(Archived) REQUEST: Flags and notifications; free account notebook sharing

[RoboSaloon 0]

I've recently been introduced to Evernote through my school. Full Sail University had me create an account for use in some of my classes.

That being said, I instantly fell in love with the program. It's only been a week or so since I first installed it, and I've already completely adopted it as my main form of trading ideas back and forth with my writing and drawing partners on my film/comic projects.

That is what I'm using Evernote mainly for. As a hub for trading back scripts, concept art, notes, and ideas.

With this form of usage in mind. I have two huge suggestions for features that seem to be missing and are direly needed.

1. First off, a note flagging and notification system would be incredibly convenient.

At this point, whenever you add to or in any way change a note, the only thing it does is pop to the top of the list of notes in the notebook. This is alright, but it would be so much better if the note was flagged as having been changed. If I signed in to my Evernote desktop app, and all of the notes that had been changed in any way had little red flag icons in the corner or ANYTHING like that, it would be a billion times better.

And if a dialogue box popped up coming from the little Evernote icon in my task bar informing me any time a new note was added or changed in any of my shared Notebooks(similar to the way Drop Box does), it would make the system so much better for mine and my partners' purposes.

2. This second suggestion is a bit of a long-shot, but I figured I might as well request it. I really like this program and plan on investing the 45 dollars for Premium as soon as it becomes financially viable for me, but until then I feel like disabling anyone from adding to or modifying the Notebooks your share with them is HUGELY crippling to the entire experience. For me this almost breaks the program for what I need it to do. I don't even need huge results. Just the ability for me and my partners to add little notes directly to scripts or drawings we share with each other instead of having to create entire separate notebooks with notes and try to label them to match up with their respective scripts/drawings would be fantastic. I feel like it's a little bit of a grift to deny this very simple yet very integral feature to the free account customers. Comparing it to Drop Box once again, their free account limits your monthly upload limit and server space, but doesn't cripple functionality of the program, and I still intend to pay for a premium account with them just the same.

These are two functions that would elevate Evernote from being a great, really cool program for me to becoming an extension of how I work and create.

[jefito 5,598]

At this point, whenever you add to or in any way change a note, the only thing it does is pop to the top of the list of notes in the notebook.

This is not really true; it depends on how you are sorting your note list. Sort by Updated Date, and sure, but sort by title and you may not see your list change at all.

2. This second suggestion is a bit of a long-shot, but I figured I might as well request it. I really like this program and plan on investing the 45 dollars for Premium as soon as it becomes financially viable for me, but until then I feel like disabling anyone from adding to or modifying the Notebooks your share with them is HUGELY crippling to the entire experience. For me this almost breaks the program for what I need it to do. I don't even need huge results. Just the ability for me and my partners to add little notes directly to scripts or drawings we share with each other instead of having to create entire separate notebooks with notes and try to label them to match up with their respective scripts/drawings would be fantastic. I feel like it's a little bit of a grift to deny this very simple yet very integral feature to the free account customers. Comparing it to Drop Box once again, their free account limits your monthly upload limit and server space, but doesn't cripple functionality of the program, and I still intend to pay for a premium account with them just the same.

For you this might be critical functionality, for others who don't used shared notebooks, it's not a crippling lack at all. Evernote has only a few things that really differentiate the free and premium versions, unfortunately your preferred usage stumbled across one of them. Sure it would be great if Evernote gave away everything for free, and a pony for Christmas, but they have a right to charge what they will, and let the marketplace decide. (p.s. Likening Evernote to 'grifters' isn't exactly the way to win sympathy for your cause.)

These are two functions that would elevate Evernote from being a great, really cool program for me to becoming an extension of how I work and create.

It's already a really great and cool program.

[GrumpyMonkey 4,320]

I've recently been introduced to Evernote through my school. Full Sail University had me create an account for use in some of my classes.

That being said, I instantly fell in love with the program. It's only been a week or so since I first installed it, and I've already completely adopted it as my main form of trading ideas back and forth with my writing and drawing partners on my film/comic projects.

That is what I'm using Evernote mainly for. As a hub for trading back scripts, concept art, notes, and ideas.

With this form of usage in mind. I have two huge suggestions for features that seem to be missing and are direly needed.

1. First off, a note flagging and notification system would be incredibly convenient.

At this point, whenever you add to or in any way change a note, the only thing it does is pop to the top of the list of notes in the notebook. This is alright, but it would be so much better if the note was flagged as having been changed. If I signed in to my Evernote desktop app, and all of the notes that had been changed in any way had little red flag icons in the corner or ANYTHING like that, it would be a billion times better.

