hanseric

Having worked at a publicly traded company for a number of years, I can attest that Board pressures are real! I think about the only thing we can do at this point is watch and note (in version 6, haha) what happens while continuing to test other app candidates out there. Incidentally, if anyone is on Reddit, there's some chatter there which might be worth following too, like this thread:

In many ways, EN is starting over. It's really less version 10.0.10.xxxx and more like "the new version 0.xxxx". That's not to say they should have released it at this stage. They shouldn't have. But I won't pretend that other factors don't exist, too, such as pressure from the Board or the need to commit everyone fully to a path by "burning the boats", perhaps. Probably some of that going on in one flavor or another as well. Again, not justifying for them. Just thinking out loud while hoping they sort the speed thing out sooner than later. I think that would bring about the first bit of calm in this particular storm.

Speed issue can be caused by a number of factors. I guarantee you they didn't release a slow app knowingly. No developer ever would, especially one like Evernote where speed would be a driving factor for customer satisfaction. E.g., you might have some other app where the app is expected to take x seconds/minutes to do whatever it is doing. So speed is of course relative to expectation within any given context. So this could be some fundamental architecture issue, could be they just miscalculated some factor which, now that it is "in the wild" has become an obvious constraint, etc. Hard to say what that might be (could be a line of code or it could be a deep architectural issue, or even some hardware, although that's much less likely...point is: lots of factors make an app "fast" or "slow"...] Three decades of software experience tells me: these things happen. We can make judgments at this stage as to how it shouldn't have and so on (not you, just speaking generally here) or we acknowledge that it has and now see what EN does or doesn't do. All speed issues are "resolvable". Let me put it another way: anything can be fixed given enough time and/or money. 😄 So the question, now that we all KNOW it is slow, is: what's the actual cause and how long will it take them to find that cause and resolve it. Not sure we the users will ever know what the problem is (they probably won't give us whole story, especially if it would reduce goodwill or public relations somehow). So don't expect to "read all about it..." necessarily. Just look to see what happens to this specific problem. In other words, we'll just have to see how this goes over the coming weeks. They have everything to lose on this so they are either going to get this speed thing fixed or they aren't. Slow apps won't be tolerated, typically. A slow EN app, due to its very nature in terms of function for the user, would be even less tolerated. So I say hang tight, use 6.25 and let's see how EN pivots and navigates this key performance issue. That will likely tell us a lot about what to expect in the coming months.

How does one use the MultiQuote feature in the forums? Example: someone posted multiple paragraphs in their post and I want to respond to each one separately by having my text appear below the quote object containing their text. I see it sometimes but I haven't been able to figure out how to do it. And there doesn't seem to be a post which covers this, at least not with the term "MultiQuote" in it, which I assume is the right word for it (got that from the checkbox at the bottom of each post).

Yes, we are Task/Process Nerds. But I think this may be a larger cohort than EN may realize. the Get Things Done type folks, I mean. I think that would be the "parent cohort" if you will. And there's a subset of those type people who are outgoing enough to get in here and nav the forums to post their complaints. But how many of the larger group are just saying "well, that's it. I'll go find another app...", especially given that the app has slowed by a factor of 3-5x (in my estimation)?

Totally agree with you here. Speed is 90% of the issue for me. I was willing to keep it loaded on one of my two machines in order to give v10 a chance and learn it better. But the lack of speed keeps me from doing so. I can be patient with a lot of things in my apps, but not massive lags between when I tell it to do something and it finally gets back to me. When that is resolved, I'll give a new test, but at arm's length until it's confirmed speed is up to par. "Par" for me is sub 2 secs. Anything over that is a hard pass. v 6.25 is basically instant most of the time--not including searches. I can click any note in my present view at any time pretty much and I'll get instant data in showing in the note. If I change the view, I'm willing to allow a few moments for things to re-settle, so to speak. But after that, responsiveness needs to be pretty much instant.

Interested to hear what they say, but if they think they can have "unrestricted..." rights to my data, they can forget it. I'll never give them my data. Thanks for pointing that out. Evernote isn't particularly secure either, but I don't think they have anything like that in their T&C. I should probably recheck it though... Have you looked at theirs lately @wbutchart?

