lhb

On 4/12/2024 at 6:58 PM, gazumped said:

Meantime if you want to show a difference - use an emoji for internal links?  🔸<link>

I mainly weep for the past links that don't stand out anymore. but then, there are also alternative ways to represent these links!

on the bright side, after a decade of disfunction and neglect on the legacy clients I am always happy to notice someone is actually working on the product. 

I may have contributed to this topic earlier. I am at times in remote sites in remote countries, and all I have is a weak, more or less flaky cell phone connection: it works for most of the stuff, but synchronizing evernote note was one of the things that suffered, in terms of edits lost or duplicate/multiplicate note versions. Working on several devices was a liability. Yes, the problem was confirmed to exist, and yes, with a better interconnection you were unlikely to suffer from it --- I never or rarely did on fast connections.

Evernote must have performed considerable and commendable work into the stability of synchronization. In the past three months, on the same slow connections, I have barely issues. A few times I got a duplicate note, but with a warning outlining the problem, and without lost content. Great job!

These days I visit the forum very rarely. This says everything about the current state of Evernote: Now it just works. And I upgraded to the better plan for the better search options and better home page, and because I am a pretty happy customer now.

On 10/21/2018 at 1:48 PM, mode1 said:

Thank you, Stephen. That would definitely explain the issue I'm experiencing. I usually use "Simplified Article", which indeed renders as a serif font. I happen to HATE serif fonts, so mark me down as someone who does not find that easier to read. 

Here in 2022, hating the problem sufficiently to try to look it up.

• When clipping with the web clipper as "Simplified Article", I still have to simplify further in the desktop program. Although the article visually shows as "Sans Serif", in the "edit" bar the case it still says "Mixed" and selecting the entire article and "Simplify Format"-ing visibly changes font sizes and the like.
• When clipping with "feedly" web integration as "clip to Evernote", I seem to get the same; still have to "simplify" it further.

In both cases, it seems as if the "default font" is roughly right as "Sans Serif", but the sizes and stylings of the different paragraph types (Heading 1, Heading 2, ... , Normal) are wrong and do appear to override the "default". 

I am not going to play around with different "serif" settings and the like, but it seems as the clippers and integrations somehow override the "default" formatting, which they should not do.

Let me put some gasoline onto the embers of this discussion:

Recently I have been using MacOS (Evernote 10.45.18; it thinks it is up to date) and copy sections with images from one note to another new one, using Apple-C Apple-V. (I did not try drag-and drop, as it is inconvenient with the MacOS-type maximized windows in Mission Control or whatever it is called.) The images are of type .png.

Where I copy them from everything looks fine, where I paste them: I get the dreaded "Unable this type of image" attachments.

The rendering is consistent in the web client (on Windows), the MacOS client, the Windows client, and the Android client. I apologize for not having an iOS device. But in all my clients, the original note shows the images inline, the new note has said problems.

All attachments from the new note, however, download simply fine on every platform as .png files and can be displayed after the download by the local software, even though Evernote does not manage to render them.

I do suspect something is still fishy with the way images are imbedded in the note, or rendered, respectively. I do have many other notes that show such attachments that I cannot see in the client. Sometimes I was advised to reinstall the client, clear the cache, or whatever. Sometimes this helped or seemed to help (at least for a while, for for some notes). But in the present case I simply copy between notes in the same client, and in all cases the original note renders fine, the new note not.

On 7/8/2022 at 9:01 PM, lhb said:

I conclude that Evernote is not safe on an internet connection which lacks performance. Goodspeed, everyone. Since you never know when your internet connection might go away, Evernote is NOT safe. The type of erros I encounter do not give me confidence that the Evernote cloud synchronization strategy is sound and safe.

Just as an update to my above experiences: While being "back to civilization" for a while with a fiber high-band-with connection, I have not encountered the sync problem with duplicated notes anymore, after having had it quite frequently with a bad connection. I had it once today on my Android client, most probably caused by changing networks as I walked outside the house and drove through a region with notoriously bad cell phone connection. 

I had the same happen to me. I was a bit shocked for a moment, as I could not export the note to PDF etc., and was worried that the note had been corrupted. I then checked on other clients (Windows, Android, ...) and the images showed there.

Restarting the Mac client worked, and the pictures showed again.