And if a dialogue box popped up coming from the little Evernote icon in my task bar informing me any time a new note was added or changed in any of my shared Notebooks(similar to the way Drop Box does), it would make the system so much better for mine and my partners' purposes.

2. This second suggestion is a bit of a long-shot, but I figured I might as well request it. I really like this program and plan on investing the 45 dollars for Premium as soon as it becomes financially viable for me, but until then I feel like disabling anyone from adding to or modifying the Notebooks your share with them is HUGELY crippling to the entire experience. For me this almost breaks the program for what I need it to do. I don't even need huge results. Just the ability for me and my partners to add little notes directly to scripts or drawings we share with each other instead of having to create entire separate notebooks with notes and try to label them to match up with their respective scripts/drawings would be fantastic. I feel like it's a little bit of a grift to deny this very simple yet very integral feature to the free account customers. Comparing it to Drop Box once again, their free account limits your monthly upload limit and server space, but doesn't cripple functionality of the program, and I still intend to pay for a premium account with them just the same.

These are two functions that would elevate Evernote from being a great, really cool program for me to becoming an extension of how I work and create.

welcome to evernote and the forums!

1. sounds good. i don't know if it would be on evernote's roadmap, but they seem to be headed into more collaborative territory, so maybe so.

2. it never hurts to ask, but if you compare evernote to any app on the market including dropbox and can find something even remotely similar in functionality then let me know! and, it's free. their business model depends on premium subscribers, and they have to offer some incentive that will get you to part with the price of one coffee ($5) each month. the staff has to eat somehow

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

I feel like disabling anyone from adding to or modifying the Notebooks your share with them is HUGELY crippling to the entire experience. For me this almost breaks the program for what I need it to do. I don't even need huge results. Just the ability for me and my partners to add little notes directly to scripts or drawings we share with each other instead of having to create entire separate notebooks with notes and try to label them to match up with their respective scripts/drawings would be fantastic. I feel like it's a little bit of a grift to deny this very simple yet very integral feature to the free account customers. Comparing it to Drop Box once again, their free account limits your monthly upload limit and server space, but doesn't cripple functionality of the program, and I still intend to pay for a premium account with them just the same.

(Emphasis mine)

"Thanks for the feedback. A lot of companies deliver broken "free" versions of their applications that include short trial periods or things like watermarks on every printed page, nagging pop-ups every time you launch the application, etc.

We've chosen to make a service that can be used for many years without paying anything.

However, we are a business (not a UN-backed nonprofit), and our employees like to eat and pay rent and whatnot. So we do need to pick some set of more advanced capabilities that you get if you actually do pay us a relatively small amount of money. We've tried to choose a set of features that most people can live without, and that tend to cost us more than other features.

So Premium users can upload more data (which costs us more bandwidth and storage), they get faster and more direct tech support (which costs us in labor), and they can access their data offline on an iPhone or Android phone (which costs us many engineer-months of effort to add to the clients).

These Premium features are designed to balance our costs by giving you a gentle reminder to consider paying us for our work.

Thanks"

[RoboSaloon 0]

In reference to some of the above comments, I should clarify a few things I said:

First off, I LOVE this program. It's great for what I need out of it. If I'd known this program existed I would have been using it for all of my collaborative needs a long time ago. I said that it WAS already a great and cool program, but that these added features would make it everything I'll ever want out of a file trading program. I've never gone onto a program's website, especially a free program, and made feature suggestions before. That's how much I like this program after only a couple of days using it.

I understand and fully support the Evernote staff's desire to pay rent/eat, and accept that it's fully logical to offer a paid premium version that offers more features. I was never suggesting they give all of the features to free users and do away with the paid version. That would be absurd to suggest. I'm perfectly fine with most of the limitations of the free version; I also appreciate that they don't blast you with ads or only give you a 30 day trial like other programs do. And also I wasn't suggesting that Dropbox or any other program that is comparable is better than this program. I like this program better than Dropbox or any other program like this I've come across. What I was trying to suggest is that Dropbox also has a similar business model of offering the free version and paid premium version. And just like Evernote the premium version offers more storage space. But even with the free version of Dropbox, they offer the VERY BASIC function of adding files to someone else's box and make notes on shared files, and their Premium version is still desirable to me and other customers. The storage space and monthly upload limits of Evernote I FULLY understand. I'm fine with the advanced technical support of the premium version. The offline data feature is perfectly understandable. All that stuff sounds like it's probably a huge expense to offer, and disabling it to the free users and giving them a reason to want to upgrade to premium seems smart and fair.

