Rob Freundlich
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Posts posted by Rob Freundlich
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20 hours ago, PinkElephant said:We will have to wait a little to see what is going to happen.
Part of my point is that we shouldn't have to wait to see. If you (a company with a very mature product and a large user base) are going to release a complete rewrite that doesn't contain all of the functionality of the product it is replacing, the responsible, correct way to do it is with lots and lots of communication up front.
You don't leave your users wondering "where did my critical feature go?" and "when, if ever, will it come back?".
You don't leave them wondering if the legacy app is going to live on or suddenly disappear.
You don't leave them wondering if they are going to have to completely change the way they have done things for the last 5 years, 10 years, or even longer.
Even if your policy on the past had been to not talk about future plans, you put that aside, because this is a critical juncture in your product's history, and you need to recognize that business as usual isn't going to work. You have to give your customers the information they need to make intelligent, reasoned decisions.
Doing it any other way is irresponsible and shows a tremendous disregard for your customers.
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2 hours ago, DTLow said:
I continue to use legacy versions of Evernote; there's official Mac/Windows versions.
Not clear if there will be any supportThat's my plan for now as well. But I'm pretty sure they said there won't be any feature development in the legacy version (kind of implicit in "legacy"), and I think I saw something that said there won't be any support. I could be wrong on the second point (and hope I am!)
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Reading all of the posts here and in the EN reddit over the last few days, I've had a sinking feeling in my chest. I was so excited that the folks at Evernote were going to a single code base! As a developer, I understand this. It would make bug fixing and adding features so much easier! All of the platforms would finally have the best of all worlds!
Instead, what we've gotten is, well, what we've gotten. I'm very disappointed, both as a user and as a developer.
I've been working on a similar project for the last two or three years - porting a Flash-based application to Typescript and HTML. This was not optional; at the end of this year, browsers will stop supporting Flash, and my company's customers' business-critical applications need to continue working. Dozens, if not hundreds of enterprise customers, and tens or hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue, are on the line.
We started releasing the port a year or more ago, while still supporting the Flash version. With every release, we included a clear list of what worked and what didn't, with as complete a road map as we could of when the incomplete features would be complete. We made a few usability changes along the way, and dropped only one feature that I can think of. Before deciding to drop that feature, we polled account managers to see if it would be a problem, and were told it would not be. Even with that dropped feature, we are working to implement the spirit of it in another way.
Customers received the feature complete version a month or two ago, and even the ones who were slow to adopt it are now waking up and realizing they need to. Bug reports are rolling in, and we are prioritizing them over everything else, putting out patches every couple of weeks.
In addition to the bug fixing, we are communicating all of this to the customers. They know what we're doing, and they know that when Flash shuts down, they will have the best replacement possible for the product they have built into their business processes.
They are thrilled with us. Universally.
This is how you replace the code base beneath a product.
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Any response from support on this?
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Hah! Found a workaround! I tiny.cc'd the URL, and it now works. 🥳
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I poked at this a little more, and it looks like it's this link specifically. It's a link to a Google Form I've created to help me track my daily activity. Check out this screenshot of the note it's in:
I threw in the link to www.google.com just to try things out, and also put in the link to the form outside of the table, in case there was something funny about tables that was coming into play. What I found is that I get the error clicking on the form link in either place, but I can successfully click the www.google.com link.
Notice the icon next to the form link - I think that means it's seeing the form as an attachment and doing something different to download it. That may be the problem. I
'mgoing to send inhave sent in a support ticket and see what they say.@gazumped thanks for your note - 30 years in software development/debugging, and I still wouldn't have thought to try a non-form link if you hadn't posted it. /sigh
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If I have a URL link in a note, and I click (tap) it to try to open it in a browser, I get the following in a toast popup:
Unable to access document. Please make sure you are connected to the internet.
I am absolutely connected to the internet, and the link is valid - I can click it from the Windows and Web Evernote clients.
Anyone else seeing this? Any ideas what's going on? I'm on Evernote version 8.12.4, on a Galaxy S9 running Android 9.