1 hour ago, Scott T. said:

I assure you this is in active development and we're making good progress on it. But it's a MAJOR change that cannot be taken lightly and released before it's been thoroughly tested. But the efforts along with some other internal feature development should make a big impact on sync reliability and note conflicts.

Thank you, Scott, I am very happy to hear. Especially as I continue to travel and be abroad.  And yes, it is something tricky. Have a great week-end! 

On 6/29/2022 at 5:30 AM, gazumped said:

AFAIK 'basic' sync is alive and working well for the majority of 200M+ users  - certainly it's fine for me,  as an undemanding user;  I use a couple of laptops in fixed locations,  and a tablet / phone for mobile lookups and some note creation.  I don't believe I've lost any notes (or parts thereof) in several years...

The problem is in my experience linked to "flakey" internet connections and caused by a sync strategy that seems to have its flaws.

When in Europe with fast/broadband/fiber/5G internet connections I generally do not have problems, or at least they are rare.

Currently I am in South America, country side, on a cellphone connection that provides a WiFi network that is not always very stable or high throughput, to which are coupled two Android devices (phone and tablet) running the latest versions of Evernote and a Windows laptop running Evernote legacy (which I am firing up and using once in a while, often when I despair of Evernote's problems listed below).

On Android, I experience

• Frequently duplicate or multiple notes
• Lost edits, ie, edits that I know I did, but which get lost. I could see changes in titles and lines reverted, sometimes letter by letter.
• Excruciatingly slow sync. A text note can take forever. I am not sure whether Evernote for Android (or mobile in general) is artificially throttled; the practical impossibility to download any notebooks for offline use may be related to that. 

I conclude that Evernote is not safe on an internet connection which lacks performance. Goodspeed, everyone. Since you never know when your internet connection might go away, Evernote is NOT safe. The type of erros I encounter do not give me confidence that the Evernote cloud synchronization strategy is sound and safe.

Some people suggest using Evernote offline until I am ready to synchronize. But I can't take my entire device offline. That would be dumb. I sometimes do use Evernote "manual sync", but it often continues without ever stopping. I have sometimes stopped a stuck sync by killing/closing the app, which may have caused a loss in an edit; at least at those times the memory was fresh, and I was prepared to redo a change. 

To merge Evernote note versions, I need to compare them line by line (fortunately I have the abovementioned laptop).

Note that I am not experiencing problems with Google Docs, Google Drive, One Drive, and synchronization is fast. I did have a few issues with OneNote, but it usually highlights where the problem is.

So, I do have alternatives which I increasingly use, although I would like to prefer Evernote, where I have most of my notes collected and curated, for more than a decade. 

It is extremely frustrating to use a decades-old cloud solution where basic synchronization problems persist.

I suggest that Evernote developers be forced to occasionally use the product on a slow connection.

Thank you for the charming picture of "Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant".

Yes, Evernote is many things to many people. It should be useful to many people, in many workflows. Some have used or tried to use it for years. Some use cases may be useful, some of them not.

Yes, I even took part in the beta user group, customer surveys, feedback, and have interacted with support.

Faced with such a breath, legacy and potential entrenchment of a product, how to get good feedback. How to get rid of annoying experts with their myopic views, blind to what other people are doing? How to not only get feedback on what users use, but what they would what to use, and what could make a product more useful?

What about a user forum, a section "Product Feedback/General Requests" / "General Feature Requests" where users can suggest ideas, supply comments, suggest enhancements, vote upon them? In the process suggestions could be refined, their relative relevance substantiated, myopic experts have a chance to broaden their horizon, and the potential bias of individual experts diminished. We happen to be in just such a forum. Evernote should value the effort made by the participants and read it.

It seems therefore disingenuous and disrespectful to suggest that rather than taking the effort to engage in such a forum, people should just use the feedback function, be done with it, and go away. Even if the mild suggestion that forum participants are irrelevant idiots is communicated through trite content from a correspondence course in "Marketing 101".

5 minutes ago, lhb said:

Regarding the feedback system of the client, and possibly the support which I also pay for: I find this forum much more convenient and useful. I often get good feedback and on what I write, inspiration on how things could be done, and see that I am not alone with my grievance. There is even a voting system. All things the built-in feedback function does not provide.

 

I fear I did not word that strongly enough: The pinnacle of dumbness, the apex of stupidity, the culmination of ignorance would be if Evernote prioritized a "built-in" feedback over this forum of experienced, knowledgeable and passionate users.

