Kirby Krieger

Mark F — I think it's _very important_ to separate usability concerns from ... visibility concerns. Visibility is the user's responsibility. I'm 54. I had 20/20 vision until I was 42. My eye doctor informed me that the worsening of my eyesight was right on schedule. Since then — I'm an artist; I work long hours with my eyes — I have relied on vision prosthetics to correct my eyesight to 20/20. These wonderful body-additions are called "eyeglasses". If you have trouble reading text on a computer or a smart phone — have your vision checked and get new eyeglasses. Seeing well is important, and not priced out-of-reach for almost all Americans (and others). "Not perfect eyesight" should _not_ be a developers concern (outside of accessibility issues, which are the responsibility of the OS, not the app). That does not mean that "hard to read" is tolerable. But if all text is hard to read _for you_ because you have not taken advantage of the widely-available vision-correcting devices (that's "glasses"), then you should get glasses first, and criticize UI design only after you've gotten used to them. I love the look of Yosemite — the improvement is screen fonts on Retina screens is alone worth the trouble of upgrading. And I like the general look of Evernote (I had such serious issues with its usability that I don't rely on it — that's a different quail). It needs to be improved. But I certainly would not consider making it easy-to-read for people who need but don't have properly prescribed eyeglasses an improvement. I have no trouble reading the notes. And I have no trouble reading the tags page, though I don't think the use of contrast is commendable. Lastly, "20-something developer team" is crude ageism and probably incorrect as well. If your perfect-sighted wife thinks the design is insane — that's fine. And it has nothing to do with her age, your age, the age of Evernote's employees, or the age of any of the millions of people who use the Internet. —Kirby.

I think we might be starting to conflate actions that are best, imho, considered separately. The thread is about (afaict) using highlighting and underlining and other _text markup_ tools. (The thread is titled "Text Selection".) It is not about what might be differentiated as _document_ or _page markup_ tools. Skitch (and whatever the built-in tools in Evernote are called) is, IME, excellent for document mark-up, and, in it's current form, useless for text mark-up. Preview, by way of example, does text markup quite well. Aside: the old beloved Skitch — prior to being swallowed by Evernote — was one of the best-designed utilities ever. It was common to see "Skitched" screen-grabs all over the Web — a stretch of growth that accelerated weekly until Evernote's unhelpful changes.

Come'on people — be nice. We're communicating — well, considering the difficulty — by sending little black on white (mostly) stick figures to each other through very long, very narrow straws. It's not easy. Manny — Scott's comment was based on misunderstanding which client you use. It's an understandable misunderstanding. When discussing a multi-platform program (it's really several distinct programs) such as Evernote, it is always helpful to specify the client. (Truly, when asking questions on any on-line forum, you should specify your hardware and software.) Scot's question, while inarguably passive-aggressive (imho) is still meaningful when taken literally. What was unintuitive about your use of the software? We — who aren't you, may not work on job sites, and don't know which hardware or client you are using — still do not know.

Well, not to harsh your buzz, but, imho, it's important to say: of course thanks to the hard-working employees of Evernote. Terrific software with a tremendous future. Just a few dozen more tweaks and it'll be up to 2011 standards. My criticism is not meant to be hurtful. I _like_ Evernote; I want it to succeed. But I also don't think users should feel they have to kneel and beg for features that have been bog-standard since perhaps a decade ago (or longer — when was the last time you used a text-editor/word-processor as capricious and low-powered as Evernote's?). As a frustrated user, I'm bothered by what I and others see as a large gap between revenue and development. Evernote is a rich growing company. Users deserve a rich, bug-free, growing features list. That we don't get it is not an employee problem. It's a management problem.

An excellent idea. I do think in the next five years we will have the kind of "academic" mark-up tools you mention readily available and easily integrated. (May be already available in some software.) You might search the Web for articles on academic workflows. There are whole blogs devoted to the topic. Of particular interest, take a look at that robust ugly duckling, DevonThink Pro. As an aside, having multiple versions of a base file, and saving only the instructions on how to mark-up the file (rather than copying the whole file) is how all current photographer's RAW workflow tools work. It's brilliant, efficient, and empoweringly useful. In the meantime, Scott's advice is, IME, spot-on: use Preview. It works well, at the cost of not being "in" Evernote. Note that you have a choice among five highlighter colors, and an underline. I think the underline looks best, but it _is not_ included in the summary in the Sidebar (neither are callouts). I color code my highlighting by use (e.g.: yellow — notes on the text; red — notes to the author; purple — notes to me). Unfortunately, there is as yet no way to show/hide by color, and the colors are not shown in the Sidebar summary (on OS 10.8.5, afaict). There is also no way to search just one's highlights, but the Sidebar contents are searched at the same time as the document (e.g.: search for "octopus" and the Sidebar will show only highlights and notes containing "octopus". If that kind of work-around doesn't meet your needs, I suggest finding another base application (not Evernote) for document and information storage and retrieval. HTH.

