tavor

8 hours ago, Flier said:

I don't think anyone in this endless thread has advocated ditching the tags. 

I get that. My concern is that by caving to the notebook mob, EN will de-emphasize tags. And indeed, that seems to be the case per Ian Smalls comment re: 2% and the rearrangement of the v10 window to put tags at the bottom. It's possible they may continue in that line and possibly eliminate nested tags, which I think is a feature many competitors do not have. For us tagaholics, nested tags is important for creating structure.

I knew that back in the Libin era when the gospel of tagging was sung from the rooftops, us tagaholics should have driven you notebook heathens out with pitchforks! Alas, we turned the other cheek, and now the notebook hordes are taking over while Small tacitly approves. The brotherhood/sisterhood of the tag is going to be overrun.*

* OK, that was perhaps a bit melodramatic, but I thought it was appropriate given the nature of this thread. 😛

4 minutes ago, CalS said:

The note title must be accurate whether it is just the title or the ID in the title for this to work. .  Clueless as to how to get ID to title easily on Windows.  

I adopted the same title/link strategy early on to shortcut the losing links on import issues of EN. I use links but not extensively so I am okay with it.  And I’d rather keep titles clean, personal thing. FWIW 

I wouldn't put the noteID in the title (too ugly and in your face all the time, when it would only be needed very rarely), but rather append it to the end of the note. 

28 minutes ago, Flier said:

I've been following this inadequacy for years; a few years ago there was discussion/speculation that implementing a folder system might require a rip-up and re-do in an old and often-patched bunch of code.  IOW, risky and expensvie.  Then about two (?) years ago an EN employee intimated that folders were coming, driven by their aspirations of bigger corporate business.  I have seen nothing since, however.  Maybe this big re-write they are currently engaged in will also provide this missing capability. 

I would be sad to see EN go this route as I think tags are superior, but yes, it does seem to me that EN is caving to the crowd (i.e., what all their competitors are doing, and what, according to Ian Small's claim that only 2% of users are using tags, what most of their userbase is doing).

Well, I call it caving, but I'm sure the *allegedly* 98% that don't use tags see it as sensibly responding to the userbase. In any case, I think you will get your wish.

On 12/11/2020 at 5:09 PM, DTLow said:

I append the note-id (and other metadata) to the note contents   
This allows replacement of the link function with text search

On 12/11/2020 at 10:54 PM, CalS said:

Linking is ugly.  If you keep the link name the same as the note title you at least have a mechanism to do a secondary search to find the note of record. . 

On the issue of note links as it relates to portability, as I understand it (and please correct me if I'm wrong), the issue is that enex files do not include a note's noteID. NoteID is how a link in Note A to Note B identifies Note B. Without Note B's noteID, there is no way for any app that imports enex files (including Evernote itself) to identify the note that is pointed to by the note link in Note A. So you end up with Note A containing a link to nowhere. Is that about right?

Why wouldn't EN, in defining the enex standard, not include the noteID? I guess it's not an issue if you have your exb file backed up, but restoring from enex files would be a minor disaster for someone who makes extensive use of note links.

@DTLow's solution makes sense. If you append noteID to each note's contents, then in my example, after importing your enex files, when your work next brings you to Note A, you see the note link (usually a title name - as per @CalS' suggestion, if you're diligent about this, you can search for that title to find Note B), copy the underlying link's noteID, and search for that noteID to find Note B, and then you can recreate the note link.

@DTLowhow are you appending noteID to each note's contents? AppleScript? I was looking at ENScript (for Windows) and don't see an obvious way to retrieve a note's noteID. You have more scripting knowledge than I do - perhaps you see an avenue of attack that I'm missing? https://dev.evernote.com/doc/articles/enscript.php

Alternatively, I could probably script something in AutoHotKey that cycles through all the notes and appends the noteID to each note.

On a side note, any idea why the note links repeat the noteID 2x? 

2 minutes ago, DTLow said:

The theory is - let the Basic users continue to use the service forever
The more they use the service, the higher the paid conversion rate    

That certainly has been the idea for over a decade. Has it worked? I look at the stepwise reduction of Basic's feature set as evidence that this hasn't been working, so now they are trying to push people into Premium. The next logical step, IMHO, is eliminating free forever. 

