How I met my Waterloo with Related Notes

[IncrediMetaBeta 22]

The text in quotes (starting paragraph four) appears at https://blog.evernote.com/blog/2012/12/12/evernote-for-mac-updated-with-new-premium-related-notes-and-usability-improvements/  The footnotes I've supplied, as though they were written by an Evernote employee to clarify what is meant by the "Related Notes" feature in Evernote Premium.  

 

Send all blame to me, IncrediMetaBeta.   I can has brickbats...  As harsh as my irony may seem ("harsh irony" being, after all, how 'sarcasm' is defined, and one man's harsh irony brings another's insightful realization), my raising this discussion topic about "Related Notes" is meant constructively as a wakeup call to management.  

 

You, who need to wake, you know who you are!  Why do you persist in having a feature on the market that is so lacking in clear intention and that frustrates people?  Please see the Forum member comments below, which substantiate this.  And there are many other Forum comments about "Related Notes" that I have not included, from poor souls who earnestly think the failure is theirs to figure this feature out.  Failure to address features and how they perform encourages perception of Evernote as not being a serious company, as one that doesn't give a hoot about its customers.

 

"Premium feature: Related Notes

We’re always looking for exciting ways to help you rediscover the content and memories stored inside of your Evernote account .

This update adds a new Premium feature that does just that. (1)

As soon as you start creating or viewing a note, Evernote checks to see if there are any notes in your account that relate to what you’ve written and displays these Related Notes below the note area. (2) 

The more you type, the more refined the Related Notes will be.
If you have a long note, you’ll see a little elephant popup appear in the lower right corner of the note area. (3)

This popup indicates that there are Related Notes waiting for you when you scroll to the bottom of the note.
For Evernote Business users, we also display notes from Business Notebooks that you have access to, making the Related Notes section a combination (4) of your notes and those from your team."

 

Footnotes:

1 - It's such an exciting feature that one forum member says, "one of the features that's always befuddled me is that of Related Notes".  Another says, "I think "using" the related notes functionality in any respect would be pretty risky.  I look on it as an occasionally useful, frequently amusing and largely cosmetic thing that will be a good idea when it actually works.  It's not worth worrying about at this stage."  Another says, "I want to get more out of my notes with correlations and that is what I really expect from Evernote. There are apps that do that, and EN pretends it can do the same but once again that is a fallacy. Now I realise I am unlikely to get it."  Actually, it's an exciting feature in the sense that, if you want to see what notes we've found that may be related, when the pop-up comes up, you have no choice but to stop everything else that you were doing and act to rediscover it right when it pops up while you're saving something to Evernote, because the moment you click the background of the saved webpage, the related notes popup will be gone forever.  Gone!  You may have not expected nor wished to be interrupted with this clarion call.  You may have meant simply to save the item and continue what you were doing.  But, if you want to see what else we've discovered that this item you're saving is related to, you'd better act now.  This is a one-time offer!  You can't come back to it later.  We've found an association, and if you looked at it NOW, it might be illuminating, though of course it might not be, and we may have just been blowing smoke.  But it's a one-time offer for you to examine it and you may never see this association again.  You know, exciting, like a bloody carnival barker.

2 - So, note 1 above notwithstanding, we will search for you and bring up for you these "related notes", not only when you create a note, but also when you view an existing one!  But the search for related notes apparently searches only with reference to what you've written, not what you've merely copy-saved to Evernote.  Your mileage may vary.  But any related notes we find will appear below the note area.  Though, since the copy area of the note is all that is below, and there are no regions or areas of the Note other than the copy area, we frankly don't know what region of the Note we're talking about, but we're adamant that any related notes will appear below the note area.  Maybe what we mean is that they will be APPENDED below the COPY AREA.  But we don't know, because we did not really check this smiley help page before publishing it online.  But we're offering a free brain chip to the first person who can find the elephant logo that indicates that there are related notes at the bottom of your already saved note. He's a small elephant.  We swear, we saw him, and he wasn't pink!
 

3- This little elephant popup happens if you have a long note.  We don't know what we mean by long, actually.  A long as a trunk?  Some how, some way, it should be longer than short, but we don't know what we mean by short, either.  Have you ever seen one of these little elephants?  We could have shown you an image of one in context, so you could see for yourself what we mean by "the lower right corner of the note area".  Note carefully, that this is "the lower right corner of the note area" we're referring to.  It emphatically is not the bottom right corner of the note area we're referring to.  That would be silly, wouldn't it, because why would we use the little elephant to let you know there are related notes at the bottom, if we were already making you scroll all the way to the bottom to find him?  So, he'll show up, if related notes are found, which as you know, we don't always find.  And if he doesn't show up, then either we didn't find any related notes or maybe he's off looking for peanuts. 
 

4- As interesting and potentially valuable as this "Related Notes section" feature of Evernote Business may be be to you, which can be found only in Evernote Business, and which we are definitely not going to provide a direct link to, one that would show you an image of what that area of the Evernote Business screen looks like; we just didn't have time.  Maybe you subscribe to it already...  Maybe you don't...  We don't know!  Are you tantalized?  Have you ever seen the jumping frog of Calaveras Country?  Well, maybe, if we decide that we'd really like to sell Evernote Business by describing adequately what it does, then we'd provide an illustrated description.  Oh!  But we would never do that here since this is the forum/support section, not Sales, see?   And we know for a fact that no one who comes to support ever buys anything else from us again, right?  So it'd be pointless to provide the link.  And any way it'd just get people all escited, thinking that related notes actually is a real feature.

 

You see, dear friends, we like you, we appreciate your patronage and we think that our product, which is still evolving, that, on balance, it provides good value.  Our founder has dreams.  As reported in the media they include planting chips in people's brains, so that they can sponge up more information and recall it as needed.  Sometimes he even remembers to bring his chip to work.  Hey, People!  If anyone saw Phil's chip in the men's room, please leave it with Vicki!

[gazumped 11,652]

...you do know it's possible to switch this off,  right?

 

(classy rant, though.. )

[jefito 5,589]

tl;dr;ntf... *shrug*