Paul A.

3 hours ago, Dave-in-Decatur said:

Thanks. I'm only looking at the samples in the blog post, and in the notes list I'm not seeing bolder type, only smaller type.

Presumably the screenshots were taken at the default zoom level. Is it possible you have an increased zoom level, thus you are used to larger text?  I have mine zoomed one level, using command - +. Control - + I think on windows. Cms/Ctrl - 0 to reset to default zoom.

I just got prompted to install 10.72.2, which fixed one annoying bug I was experiencing with the top frame of the window only responding to click to drag at the very top of the window - that's good. However, since I received the new UI I now can't copy tags from the bottom of a note window to paste into another note - that's annoying and bad.

In general, I'm a little blasé about this UI refresh. In general I like UI refreshes, I believe it's good for apps and websites to get a "fresh coat of paint" periodically, and so far I think the updates are OK. I would usually provide detailed feedback but I'm not motivated to invest the time when there are so many other areas of concern with the app, continued data loss concerns, an Android app which needs a huge amount of love, and so on.

Even in the desktop app and UI-adjacent, the very first thing I checked once I received the UI beta was whether the Tag Kingdom had been updated to provide a multi-column view - nope. I only have 150 tags, but it can be difficult to find what I need in a single column view. I miss the legacy app's ability to put far more tags on-screen at the same time, and I know I'm not alone. (I imagine the same issue applies to people who use a large number of notebooks.)

My subscription expires this month and with the lack of focus on areas that I deem important I've decided to cancel and take a wait-and-see approach to see if Bending Spoons starts sharing specifics on their plans to improve what I consider core functionality.

9 hours ago, eric99 said:

For instance the note background color in the new dark theme is fully black which looks ugly and less readable.

I wonder if this change (if it sticks) is designed to look best with OLED displays? I've started to see some Android mobile apps with three themes, light, dark, and black. The black looks best with OLED displays, which are somewhat common in phones.

Full-size OLED monitors are less common but starting to get popular, and perhaps BS designers / execs have them? Just some idle speculation.

Another possibility is that the dark mode is simply not finished. No dark mode screenshots were shared on the blog post, and if I were designing a new interface I think I'd try to perfect the light one first and only then optimize the dark one.

I just got a new version, 10.65.2; bug still exists. 😞

28 minutes ago, Dave-in-Decatur said:

I agree that the Gboard issue(s) should be fixed--assuming it's something Evernote can fix, and they're not waiting to hear back from Google.

It's been over three years since I first reported the issue to Evernote. I'm guessing that should be enough time.  

6 hours ago, Dave-in-Decatur said:

I think #4 is also a Gboard issue, or at least is keyboard specific; I don't see it using Smart Keyboard Pro.

If so, they need to get some Android devices with Gboard and start testing them thoroughly. Because the Gboard-related issues are legion, more than three years into the "v10" era of Evernote.

6 hours ago, Dave-in-Decatur said:

#2 is no longer an issue

It's absolutely still an issue. At some point people give up raising the issue when there's zero movement at all, but it doesn't mean the issue has gone away. Almost every single app on my home screen allows me to long press on the launcher icon and gain access to useful shortcuts without having a large widget permanently taking up space on the screen. Evernote on Android pre-v10 used to support this, and it was very useful to quickly launch into a new note to take down some information, or to immediately take a photo to insert into Evernote or record a voice note.

For anyone who hasn't clicked the link, here's how it looked pre-Evernote-v10:

And the frustrating thing is this shouldn't be some big coding project that has to be prioritized and resources allocated. It's basic Android functionality and should be trivially easy to implement.

6 hours ago, Dave-in-Decatur said:

the blue + button has a Note Link option, which inserts an Evernote:///view link, which can be a link to the current note, and can be copied to clipboard if desired. OK, OK, that's a kludge

Yes a kludge but good to know it's available. Still, this is something so small and simple. The other items are many times more important to me, I mention this because it's lingered for so long and just seems symptomatic of the lack of care and attention to the Android mobile app for years.

2 hours ago, Dave-in-Decatur said:

Actually, I just tested this and it seems rational: back once to exit the keyboard (the Android back button is a "down" button when the keyboard is active), a second time to exit Edit mode, and a third time to exit the note. Guaranteed that if a single tap on back exited the note when in Edit mode, people (including me) would be in here objecting.

Interesting; it doesn't work this way for me. When I do a single swipe back from a note in edit mode the keyboard briefly folds down out of sight then the keyboard quickly reappears, and the note remains in edit mode. It also causes the phone to create a single "tap" of haptic feedback.

