Sugeeth Krish

Some simple math - Legacy has different codes from different "operating systems" [ including seprate parts]. Evernote needs to support all these operating systems. But each OS evolves in its own direction. Sometimes, the API's written by one version of android or apple, may not be compatible, two or three versions later, which may need a major re-write. Suddenly, some OS may stop a particualar function, which may break in one OS, and all of this. 

Not only does EN have to keep its different code bases running all along the OS's [ and keep them running in parallel, the sync engine running across all of them], with its versions, it may need to keep supporting 4 or 5 versions of Android / 4 or 5 versions of Apple/ 4 or 5 versions for Windows ( Windows 8 was a totally new code writeup, in parallel to the regular Windows, i recall), and also at the same time, keep sorting out its never ending stream of inevitable - tech debt. 

Unlike say a service like Dropbox or Drive, which primarily deals as virtual hard drives, EN is different. Its systems are a lot more complex, with miniscule feature additions, across each platform, one of those featues may be developed as an API in form in Android, which may totally be unusable in Apple. So, this means not only redundancy of code, but also, a bigger pain, to make them compatible, all across, the board. 

Why not Notion? Why not Obsidian? one may ask - These newer gen PKM tools, emerged at a time, when the idea of the cloud was well established, and most of the OS wars were over. Notion didnt need to develop for Blackberry, or Palm Pre or Windows. But Evernote, which came earlier, needed to. Now, these services are no longer there, but to their part, they have added the tech-debt, and gone. More over the back end was formed in 2000, when Apps were still old fashioned. The idea of Mobile didnt even exist. So, Evernote had to fight its way by upping itself, to newer technolgies, without turning off the service. All of this led to the back end becoming rickety, to the point , where entire clients were re-written instead of just adding funtionality to existing clients [ Version 8 IOS was a total re-write, simply because the Engineers couldnt figrure what to do with years of tech-debt]. 

So, does this serve as an excuse? Absolutely not. It is inevitable and undeniable that Evernote has lost its sheen to newer gen apps like Notion or Obsdiain or other apps. 

But my argument here is simple. Evernote V 10 was inevitable. Whether a person lieks V10 or not, or prefers legacy is different. It was only a matter of time, before Legacy broke totally, and something had to be done. 

In the years between 2015 and 18-19, there were hardly any new features added, and even those were added were minor, and not even cross-platform. for the simple fact that EN had gone to a point where it was only possible to improve indiviual clients and try fixing older bugs and ironing the service of specific clients, but not the service and experience as a whole, which in the cloud is meaningless. 

[ Pleae refer to the Old Evernote tech blogs between 2015 and 2018, to know the actual state of the product] 

@Federico Simionato  @Nux 

Lost features - The old users are grumbling only about the 'lost features'.As a power user, i can feel what they go through, but the fact remains that [ look up the old Evernote tech blogs between 2015 and 2019 - The back end was stuttering and the tech debt was inevitable. Evernote Version 8.0 for IOS released in O'Neill's term, the tech debt was so bad that they could not fix, that they killed an amazing Version 7 [ Phil Libin's era] and re-wrote the code of Version 8.0 from scratch. Some of the [Augmented Intelligence features of Version 7 was lost, as a result. Most users have not realised that the tech side of legacy code development for each platform is no longer feasible, and were not realising that each release was slowly killing features, it just wasnt obvious, at that point]. 

Many legacy users who tried the first version of V10, left it due to many missing features from the legacy, they were used to. 

Many legacy features came back in Ver 10.x - Some of those features include [IMPORT NOTE FOLDER], [QUICK SWITCHER Cntrl+Q] ,[TOGGLE VIEWS], [TRADITIONAL KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS], [ QUICK WIDGETS ON MOBILE]  etc. The Evernote team made it clear that a lot of these features would come back, and they have been added back, now , i'd say functionally, the new V10 is now about 80-85% on par with Legacy functionality. I feel that the old features which were later been added to Version 10, is not known to many old power users, who got annoyed and just probably left. 

