Thanks for the Highlight Tool

[JMichaelTX 4,118]

Thanks for the Highlight Tool  

 

I just wanted to give a special thanks to the Evernote Mac Dev team for providing the Highlight Tool.  I must, literally, use it 100 times a day.  I capture, create, and edit a lot of content daily, and it is VERY HELPFUL to be able to highlight the key, important text in each Note.

 

I know it must seem like I mostly complain about Evernote, but as a whole it is a great tool.  My "complaints" are made with the best of intentions:  To improve Evernote (as I see it).

 

It did take us a long time to convince you to provide this tool, but you finally came through in the end. 

 

OK, now that I buttered you up , it sure would be nice if you could provide us with a drop-down list of multiple, user-selectable, colors for the highlight color. 

 

Many thanks!

[Kirby Krieger 72]

It did take us a long time to convince you to provide this tool, but you finally came through in the end.

 

 

 

Well, not to harsh your buzz, but, imho, it's important to say:  of course thanks to the hard-working employees of Evernote.  Terrific software with a tremendous future.  Just a few dozen more tweaks and it'll be up to 2011 standards.

 

My criticism is not meant to be hurtful.  I _like_ Evernote; I want it to succeed.  But I also don't think users should feel they have to kneel and beg for features that have been bog-standard since perhaps a decade ago (or longer — when was the last time you used a text-editor/word-processor as capricious and low-powered as Evernote's?).

 

As a frustrated user, I'm bothered by what I and others see as a large gap between revenue and development.  Evernote is a rich growing company.  Users deserve a rich, bug-free, growing features list.

 

That we don't get it is not an employee problem.  It's a management problem.

[ScottLougheed 1,316]

Well yes and no. I mean, there are always going to be sets of short-term goals, and sets of long-term goals, and sometimes things that seem like short-term things are lumped in with long term things. As a hypothetical example:

 

Problem: only one highlighter colour. 

Ok, this seems like a short-term development goal. Wham-bam simple tweak and the problem's solved. 

 

However, we know from other posts on this community that Evernote is currently working on a significant revamp of their note editor(s). This would likely be in the long-term development goal category. 

 

This begs the question, does management commit resources to fixing the highlighter for the next release in a couple weeks (or whatever)¹, when it knows that in six months (or whatever)², a new note editor will be rolling out that includes more robust highlighting³? Where should management place the resources? I can see the logic behind not fixing the highlighter for next week, and instead waiting until the new note editor is in place which might include more advanced highlighting features anyway. To choose to fix the highlighter now would mean that some of the labour would be duplicated in fixing highlighting in the old note editor while re-writing it for the new note editor. For what is arguably a non-pressing issue (as opposed to say, profligate data loss or glaring security issues), I don't see this as an effective use of resources. 

 

But that being said, I'm not in anyway involved in software development (or even business....) so I'm just shooting my mouth off here basically. 

 

¹Hypothetical!!!

²Hypothetical once more!

³Speculation/Hypothetical, of course.