6 hours ago, PinkElephant said:

With a little work you can mimic this already, by using a table to hold the text.

In general drop things you would like to get in the feedback function build into the clients.

Correct, but mimicing "with a little work" it is also inconvenient. I may have sidetracked the issue --- possibly even have run it into a ditch --- by pointing out that comments/sidenotes could be presented in a visually pleasing way. 

Let me restate: I would be just happy with the comments as in other systems, gaudy bubbles and all. The key part is the convenience and usefulness. Comments/bubbles/marginalia/sidenotes: They are very convenient and useful.

After all I use Evernote because it has a very convenient clipping system (with metadata such as URL), a very convenient tagging system, a reasonably convenient storage system, and a reasonably convenient editor. 

"With a little work" I could shoehorn the conveniences of the tagging system and the metadata system into Google Drive or another system, but it would not be convenient; migration is another inconvenience.

Regarding the feedback system of the client, and possibly the support which I also pay for: I find this forum much more convenient and useful. I often get good feedback and on what I write, inspiration on how things could be done, and see that I am not alone with my grievance. There is even a voting system. All things the built-in feedback function does not provide.

I support comments as well. Especially since Evernote is not only a "note taking app". I use it more for clipping and annotating web content for further use. The clipping capability is one particular area where Evernote shines.

I'd love to see them supported as "side notes" or "margin notes",

• Like in books (scribbled by readers, but sometimes used as part of the book design as an alternative to footnotes if it is important to keep comments close to the text. Yes, some may overflow, and there are ways to address that.
• There are some markdown extensions, mainly associated with R (the statistics programming language). I believe they are an alternative to "footnotes" native to markdown. Footnotes have the disadvantage that they separate the annotation far from the relevant place. Side notes are commonly associated with Edward G Tufte, the one from the books on Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Beautiful Evidence, and Visual Explanations, all "must reads" if you work anywhere near science and visualization; he has used margin notes extensively and to great benefit.
• A bit like the bubble comments in MS Word or Google Docs. I would like to have an extremely effortless and visually pleasing way of adding my comments, thoughts and highlights (well, I can do highlights, now even in assorted colors), while keeping the original text largely intact. I don't like the "bubble comments"; I prefer the simpler "margin note" or "side note"
• For my own comments I also do not need the whole "who and when" information, but for collaborative comments it is excellent.
• I guess you could convert them into something visually smaller that pops up for mobile, but when I work on a computer, I have at least a 4K screen that I subdivide into narrow columns, so the windows are manageable. There it is not an issue. Evernote should also offer some benefits to "power users", not only to bring Evernote to small mobile screens.

I attach a picture from somewhere below.

Some people may now comment "but why do you not use MS Word or Google Docs, or Dropbox Paper" documents within Evernote, as a simple workaround. I would like to comment that features like web clipping and tagging, as well as more than a decade of using Evernote, basically before Google Docs or Dropbox Paper, and some Evernote alternatives became available. At this point I am at the edge: if somebody would write a good ENML/ENEX editor for one of the other alternatives so my exported notes would not suffer, Evernote would be dead for me. I would happily and very generously contribute to a kickstarter that offers a good open source ENEX/ENML editor integrated into one of the other environments, so I do not lose my formatted notes.

There was a time when Evernote was so unique and successful that one of the diversifications for the big money flowing in were ... socks! I do think Evernote has to get their act together not just by catching up with a decade of neglect in the product and streamlining their product (and removing some useful features in the process), but also adding some useful features for people that are really overdue.

38 minutes ago, agsteele said:

As a workaround I mark quotes with a Quote Emoji. I also indent the paragraph. Like this...

 

Well done!

A "code block" is not a "block quote". I would not like to abuse one to get the other, especially since HTML, from which many notes are indeed copied, does have a "blockquote" tag.

Fun fact: ENML (the Evernote Markup Language based on XTHML) does support block quotes (also in Legacy) in form of a <blockquote> tag, although they are not accessible through the Evernote editors. Marking up an ENML (actually ENEX) file works fine; the block quote is displayed with an indent (in the legacy version as well as in the v10 editor), and it also survives actions such as "simplify". But I am sure there are very good and valid reasons for not making it accessible through an editor.