Performance issues - Secondly, over the last few months, there was major performance issues, and this turned off many users. The peformance is much better particualrly after the bending spoons take over. yes, there are issues around, but some major changes are coming, and the changes do get fixed up rather quickly, in my opinion. and the performance of Version 10, is way way better, off late. 

Many users still think of Version 10.x as the 2020 version. The 2023 Version has not been given a trial, by many who left. But there is a strong possibility that those who come back and give it a try, without any prejudices, may like it. 

New (and some amazing) Features - Since they have not tried Version 10, many are not aware of the new features. I feel that the Evernote team, has not publicised this enough on their blog, and inform users, why the Version 10 is more powerful than the legacy - 

see this note for reference - https://www.evernote.com/shard/s200/sh/57a18d65-a50f-7062-efd6-a866512375ba/iM4zwFTaiE3O1BRgUTz3JpMzu56WBRjsdUYS1RAKDtZncFl872GuKrUVwQ 

To be honest, as things stand it is painful to use 10.x 

But uptil 2 months ago, it was buttery smooth. At least for me 

So, my guess is some naggy bugs came in from somewhere, and since it's a unified code base, it should be relatively easy to fix and sort out. 

But my main problem is as of now, the mobile client is become terrible. In the current state of affairs, Bending spoons need to get their act together, and bring back the unified code to be stable and sync seamlessly. 

That has to be the top priority. 

For now, I have an Old phone which runs legacy (the legacy infra seems to be still working well). But I have started to get used to the new 10.x features tasks, calendars, widget box etc. So, 10.x has been designed well, and looks good. 

But when will the bugs get sorted out? That's the question. 

On 1/20/2023 at 10:44 PM, Dave-in-Decatur said:

I wouldn't mind a little more communication from EverSpoons, or NoteBenders, or whatever it's going to be called. But I have no experience myself in corporate mergers, and I'll accept the cooler-heads advice from @gazumped and others here.

It's a bit of a Goldilocks situation. You know, "This porridge is too hot. This porridge is too cold." BendyNote's new owners communicate too little. Twitter's new owner ... 😣

We'd want to be optimistic calling it a 'merger'. sadly, it isnt

Evernote, joins the 'Bending Spoons' suite of apps, thats the way, the old CEO, Ian Small, described in his post. I guess, how things may go, is rather obvious, from here. 

At this point, i care much for the cultural side of things. Will 'Bending Spoons' keep my beloved 'Evernote' running? irrespective of it, change the name or whatever ?I hope so. 

Hi all, i am a long time Evernote user and used to quite active on the forums. Over the last few years, Evernote launched 10.x - the new unified code - base. It has polarised users, some of them think its the best thing to happen to Evernote (like me), while others who are used for long to the legacy set-up are feeling alienated. 

Like most of you, it indeed came as a shock to know that Evernote, has been acquired. but sadly, its what it is. Over a period of time, as an Expert, it is bound to see lots of changes happening to the product and how the management takes things forward. 

Whether its for good or bad, only time will tell.

Having said this, the inital promise from the new owners, that they are investing in the long term, sounds momentarily re-assuring. But, then, fingers crossed. 

I see a lot of users, raising questions and queries about the future, product related issues, management related issues and so on and so forth. 

The sad truth is that, a substantial portion of the old employees are laid-off. The new team, likely is much lesser in number and they will take some time, to get used to things, and fill the shoes of what the old Evernote employees, did . So, it is possible that some processes/bug fixes/new feature additions/ communications policies may take some time. 

Some expected routine processes may remain non-communicative for a while, maybe, even months, and i hope the new owners, slowly take charge of existing processes, and bring them back to a state of running, like old. 

Until then, i wish to make a request that we, the users, the community, give the new owners some time. 

And i hope in good wishes, that Evernote, the product will once again, see its halcyon days, once again. 

Ritepen was a product from the EverNote stable, indeed. But this dates back even before the Phil Libin era, sometime around 2004-05. 

It was still EverNote (capital N) and Stepan Pachikov alone was involved in the company at this time. 

Later in 2008, Libin joined them, and they renamed and formed a new company 'evernote' ( with a smaller 'n') .. well .. yeah  

Kiling the app from task manager and restarting the app isnt helping. 