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On 12/3/2019 at 4:06 PM, TK0047 said:
Note is saved as a shortcut (CTRL+4)
TIL that Ctrl+1 through Ctrl+9 open the shortcut notes. Thank you!
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I've got the same problem. Tables are just plain useful, and I've got lots of notes that use them to hold lists of information. When I'm in my kitchen updating my grocery list, or at the doctor's office browsing the web while I want for an appointment and see something I want to tack onto the end of a list, I'm not at my desk: I'm on my phone or my tablet. So I want to add a row to a table right there, right now.
I was very excited when table became useful in EN, and IIRC, around the same time, there was talk of "one common editor" for all platforms. That would certainly help here. /sigh
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18 hours ago, gustavgi said:
It does, you just hold down the Shift key when you expand/collapse the level. The workaround above is just needed for "Tags view" and when you want to collapse or expand all levels.
True, although the Shift thing isn't very discoverable - I've been using Evernote for 11 years and I am only just now learning about it. Having the options on the right-click menu would be nice.
And then, once they're their, having them available and in the right-click menu in Tags view would be an obvious, usable, extension of that.
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On 2/21/2017 at 3:07 PM, gustavgi said:
I don't know if I understood you exactly but I suggest you create a "master" tag where you put all your tags, and then hold down the Shift key when you collapse it to collapse everything while in Tag view.
That's a decent workaround, but it's still a workaround. It'd still be better if the application offered "expand/collapse children" at each level, and "expand/collapse all" at the top - that's a pretty standard thing for tree/hierarchical UI's.
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On 9/28/2017 at 6:09 PM, gustavgi said:
A better workaround that has been introduced more recently is that you can now drag and drop a search result from the ctrl+q search onto the note body.
The problem with this workaround is that it requires using the mouse. If you're a user who prefers the keyboard, this interrupts your flow.
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Like the title says - sometimes when I try to use the Web Clipper to capture a message in GMail in Chrome, it just doesn't start up. No message, no error, nothing. It doesn't matter whether I'm using the keyboard shortcut or clicking the icon in the Chrome toolbar.
When I go to the Extension and click "background page" in "Inspect views", it opens the Chrome debugger (nice!). Hitting the shortcut key gives me this:
Quote------ Button clicked -------
commons.js:46 Reloading account in slot 0
commons.js:46 Got user name: my user name and (presumably) user id
commons.js:46 userid: Sync started
commons.js:46 userid: Sync from USN: a numeric id
commons.js:46 userid: Purging 0 notes.
commons.js:46 userid: Sync completed USN: the same numeric id
commons.js:46 userid: Sync finishedI've seen this for a while, so I don't think it's version specific, but just in case:
- Chrome Version: Version 74.0.3729.131 (Official Build) (64-bit)
- Web Clipper Version: Version: 7.10.1.1-5ba38a4
Anyone else having this problem?
(I've just submitted this to EN Help as well as posting here, so I'll let y'all know what I hear)
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@jefito
You make good points all around.
18 hours ago, jefito said:A rebrand tends to be more cosmetic in nature, nothing too deep. We're not a lifestyle brand; our users just want to solve problems in their field; more function over form. The buzzwords "Functional", "Fast", and "Cheap" are where we live. Good UI in our software is important, good iconography helps, but the branding stuff doesn't feature much in the software itself.
Sounds like we're in similar places - our customers have very hard problems to solve, and they want something that gets the job done. For years, our software was incredibly utilitarian, and was used by only the most technical users at the customer sites.
More recently, our customers have had more of a need for the less techie people to be able to use our stuff. Functional, Fast, and Cheap are still hyper-critical for the runtime software, but we've had to bring in Friendly and Usable on the UI side. That's been a huge bonus for me, because even though I do have a background in comp sci, the really hairy computational stuff doesn't really float my boat - UI is where it's at!
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On 8/15/2018 at 12:50 PM, CalS said:
What's a c word for optimistic? If you are going to brand...
The cynic in me wants to say "Clueless". <grin, duck, and run>
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On 8/15/2018 at 10:23 AM, jefito said:
Well, I'm a software developer who believes that branding does matter, and in a potentially good way (potentially because not every rebranding -- or even product direction or software architecture -- change is successful).
