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dsblox

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Everything posted by dsblox

  1. One more +1 to finally doing this. Still - thanks to everyone in this forum for all the workarounds.
  2. An Open Letter to Evernote - with lots of praise for the turnaround as well as feature requests to keep the momentum going. Dear Evernote, Thank you for saving your company, your product, and ultimately, your customers. I’m about as heavy an Evernote user as you can imagine: I have been using it as my file cabinet, my planning system and my recipe archive for over ten years and I love the application. But between 2015-2019 my frustration hit a peak: I tried three separate times to leave you – just fed up with the bugs. Had it not been for just one or two missing features in your competitors (OneNote, Google Keep, Bear) I would not be using Evernote today. I was literally desperate for an alternative. But you’ve been on a resurgence for the past 2 years after hitting a low point characterized by buggy software, security issues, and the introduction of value-add “features” that didn’t add value. A great example was Evernote Food which I was really excited to see since I’m a foodie and use Evernote for all my recipes. But it was useless: offering almost no functionality of use except for the creation of a foodie community – which wasn’t my interest at all. If you couldn’t make Evernote Food work for someone like me – who loved Evernote and loved cooking and already used Evernote for recipe management – then how could I believe you’d fix the bugs? And the bugs were piling up. I stopped taking automatic upgrades on my computer because the latest releases consistently broke critical editing capabilities I needed to use Evernote to run my life – leading to painful and time-consuming manual downgrades. I started “living with” workarounds and bug-avoidance strategies to avoid stepping in the traps I knew were there. It was at this time I tried several other options: I was pretty sure Evernote would be gone as a company within a few years and my data and “way of life” using your application would be at risk. But something happened at Evernote. I’ve not taken the time to research what happened, but it is clear someone woke up. I really appreciated that you told the truth. The message I heard as a user: we know the software is sucking wind, please be patient, we’re doing a major rewrite to shore up our core functionality and make sure it works across devices. It was music to my ears. I can wait for the program I love if I know you care. And you have been delivering, slowly but surely, over the past year: a beta program, a more consistently working editor, fewer bugs, and better cross-device use. But it’s not all back. Here’s the wishlist that I still have. I’m hoping you will check these off and bring the program back to its full glory, even adding some things we didn’t have before. Thanks for the re-investment in your customers! David’s Evernote Desktop-App Wishlist: (David is using Evernote for Mac 10.8.5 as of this writing) Paste without Google Links (catchup to old client)- I use Evernote to plan my day and I love to decorate my to-do items with links: to another note, to a Gmail, to a website, or — very commonly — to a Google Doc that I’m working on. But I like my lists evenly spaced vertically and I absolutely hate the superfluous Google Doc icons that take up all that vertical space. There is a work-around (ctrl-z “undoes” the Google links) but what a pain to constantly be undoing after each cut/paste. I believe this could be turned off globally in the old Mac client. Internal Link Opening Choices (catchup to old client) – It appears that the new UX model is to encourage me to do as much work as possible in the main Evernote window. But my usage model made separate use of standalone note windows (to focus on one task) and the main window (to find stored notes). From the sidebar(s) I can double-click to open a note in its own window, but then when I click one of my hundreds of cross-linked notes I jump back to the main window. Usually I want the cross-link to open in the same window I’m in so I can continue my focus in one place. And my next most common case is to open in a new window. Only rarely would I want to open a link in the Evernote main window. This was one thing the old client did right: the default single click opened in the same window, and a right-click allowed me to open in a tab or new window. I don’t miss tabs at all (!), but I miss this functionality which I used to easily keep my focus in one window. Support Smaller Window Sizes (catchup to old client) – This is a bit related to the previous item. Your UX designer may ask why I can’t just use the main Evernote window for my “focus on one note” use case. After all, you added the “expand to full app” button for just this purpose. Well, the reason is that I can’t make the full-app window small enough. 