Bill Butler

I architect and build enterprise software. And a guiding principle I have learned to follow is Less is more. As someone who considers themselves a power user in just about all things software, I have found in my 30+ years in this business, adding features for the sake of features is a poor plan. This thread speaks to the interest of many serious and long time users of EN for this feature to be able to pin notes. It is a simple feature that can add a heap of usability. "for me it adds zero value to the existing package, and I would expect that the same would be true for many users." On what basis do you make this claim? And as for workflow, I really don't see any workflow value of any kind in this product. It is a note taking and information management platform. Its task functionality is weak and does not impress me at all. There are plenty of other products to cleanly manage workflow. EN should not be trying to become something it isn't.

Oh, super really? I have been a loyal user since 2013. And the only thing I asked for is to be able to pin notes. And it has been an open request on here for an equally long amount of time. And your response is Upgrade to Professional. Really?!?! Even so it doesn't do what I want. I want to pin notes within the notebooks, not cluttering up my home page, which I find rather useless.

Apparently you have come late to this thread. The home page only allows ONE note to be pinned. I, along with the others requesting this feature, want to be able to pin a note within a notebook. I have many notebooks for the various projects I run, and want at least one note that is most relevant to my work in that project to be pinned at the top of the notes list. I shouldn't have to bend over backwards which is what Evernote asks of us. Use reminders so it shows in the Reminders tab. I can tag a note and use filtered notes on the home page, but once again, too many steps. Click a pin and boom it is pinned at the top.

I second this request. I could see where that list will become quite cluttered if there is no way to hide notes that have no uncompleted tasks. In addition to "Move completed to bottom" (should that really be "Move completed Notes to bottom", add "Hide completed notes"

I would think by now they should be using some very basic database upgrade techniques. When I build desktop/mobile apps, the first step after clearing away basic readiness housekeeping was to check the version number in the DB against the one the app was expecting and then executing the appropriate code to add that. Since the central DB should be up to date with the latest, clients that did not have the field just won't sync it. And I have to think they are already dealing with this sort of thing since they already have feature forks--works in this product version, doesn't work in this product version. As for the UI, all they need is the equivalent of a button--easier than a right click in my mind because you have to code the right click into all of the containers (windows or forms) to handle the UX. In my past designs a simple Font Awesome glyph indicating pinned or unpinned status is pretty straight forward. Click it once it is pinned, click it again and it is unpinned.

DTLow, I assume this is not a rhetorical question, and thus deserves an answer. First some background for context to my responses. I have been developing software since I was 12, almost forty years ago. I have been servicing my clients in the role of enterprise architect for the last 20 years. During that time I have worked on everything from the IBM 3090Z down to the Arduino. I have architected, managed a team and worked on the development of a custom Point Of Sale platform for 300 stores with multi-modal distribution (register, mobile and web). This system had HA (High Availability) requirements and was down for a total of 2 hours over 7 years.We delivered new functionality every 3-4 weeks. I have other CV stories if interested. We have had several clients who are in the health care and social work space. These clients were extensive note takers, and we have built out note systems that are not unlike Evernote in concept with attachment and WYSIWYG capabilities. A recent project in the health care space is currently in the neighborhood of 300K in development costs and is both web and mobile. While they haven't asked me yet to implement such a feature, being able to Pin a note in a client's file would probably take about a max of 2 man-days or say $2000 in developer time and testing. Yes it should be simple in the grand scheme of things!! As a guess Evernote should be using some sort of document style database (couch, mongodb, etc) for its back end. Such storage mediums are extremely forgiving to the introduction or removal of data elements. You can add a new field to a JSON or XML block and no consumer of such a change would care. To support pinning a note, all one needs to do is add a new bit type/boolean field to the data structure, and then make sure it is present in the (hopefully) common data management layer that exists. (Yes we can talk about sharding storage across multiple servers and the need to coordinate synchronization, but they should have tools to deal with these issues to make this update trivial.) It will take time to update all of the presentation modes they offer (desktop, web, etc), but once again this is a relatively straight forward feature. They already have a segment of code which orders notes, and which places notes with reminders at the top of the list. It should be a day per mode to change and test code to "pin" a note at the top. It is simple because they have had 6+ years since the first request showed up on this feature, and they could have inlined the request with any of the other changes they were making without having any measurable development costs. I have been using their web beta since January and haven't seen any significant changes in feature set which they were promising were coming. I have to ask myself what they are doing over there. If I hadn't already made a solid commitment to use Evernote for the last 6 years , I might consider switching back to OneNote.

So why after almost 6 years is this very simple request--pinning a note--not a feature in the product???

I appreciate your commentary, however... The whole idea with developing a good UX (One of my jobs as software architect) is to minimize clicks. An Inbox choice--between All Notes and Notebooks--in the left most vertical nav-bar would allow quick access to the default notebook for new notes. (I understand that the default can be changed, so display the default notebook). And I am well aware of the technique to fool systems into ordering items by putting symbols in front to push important stuff to the top. It is a problem that should be solved natively, without the need to invent cockamamie workarounds. Yes, I know there is no PIN feature, which is why I am requesting it. Sorting by date does not solve the need to keep very important notes at the top of the notebook list. I write a spec, or project outline that I want to keep in focus all of the time. All of the other notes in the notebook are supporting for the primary spec. It is sort of like taping in a document to the front cover of a real copybook.

I just switched to the Beta. Kinda pissed that I didn't receive any notification that it was available because the last update, prior to this beta, blew away auto-complete shortcuts along with code formatting on the toolbar which I use extensively. My apologies if any of these were already posted, but I tried to make sure they aren't repeats. 1. I am missing the ability to quickly change a note's notebook by clicking on the notebook and then being able to do a text search for the target notebook. Having to click on the menu and then choose move note, and then scroll through my 50+ notebooks is tedious. a.) the note should always have the associated notebook shown. I like the ability to click on the name itself to go to that notebook; b.) the notebook should have an edit icon next to it that I can click to change it. 2. Since you elected to roll all of the notebooks into a separate click in the sidebar, why don't you put the Inbox on the top level. It would flow so much better. I treat my Evernote like I do my Mailbox and my GTD task manager. Put things in the inbox, review them, and then move them to notebooks. And it would be great to have Inbox as the "home" page if you will. 3. This has been requested several times over the years, so I thought I would try again. Add the ability to pin notes to the top of a notebook. I usually have one or two notes that represent a summary of the activity going on in a notebook and I would like to have easy access to them. Please don't suggest favorites or reminders, as they do not solve the organizational dilemma.

Ditto here. I use this all the time. Please bring it back.

Gees, this would be a great feature. I keep my employee review notes in Evernote and I find it hard to keep them encrypted and out of sight as a group.