(Archived) Best way to provide feedback/RFE's for Evernote Android?

[waltermundt 0]

I have several bits of feedback I wanted to provide for the Android Evernote app. I'll go ahead and provide brief descriptions here. However, my real question is what kinds of feedback ought to go here, versus being submitted to the support system. Is there a public bug/RFE tracker as well?

For what it's worth, overall I'm very pleased with Evernote and with the app, and may soon upgrade to support further development, even though I don't really need any of the Premium-level features.

Anyway:

First off, there seem to be some very unintuitive interactions between the various ways of launching Evernote and an active editing session. For example: open a Note via a home screen shortcut, Edit, enter text, press Home, open the Note again. The unedited Note appears, and there's no obvious way to get to your changes; you have to hit Back from within the non-edited note. If you proceed to edit the note AGAIN, you start over, except that hitting back, discarding changes, and hitting back again returns you to the first set of edits. I've also run into an issue in the past where somehow I ended up having two Evernote icons appearing when I hold the Home button to return to recent apps, and it's not clear which one is for what, and one is a current edit; I can't reproduce this right now so perhaps it's been fixed in an update.

Second, lists inside of Notes seem very awkward. Creating a list partway up a Note sometimes causes the entire remainder of the Note to be indented under the first bullet with no obvious way to fix that. Also, I've been confused by the behavior of backspacing through a list bullet, but I don't have time to play with it again and break down the specifics; I will in a reply or ticket if this is desirable. Furthermore, text selection seems incapable of crossing list bullets. Finally, when switching to portrait-mode editing, all the text not within the same list bullet as the cursor disappears; hitting up and down via arrow keys on Hacker's Keyboard will switch bullets; continuing down past the end of the note so that the formatting widget highlights causes the normal note view to reappear. All of this in combination is annoying enough that I've reverted to just using paragraphs and dash or bullet characters on Android, despite the lack of hanging indent. Oh, and there's no way to do nesting, and tab from Hacker's Keyboard doesn't do the right thing, but those are minor to me relative to the other issues.

If any fellow Android users are reading this, feel free to let me know of any workarounds or best practices for dealing with these issues. If the Evernote devs see this post and need more data on these concerns, they're more than welcome to ask here or have me file tickets; my Evernote account is the same as the forum name here.

[gazumped 11,667]

Hi - not sure if this is because I'm using a beta version, but my Evernote has a handy widget on the Home page which allows me to jump to new note / camera note / sound file / skitch, and when I've finished creating or editing, and I've chosen Save from the various options, I can come back to my saved item to add more information. I haven't found the process as involved as you seem to describe. (see my sig for the version details)

The lists issue (in various forms) has already been raised here and we expect more changes as new versions find the light of day. "Soon" is a favourite (but very carefully undefined) timescale for lots of improvements, but the Big E doesn't share its future plans.

If you have any comments or queries on Evernote this seems to be the correct place for them - Evernote staff do read these posts and comment when they can.

[waltermundt 0]

I have the widget, and use it here and there, but I'm not talking about that.

I'm talking about what happens if you use "Add Shortcut -> Evernote" from the home screen to create a link directly to a particular note on the home screen. I use this feature a lot because I have a few constantly-updated notes (plan for today, exercise log, future project ideas) that I want one-touch access to. The issues occur when you use this feature to open a note from Home, start editing, but then press Home rather than Back to exit; there's no confirmation on a Home press and the edits sit in limbo until you go back to Evernote. I wouldn't mind that, but if you open a DIFFERENT note at that point, or even click the direct shortcut to the SAME note, the new note view ends up "on top" of your pending edits, and there's no obvious way to tell there are unsaved edits pending or how to get back to working on them.

[gazumped 11,667]

Maybe its the version of Evernote that I'm on, but do you not get a "save" button on the toolbar at the bottom of your screen? If you press that after an edit, then the changed note is saved and will come back up as changed after clicking to another app and back again. Not sure if a "do you really want to navigate away from this edit?" warning message would be a plus (or is even possible) here.

[waltermundt 0]

Yes, I get a "save" button, as you might have guessed from all the talk about UNsaved edits. That is not good enough, because it is very easy (on my Nexus S anyway) to aim at "Save" and hit the Home button immediately underneath. Not to mention that Evernote and Skitch are the ONLY Android apps I use that can lose state if you go home from them at the wrong time. This is totally against the conventions of the platform.

[gazumped 11,667]

OK I understand your point - the Android generally seems to me to suffer from TFS (thick finger syndrome), plus when I was less used to the interface I'd frequently choose incorrect options - especially if the handset screen was landscape rather than portrait and I wanted a menu button that used to be in the bottom left corner, but that's where the 'back' button is now...

I bought a stylus to avoid TFS when I'm texting / noting at any length (it helps with drawing too..) and I don't seem to have the same problems.

Evernote will read these posts and can maybe come up with a "do you really want to?" step, or just set up a frequent autosave while editing...

[waltermundt 0]

I'd be all for an autosave, or maybe a "draft" icon in the regular note view fhat lets you reopen unsaved edits. Anyway, thank you for trying to help. Personally I already have the workaround of knowing when to use "Back"; I am just trying to give the E team constructive feedback.

[gazumped 11,667]

No problem - I think you have a good suggestion there; there's already a "conflicting changes" notebook for hiccups in syncing. What about unsaved edit changes when Evernote closes going into that notebook for future attention? Anyway: over to you Evernote peeples..