3 hours ago, mackid1993 said:

Technically now it works like every other android app which is great for muscle memory especially if you use gesture navigation.

Agreed, this is how all Android apps are supposed to work and I'm glad they made it match Android design guidelines. Sadly, the back gesture still doesn't exit an (unedited) note in edit mode, unless I gesture 2-3 times in a row quickly. Also, Android app still has the following issues:

1. Gboard capitalization
2. No support for app shortcuts from launcher
3. "Copy internal link" on Android actually creates a web link
4. More text deleted than should be [This bug has popped up and been fixed many times over the years. Specific reproducible steps tend to vary, but I'm definitely seeing some variant of this bug in the latest version.]

Interestingly, I got a survey, but all it asked about was whether I know about and use checklists and tasks. I wonder how many different surveys they are doing? 🤔 

15 hours ago, agsteele said:

Which piece of the tags provision do you have in mind - given that tags exist and do most things? I presume you have a specific issue in mind.

Given the context I imagine he meant rapid tag sync. Something I am looking forward to, too.

On 12/17/2023 at 9:54 AM, gazumped said:

Evernote,  who's CEO is and was a fan,  decided he liked the product so much he bought the company - much like everyone dreams of from time to time.

Hmmm, questionable. Bending Spoons has raised money from investors who expect a high return on their investment. They purchased Evernote because they believe they can get a strong financial return, not because the BS CEO likes the product.

On 12/17/2023 at 9:54 AM, gazumped said:

Bending Spoons have improved the speed and reliability of the product,  added a BETA AI service,  improved the code base

First and third statement are also questionable. Evernote's reliability has gone down for me since the acquisition - I've lost data multiple times in the (rushed?) migration to RTE sync. 

On 12/17/2023 at 9:54 AM, gazumped said:

BS also dropped a completely free service that was being abused by some users

Where's the evidence it was being abused? Evernote likely had items in their TOS against abuse of the service (all online services have this), so they could have targeted any abusers individually. I'm a little disappointed with how quickly some people have started denigrating former free plan users as freeloaders, ingrates, and now "abusers." As far as I can tell (absent any evidence of real abuse), all the Free users were using the product exactly as it was designed to be used.

On 12/17/2023 at 9:54 AM, gazumped said:

BS have acquired a reputation - supported by no evidence I've seen yet - of asset-stripping and price gouging.  I'd be interested to see actual proof.

Clearly they are taking a page out of a popular (though often maligned) private equity playbook with their purchase of struggling or under-monetized assets and then improving their financial performance. Some private equity companies have developed a bad reputation for behaving like vultures (stripping all value from a company and leaving the rotting carcass), and some have been reasonably good stewards of their purchases. I personally think the jury is still out on Bending Spoons. 🤔 

More directly to your question, the below article has been influential in shaping some of the narrative around Bending Spoons. I share without comment on the merits of its arguments:

https://impassionedmoderate.substack.com/p/ryan-reynolds-didnt-pay-close-enough?utm_source=direct&r=1ix542&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

On 12/17/2023 at 9:54 AM, gazumped said:

Please can we go back to talking about actual facts instead of shaky opinions soon?

I don't know, can we? 🤪

I believe one notebook is maximum. Can you move all notes to one notebook and try deleting the empty notebook?

On 12/15/2023 at 12:07 PM, gazumped said:

They're not looking for conversions,  they're fixing a drain on their resources in the future.

What makes you say that? I think it far more likely that the goal is to incentivize a significant number of free users to begin becoming paying customers. The ongoing costs to maintain a small amount of data for free subscribers is non-zero but it pales in comparison with the possibility of enrolling (e.g.) a million new subscribers in a $10/month plan. 

21 hours ago, Oddball said:

That's disappointing too, but I appreciate the information. If I'm understanding you correctly, you mean that the devs know about this issue but have chosen not to address it? I've certainly seen lots and lots of updates to the app but none that address bugs I have.

Correct. Though I would personally rephrase from "chosen not to address it" to "not sufficiently prioritized fixing it/them."

Regardless, I'm frustrated too. New features are fine and there are some new features that I'd like, but at this point fixing some of these bugs that have annoyed me for years is more likely to keep me subscribed than new features.

2 hours ago, Dave-in-Decatur said:

Clearly Evernote doesn't work well with Gboard, at least in some specific functions. It's possible, I suppose, that it's Gboard's error and they'll have to fix it.

It's not. I've reported this to Gboard. It's Evernote's issue.

15 hours ago, agsteele said:

You should try an alternative keyboard to isolate whether it is an issue between Evernote and Gboard only or an issue with all keyboards on your device.