It will, because we are a free market economy!

PS: I've tried all the solutions given in this thread. Doesn't fix it.

@david@davidbernstein.com did you ever get a reply from Evernote Support on this? I just ran into this again myself. It had happened a couple versions ago and now it's back again after a fresh install of v. 6.25.1.9091.

I had a couple of immediate issues with it, one of which was a bit too odd for my liking: Web clipper did not provide consist results and sometimes couldn't understand what I was clipping. I need a rock solid clipper and love EN's. When I tried to schedule a reminder, the calendar landed on the correct date and everything, but the DAY was wrong. It said it was Friday when it was actually Wed. So +1 for the calendar's wishful thinking, but -10 for developers having a bug of this kind in a simple calendar function.

Glad you liked it. Your note reminds me to check out Notion. 👍

I had never heard of this app before. Thanks for mentioning it. Not sure if I'll need it, but it looks pretty neat.

For what it's worth, I have been frustrated with EN for a long time too. But it's been performance mostly--seizures when sync'ing and that kind of thing. I have to give them a chance to make this right, but for the long term. And that is definitely not a trivial task for something as "mature" as the current code and, perhaps just as importantly, the number of subs they have. Maybe give them a chance to earn the trust back. I'm in no rush. As long as I can use 6.25 for the next year so, I'll just keep doing what I was going to do anyway. 😉

Did you watch the entire interview with @Ian Small? I watched a lot of it feel satisfied they are neither being reckless nor ignorant. If we had to be critical, I would perhaps choose something closer to "overwhelmed with the scope of the task...". The new value, because of that scope, will take many iterations, just it has with the current code. Would you have them continue on an unsustainable path as they have been with versions prior to 10? What would you have done to make someone like yourself happy with a first release?

Totally disagree. What they are embarking upon now takes MASSIVE courage. They are rewriting the whole platform so they offer way more value down the road. If you're this unhappy, you should seriously go back to 6.25 if you haven't already or go find a better app if you can.

Hey @RavBoy, THANK YOU for taking the time to timestamp this and provide some summaries. That takes a bit of work and it helped me a lot to bounce around to the various points in the video where I could see @Ian Small speak about certain points in which I had a personal interest. Definitely appreciate your contributions on that. Here are my comments and take-aways, for what it's worth: Few probably really appreciate how massively non-trivial Small's undertaking truly is. I have been in and around the making and implementing complex software for about 3 decades now. Evernote's codebase was on a disastrous vector which would have inevitably led to its demise, even if 10+ years from now. The bloat of having to deal with 5-6 unique applications, essentially, would have made innovation absolutely unsustainable one day (if we're not there already and I would argue we are) and competitive apps would have shown up to tear it apart. I mean, this is something we are already seeing with apps like Nimbus and others. So this move he is making is as necessary as it is risky to the loss of power users like me and perhaps many others. The risk comes from the fact that these first re-writes of the code from the ground up could never have all the features everyone wants in a first iteration. They are basically starting over. It would be too expensive to even try to have all the important features to every persona out there using Evernote. Therefore some are going to jump ship, or seriously consider it for perhaps the first. (I was one of those. More on my intentions in a second.) They are not just "rewriting code". They are building a new platform on which to write future code that we probably haven't even considered yet as use cases. This makes me hopeful. I've often thought it would be amazing if Evernote could, just as a crazy example here, contain all my raw note data from meeting let's say, and I could bolt on something like a mindmapping app which could tap into a note(s) and let me pull it apart in the form of a mindmap from outside Evernote. Whether that that particular use case is or isn't possible (or even worth considering) is beside the point. The point is: to consider anything like that now they would have to build it 5 separate times for each app OS. Never going to happen. The new and improved codebase makes innovations along these lines conceivable--it cracks that innovation door open. I find that exciting. Clearly Small recognizes that there are those of us who will keep rolling on v. 6.25 and they will support that for a time. That's all I needed to know. I'm in no rush. I know undertakings like this take an almost diabolical series of iterations in order to get to even get near the brass ring. I just don't want my working life wrecking-balled while I wait. So, all good here. I'm going to keep on keeping on in 6.25 for a good 12 months or so while I see what the new releases bring and re-evaluate then. I have two machines I work with, a notebook and desktop (and mobile of course). I may install v10 on one of them just so I can keep tabs on the latest improvements. Pondering this. In short, you probably saved an Evernote user today @RavBoy. I was testing Nimbus just before checking in on these Win 10 threads. It's not where I need it to be either (which I may or may not post about in my blog). Nimbus is deficient enough in areas like their clipper and just basic polish of core features that I may as well give Evernote time to nurture this new codebase and see where it ends up. It's their future to lose or win at this point.

