BUG: Thanks guys!

[Coach Wade 80]

I just wanted to take a moment and thank the developers. See, for at least six months you have known about a bug in your mobile software that strips out random spaces from text, usually in the same paragraph as bold or italic formatting. The first complaints of this bug that I uncovered with a cursory search of less than a minute appeared in this very forum in November.

Since that time you've had at least eight updates and added several new features, but you have not put any visible effort into fixing this bug.

Yesterday I wrote 2,600 words in my novel. I was hoping to crack 4,000, but I used the mobile platform to make one minor change-- literally I changed ONE word. And the practical result was 181 typos introduced into my godd*mn book by your software. The rest of my writing time was stolen chasing missingspaces like theseones around.

This means your software is effectively useless. College students probably don't appreciate getting marked down by their professors in the grammar and spelling department because their note-taking/word processing software randomly introduces errors, and I know quite well as an author that my editors don't appreciate paying copyeditors and proofreaders to unscrew my work.

If the only thing you're trying to do is make a grocery list, you've done decently. On the other hand, if you're trying to develop a mobile writing platform, the words "Epic Fail" spring to mind.

I'll put it into simpler terms. From one professional to another: you offer a free version of your software to get users interested and give them a chance to try it out before they buy. Many won't, but people like me, who depend on their tools to produce their work, are more than willing to pay for the items that move them more smoothly through their day.

Your software isn't one of them. If you would like to be paid for it, I suggest you make it trustworthy, because right now, it is not, and although I know the software fanboys will attempt to excoriate me in the following posts (assuming your forum police even let this sit long enough to be replied to), the bottom line is very straightforward: Make it work or don't sell the d*mn thing.

Stop adding features until your program can do the basics-- like allow editing and saving without ***** up the document-- properly.

~D.

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

I just wanted to take a moment and thank the developers. See, for at least six months you have known about a bug in your mobile software that strips out random spaces from text, usually in the same paragraph as bold or italic formatting. The first complaints of this bug that I uncovered with a cursory search of less than a minute appeared in this very forum in November.

Since that time you've had at least eight updates and added several new features, but you have not put any visible effort into fixing this bug.

Yesterday I wrote 2,600 words in my novel. I was hoping to crack 4,000, but I used the mobile platform to make one minor change-- literally I changed ONE word. And the practical result was 181 typos introduced into my godd*mn book by your software. The rest of my writing time was stolen chasing missingspaces like theseones around.

This means your software is effectively useless. College students probably don't appreciate getting marked down by their professors in the grammar and spelling department because their note-taking/word processing software randomly introduces errors, and I know quite well as an author that my editors don't appreciate paying copyeditors and proofreaders to unscrew my work.

If the only thing you're trying to do is make a grocery list, you've done decently. On the other hand, if you're trying to develop a mobile writing platform, the words "Epic Fail" spring to mind.

I'll put it into simpler terms. From one professional to another: you offer a free version of your software to get users interested and give them a chance to try it out before they buy. Many won't, but people like me, who depend on their tools to produce their work, are more than willing to pay for the items that move them more smoothly through their day.

Your software isn't one of them. If you would like to be paid for it, I suggest you make it trustworthy, because right now, it is not, and although I know the software fanboys will attempt to excoriate me in the following posts (assuming your forum police even let this sit long enough to be replied to), the bottom line is very straightforward: Make it work or don't sell the d*mn thing.

Stop adding features until your program can do the basics-- like allow editing and saving without ***** up the document-- properly.

~D.

/cue flashing lights and siren of the notorious evernote forum police

hi. i modified your title to make it clear to developers what this thread is addressing. thanks a lot for commenting on your experience. good or bad, it's cool. i think your thread ought to stay on the forum.

as to the points you raise, i cannot speak about android, because i don't use it enough to have encountered the issues you mentioned. however, on the osx and ios clients, there are several formatting issues that i have also raised repeatedly over the last year or so. are the developers listening? i think so. are they working on the bugs? i think so. i would like to see things move faster as well. but, i think they are working hard to meet a lot of competing demands on their time, so i understand that things move more slowly than i would like.