Another fun fact: This particular editor (here in the discussion forum) does have block quotes, and it also seems to be more or less a standard feature for HTML editors. Also, notetaking apps such as Simplenote, OneNote, Notion etc. do apparently provide it, Not Dropbox Paper though, it seems.

But I empathize with indifference and support ignorance, as more than a decade uf using Evernote has taught me to rely on workarounds instead of basic useful features.

As a workaround you can use this editor (the one in the discussion forum), use block quotes and copy-paste from here to Evernote. It is not the best one, you might have to do some cleanup.

There could be something to that, but I find it unlikely.

It opens fine with web browsers (well, the latest versions of Edge), Windows 11 Photos, Paint, Paint.net, Affinity, Samsung browser, Samsung Gallery, and an online metadata service does define it as JPEG. Nothing strange there.

Also, exporting the image (which shows more like an attachment that cannot be rendered) to the desktop and dropping it into a new Evernote note from there works. Also, importing with the web clipper works. Exporting the note with the supposedly non-renderable jpg image to PDF works.  

It is dragging/dropping or copy/pasting the original content (pictures and text) from the browser (Edge) that results in the problem. 

Exporting as .enex and re-importing the note also shows it as non-renderable in the imported note; nothing strange there.

In conclusion, I feel therefore tempted to indeed squarely suspect Evernote --- in particular the drag/drop copy/paste part --- rather than the format or content of the image. 

For anybody having the patience to submit a bug report or investigate, I attach a copy of the corrupted note. The image and the note are provided with the intention of allowing interested parties to reproduce a problem. I claim no ownership of the content, do not transfer any rights, and provide no warranties.

Image Corrupted, JPG or what.enex

Interesting is that I get this behavior for .jpg images on Windows that i copy/pasted into it from Windows Edge.

But double clicking it shows it fine (Windows 11 Photos), saving it to, say, the desktop gives a proper jpg image with the proper thumbnail. I uninstalled and reinstalled the last version, just to make sure it was not an inherited problem.

Update: Android (10.27) also exhibits the same inability to show the picture in the note, but also allows to download it, and the download is just a normal jpg picture.

1 hour ago, PinkElephant said:

A new note, for example …

Well, yes... the scratchpad is for temporary notes only, and they seem even more temporary than expected... 

My cellphone may have been out of range.

also, it just lost the telephone numbers I noted down.

I'll use something else as workaround....

Same, Android 12, Evernote 10.25, Samsung S21Ultra, fresh install due to issues with clippi g.

Got the same, Android 10.25, fresh install (due to issues with clipping).

3 hours ago, agsteele said:

This is a known issue with 10.25. It seems to be resolved by uninstalling and then reinstalling from the Play Store.

Thank you. It’s working again for me.

Now I'm on 10.25, Android, Samsung hardware, Phone and Tablet, tried both. It says it clips, but the note is not made after the pop-up disappears. 

Developing a new workaround. Something like Evernote would be useful to keep track of all of them.

51 minutes ago, PinkElephant said:

In iOS they added a switch some releases ago, in the apps settings, camera. When it is ON, fotos taken in EN will be saved in parallel in the camera roll.

About the disappearing scans: Can only be a bad sync then, if a thumbnail is there the content was saved and stayed some time on the server.

It should be possible to recover through note history. It runs on all accounts. Subscribers have  access using the desktop client. Free users can unlock the existing history by subscribing for a month.

I can confirm that this also exists on Android, looked for it and found it. Ttthank you, PinkElephant!

I tried note history ,.. that's how I ended up with the broken Windows version of the note. I could not check the problem in Android.

Yes, must have been a bad sync. With the spotty cellphone internet in some places I am permanently worried about those.

That was my experience at other times, too.

But I did have a thumbnail in the note preview and two broken embedded pictures on Windows. That points to a problem rather than mismanipulation. 

At least on Android, the pictures taken by the scanner part are temporary and will not show up in the gallery.

1 hour ago, ChBuenger said:

in the meantime I changed my Android Smartphone. Before I used a HTC, now a Samsung S21 5G running Android 11 until December 2021 and then 12. With the new gadget I have no problems anymore. Not any at all! I can clip and I can work with the new Evernote. The hassles I had before are gone. But for the times I had the problems I was realy angry about the non perfomance of Evernote as an important tool of my working environment.

I hope your good luck keeps up. I reported the clipping problems for a Samsung S21 Ultra 5G and a Samsung Galaxy Tab S7.