(Archived) A few notes and questions/requests

[ardee 0]

Notes:

1. I've been playing around with EverNote on the PC, Mac, Web, and iPhone (iPod touch 2G plus mic, actually). With a few caveats (see below) it works great. The potential here is incredible! It could even be life-changing.

2. Having used disjointed tools such as PaperPort, NetSnippets, to-do lists, voice recordings, PC-Palm syncing, digital cameras, OCR, web syncing, handwriting recognition (Apple Newton MessagePad!), and much more, seeing them all (potentially) tied together in this way is amazing. I hope you have the key technologies patented!

3. I predict that before 2009 ends, EverNote will be part of Google (hope so) or Microsoft (hope not).

4. The Mac version seems to be nicer than the PC version in a few ways, including note-viewing options. You must have two separate code bases. Having created cross-platform apps, I know it's possible to do this with a single code base and I recommend it. It's a lot easier than keeping two code bases feature-synced "manually".

5. Though most people will probably disagree, I think it's wise to resist doing movies. Too much bandwidth, too difficult to do recognition, and just too YouTubey.

6. The ability to send e-mails (or attachments) to create notes is a stroke of genius. That lets cell phones that have Internet access but aren't using the iPhone OS or Windows Mobile create notes, including picture notes if they have cameras, right?

Questions/requests:

A. Is there a way to record voice notes directly into the Mac or PC apps? If not, please add that.

B. I also did not see a way to create "ink" notes on the iPhone. Please add that, too!

C. Please either go to a cross-platform development environment or keep the desktop apps more closely aligned, feature-wise.

D. Longer term, are you planning to recognize words in voice notes? (I bet you are!)

E. Do you have plans to support other mobile platforms, such as the new ones from Palm or Google? (I bet you do!)

F. If I sign up for the premium account but find that the bandwidth per month is still insufficient, is there a way to pay to scale it up?

Thanks!

Apple technologies changed the world several times; Google did it at least once. Looks like you guys are next -- kudos and keep up the great work!!

[engberg 89]

Thanks for the feedback. We can't give specific plans for future features or dates, but a few thoughts:

The Windows client is based on a Windows note-taking application that has been around for a few years. We chose to start the Mac (and iPhone) applications from scratch rather than porting the Win32 C++ app because Apple's Cocoa development frameworks allowed us to get a native Mac feel with much lower resources than a lowest-common-denominator UI port. We do, however, intend to make the user experiences of the two clients much more similar this year. Part of this will be a new UI layer for the Windows client, including an improved HTML text editor.

Yes - the email gateway is primarily intended for people to send in notes and photos from places that they don't have access to a full mail client. While it works from a normal desktop mail app, I find it much easier from my PC/Mac to just drag/copy content into Evernote's full clients instead.

We don't currently have a way to increase your monthly upload allowance if you hit the Premium limit for a month, although we've accommodated a few people through support if they get stuck for a month. We are considering options for this, however we want to make sure that the experience people get is as smooth as possible.

Thanks!