personally, i am willing to be patient, because i think it takes a while to iron out these kinds of issues (even venerable programs like microsoft word and apple's pages have bugs), and the application does so much for me, i wouldn't want to go back to my pre-evernote days. to address your concerns more directly, i am also a professional writer, so i use software made for professional writers. i highly recommend scrivener (it is on osx and windows). it syncs well with several mobile platforms (plaintext, simplenote, notecard, and elements in ios) and hopefully there are some in android for it.

all of my projects start out in evernote, but when i get to the point where i have revisions, rewriting, and editing then it moves out to a more robust environment. i am very leery of anything that does not give me true plain text, precisely because of these kinds of issues with formatting that creep into my work, but evernote's many other good points outweigh my concerns. hopefully, there will come a day (soon?) when we will get true plain text. until then, i'd recommend adding something like scrivener to your workflow.

[Xavier_ 132]

@Coach Wade, sorry to hear that you lost some of your data. As product manager, I am more to blame than our developers.

I don't remember replying to this issue, I remember one about missing tabs that we addressed.

If you want to send me a note that would lose space when edited on Android, I would be happy to look into this problem.

In the meantime, for our premium users, there is a way to revert undesired changes and access the revision history. That can be useful for this kind of situation.

[Coach Wade 80]

@Coach Wade, sorry to hear that you lost some of your data. As product manager, I am more to blame than our developers.

I don't remember replying to this issue, I remember one about missing tabs that we addressed.

If you want to send me a note that would lose space when edited on Android, I would be happy to look into this problem.

In the meantime, for our premium users, there is a way to revert undesired changes and access the revision history. That can be useful for this kind of situation.

Hi, er... what the heck is that name? xdelplanque? Wasn't he a bad guy in a Superman comic? (Or was that Mtzplk?)

In the interests of accuracy, I didn't actually lose data. I lost time proofreading errors that were induced into the text. Not quite the same thing, but your time is limited so I don't want to send you haring off after a data loss bug.

Anyway, I will see if I can replicate the fault and send it to you. Basically, it does this to text:

"Thisis an exampleof the way spaces are stripped out of notes. It only seems to happen when the androidclient is used to edit a preexisting note, anditseems to happen more frequently in paragraphs that have formatting (italics and boldface)."

Another thing I have noticed is that cutting and pasting from Evernote into MS Word for my final copy of the manuscript also plays merry heck with the formatting. For some reason the first page of an individual note is usually a 15-16 point boldfaced non-serif font. (I'm not sure which one, off the top of my head. Cambria?) That first page is also triple spaced between paragraphs as well. (For editing purposes, I double space paragraphs.) So far, it's been that way in the first nine chapters. I don't know if it's the same bug or not, but it's formatting, so it might be related.

Thanks for looking into this. Is there an email address I should send the note to? (You can contact me at Coach_Wade AT Hotmail DOT com if you don't want to put that address here for some reason.)

TY

~D.

[Xavier_ 132]

Sure, you can actually use the email here:

android-preview@evernote.com

Add in the title "space loss". I consider any formatting or character loss as data loss actually.

Copy pasting to MS word, is probably another issue. I am only the mobile guy, but I can still speak about it to me colleague.

PS: My name is Xavier. I believe it doesn't make me less of a comic guy, but probably more of the good guy

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

@Coach Wade, sorry to hear that you lost some of your data. As product manager, I am more to blame than our developers.

I don't remember replying to this issue, I remember one about missing tabs that we addressed.

If you want to send me a note that would lose space when edited on Android, I would be happy to look into this problem.

In the meantime, for our premium users, there is a way to revert undesired changes and access the revision history. That can be useful for this kind of situation.

Hi, er... what the heck is that name? xdelplanque? Wasn't he a bad guy in a Superman comic? (Or was that Mtzplk?)

In the interests of accuracy, I didn't actually lose data. I lost time proofreading errors that were induced into the text. Not quite the same thing, but your time is limited so I don't want to send you haring off after a data loss bug.

Anyway, I will see if I can replicate the fault and send it to you. Basically, it does this to text:

"Thisis an exampleof the way spaces are stripped out of notes. It only seems to happen when the androidclient is used to edit a preexisting note, anditseems to happen more frequently in paragraphs that have formatting (italics and boldface)."