4 hours ago, PinkElephant said:

The tree-type folder structures came with computers, and they were rooted in the file systems. There is nothing natural about it, it was how files were organized on disks, back then (and still today).

Ever searched an invoice (before filing it in EN) to claim warranty ? Where may it be - in the invoices folder, with the product documentation, at the accountant with the tax stuff, with the suppliers data etc . ? What is the natural reaction ? Copies. Which translates in IT into duplicates, the bane of all folder type structures.

Yes, EN forces you to rethink this. First, find it all by search. Second, if you want structure, use tags. If there would be deeply nested notebooks, this rethinking would not happen, and we would produce again duplicates. Which makes searching difficult (which copy is the right one ?).

My opinion: Take it, as it is, and learn to use it to its full potential.

Or switch to another app.

I'm a proponent of tags, I love them and find them more useful than folders. But I don't think current EN mgmt is as committed to tags as mgmt from the Libin days. Look at how Ian Small described tag usage as a tiny niche. I cannot imagine Libin talking like that - he'd be trying to spread the gospel of tagging. And apparently v10 has moved tags to the bottom of the interface, away from the note title. And I don't think many or any of the other note apps have ever pushed tags as hard as EN has.

Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but I'm thinking that maybe current EN mgmt has decided EN has fought the good fight on tags, but that it's time to acknowledge that this isn't the hill to die on.

6 hours ago, AlbertR said:

Rumor: They will re-enable Plus subscriptions (30 €/Year) 😉 (robust, really multi-device, pre OCRed PDFs searchable, upload "limit" 1GB/month, ...)

Doubt it, they tried Plus before and it didn't achieve satisfactory results. My bet is instead of a free Basic, Plus and Premium, we get time limited free trial, ~$25 Basic, and Premium. No more free forever option.

On 12/14/2020 at 2:44 AM, Rainer Winkler said:

I do not understand, why Evernote does not want to earn money in the new market they created. It would be quite easy, as the a working prototype is already existing (The Evernote Legacy version).

Because it's a lot easier to offer better search and collaboration features when the company can see your notes' contents.

And what have we learned from the rise of Google, Facebook, Instagram, etc.? That consumers are usually willing to trade their privacy for free and/or better services.

Not sure what kind of hack it will take for people to start taking privacy more seriously. Imagine if a disgruntled employee at a note app company copied data from hundreds of thousands of users and started selling this data on the dark web. There is already a market for stolen credit cards and such. Imagine the damage someone could do with your entire collection of notes.

1 hour ago, CalS said:

'twere me, I'd set the subscription at $25 to $50 per year (some whatever rate) and limit the free trial to 15 days.  Basic users aren't adding EN the value today that they did in the beginning.  The company has strayed quite a bit from the original path anyway.  Sh-- happens.

They've tightened the belt on Basic a couple of times in recent years, and it was by reducing number of devices. I think they've pushed that as far as they can reasonably go. A freemium version limited to 1 device isn't going attract new users because the syncing to multiple devices is a huge part of the advantage of a note app over a bunch of text files in a folder on one's computer. So what else can they take away from Basic? I think you nailed it - the free forever but still robust featurewise app is an outlier in the note app space. The other players offer either a super bare bones free version or a time limited robust free version. EN Basic is an anomaly - very robust (less so with the 2 device limit) and free forever. If EN wants to increase their paying subscriber ratio, replacing free forever Basic with a limited time trial seems like the obvious next lever to pull.

10 minutes ago, Paul A. said:

I agree with much of what you said, but I just wanted to comment specifically on the above. You're absolutely right that "note taking apps" are boring right now. They are commodities, with many free or low cost options. This is why I believe that Evernote wants to broaden itself into more of a "productivity" app, as indicated by their new slogan, "Remember everything and accomplish anything."