It's a known issue with Gboard that Evernote refuses to fix for over three years, from while Evernote v10 Android was in pre-release beta. It was on their list to fix "at a reasonably high priority" according to an Evernote PM over two years ago, and yet here we are. It's little stuff like this that sours me on Evernote. Fix the small stuff that irritates and I'm happy to pay for the app, but it rankles to get big price increases and the old irritating bugs remain.

Btw, you were the first to comment on one of my posts on this bug two and a half years ago.

Slightly off-topic, but all of the "Sunday week starters" in the Western World are a mystery to me. The work week, school week, financial week, and government services week all start on Mondays, and so I've never understood why anyone would want their calendars to start on Sunday!

7 minutes ago, ddenlinger said:

Respondents are not helpful. This is actually messed up.

On Mac:

1) Perform a search on a word (which sometimes is broken, it won't search, it will just erase your word and you have to type it again - this is a different bug of many)

2) Now the search field is populated with a word, you want to search on a new word. 

The best way would be to double click on the populated word to highlight it, so you can type a new word on top. But on the first click it moves, it is no longer under the mouse cursor. You can't just double click it. You have to chase it and double click in its new location.

It was suggested to click the X to clear the search field. Now the cursor is not in the search field (it is nowhere) and you have to move the mouse into the search field and click again. And when you do the search field moves again. 

This is all bad. It should be fixed. 

 

 

Agreed! This is a (small) irritation to me every single day. Thanks for describing the issue succinctly. I hope Evernote fixes it.

14 hours ago, Mike P said:

I like the saying, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". EN seem to have adopted "if it ain't broke, break it" instead.

I don't understand why they don't offer an open beta program. Evernote has a number of very passionate/loyal users (many of them active on this forum) who would gladly subscribe to a beta channel and help catch many of these bugs before they hit the public. The Signal messaging app similarly has a number of loyal users who put in a lot of time beta testing and it seems to work very well. See https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007318471-Signal-Beta for example.

1 hour ago, gazumped said:

They're still (I would guess) one of the biggest data-centre customers around - in the top 10 at least.

You might be surprised. According to a Google cloud case study, link below, Evernote only has about 3.5 PB in storage. That's peanuts among big storage users. Definitely not top-100, probably not even top-1000.

https://cloud.google.com/customers/evernote

4 hours ago, Wanderling Reborn said:

"For advertising purposes" is the key here. They announced back in the summer of 2016 that they would not use email scans to personalize ads, not that they would not scan emails for any other purposes. Google's FAQ today states "we do not scan your emails to show you ads". Which begs the question, are they scanning them for any other purposes (virus scanning obviously, but also criminal content, AI training etc.)

They don't scan personal user content for AI training, per their privacy policy. They do use publicly available information for AI training. They scan for viruses, spam, CSAM, for attachments so they can link to Drive or Photos, for user-specific AI features, and so on. Nothing nefarious.

16 minutes ago, Wanderling Reborn said:

I mean, how many Evernote users have Gmail ? Talk about data mining...

FYI, Google hasn't scanned Gmail content for advertising purposes for over 6 years.

8 hours ago, Bill Myers said:

I think this makes a few unsafe assumptions. First, we don't know that the majority of free users are willing to pay any price, no matter how low. 

Agreed, with the number of free alternatives out there many current free users are unlikely to convert at any price.

8 hours ago, Bill Myers said:

Second, this assumes that offering a subscription of £1.50 a month would be profitable for Bending Spoons. We don't know that either. In fact, I tend to doubt it would be.

Actually, I'm very confident that BS would be massively profitable with 200 million subscribers paying about $23/year (rough equivalent at current exchange rates.) The big cost is salaries, not cloud, which is pennies per Gig per month, and salaries don't scale (much) with the number of paying subscribers.

It's just wildly unrealistic to assume that Evernote could get anywhere close to that number of subscribers, as you point out. They certainly have fewer than 5 million paying subscribers right now, and likely fewer than 2 million. 200 million is not even a pipe dream!

15 hours ago, bmcl26 said:

I have no clue as I do not use threads in my email,  I only have individual emails.

Those were rhetorical questions. Clearly it does not work, as evidenced by the long thread above with multiple people reporting the same issues.

Respectfully, it's not very helpful to have people chiming into threads saying 'it works for me" without making any effort to understand the nuances or be empathetic to the issues that people are experiencing.

52 minutes ago, bmcl26 said:

Web Clipper working fine for me as well in Gmail

Does it give you an option specifically for emails? What happens if you use it in a long thread, does it allow you to select individual emails within the thread to save? All that functionality is missing since the summer. Also, I note the web clipper (at least in the Chrome store) hasn't been updated since the summer.