Disabling the simple ability to just be able to drag a file into someone else's folder or AT LEAST be able to add a sticky note to someone else's notes in their folder? I just feel like that might be a little bit of an arbitrary inflation of the desirability of the premium version.

What's more, maybe referring to it as a 'grift' was a little bit harsh, and for that I apologize. I honestly wasn't even meaning to sound hostile; that's just the best word I could think of to describe it. More a comment on my lack of a well-rounded vocabulary than anything.

Honestly I'd just be happy to be able to add sticky notes to notes in a shared folder. I just need a more practical way to comment on my partners' files than creating an entire notebook JUST for notes on THEIR notes, and then trying to match them up with complicated labels (i.e. "The following note is in reference to your note titled Script Idea # 2 in the 'Script Ideas' Notebook).

In reference to the first reply, I realize that these functions seem integral only to me, and might not be important to a lot of other users. I wasn't trying to imply that my needs for the program were the be-all end-all needs of the masses of the Evernote community. But the fact of the matter is that they ARE important to me and so I was expressing my opinion that they'd improve the program.

Lastly, and something I probably should have stated from the get-go, I am in NO way just asking for hand-outs or whining about a product while refusing to support it financially. I fully intend to pay for the premium version; it's a great price! But until I DO decide to upgrade, and for all the other free members who haven't upgraded yet or maybe never will, and just out of principal, I take objection to the disabling of modifying shared notebooks for the reasons I've outlined above.

Hope this cleared some stuff up and made my initial post seem less hostile and ungrateful.

[GrumpyMonkey 4,320]

Hi RoboSalon. I hope it didn't seem like we were piling on top of you! Like I said, your first suggestion seems useful. The second one impacts the way in which Evernote generates revenue. These days there are very few differences between the free and premium plans, so as a user who hopes the company sticks around (they're aiming for 100 years), I am sensitive to the issue of further eroding demand for the premium plan. Personally, if it were me, I probably wouldn't allow sharing at all for free users

[peterfmartin 221]

1. First off, a note flagging and notification system would be incredibly convenient.

At this point, whenever you add to or in any way change a note, the only thing it does is pop to the top of the list of notes in the notebook. This is alright, but it would be so much better if the note was flagged as having been changed. If I signed in to my Evernote desktop app, and all of the notes that had been changed in any way had little red flag icons in the corner or ANYTHING like that, it would be a billion times better.

And if a dialogue box popped up coming from the little Evernote icon in my task bar informing me any time a new note was added or changed in any of my shared Notebooks(similar to the way Drop Box does), it would make the system so much better for mine and my partners' purposes.

Search "updated:day" (or "updated:day-0") and you have what you want, minus red flags (or other such icons).

That is what I'm using Evernote mainly for. As a hub for trading back scripts, concept art, notes, and ideas.

My experience with Evernote, as amazing as it is for me personally, is that it's currently pretty bad software for most sharing and collaborating. There are certain collaboration functions it does pretty well; for example, my girlfriend and I used a shared notebook recently to share apartment listings we had found when we were looking for a new place, and that worked very well for us. But anything more interactive than that—meaning anything that requires back-and-forth discussion, or frequent editing—I wouldn't bother to use Evernote for. If/when Evernote makes its sharing/collaboration features much more robust (which could happen, but probably won't happen soon, based on what Evernote employees, notable Heather, have said here in recent months), I might find it helpful for what you describe. As it is now, I'm surprised you're so happy with Evernote as a collaboration tool and I respectfully suggest that maybe the source of your (small, I understand) disappointment with Evernote is your using it primarily to collaborate, which is its weak point.

And also I wasn't suggesting that Dropbox or any other program that is comparable is better than this program. I like this program better than Dropbox or any other program like this I've come across. What I was trying to suggest is that Dropbox also has a similar business model of offering the free version and paid premium version. And just like Evernote the premium version offers more storage space. But even with the free version of Dropbox, they offer the VERY BASIC function of adding files to someone else's box and make notes on shared files, and their Premium version is still desirable to me and other customers.

That comparison's not really fair. All Dropbox does is file sharing. It doesn't limit that functionality for free users, since it has no other functionality to offer. As you've discovered, Evernote offers free users boatloads of other things. You call collaboration "VERY BASIC," but that's not at all core to what Evernote currently offers. Would such functionality be "VERY BASIC" to iTunes? Word? Do you see my point?

Lastly, I hope I don't sound too hostile, but I hope that your financial situation and priorities allow you to soon sign up as a premium user. Given how much you love the program, I hope you can support it financially, not to mention take advantages of all the features that $45 a year gets you.