The "accomplish anything" part is very hot right now as there is tremendous growth and interest in productivity apps. Hot apps include Notion, Roam Research, SuperHuman, a slew of "task" apps led perhaps by Todoist, and many more that are receiving sizable investments, high valuations, and seeing rapid growth. Evernote is already used by many people to assist in their productivity, and it's not a stretch at all for them to build some new features to make themselves an even more functional productivity tool, and allow them to capture some of the "hotness" around productivity apps.

So we'll see! I'm pleasantly surprised at some of the performance improvements in 10.5.7 (which I only just installed and need more time to test). I feel like the app is finally getting to what I would consider "open Beta" quality, which is not a strong endorsement for an app that has already been in production for months(!), but I do see it improving steadily, and I'm hopeful for what 2021 will bring.

Anyone remember when Phil Libin was talking about competing with MS Office? I remember thinking how laughable that was given EN's QA process.

I think the productivity space is a more reasonable target - going up against smaller competitors and going for a userbase that is more tolerant of the fast and loose QA that EN uses. Spreadsheet users would never tolerate the kind of bugs that routinely escape into EN general release products.

2 hours ago, ehrt74 said:

I really don't know Joplin but does it run an OCR over images to make then searchable or offer real-time search indexed search results of 1000s of notes? How about adding notes to pdfs or images? Does it have a grammar allowing you to issue specific queries over http? 

You're asking mostly about EN Premium features. For someone who requires those features, Joplin is not an option. But it could be an option for someone for whom EN Basic suffices, and it eliminates some restrictions such as device limits and has some additional features. And it's open source and free to use.

What's really interesting is how note apps has exploded in recent years. Lots of options, all a bit unique in feature-set. The competition should drive some great innovation in the note taking space.

4 hours ago, eric99 said:

If you dislike the V10 GUI, then Joplin is no alternative because it has almost exactly the same layout and it has no wysiwyg editor like EN. Joplin also renames all your resource files (pdf, images) to a cryptic ID, even in the exported folders.  For me, this is a stopper because my files have meaningful names which may be searched independently.

That being said, Joplin has a lot of potential. If the developer would be able (financially) to work full time  at this product, it would be very soon at the level of EN V6 or better. The most interesting feature is of course the E2E encryption.

Joplin does allow you to use your preferred editor, so you can use something like Typora, which has features that far exceed Evernote's editor (outlines, formulas, diagrams). I imagine there's no issue using a WYSIWYG editor if you prefer that over a markdown editor.

Agreed that renaming your attachments is not desireable.

I find it amazing that an open source project on a shoestring budget that is largely driven by one man has been able to create a note app that is within reach of EN and its hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars in funding, and several hundreds of employees. It really does make you wonder about EN's deployment of its resources (remember Evernote socks and coffee mugs?).

I agree that if the Joplin dev devotes more time, he could soon catch EN Legacy (which means surpassing current v10). Another thing he has going for him is the plugin architecture which allows people to add functionality to Joplin without having to wait for the main Joplin dev to get around to it.

1 hour ago, Gnopps said:

For EN-replacement with local storage: Joplin

For EN-replacement with more functionality: Nimbus

For working with flexible documents & databases: Notion

There are plenty more, for example Obsidian. However, none of the options can match all of EN legacy functionality.

Check out noteapps.info for comparisons of some alternatives.

One place where Nimbus falls short is opening/editing multiple notes simultaneously. I believe that is not possible in the Windows app, though may be possible in browser version.

9 hours ago, mikefinleyco said:

Is there a way to roll back or uninstall and reinstall the previous version of Evernote for Android that I can use until Evernote resolves all of these issues?

I might have missed it, but I haven't seen EN provide link to legacy Android version as they have with Windows and Mac legacy apps. Hopefully @Nick L.can provide such a link.

An alternative is downloading the Evernote for Android apk from somewhere else, such as a site that hosts Android apk's, but this is less secure as you don't know if the apk has been tampered with. Really EN should provide a means of rollback given all the features that were dropped by the newest version. Seems to me they should be doing this until the new version is up to par with the legacy app.