Another thing I have noticed is that cutting and pasting from Evernote into MS Word for my final copy of the manuscript also plays merry heck with the formatting. For some reason the first page of an individual note is usually a 15-16 point boldfaced non-serif font. (I'm not sure which one, off the top of my head. Cambria?) That first page is also triple spaced between paragraphs as well. (For editing purposes, I double space paragraphs.) So far, it's been that way in the first nine chapters. I don't know if it's the same bug or not, but it's formatting, so it might be related.

Thanks for looking into this. Is there an email address I should send the note to? (You can contact me at Coach_Wade AT Hotmail DOT com if you don't want to put that address here for some reason.)

TY

~D.

hi. at some point, would you mind posting how you use evernote to write? i tend to rely on scrivener (syncing with various other apps) to work on chapters, because i can split things up and move content around easily. evernote does not have a way to fix the order notes get displayed (short of changing the title of every note each time something moves). i'd be interested in learning how you make it work. thanks!

[Coach Wade 80]

hi. at some point, would you mind posting how you use evernote to write? i tend to rely on scrivener (syncing with various other apps) to work on chapters, because i can split things up and move content around easily. evernote does not have a way to fix the order notes get displayed (short of changing the title of every note each time something moves). i'd be interested in learning how you make it work. thanks!

Sure, I don't follow a horribly complex process. I write on my laptop, usually. Each note is one chapter. Currently, the piece I am working on typically has each chapter divided into subchapters (there's a past element, a framing element, and a present day element).

After I write the chapter-- sometimes even AS I write the chapter, I'll have other things I have to do, so I'll take my phone or my tablet with me and proof what I've written. The phone keyboard is a little small for comprehensive writing, but I have one note just for notes, and another for "scenes" that sometimes come to me that don't quite fit into the narrative yet, but I know are going to be a part of it somewhere. I'll either tap these out on the phone keyboard or with the tablet, or just make an outline for when I'm back at my laptop.

Where Evernote is saving me the most time is in the proofreading and revision area. Because I can take the book with me virtually anywhere, whenever I get a spare moment I can read and revise what I've written. (Where it's costing me time is that darn bug introducing errors by stripping out spaces. I'm sure they'll get that hammered out soon.)

Another area where Evernote has really assisted me is by allowing me to not face an empty blank page. Along the left hand side are a bunch of my notes and ideas... even when starting a new chapter, any thoughts I have that might fit in down the road, such as foreshadowing, or a bit of character interpretation, can be dropped easily into a note. In two mouse clicks I've synched and moved back to the scene/chapter I'm working on.

In MS Word, by contrast, I have to either have several different files open simultaneously, and/or wait while each one opens and closes. Evernote is simply faster and VASTLY more efficient. (Oh man, I'm a fanboy now. DANG it! You did this on purpose, Monkey!)

If you take a look at the image, you'll see my chapter list on the left. (I don't title my chapters, just "Four", "Seven" etc.) You'll also see my "scenes" note and at the bottom my Characters note. "The End" and "Final Choice" are actually scenes that got big enough to need their own notes. They'll plug into chapters down the road. "Chapter Seven" has actually not been started yet, the lines there are notes I made to jog my memory for the scenes I want to write. "General" is a series of notes, usually made for research purposes. For example, I needed to research the criteria for the US Army Decoration "Silver Star" to see if it was applicable for one of my characters. The criteria, and the accompanying citation, are in that note, along with a couple of other things (timelines and the like).

I write a chapter and then copy/paste it into a word document. This is saved into my dropbox folder, to which my editor has access. She marks up the work and sends me her revisions, and I add or argue as necessary. (She's almost aways right, sadly.) When the chapter is finalized, it gets cut/pasted AGAIN into the final copy, also in dropbox. This sounds cumbersome, but it allows me to track changes and also serves as a multiple backup in case something goes haywire somewhere.

Not being on the Mac, scrivener isn't an option, but I have looked briefly at yWriter, developed by the author of Space Jock Hal. It's a great, free authoring software, but it's limited for what I want to do because of the lack of cloud. (Actually, running a new search it appears a version of Scrivener for the Win7 user was released not long ago. I'll have to look further into it now. Are you aware of any cloud based ability, and/or an Android client?)

One thing I wish Evernote could do as a writing tool, and I will probably be the ONLY person to ever ask for it, is a Gantt chart. I use these for timelines in my fiction, particularly an intricate piece like this that has three simultaneous timelines going on that need to intersect at a single point.