The app just doesn't load up. 

1 hour ago, tavor said:

A few points of clarification. Note links are not unique to Evernote. As for importing Evernote notes to other apps, yes, you will lose existing note links, but that's due to EN's enex format, which does not preserve note links. If you import enex files into Evernote itself, you will lose existing note links. There are workarounds for this, but the issue is the enex format, not a limitation of enex importers. There are export formats that preserve note links, e.g., Joplin's jex format.

Thank you for this info. 

a small point of clarification. You mean, if i exported my account as .enex, and re-imported the same file again to EN, the notelinks wouldn't work? Then, what is the point of the export, then? 

POSITIVES - To be honest, i think atleast for me EN is doing better. It still lacks my main go to feature Cntrl+Q, but somehow, for me i sense that it is much more stable and syncs faster, and in general is much more responsive. The old 6.x code ( starting from Ver 4.x) would suddenly go off into a freeze state, for no specific reason, and i just had to wait aeons, for it to recover. Only way out was to kill the app, and re-open it again. In that sense, the new V10 app is doing quit well for me. 

The otehr reason may be that, I use on Android, but the latest Android version has still not yet popped up in my play store. I am still using 6.x on Android. Somehow, importantly, amidst all its transition, Evernote have got the sync engine working between the new and the old. 

MY CRIBS - I am not happy with the way, Evernote Search works. I preferred the old WIndows Search better ( I gave a feedback document to the EN Development team and also had a online discussion session with them.) I was told that the new search, was here to stay. 

During the discussion back then, i was also told that, there was so much demand for the Cntrl+Q, ( the whole discussion which i had was based around this Ctrl+Q, with examples, and how to me- the Web Client was useless without Cntrl+Q ( Windows 10.x was not ready at that time) and that they were bringing it back, due to popular demand. They also said that tag users were a very small portion of EN population, but they had to keep supporting tags, because a huge number of users/power users were heavily dependent on Tags. 

Similarly, i get that, if popular features which are going away,  are pressed in huge numbers, they will invariably bring it back. 

QUITTING EN? - I am sure lots of you, me included have been so frustrated with EN, at various points in our life with EN. It appears that the 10.x version has also not gone too well, with quite a few. Question, is what next after EN? Thats the major challenge. For me, i have 20,000 Notes with a 40 Gb database. I did a trial import to Notion, Notion did do a decent job, i tinkered around with it, for a while, when i realised that it didn't support the flexibility of adding and indexing/searching/organizing tags the way EN does. Bummer. 

I also tried some other apps. I think one was called 'Nix Note' or 'Never Note', which was almost a ditto clone of EN. but again, some of the features supported in EN, were missing. 

Several third party clients, which ( even sync with En) look very promising, but over the years, lose steam and eventually don't get supported. Matcha was an awesome IOS app and i was using it as my go to EN client a few years ago, , but it isn't supported today. Similarly, lots of Android apps, as well. Even, if we exported our data and imported the date in another client, will the 'Note LInk' feature, which was designed for EN, work there? 

In such circumstances - MIgrating else where leads to 2 problems. 1. Will that app continue to be in active development ? 2. Will it support the major tool set/workflows which we had in EN? ( This is variable for each users. For me i use a combo of Tags/Notebooks and also the Reminder button in EN). 

So, under such circumstances, whether i like EN or not, i am sticking with it, since, for me its competitors are either too complex/ very poor features and don't mimic my workflow in EN. As someone mentioned, it's like a trap, and changing my workflow around a new app, when i have invested 10 years in EN, doesn't seem to make any sense. 

So, whether i like it or not ( at the moment, i like what the app offers, as i don't like its competitors ), i am using Evernote. But with the new promise, i am hopeful, that things will get better. 

For users who are frustrated, but think they have a working solution else where, you can do a test migration. For me, i am staying, 

3 hours ago, Rabbit704 said:

TRIGGER WARNING FOR GURUS: This post does not represent blind support for Evernote. Like most normal users on these forums, I don't care for your self righteous, arrogant views but if you feel you need to respond to get your post count up then fill your boots.