20 minutes ago, CalS said:

I think direction is dictated by what is in the local notebooks.  I've posted this elsewhere.  In summary

1. Most of my local notes contain PDFs (7600 of 8100) which don't require a lot of access. 
2. I'm considering putting all the attachments in a very simple Windows folder structure and use Windows Indexing and File explorer for access. 
3. For non PDF notes I'm considering printing to PDF and putting that in the folder structure.

I'm guessing you aren't planning to modify these non-PDF notes on a regular or possibly even infrequent basis? The pdf route and using Windows search is an interesting idea for static notes. Not so much for notes that you want to be able to update. It also means a second place to search (unless you know with some certainty which information bucket to search), though any solution that clings to EN Legacy for Local Notebooks and uses v10 or other note app for everything else has that same drawback.

If I found a fairly fully featured E2EE note app, I'd be willing to move all my notes there and avoid the splitting up into multiple external brains. Maybe if Standard Notes upped their game considerably in the coming months . . . 

20 minutes ago, CalS said:

I would just as soon not have to do any of this but it seems clear EN isn't bringing back local notebooks.    

100% agreed, I'd much rather stick with Evernote, but the writing on the wall with respect to local notebooks is clear enough that I'm not holding out hope on that front. Also not holding out any hope on real E2E encryption after listening to an interview Ian Small did recently - his vision of search requires access to users' note contents.

So even though it will be some months before the bridge has to be crossed, that day is inevitable, so like you, I'm starting to think about how to prepare.

54 minutes ago, tavor said:

And if I understand things correctly, I should be able to use EN Legacy for as long as I use an operating system that it runs on (Windows 10 in my case) and have an EN Legacy install package handy should I switch to another machine or reinstall Windows. So I can use it long after EN officially abandons EN Legacy and stops syncing it.

On further thought, I may be wrong about this. I'm thinking of the login requirement when first launching EN Windows. EN could lock out Legacy if they wanted, so it's possible that when they stop syncing Legacy, they put a hard stop on anyone using it even for unsynchronized notes.

6 minutes ago, DTLow said:

Moving sensitive attachment files out of Evernote and replacing with a file link

Yeah, that's a good option for files. And the file link can be to file on web if said file is available on web from some other entity or you host it on your own/leased server, or if you don't need access from multiple devices, can just keep file on local storage device.

But I'm more concerned about the note content itself. I could convert that content to pdf and proceed as above with files, but that's very inconvenient especially for notes that are dynamic.

Given that Evernote's privacy option, Local Notebooks, has been abandoned in the new Evernote (v10) and most likely is never coming back, how are users, who have some notes that they absolutely will not just trust to a company's promise to not read your notes (as if employees have never gone rogue before), planning to move forward?

I've been looking at some of the other note taking apps and it seems most are not implementing true end to end encryption, even though they like to use that phrase. Meaning, they have the ability to decrypt your notes. True E2EE means only the user can decrypt the notes - not the company or anyone else. A primary reason for this is that without access to users' notes contents, features like search and collaboration are not as easily implemented. They are betting that features and convenience are more important to users than security, which is probably true for most users for most of their notes - i.e., even for security-conscious users, probably a large % of their notes are not confidential.

That's why Local Notebooks is such a great feature. You don't need to lock down the, say, the 90% of your notes where hyper confidentiality isn't that important. And the app developers have access to all that non-confidential content to serve up better search results, easier collaboration, etc. But it seems most note apps do not have the equivalent of Local Notebooks, meaning *all* your notes get sync'ed to the cloud, where of course they are potentially vulnerable to hacking by third parties and also access by company employees as the company has the ability to decrypt the notes.

If you know of note apps with either the equivalent of Local Notebooks *or* true E2EE where the company itself cannot decrypt the notes, please let me know. The only ones I'm aware of are Evernote Legacy (local notebooks) and Standard Notes (true E2EE).

After a cursory look around, I'm thinking I might keep EN Legacy for confidential notes, where access from my primary desktop is sufficient for my needs (i.e., I don't need to access these private notes from my phone or other device). And if I understand things correctly, I should be able to use EN Legacy for as long as I use an operating system that it runs on (Windows 10 in my case) and have an EN Legacy install package handy should I switch to another machine or reinstall Windows. So I can use it long after EN officially abandons EN Legacy and stops syncing it.