Anyway, that's how I use it, and if anyone at Evernote would like me to write a more detailed analysis of my procedure to put in the archives somewhere, I'm happy to do so.

~D.

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

hi. at some point, would you mind posting how you use evernote to write? i tend to rely on scrivener (syncing with various other apps) to work on chapters, because i can split things up and move content around easily. evernote does not have a way to fix the order notes get displayed (short of changing the title of every note each time something moves). i'd be interested in learning how you make it work. thanks!

Sure, I don't follow a horribly complex process. I write on my laptop, usually. Each note is one chapter. Currently, the piece I am working on typically has each chapter divided into subchapters (there's a past element, a framing element, and a present day element).

After I write the chapter-- sometimes even AS I write the chapter, I'll have other things I have to do, so I'll take my phone or my tablet with me and proof what I've written. The phone keyboard is a little small for comprehensive writing, but I have one note just for notes, and another for "scenes" that sometimes come to me that don't quite fit into the narrative yet, but I know are going to be a part of it somewhere. I'll either tap these out on the phone keyboard or with the tablet, or just make an outline for when I'm back at my laptop.

Where Evernote is saving me the most time is in the proofreading and revision area. Because I can take the book with me virtually anywhere, whenever I get a spare moment I can read and revise what I've written. (Where it's costing me time is that darn bug introducing errors by stripping out spaces. I'm sure they'll get that hammered out soon.)

Another area where Evernote has really assisted me is by allowing me to not face an empty blank page. Along the left hand side are a bunch of my notes and ideas... even when starting a new chapter, any thoughts I have that might fit in down the road, such as foreshadowing, or a bit of character interpretation, can be dropped easily into a note. In two mouse clicks I've synched and moved back to the scene/chapter I'm working on.

In MS Word, by contrast, I have to either have several different files open simultaneously, and/or wait while each one opens and closes. Evernote is simply faster and VASTLY more efficient. (Oh man, I'm a fanboy now. DANG it! You did this on purpose, Monkey!)

If you take a look at the image, you'll see my chapter list on the left. (I don't title my chapters, just "Four", "Seven" etc.) You'll also see my "scenes" note and at the bottom my Characters note. "The End" and "Final Choice" are actually scenes that got big enough to need their own notes. They'll plug into chapters down the road. "Chapter Seven" has actually not been started yet, the lines there are notes I made to jog my memory for the scenes I want to write. "General" is a series of notes, usually made for research purposes. For example, I needed to research the criteria for the US Army Decoration "Silver Star" to see if it was applicable for one of my characters. The criteria, and the accompanying citation, are in that note, along with a couple of other things (timelines and the like).

I write a chapter and then copy/paste it into a word document. This is saved into my dropbox folder, to which my editor has access. She marks up the work and sends me her revisions, and I add or argue as necessary. (She's almost aways right, sadly.) When the chapter is finalized, it gets cut/pasted AGAIN into the final copy, also in dropbox. This sounds cumbersome, but it allows me to track changes and also serves as a multiple backup in case something goes haywire somewhere.

Not being on the Mac, scrivener isn't an option, but I have looked briefly at yWriter, developed by the author of Space Jock Hal. It's a great, free authoring software, but it's limited for what I want to do because of the lack of cloud. (Actually, running a new search it appears a version of Scrivener for the Win7 user was released not long ago. I'll have to look further into it now. Are you aware of any cloud based ability, and/or an Android client?)

One thing I wish Evernote could do as a writing tool, and I will probably be the ONLY person to ever ask for it, is a Gantt chart. I use these for timelines in my fiction, particularly an intricate piece like this that has three simultaneous timelines going on that need to intersect at a single point.

Anyway, that's how I use it, and if anyone at Evernote would like me to write a more detailed analysis of my procedure to put in the archives somewhere, I'm happy to do so.

~D.

hi. thanks so much for sharing that. it was very instructive! i was not familiar with a gantt chart. it sounds quite interesting.

as much as it pains me to say this, i cannot use evernote for my writing, because the formatting is too inconsistent. in an ideal world, it would just be plain text, and i could do all of my work in evernote. in the real world, it is enml, and i have mysterious lines, text that leaps around while editing, uncontrolled font family / text size changes, missing spaces, and other issues (reported but not yet solved). these have plagued me for about a year now (osx and ios). and, i have lost data (evernote failed to save a note and crashed once with ios, taking all of my stuff with it). with large projects, i have learned the hard way that i have to use another app for my writing. i do hope that the formatting gets ironed out, because i definitely would prefer working in evernote.

i use scrivener on the mac and it syncs beautifully with elements, indexcard, and simplenote (ios). i imagine there is something on android, but i do not know.despite having wonderful features, scrivener takes me out of evernote, and i end up having my work spread across apps, so i would prefer to work exclusively in evernote. maybe someday!

