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Evernote for Mac 5.7 released


SoftwareMarcus

Idea

Today we've released Evernote for Mac v5.7.  Here are the official release notes.

 

Premium feature: Context

  • Context displays notes, articles, and people related to what you’re working on
  • View related articles from The Wall Street Journal and other sources and related people from LinkedIn and your business

Presentation Mode has been improved with a fresh look and new features

  • Use the layout panel to navigate your presentation and add dividers
  • Images are now presented from screen-edge to screen-edge
  • Beautifully styled tables make your information stand out

Other improvements:

  • Send messages to share notes and discuss things you’re working on without leaving Evernote
  • Bug and stability fixes

 

This is a big release for us and if you've been wondering why we haven't fixed some issues it's because we've been working on 5.7.   In the bucket of how amazing technology is...Jackoliscious pushed out the release from an airplane at 30,000 feet.  Pretty crazy stuff.

 

You can get the build here:  http://bit.ly/1udeY7G

 

We plan on submitting a release to the Mac App Store soon to get everyone caught up.  It's coming but I can't give specific dates.  

 

Please reply to this post with any specific 5.7 issues.  I'll be monitoring this thread pretty closely over the weekend.   Thanks in advance for all of your feedback.

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Evernote used to be king in this space, but if you annoy your user base there are plenty of alternates to flick to. I just cant comprehend how evernote can mess up so badly. You were in a good space with your users, plenty of word of mouth recommendations. Not so much anymore.

 

For people here who are expressing sentiments like this one, and are struggling to understand the "why" of some of the recent changes, I think it's important to understand the context (no pun intended) within which they're being made.

 

Specifically, it's important to understand that Evernote is doing something of a pivot in their direction and vision for the product. It was already mentioned earlier in the thread, but if you want to understand the WHY of some of the recent changes, I REALLY HIGHLY recommend you watch Andrew Sinkov's video from the most recent Evernote Conference.

 

And specifically in regard to Work Chat, again if you want to understand the thinking behind it, and a bit of where it might lead going forward, I REALLY HIGHLY recommend you watch Jack and Jamie's conference session video.  (Added benefit: you can see the man behind Jackolicious.)

 

You may or may not agree with the pivot they've chosen to make or their new vision - and I'm quite sure they realized that in making it, they were bound to piss off some of their existing 100 million users - but at least you can understand more of the background from these videos.  They didn't really "mess up" but rather are very consciously choosing a new direction, for better or worse.  Ultimately only time will tell whether it was in fact for better or worse.

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I'm not sure Evernote has seriously considered all the use cases of their software.  Either that, or the pivot referenced above is incredibly significant.  Evernote is FAR from ubiquitous software, although it's doing quite well.  This move feels like a move toward ubiquity, but is WAY to soon.

 

With the current "email a note" feature - prospective evernote users get a nice little drip-advertisement at the bottom of the email.  There is no way users will spam their friends, prospective clients, etc to create evernote accounts and download / install apps just to read note content.

 

Would anyone use "work chat" to send notes to a prospective client, colleague, networking contact, etc?  I suppose if there was prior knowledge that person used evernote... otherwise the barrier to entry is ridiculous.

 

The conversation used to be: "Hi <prospective client> - see below for notes from our meeting.  It was great having a chance to sit down with you and discuss ___ ".  

 

Now the conversation is:  "Hi <prospective client> - I took some notes from our meeting and would love to share them with you.  To access the notes you'll need Evernote.  Do you have an account?  If so, can you let me know what email address you used to sign up?  If not, you'll just need to go to evernote.com and sign up for one, and then download and install software.  Let me know when you've gotten that far and I'll walk you through accepting my invitation to "work chat" so you can read the notes from this meeting."

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After watching that talk (very LONG talk) from Andrew Sinkov referred to above, I go the sinkov - er, sorry - SINKING feeling that Evernote is becoming more and more what I do NOT want.

 

It worries me when he says that from surveys (much of which was done "internally") they found that 70% of users use Evernote for work. Well, duh - yes, a lot of us do. But I did not hear him say how many people use it for personal stuff - and the whole point is that they are not mutually exclusive. The 70% who use it for work would include a large proportion of those who also use it for personal stuff. In other words, many users would use it for both.  I do.

 

The other thing I find very depressing is this idea that seems to be all-pervasive that work MUST involve collaboration. Mine doesn't, and I'm sure a lot of others have no need for collaboration. We don't all work in corporate environments or Silicon Valley type think tanks.