90% of my day I’m in an app that is not Evernote, but I want and need my to-do list on the screen as well. So I need to make my to-do list small enough to be out of the way, which is impossible given the main-app window’s minimum size today. In fact, when not using an external monitor even the standalone window’s width is larger than I’d like, but I’m “putting up with it” for now, even though I often have to manually expand other windows over it. So please at least make the standalone window more shrinkable. More Text Colors (catchup to old client) – I use colors to distinguish items / categories within my notes. First, I’ll say I appreciate the need to standardize colors across devices and thus reduce the number of choices: I don’t need 64k colors or the ability to specify an RGB value, nor do I need more fonts. I also love the “use default color” that respects dark mode. But the 14 other colors offered just don’t give me the choices I’d like. I’d think about double (28 color choices) would do the trick in most cases for me. Auto-Create Attachments-as-Notes with Links – When I have files (usually PDF files) I want to store I typically like to store it as it’s own note and then link to it from another note that has the context (e.g. – a new device has a note with lots of info on the device and an internal link to the PDF user’s guide). Today I have to separately create the note, then copy the internal link, and paste it into the outer note. It’d be nice that during pasting (or even on a right-click menu after pasting) I can have the attachment auto-separated into it’s own note with it linked. The “embedded PDF as attachment” works some of the time for this, but it creates big visual blobs in my notes (see my dislike of those up in Google links), and I simply like the idea that each document lives on its own. Sidebars Opening and Closing (catchup to old client)- It took me forever to figure out that when I open a specific note, the “second” sidebar (notebook sidebar?) goes away, and to get it back I have to click on a notebook. This drove me crazy because I have come to depend on the second sidebar to see my most recent notes and jump back to them, and I’m often clicking from note to note with internal links, which made that sidebar disappear. Then I’d go on a treasure hunt to find a way to turn it back on, and there was no way to do it (not in the View menu where I expected). Now I know to click “All Notes” to get it back, but any kind of consistency of that sidebar/index would be more helpful then hiding it each time we open a new note. Blank Pages Bug (bug) – Granted, it has a quick solution, but on my Mac version sometimes the pages will just stop showing any text, typically after the app has been running a while. The only solution I’ve found it to quit the app and restart, which tends to work. It’s rather annoying though. Wrap-around Image Formatting (new feature not in old client) – I’m grateful that you’ve never tried to make Evernote into a word processor. However, there is one word-processing function I’d like to have, particularly for my “instructional” or recipe notes where I’d like to better intersperse pictures or icons with my instructions. That is the ability to wrap text around images. Better image control (new feature not in old client) – This may seem like a nit, but I do like the “second” sidebar (note list view) in snippet mode with an image. But the algorithm to select the image when there is more than one in the note is not useful. I’d like to be able pick the photo that should be included in the snippet. Presentation Mode (catchup to old client with bug fixes) – This is not my biggest issue, but I did enjoy presentation mode for some few use cases in the old client. Not only would it be great to have it back, but to be useful it needed to look good (the old client “broke” this in its later versions by using a terrible looking font and losing other formatting). I kinda made this list for myself as a reminder of what I’m looking for, but if you’d like to use it to inform your backlog prioritization I’d welcome the approach! Thank you for your return to a customer focus. Sincerely, – David Block
  3. Sometime in the past few months the font typeface used in Presentation Mode (Evernote for Mac anyway) changed from a beautiful sans-serif font to a plain-and-ugly serif font (Times?). I've tried to control this manually (by changing the font in the note) but it looks like Presentation Mode always wants to override the fonts in the note. I've searched the help systems and forums without success looking for a way to control the font in Presentation Mode, but have found nothing (it is nice that I can control the font-size, but why not the type-face too?). Had the old font not been so beautiful I might not have noticed or cared, but it seems such a shame that Presentation Mode is so much less useful and elegant than it used to be. Does anyone know of a way to specify the font to use while presenting without down-grading several versions?
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