[Coach Wade 80]

hi. thanks so much for sharing that. it was very instructive! i was not familiar with a gantt chart. it sounds quite interesting.

as much as it pains me to say this, i cannot use evernote for my writing, because the formatting is too inconsistent. in an ideal world, it would just be plain text, and i could do all of my work in evernote. in the real world, it is enml, and i have mysterious lines, text that leaps around while editing, uncontrolled font family / text size changes, missing spaces, and other issues (reported but not yet solved). these have plagued me for about a year now (osx and ios). and, i have lost data (evernote failed to save a note and crashed once with ios, taking all of my stuff with it). with large projects, i have learned the hard way that i have to use another app for my writing. i do hope that the formatting gets ironed out, because i definitely would prefer working in evernote.

i use scrivener on the mac and it syncs beautifully with elements, indexcard, and simplenote (ios). i imagine there is something on android, but i do not know.despite having wonderful features, scrivener takes me out of evernote, and i end up having my work spread across apps, so i would prefer to work exclusively in evernote. maybe someday!

No problem, glad to help and hopefully it intrigues someone else out there to adapt a style that works for them.

Truthfully, I have never cared for the Mac. I used Macs exclusively from 2004-2010, and I found more issues with the hardware than with any other computers I've ever used. My Powerbook had to have three batteries inside a year, still gets too hot to touch whenever I try to watch or edit video on it, and has had four hard drives since I bought it in 2004. The iMac I had suffered from "feature stupid." In the mid 1990's most computer manufacturers wised up to the idea of putting the graphics card on the mother board. Due to heat, graphics cards are high failure items. Putting them on the motherboard means when the graphics card goes, so does the motherboard.

You can guess what happened. Apple is apparently constitutionally incapable of learning from the hardware blunders of others, so within three years my 19" iMac became an expensive paperweight.

Add into this the minor annoyances-- every time I update iTunes it puts a shortcut on my desktop. Yes, this is a silly little thing to be aggravated about, but if I WANTED a shortcut on my desktop, I wouldn't have deleted the last ELEVEN you put there, dang it!-- and I am pretty much done with Mac and Apple products. Of course, that's me, and I don't ask anyone else to be like me. For one thing, the world isn't ready for that kind of sexual magnetism.

I suffered from a lot of formatting issues with the Mac as well. As a football coach, I've done a lot of clinic speaking, and almost every time I tried to animate a PowerPoint presentation that was written on my Mac, I couldn't present it on any other computer. That was pretty blasted annoying. Eventually, the costs and the various issues forced me back to the Windows platform. (Actually, my intention was to install Linux Mint when I got this laptop, but I discovered that I really like Win7... words I NEVER thought would cross my lips.

I have noticed a fairly minor Evernote formatting problem: when I cut/paste into word, for some reason the first page-- usually ONLY the first page-- is in a 16pt non serif font. All other formatting is fine: italics are in the right place, etc, with the exception of that single page also being triple spaced for some reason. I noticed this also when I cut/pasted a blog entry into an outlook email to send to a friend.

There are two things that make Evernote perfect for manuscript writing (at least for me.) The first is the cloud. I HATE cloud computing, normally, but this isn't STORED in the cloud, it's merely cloud SYNC, so it really does save me a lot of time in the proofing process. I can generally crank out about 3500 words an hour, but the revision and proofing/copyediting takes anywhere from three to five times as long. Being able to take that with me and do it on my phone or my tablet makes it WAY more convenient.

And second, I've never worked with a software that makes it so easy to switch between chapters. Each chapter is a separate note, and they're all listed on the side of the screen (the reason I LOATHE Snippet view on the tablet), I can click in and verify that I did, in fact, mention Burke Chapman's high school GPA in chapter three when I'm making reference to it in chapter seven. I can do this so quickly and easily that it doesn't break my stride-- hitting backspace to correct a typo actually slows me down more sometimes.