This would free up the requirements on the note app I use for the majority of my notes, as I wouldn't need the app to have true E2EE, so I'm not limited to an app like Standard Notes, which, while hyper security focused, doesn't have the features of many of the competitors, whether it's EN v10 (in which case I'd run and use EN Legacy in parallel with EN v10) or Notion or Nimbus, etc.

Running EN Legacy alongside another note app isn't ideal, but in lieu of a better solution, that's where I'm at currently. Would love to hear from others for whom maintaining privacy for at least some of their notes is non-negotiable - how are you planning on moving forward?

46 minutes ago, Paul A. said:

 

Tabs only available in Evernote legacy for macOS, if I'm not mistaken. But even if you run on Mac it's still not your oversight @tavor, the Evernote interface does a very, very poor job of visually informing the user that tabs are available as an option. Which is the same point many of us made when the CEO indicated that very few users used tabs. If only one of two desktop platforms even support them and even on the supported platform EN doesn't go out of its way to let you know they exist, not hard to see why usage would be low...

Thanks for the clarification. I use Windows, so I use multiple note windows when I need to view/edit multiple notes simultaneously. Tabs would be useful if the Windows Legacy version had it, but not as useful as opening multiple windows. I was just surprised thinking that I had somehow overlooked this.

5 minutes ago, sonoio said:

I used multiple tabs and some keyboard shortcuts. These are gone. So using a few tabs, and a few keyboard shortcuts has apparently made me a "power user".  ("it happened to me - so it could happen to you...")

Tabs? You mean tags? Or does EN Legacy have tabs and I somehow missed this?

33 minutes ago, eric99 said:

If EN is a critically important tool, you might consider to get a paid user. If all these users would contribute,  version V10 wouldn't even exist because there would be sufficient resources to maintain platform specific implementations...

Which highlights the notion that the Basic version is too feature rich. EN Basic Legacy is, from my perspective, the second best note app available, right behind the best, which is EN Premium Legacy. For the vast majority of use cases, the 2nd best app in the entire note taking space is good enough, so not much incentive to jump to Premium and pay the highest(?) fee in the note app space.

31 minutes ago, MrIllustrator said:

Thank you for the video, perfect example of what all EV 10 users are experiencing. A graphic indication indeed of why EN 10 is not fit for public consumption. Just as I have said before, don’t the people at Evernote use their own product, just look at this rubbish you have released!

I have suspected for years (based on longstanding pattern of general releases of product with glaring bugs), and said as much on this forum, that no one in senior management is a power user of Evernote.

That video and similar complaints in many posts have me reassessing - it may be that no one in senior management is even a daily user of Evernote! 

The one thing they did correctly with this release is continuing to sync the legacy Mac and Windows versions - which really does highlight that the v10 general release is actually a beta testing scheme. Imagine if they dropped sync on the legacy desktop apps! It would be notemageddon!

35 minutes ago, Goetz said:

Additionally, several bugs that are so obvious but still not fixed making me asked myself whether there are any feature descriptions at all to test against. Especially the beta testing phase isn't worth mentioning. Who on earth would spent significant time and risk with one's productive system in a beta phase.

This is an issue I raised years ago. The test suite then, and now, seemed woefully lacking because updates would routinely break features. You would think a competently constructed test suite would incorporate a lot of this so that the QA process would capture a lot of the errors affecting basic functionality. Then alpha and beta testing could iron out the quirks. 

A few years ago, I would routinely download updates as soon as they were released (not beta, but general release). After having my workflows disrupted on a regular basis, I decided even downloading general release updates wasn't worth the pain. Forget about beta testing! 

And that's the problem. The internal QA phase is so poor, that it makes beta testing unappealing, especially to power users and others who are heavily dependent on EN. So the very people who could detect most of the bugs are reluctant to participate as beta testers without any incentives. And as far as I know, EN offers nothing by way of incentives. Not that incentives are needed IF the QA testing was much better and users had some confidence that betas would not be a huge headache.

