(Archived) A Secular View of Evernote

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A secular view of Evernote.

I think that Evernote is a truly worthy ambition. It is an absolutely necessary tool in this crazy world. I'm a premium user just to support the efforts and thinking behind the idea. The view I'd like to provide today is one of a "tech outsider" a person who feels that tech should conform to him rather than needing to conform to it. To bring it to present day it's "Apple thinking" versus "Android / Microsoft Thinking", focussing on user experience.

I'd love nothing more than to have only one app for my stuff. Here's why that currently can't be Evernote despite my love for it.

Feedback

For starters, feedback must be easier to give. There should be a feedback button on the front page of the website. Currently your steps for giving feedback are...

01. go to website.

02. go to "Support" (you've lost most of us here - how could I know that giving your my opinion of how to make your software better is going to live under "support" which traditionally means that I'm asking for help. The mapping is coming from a tech brain who knows about forums and such things.)

03. go to "User Forum" (you've lost more of us for a couple of reasons - 1) I've already had to work too hard to help you out. [i totally understand how ridiculous this sounds to the geek culture but having as little friction as possible is the current way]. 2) If I'm not familiar with forums there would be no way to figure out that that is where I should be going.)

04. Figure out where to post to (more losses - forums are daunting to most people, which is why most people [consider entire world population here] don't use them. Just figuring out where to place a post like this one is a task.)

05. Login... no wait register first. (now we're into frustration - I'm a premium user I already have a login and use the web version all the time. going through this process again is tedious and confusing [Will this give me two logins? how will this effect my account? will i have to sign in twice now? and a host of other even dumber questions that are asked by people who don't understand forums] I should be able to get to the forums with my account login, just pop up the terms I need to agree to as needed.

06. Login... no wait, get a confirmation email. (more frustration - As above, I have an account why can't I use that? now I'm expected to leave the site open my mail and wait [i had to wait only about 2min for my gmail account to update, but still, it's waiting]

07. Login (at this point i've done so much I'm wondering why I need to login but I do)

08. Decide where I'm going to post, again. (check me on this but I'm pretty sure that the layout of your forums prior to registration was different than the post registration layout. I'm pretty sure the "General Discussion about Evernote" thread was the head of a second section in the former and part of one large list in the latter).

09. Open thread

10. Click "New Topic" (non-forum users don't know to scan through the topics to make sure there's isn't there already)

11. Start typing (what they originally came to do is 11 steps away from the 1 or two they were expecting)

12. Hit "Submit" (assuming they don't want to 'save' or 'preview')

Unity

I would like to see Evernote be the same on all platforms. If not aesthetically, then functionally. There are lots of things that I can do on the Windows desktop version that I can't do on my iPad or iPhone. A feeling of disappointment washes over me every time I get the "rich text notes cannot be edited on your iPhone..." message. It's not so much that I want rich text editing, it's the disparity in the functionality and hard stop it has on my productivity. I know it might sound dumb, but I would rather have a less feature rich Windows version that matched my iOS experience one to one. Right now it doesn't feel like I can take Evernote anywhere. It feels like I can take SOME of Evernote everywhere.

Limits

I'm sure you hear whining about this all the time so I won't press on this point. 50megs is too small for many of my PDF's, some of my pictures, and it certainly doesn't allow for a note to become an album for an event. 1Gig is a slow way to get my life into Evernote once I've decided to convert to digital living. I would pay more for bigger caps, I'm sure that I'll eventually hit the 250 Notebook limit. Right now I have to resort to Dropbox et. al. for bigger storage.

Text Formatting

I'll end with this one. It's vague and nebulous. As a long time user of Word, Pages, Excel, Numbers, Notepad, Power Point, Google Docs, Mail programs of all kinds etc., etc. I have expectations of how text gets created and manipulated. Evernote is still just a bit too clunky on this front. Especially when dealing with text that has been cut and pasted into it form various sources. The closer that gets to feeling like the other experiences I'm used to, the less I feel the need to go back to those other experiences. I'm not asking for a full spreadsheet or word processor, just what functionality you do have be fully in your control and work in an expected way. (ex. i get this weird thing where i delete a line in between to text items that I've parted in (in this cae from One Note) and it creates a double lined space between them. I get weird anomalies like that all the time.) It leaves me feeling like once it's in Evernote I shouldn't touch it again.

ok, enough for now. don't mean to offend just want to help. you have my email, if there's a way i can help further, let me know.