The question may be where the developers want to take Evernote? It's possible that it might end up being a little TOO jack of all trades. It's NOT a manuscript software, it just works well as one (or at least, it works well with my particular "chasing my own @ss" writing methods). However, let's be honest, this is WAY more powerful than anyone needs to make a grocery list. I'm really curious to see what they do with it next.

~D.

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

Good points about Mac. I actually like a lot about Windows, I like a lot of PCs, but I am afraid it is not doable: I need macrons. It seems like a minor thing, but it is an everyday problem, sort of like the complaints you had about PPT. It looks like I am stuck with Mac.

Fortunately, I do most of my work on the iPad, which I love

As for cloud syncing, a lot of other programs do that for text: Simplenote, PlainText, IndexCard, VoodooPad, and Elements. Elements syncs the best with Scrivener, so it is the one I tend to use. There is a copy on my iPad that is saved every keystroke (please do this Evernote!), a copy in Dropbox on the Web, a copy on my hard drive in my Dropbox folder, and a copy in Scrivener (syncs automatically when opened).

I'd like to have everything in Evernote, but I gotta have control over the formatting (in other words, no formatting -- plain text). As you said, Evernote does a lot, so I am looking forward to its future development! I actually don't need a lot for my writing. In fact, I could use less (formatting).

[Coach Wade 80]

Good points about Mac. I actually like a lot about Windows, I like a lot of PCs, but I am afraid it is not doable: I need macrons. It seems like a minor thing, but it is an everyday problem, sort of like the complaints you had about PPT. It looks like I am stuck with Mac.

Fortunately, I do most of my work on the iPad, which I love

As for cloud syncing, a lot of other programs do that for text: Simplenote, PlainText, IndexCard, VoodooPad, and Elements. Elements syncs the best with Scrivener, so it is the one I tend to use. There is a copy on my iPad that is saved every keystroke (please do this Evernote!), a copy in Dropbox on the Web, a copy on my hard drive in my Dropbox folder, and a copy in Scrivener (syncs automatically when opened).

I'd like to have everything in Evernote, but I gotta have control over the formatting (in other words, no formatting -- plain text). As you said, Evernote does a lot, so I am looking forward to its future development! I actually don't need a lot for my writing. In fact, I could use less (formatting).

I think the thing I like MOST about Macs is that they provide competition. Competition makes everyone stronger. The worst possible outcome for personal computing would be if one OS finally won out over the rest.

I wrote my first two books exclusively in MS Word and had no problems with organization or proofing or formatting. I actually got my hands on a template that I fell in love with that made it VERY easy to be consistent across the entire 600 pages. Fiction, on the other hand, is so much harder to write than nonfic (because you're creating, not synthesizing), that I have to have every duck lined up just so in order to make it work.

Evernote has REALLY made that happen for me, so while I'm pretty cranky about the bits that are not working correctly, I'm also fully in support of what they are doing now.

Unfortunately, all the programs you list are Mac programs. I haven't seen one yet that offers the same type of cross-platform (PC/Android) syncing like Evernote does. Probably the best thing for me to do is keep using Evernote and then see what Scrivener does with their Win/Android releases. Of course, by then this book should be done, so we'll see where I end up after that.

~D.

[Dryden 0]

This thread is 2 years old, but I am experiencing some of the same.

 

I write unformatted text on a recent Windows version. It is one paragraph without line-breaks. I sync and I open it on Android. The paragraph seems fine. I copy and paste it into a text message. Something seems wrong, but I'm not sure about how that SMS app would display everything, so I just hit send. When I see my message, an additional space was inserted between the end of one line (a period) and the beginning of the next word. No formatting. Just that. That word did contain some 'special characters',  it was a Serbian name.

 

I edit the note in my Android app. Suddenly there are not two spaces, but none at all. I close and reopen, and now another space has gone missing!

 

This is really annoying. In my communications I want to be as precise as possible. Such mark-up errors are unacceptable to me. So for me it means I have to send another message apologizing for the weird spacing. It also means I have to check every text message I send for fornicate-ups I did not make. But the whole reason for using Evernote (or at least an important one) is that my SMS app has this really small window for writing and it's just pointless to write anything longer than a few SMS-sizes in it. It is HORRIBLE to have to scan back and check for errors.