So without a good QA phase (and a reputation for that), it's hard to attract lots of beta testers, and without lots of beta testers, you get buggy products pushed as general releases, making the broad userbase involuntary beta testers. This has been the cycle at EN for years - sorry to say for the folks new to the forum who think the v10 fiasco is a one-off stumble and will never happen again - I see nothing to indicate that EN is actually going to change their approach when it comes to testing.

14 minutes ago, Vidalia said:

I always wondered those who have several thousands of notes in EN, what those types of notes are! Have they reviewed their workflow to evaluate whether those many notes are relevant and/or can be handled using a different type of applications?

During my peak usage of EN, I only had ~500 notes.

Depends on  your use case. Are there only 500 pieces of (not closely related) information that you want out of your biological brain but saved to an external brain for future retrieval?

I use EN for info archival, but also as my GTD system, so my goal is to store as little of the minutiae as possible in my head and offload all of that to my external brain. Bio brain "real estate" is limited, expensive and prone to memory gaps. External brain is larger, inexpensive and has nearly perfect recall. 

So my 5k notes is merely a good start toward my goal. I can envision reaching 50k notes.

33 minutes ago, CyberBaratna said:

While I'd love it if Evernote brings back the local notebooks, if they're just going to stay full-cloud all-the-time, DEVONthink seems to have similar features and they pretty clearly planted their flag on giving users security flexibility with the quote below from their main page: https://www.devontechnologies.com/apps/devonthink.

 

Yeah, EN seems to have a different concept in mind. I don't think local notebooks or encryption works for their idea of what note retrieval should be. As I recall, some years back they shot down the idea of encryption (which is an alternative to local notebooks, arguably even better than local notebooks assuming you trust the encryption implementation because then you have access from any of your devices, you have cloud storage so your data isn't dependent on your hardware not failing or being destroyed, e.g., a fire). If users encrypted all or even most of their notes, the search concept that Ian Small talks about (where EN can bring up the notes you need with minimal input from you) doesn't work. 

I don't think any of the note taking apps that have sprung up in the last few years offer the equivalent of local notebooks, but several of them offer encryption.

8 minutes ago, Wanderling Reborn said:

MS never really marketed Onenote. Even for the past few years, as they poured more attention into the service, especially the mobile side of things and the abortive W10 app, they’ve been doing a piss poor job promoting it. And before that, tens of millions of people had it preinstalled on their work and business computers along with the rest of Office, and had zero idea of what it was or what to use it for (or even that they had it). MS had really dropped the ball there. 

I don't think even Microsoft was clear on this in their own minds! I think it took Evernote to come along and really define what a note taking app is, the rationale for using one, etc. And then Microsoft was like - "hey, we already have something that does this". But even then, I don't think they appreciated the potential - or maybe they decided it would just be a minor player compared to their heavy hitters and deployed marketing resources accordingly. They have the luxury of slow playing this because even if OneNote dies tomorrow, it doesn't affect their bottom line. And their user numbers don't really suffer from lack of big marketing push because everyone on Office 365 has it, and students get it for free, etc. They are in the enviable position of just trying to hit singles, knowing there will always be more turns at bat, while most of the competitors are swinging for the fences because they live or die based on this one product. 

We see somewhat similar behavior by Google. Keep has been around a very long time, in note taking app years, and they've really slow played that product. But they can step on the accelerator anytime they want. And if they neglect it, they still have the option of focusing on it next year or the year after that . . . 

3 hours ago, eric99 said:

This proves nothing, why are people searching for a specific term? Maybe oneNote is so complicated that users need to search more than for evernote, which is much more intuitive?

Of course the Google trends result doesn't PROVE anything. But it is suggestive, especially when it comports with our own experiences and doesn't seem from far out left field.

1 hour ago, John in Michigan USA said:

Having said all that, the OP's graph is consistent with my experience about the popularity of Evernote.

Exactly. Mine too. I'd guess many of the longtime users would not be surprised by the shape of the graph - but if people think the shape of the graph is a total shocker and out of line with their own experience, please let me know! 

As for Google changing their metrics or people using search differently, those are for sure true. That's why I included the comparison chart showing both EN and ON over 10 years.