Too many performance issues and missing features for me. Detailed some of them here in my blog. There have been others since. All of them reported through Feedback in version 10. But now I have to get back to working with the modicum of efficiency I had developed for myself using v. 6.25. Finding my way in v 10 is proving to be far too time consuming. I'll be checking in on the forums etc. to see if things seem to improve. Also will be taking fresh looks at competitive products like Nimbus, which seems to be catching the eye of enough EN power users that I feel obligated (to myself) to check it out. Been paid user with EN for 10 years last April, currently storing about 20k notes. Hate that I'm seriously considering moving on after all that time invested in my processes within EN, but maybe this is a wooden door closing and an iron door opening.

Wondering what has come of this, now that it's been a few months.

I could not have expressed this better myself. I'm a 10 year power user with about 20k notes and it saddens me to say I'm teetering on the edge of saying "eff it" and moving on. It's very likely I'll be going back to 6.25 soon. But I'm kind of looking to see what kind of response EN is going to make toward their elite (if you will) users while still ferreting out all the changes. I need to assess how much of what's "missing" is just relocated and do I want to invest the time in relearning those locations. Clearly this first minimum viable product or MVP (if it is indeed that) is lacking from our viewpoint so much that we're considering which new ship to jump toward. What EN needs to do is immediately get some solid communication out which is addressed specifically to users like us. I don't know how many of their customer base is "power", etc. but I suspect there's quite a few. We are a completely different marketing persona than those they hope to attract by making the UI "easier to use" or whatever they are trying to do actually. We need to know what to expect by way of achieving some kind of parity between what we can do in 6.25 and future versions of 10--and roughly by when. Meanwhile, I'll be checking out Nimbus again. I gave it a look a while back and don't recall why I didn't jump over then, but I think it had to do with the lack of a Chrome clipper, which is a pretty big part of the EN experience for me.

FWIW (perhaps not much), Outlook clipper works from within Outlook 365, at least for me. I realize using the web app instead of the Outlook .exe probably has many other deal-breaker implications, but I thought I'd mention it.

I'm not seeing how I can change the title. Maybe I waited too long, but I just now saw your suggestion. Only "moderation" choice I seem to have is Delete.

I'm glad @witherford found some kind of solution, as I note above. But this really should be part of the UI. One of the notes shared with me is from someone who I happen to know for a fact is no longer even an EN user. Kind of absurd that this note "sharing" relationship can be so involuntary to the recipient of the note. Seems more like Note Injecting, rather than sharing. Sharing implies both parties agree to the thing. And that should extend from creation all the way through to deletion. I'll have to see if this has already been a requested feature somewhere (if that's even visible. I'm not sure). Anyone know? If not I'll look later. This has already consumed too much time but I want to see it get resolved so I guess there's no stopping now.

Thanks for finding SOME kind of a solution. Having said, that, I shouldn't have to rejigger my whole EN db just to get rid of these things. It should be part of the UI so I guess I'll have to ask for the feature or see if someone has already. Ludicrous, but I guess necessary.

Geez. I can't get the IFTTT applet to work. I invoke Google with "Hey Google" fine, but when I say the ingredient (e.g. Save to Evernote) or whatever I put in there, Google Assistant just returns a search using that phrase. What am I doing wrong, I wonder?