 

Are there ANY good alternatives to Evernote? Something that is equally well designed visually and in terms of user controls, but that actually works as intended?

 

Also, the Evernote "revision" feature is not a revision thing at all. The server makes automated backups a few times each day. The chances for the 'revision' you want to be in one of those backups is extremely slim. It was the only reason I bought Premium, and I regret it. It is almost and lets just say "near" worthless.

 

I really can't keep using this app. I believe this is the second time this happened. I don't remember the other instance. I believe, sometimes it is not even possible in my SMS app or Whatsapp app to discern or ascertain that the spacing is indeed correct everywhere. Depending on where it happens and how that app breaks the line. This is just worthless. I will start looking for something else straight away.

 

Another thing, unrelated perhaps. The navigation in Evernote for Android is really bad. Pressing the "back" button that Evernote includes does not take you back to the list of notes you were previously viewing and that you used to open one. It takes you to that weird screen where you can select navigational items, like it is some main menu. You actually have to press "return" on your Android device to get the feature that that button should provide. And I always press the wrong button, it is so counter-intuitive. Really horrible actually. There is no good way to return to the notebook you were in.

[Dryden 0]

Alright so there are no alternatives to Evernote, as I expected. I am continually amazed by the amount of morons in the world. Evernote is the only app that is actually suitable for Human Beings.

 

All of these apps, or most of them, try to be creative by introducing all kinds of specialized features such as "to-do lists", but that is akin to having kitchen utensils for every kind of fruit you need to cut.

 

I JUST want a basic note application. Write on Windows, sync, use on Android. Write on Android, sync, save on Windows. It is just incredulous that people usually are not capable of creating something that is actually useful and user friendly.

 

That is something that has become increasingly bad in the last few decades. 30 years ago most designs were still functional. Today, they rarely are.

 

But I still can't use Evernote anymore... Maybe I should get a third app that I can paste my text into and use it to correct errors. I think I will do that.

 

Now, to find something that is actually worth something;

• Jotterpad X is actually totally horrible, with dissonant line-spacing that you cannot adjust.
• Flick Note makes all text bold ????.What the HELL.
• Simple Notepad syncs with Evernote but looks horrible by default and if they can't do the default right, they can't do anything right.
• Jota is hideous as hell.

 

ANYthing that uses "Markdown" is bound to be horrible. Anyone knows that *this* is the way to indicate bold. In Markdown? It's italics. What the .... what's wrong with using /this/ for italics? It is completely intuitive. They just copied wiki markup and then mangled it.

 

Anything that connects to Dropbox is bound to be horrible.

 

Designing for a smartphone is pretty high-level work. Not only does the app need to be functional, it needs to be visually extremely attractive. The vast majority of apps falls short in that department, and only the biggest companies do well. Even the icon for the app is important.

 

Apps like Evernote, Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram, these things are visually attractive from beginning to end. But 95% of apps that are available are just a waste of energy. Not just for me, also for the creators.

 

I now found something that will do for the moment. It is just called "Text Editor". It is not pretty but not too bad for those few seconds I need to look at it. But know what they did? Their icon is pretty good, but they forgot(?) to make the exterior transparent. So the icon is a white square background with a notepad icon in it, instead of a transparent notepad icon. IDIOTS. If you go about and create something, at least give it your all.....

 

Something's just not worth doing unless you do it well.

 

Just my opinion but how stupid is it that it is impossible to find a well-designed application that can edit some unformatted text???

 

Even my phone does not come with one. There is not actually a text-editing app on my phone by default.

 

Not that only small companies mess up. I would never use that TextEdit application for OS X, for example.

 

Design standards have just gone up in recent decades. The visuals of "Windows 95" will no longer do. I still arduously use Notepad on Windows 7 though, it still looks great. I avoid WordPad like the plague since it has the ribbon. OpenOffice is the most horrible thing ever devised. So basically, there is no formatted-text editor I can use other than Evernote. So what do I do? I use BlueGriffon which is a HTML editor. I then use Firefox to print out my documents or letters if I need to.

 

Btw, the paragraph-spacing on this forum is also not very good. It looks okay in the editor and then when you preview it or view it, it is much too big. You can see how annoying it is to read my text because I have a lot of single-line paragraphs. But this is not my doing, it is because of the line-spacing.