 

If Jack or anyone is reading this ongoing discussion, please PLEASE convey the idea of splitting Evernote into two - Evernote Private and Evernote Business. As I have suggested on another post, Private would not have Chat, or Context, etc. While Business would. But they both need to retain the ability to email a note, the ability to do a presentation from multiple notes, to configure that blasted toolbar, - in other words, all the things that either have been or are getting broken.

 

You can't just put out a program that creates a new paradigm, one of remembering everything, of becoming an extension of your memory, etc, as Evernote originally did, and to which Evernote owes its success - and then CHANGE THE PARADIGM!  That is what seems to be happening.  And nobody in the hierarchy of Evernote is listening. Yes, those who post here on your forums are a tiny proportion of your user base - but statistically, we would be fairly representative of the type of user and the thoughts of those users that make up the silent majority.

 

But you are not listening - or if you are, you are ignoring us. You have VERY long term users, you have extremely prolific posters, you have beta testers - all complaining and expressing negative thoughts about what you're doing. But all are ignored.

 

HEY EVERNOTE - LISTEN UP BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE AND YOU HEAD OFF IN THE WRONG DIRECTION..!!! 

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I am really sorry I updated to 5.7---the work chat functionality is not helpful, and now makes it much more difficult to email a note, which is what I do 15 times a week.

 

I really dont care about the how's and whys.  All I ask is that you give users the ability to enable the previous email a note functionality as in previous versions.  I have no interest in another chat service via evernote, thanks very much (and you are really late to the party I have to say).  If people want the "work chat" functionality, let them turn it on, for those who dont' let us uncheck it and get back to sharing as we had been doing previously, with the email a note functionality.

 

gracias

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I actually love the work chat feature. For folks I work with who have Evernote, it's wonderful. Even the title "work chat" suggests Evernote gets this is a collaborative and limited feature. I agree that the sharing experience is better that way, and I'd love it if the whole world used Evernote.

Alas the whole world does not use Evernote. Therefore, we need the email a note functionality to remain.

In fact, why not combine both and offer the ability to recognize email addresses of Evernote users - and possibly offer a prompt: "soandso@example.com is an Evernote user - would you like to share directly?" Or better yet, send the email but offer a response link where the recipient can "respond in Evernote" and move the whole conversation automatically into Evernote.

The possibilities are endless. The only one that truly sucks is killing off the basic of basic features that I use 15-20 times per week (minimum).

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Evernote are trying to monetize our use and data so they can sell ads against our notes.

 

Eliminating the email note is just Evernote's way of throwing a roadblock into your workflow so you have to user their work chat feature, or share out through a channel they control. That way they can spam anyone you sent a note to, and sell ads for Slate magazine based on the content of your notes.

 

In other words their venture capital bankers will be pleased that the user base is growing and EN can boast more unique users or whatever BS metric they can use to pump up their valuation.

 

In the end the software is worse and more unstable than ever and every user on the forums is nearly ready to quit using EN for good.

 

Who hasn't searched this forum for "evernote alternatives?"

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Evernote are trying to monetize our use and data so they can sell ads against our notes.

 

Eliminating the email note is just Evernote's way of throwing a roadblock into your workflow so you have to user their work chat feature, or share out through a channel they control. That way they can spam anyone you sent a note to, and sell ads for Slate magazine based on the content of your notes.

 

I haven't seen an ad in Evernote for... at last a year now... (not the least because I am a premium user, but even on my secondary, free, account). So I don't know where they'd be putting all these ads they are supposedly planning on selling! 

Really I don't think this is Evernote's game.

 

Even when they did have a bit more advertising (a couple of years ago, free users), it wasn't even targeted in any way. Back then the ads seemed more like  a relatively small selection of companies who offered products and services that Evernote felt Evernote users might be interested in (or companies that thought their product or service would be of interest to Evernote's users... who chased who, I don't know!). Since that very modest "friends advertising with friends" era, they seem to have scaled back even further in the advertising domain. 

 

I think Context is a way of generating revenue in a way that offers users penitential benefit (I have yet to understand how Context might be helpful, but I'm sure some people out there are digging it) without compromising on a commitment to your data being your data. Evernote has said the data processing that makes Context work is all done on Evernote's end (which I suspect is probably identical to the processing done to make "related notes" work pre 5.7.2), and those data are not shared with the content creators. I gather that this means Evernote fetches content from the providers based on Evernote's analysis, rather than Evernote handing over a bunch of data to have articles pushed to users by content providers. 

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All of these reasons apply, however, if they keep the email a note feature.  Sharing via email is standard functionality.  Why wouldn't Evernote want a piece of the drip-marketing pie on this one?

 

The people I share via email with are different than the ones I share via work chat.

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