the Evernote clients. Yojimbo and Journler both have this capability on the Mac. (The existing Notebook icons in Evernote are quite frankly a bit of an eyesore to my eyes.) This capability would allow you to, for instance, have your Notebook about iPhones have an icon that looks like an iPhone; your Notebook about music could have an icon of a guitar; your Notebook that you use for forwarded emails could have an icon like a mailbox; and your webclippings Notebook could have an icon of a pair of scissors; etc. This feature allows you to quickly visually identify which Notebook you are interested in, (which can be a minor hassle with the current icons if you have many Notebooks and are in a hurry). Yojimbo and Journler for the Mac accomplish this functionality by allowing you to copy the icon image from any file's information window and pasting that image into what is the equivalent of the information window/properties menu for the particular Notebook. (In Mac OS X the images you can copy within files' information windows are at the top left of the information windows). A suggested "starter set" of Notebooks with customized icons could be automatically loaded when Evernote is first installed. That would help people get started with figuring out how they might use Evernote. And from the very first time Evernote is launched by prospective or new users, Evernote will look more like the great application it truly is. Also, additional example icons could be made available for download.

Take a look at the screenshots of Delicious Library 2 at http://www.delicious-monster.com/. When people see those screenshots of that application they immediately want to buy it - and they may not even know what they would really use it for! That's an extreme example of a "pretty" application but my point is that some practical and useful eye candy as I've described above can bring more users to a software application, including Evernote.

Anyway, I give my thanks to the Evernote team for building a wonderful application.

Casey

[engberg 89]

Thanks for the feedback. We're doing some usability work now, and appreciate the input.