---

I really cannot believe that Evernote are proud to advise that they are working on new features (mostly which weren't asked for) when so many long time paying customers are just waiting for previous critical features to be reinstated and for some level of acceptable performance and customer support to be reinstated (you know, like not having to wait 6+ weeks to be advised that as a 10+ year Premium user, the reason that I cannot access Evernote v10 for web is because I have more than 1000 notes.)

Working on new features at a time like this is just another example of the utter contempt that Evernote have for its customers.

 

Not all gurus are contempt and self-righteous. Some reserve the harshest criticisms ( and positive feedback as well) for the product. And yes, your crictism is perfectly valid. While in my view, the upcoming frame work changes are positive and we need to be more persistent, a wait time of 6+ week for a paying customer, is absolutely absolutely unacceptable. 

I don't use this feature much, but i can understand the importance of this feature. Bring it back EN 

Its not a problem in my usage, because 'Notebooks' was defined for creating a common group of notes, just as in folders. 

In any case, you just contradicted yourself, because, even if i used 'tags' for organizing specific notes, with a purpose, then, i wouldn't be able to download 'a set of notes defined by a tag', simply, because 'Evernote' doesn't support downloading 'tags' feature yet, but only Notebooks. { incidentally, if Evernote were to implement a note based indepenednt download system, then automatically, it would be logically easy, to download an entire tag-linked notes, by that logic.) 

And yes, I am as much as a power user as you are, but i am strong enough to point out the criticism in Evernote. Infact i use 'tags' more than 'notebooks' in my organization structure. You may want to take a look at my detailed feedback note, which i sent to Evernote, a month ago, and you can look how detailed i use 'tags' and my organization structure, in detail. 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yOqVsYzyEE_CmO_fbdj_zXyR4H4XZ0Jk/view?usp=sharing 

(Subsequent to sharing this document, i even had an online discussion with some members of Evernote's development team, online, and shared some of my views and feedback, on the upcoming changes). 

On 8/20/2020 at 12:18 AM, gazumped said:

All very well to have offline notes, but how much free storage do you have on your device?  I have a notebook (I may have mentioned) into (and out of) which I switch the notes I need on a visit by visit basis depending where and when I'm travelling.  It works for me,  no special 'offline' status required... 

Thats why, i said, user to have an option to download specific notes, within a notebook. My database too is over 30GB+ with over 20,000 notes. Not possible to download entirely offline on mobile, although i think in 1 or 2 years, our mobile phones will have enough memory to download entire databases.

Some notebooks, contain important reference information, which i may need for a short duration of time. say 5 or 10 notebooks, ranging around 500 MB to 1 GB, whereas the entire notebook may be much more. I need to have those specific notes available, offline always, but the notebook size may be a big deterrant. Not to mention, i have a terrible net connection, with no Wifi. 

( Please don't give the option that i could move the required notes to a seperate/new notebook and download), cos, the notes are in a specific notebook, with a meaning. Doesn't make sense to keep tinkering them here and there. ) 

I think there is definitely a use case, for making specific 'notes' offline ( along with existing notebooks - feature which exists on mobile). Reason, some of my independent Notebooks themselves run into GBs, while individual notes in them may be 100-150MB. In sparse net conditions, where i mostly live, with no Wifi, and a terrible mobile connection, it defintey makes sense to have offline notes, as downloading or accessing info within a specific note is difficult.  @Ian Small @May L

How much of you, have observed that 'string search' is being removed, in favour of a more productive 'predictive search', which is returning garbage? ( Yeah, the promo video is all rose and honey, but in real world, the results are trash). As of now, they have already implemented the new search in Android and IOS( following the Web Conduit). The Windows client is yet to get the new changes, and there is a sea load of difference in search results, between the Old windows search, and the new one. 

Evernote is going down hill. Good luck, all. 

Yes, bubble browser indeed had so much functional potential. But as always, these third party apps have a problem of monetization. There was an excellent 3rd party - full featured client on IOS called Matcha, whose experience was so awesome, it too has gone this same way. 