Because if you Capitalize the first letter of every tag, and enter the Tags in lower-case, and let auto-complete do its job, then you can easily tell which Tags in your Tags list were mis-entered: they are lower-case. Gah! Nevermind. I just found out that Evernote _stupidly_ doesn't return the initial letter in the Tag entry field to the case it was typed if the text entered doesn't match an existing Tag. Better databases will _only_ change the case when the Tag _matches_. If the Tag doesn't match, it is entered in whatever case it was typed. Sorry to have not realized this before. I'm surprised at Evernote's behavior here. It's sloppy, imho.

Yes, but that feature is not part of Evernote. I found the whole handling of editing PDF's inside Notes awkward at first, but "round-tripping" through Preview is easy, and the annotating tools are good. Preview maintains an excellent "Highlights & Notes" list that can be shown in the Preview Sidebar.

Hi Jeff, It's three Tags for me, too. But that's an unwanted MacGuffin, for which I apologize. My point wasn't "how long can I make Tags", my points were: Capitalize Tags. With auto-complete, it's a great way to easily see mistakenly created Tags (which happens a lot), and, as a follow-up Auto-complete is good; I'd like to see it even better. (And that was, I'd thought, best illustrated with an example of long Tag names.) I think each of those are worthy. Consistent capitalization isn't my hobgoblin, either. Database consistency is. I've seen way too many keyword lists with things like "Family", "family", "fymily", and "FAmily".

I like it a lot, and recommend it in use, in one way, for one important reason: consistent tagging with minimum mistakes and administration. My recommendation: use _only_ Title Case for Tagsdo not use any spaces in TagsNever type tags in Title Case, unless you are creating a new TagIn practice, this results in the proper substitution of of your typing with a correctly spelled, already-included Tag. It is easy to visually scan your Tags for any that do not start with a Capital Letter. These have been input in error, and need to be corrected. I'd like to see auto-complete made stronger. In OmniFocus, the proposed matches are based on the sequence of letters, but they allow letters in-between. (The algorithm is "*a*b*c … ".) Currently in Evernote, to select the Tag "SoftwareEvernoteMac", since I have that Tag as well as SoftwareEvernoteIOS (etc.), I have to type all the way to "M" or "I" or else select from the drop-down list. Were my suggestion implemented, I could simply type "sem" and the Tag "SoftwareEvernoteMac" would be selected (assuming no other tags contained the letters "s", "e" and "m" in that order, in which case I might learn to type "soem" for that Tag). It's a great time-saver.

Click the icon in the top border of the Note. Screenshot (Evernote.Mac):

+1 for more, better pen settings, including _much_ finer line widths. Take a look at Paper by 53 for what can be done while retaining a dead-simple UI, and at Sketchbook Pro for iPad by Autodesk for what can be done to make the app as use-able as possible. The Moleskine Evernote notebooks (actual tree-space objects) make a nice alternative for those who want good writing/drawing tools, at the cost of having to photograph the pages to get them into one's Evernote database.

+1. There is no acceptable explanation for not allowing the user to override whatever auto-algorithm is in place in order to specify, "Create this Note's thumbnail from THIS image". For some users this is a _security_ issue — it's not even an issue of productivity or convenience or aesthetics.

Hi Alan, Evernote is a database of Notes. The Note is the core record in the database. The database is a list of Notes, which each note having attributes. The Reminder is an attribute of the Note. While I could see, technically, multiple alarms per note (just as you can have multiple checkboxes), I don't see Evernote ever allowing those alarms to be specific to text or paragraphs _within_ a Note. What Evernote _should do_ — in this and other cases — is create a special container of Notes that shows them in a way that aids users. You could have a container that showed all your To-Do Notes in one borderless pane. Evernote seems so far behind in basic database functions, and commits (_just judging by how far behind it remains_) so few resources to development, that I don't see that ever happening. Of course — this is a widely held desire. Despite what Evernote may claim, Evernote is radically unsuited to that task: it does not outline in any but the most rudimentary pre-computer sense, either by text within a Note, or by the structures containing Notes, and its task-management functions are pretty much limited to checkboxes in-line with text within a Note, and to the Reminder attribute of Notes. There are scores of task-managers on the market; many of them are excellent. None of them are named "Evernote". I have used, and recommend (with no slight to a program not on this little personal list) Things, The Hit List, TaskPaper, Workflowy, and OmniFocus. Each of them is at least 10x better at task management than Evernote. Here's Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote, talking a little over a year ago: Imho, he is still correct. HTH, —Kirby.

First, thanks for the info. The question is somewhere in my Questions Notes. Second — Ahoy, Evernotables! — at least change the internal name to "Largest _smaller_" dimension, which is _accurate_ and much easier to decode and use. You are not using the largest smallest dimension. You are using the largest item in the set of the smaller dimensions of all the HxW pairs in the Note.

Hi. Me again . In Evernote.Mac, when viewing the Tags container (by clicking "Tags" in the Sidebar), there are are two sort options shown in the top margin: Name, and Note Count. Note Count should match what you mean by "popularity". Is that not present in Evernote.Windows? Are you using Premium? Screenshot (Evernote.Mac):