The fact that the CEO himself is on these forums, responding to user queries, is inspiring and helps repose the faith that we have invested in Evernote, over the years 😀. Thank you very much Sir @Ian Small

Seriously seriously painful. I wonder when serious and long term forum contributors will stop defending painful actions or unacceptable errors done by Evernote, or attempt to tone down the scale of the problem. 😕

The app is taking a minute to open. The phone has 4 GB of Ram and we are in 2019. I can't fire up mu Notes or look up something important. Is this not serious enough? 

Over the years, never faced issues with the Android client, but this is painful. Effectively useless. 

Seriously seriously painful. I wonder when serious and long term forum contributors will stop defending painful actions or unacceptable errors done by Evernote, or attempt to tone down the scale of the problem. 😕

The app is taking a minute to open. The phone has 4 GB of Ram and we are in 2019. I can't fire up mu Notes or look up something important. Is this not serious enough? 

Over the years, never faced issues with the Android client, but this is painful. Effectively useless. 

Good step ahead in becoming more transparent to its users, in whats going on ahead. Thanks Ian and Team Evernote. 

@Puneet Khurana @Roshan Miranda  you may wish to connect to a certified consultant, who may help you fix your problems, depending on your closest location. https://evernote.com/certified-consultants#find-community-member 

We havent heard of it for a while now. I guess that at some point, functionlity of Penultimate will be brought into the inbuilt Evernote ( as they did for Skitch and killed it eventually). Its sad, but there is enough chaos for the main app itself, but even if it is brought around, i dont think it would give the same feel as the native app. 

On 11/4/2018 at 12:55 AM, Jason Goldsmith said:

To JMichaelTX,

If you want to see a beautiful implementation of tags, try Bear. Its use of tags is a little piece of genius.

Then you'll see why going back and forth from your Notes to Tags to constantly organize your tags in nests in Evernote is a nightmare. Strong word, I admit. But it is no fun trying to find and maintain your notes with tags and search in Evernote. It makes it hard for me to think clearly. I'm sure it works better for you.

But after giving this much thought (and rebuilding my Evernote collection of approximately 10,000 notes three times: First with tags, then folders + tags, and then links only ... plus switching to Bear and then back to Evernote), I've found that links are the best because links force you to write better notes - as our English teachers taught us, "writing is thinking". Notes with links are in large part more clear because you can have one note per topic - you should certainly strive for this. With all the relevant links built in.  

Bear can use links too, but Evernote has much better ancillary tools, including web clipping and PDF management. 

Ultimately, you want to use Evernote as a Note Taking System to help you think better, and not as a computer directory. You already have a hard drive for that, and it has the potential for incremental backup, mass storage of files, etc. And there are plenty of programs which allow you to add tags and metadata to the files in your computer directory.

 

 

I totally have to disagree. Tags are the 'heart' of my organization system, anything messed up there, and the whole structure comes crashing down. Infact, i prefer 'tags' a gazillion times to inbuilt-search. Yes, I use 'Note Links', 'Notebook-Stack' organization too, its a marriage of all tools that Evernote provides, including pin-ups ( Reminder Feature). One can't live without the other, although if i had to pick ( which i wouldnt want), first it would be 'tags'. 

But then, to each- person, his own. The beauty of Evernote is that, it has tools that allows users to choose how to organize on their own, and there must strictly be no 'deprecation' of one tool-set, in favour of the other. 

If something works for you, fine, if it doesn't, leave it. Choose, what is working for you. I request you to stop making generic statements on behalf of the entire community, based on your individual experiences. 

On 09/03/2016 at 11:51 AM, Chaosspeeder said:

Hi,

to be honest, there is no test version yet. I wanted to check out people with interest for testing.  I hope, I could make a test version in April. I would be very proud, if I you would participate in testing at this time. 

Thank you,

P.S: As a german person I first struggled a bit with your avatar name. Last year I played the game "Hearts of Iron III" and this vehicle was somewhat important there. 

I was a die hard fan of World of Tanks, but i don't have the luxury of fast internet in my new place to play that game anymore