You're a lot less cynical than I am - I've never seen the a branding change that made a difference, and was anything other than a pain in the <insert body part here> for the developers.
On 8/15/2018 at 10:23 AM, jefito said:Sure I'd rather be making, er, fixing bugs,
ROFL!
On 8/15/2018 at 10:23 AM, jefito said:the company decides what is important for me to do, and what isn't. This is a team sport; everyone needs to play their part.
True. But a smart company listens to its employees and its users as well as "the market", or whatever drives rebrandings. And I'll play my part - I'll do the rebranding work when it comes up. I'll do whatever work the company tells me to do.
But part of my part, as a very senior developer/programmer/engineer/whatever the heck we're calling ourselves this decade, is to tell management when I think a mistake is being made. Particularly since (a) my focus is user interface, so I'm thinking about the users all the time, and (b) my current company, the one I've been at for 10 years, has a very customer-centric view of the world. Because of that, I'm expected to speak my mind if something isn't right for the customers/end users - we all are. Maybe that skews my perspective as a user of other products, but TBH, I think it's the right thing for all employees in product-based businesses. Existing customers are what it's all about.
On 8/15/2018 at 10:23 AM, jefito said:it's typically just akin to changing the wallpaper (usually changes to graphics resources, with little actual code changes), and if you're a smart developer, you might be able to make your life easier with some forethought.
In a well-designed system, where everyone who worked on it at all levels was smart and had the authority to make decisions, you're absolutely right. And as long as I'm dreaming, I'd like a pony.
But yeah, I agree with you. And the stuff I'm working on now is a far cry better from that perspective than the stuff I was working on when I went through rebranding h*ll in the past. If my company handed down a decree from above tomorrow that we had to rebrand things (which, in spite of what I said above about everyone being expected to speak up, could still happen), it wouldn't be nearly as painful as my past experiences. But I'd still wonder, loudly, why we were doing it.
On 8/15/2018 at 10:23 AM, jefito said:Per Spock: “Logic clearly dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” Any engineer ought to be able to get behind that.
Well, yeah, I mean, who am I to argue with Spock? ;-b
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1 hour ago, Metrodon said:
Branding does matter. It matters to the people that work there, the investors and to potential new customers.
It definitely matters to investors, because they don't care about the things that really matter.
Maybe it matters to new customers, although I've never looked at a product that rebranded itself and said "oh, hey, now that they have a new logo and colors, I'll try it, even though I never did before!"
But speaking as a software developer who has been at companies that did a rebranding, I can tell you with absolute certainty that there is at least one group of people who works there to whom the rebranding matters not one bit. Well, that's not quite true. It matters a lot, in that they had to put in a hell of a lot of time and effort to change their code in ways that had zero practical effect, and if they're like every other software developer I've ever worked with, they're not happy about it. So it matters, but not in a positive way.
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10 hours ago, Analyst444 said:
... very experienced and very sophisticated Evernote users. Those types of customers are harder to satisfy in any business, particularly when the supplier can't charge them a higher price.
No, actually, we aren't. We can be satisfied by a product that does what we need it to do, efficiently and in which bugs and design flaws are addressed instead of remaining in the product for years. We can be satisfied by seeing the company put its resources into addressing those problems instead of into marketing fluff that appears, from the outside, to be intended to impress investors or attract new users, when the existing users are increasingly unhappy.
11 hours ago, Analyst444 said:However, it seems to me that the major challenge for Evernote management is how to make a significant enhancement to the product without making the product materially more complicated.
Many existing users are not looking for significant enhancements to the product, we are looking for stabilization, bug fixes, and the correction of design flaws. In fact, many of the "significant enhancements" (for example, the recent emphasis on collaboration and other business features) did make the product more complicated and were unwanted by many of the existing users.
11 hours ago, Analyst444 said:if I give Evernote management the benefit of the doubt, they decided now was the time to appeal to the masses by enhancing the brand.
Yes, that's exactly what they did. And before that, they decided "now" was the time to appeal to the masses by adding new features that many existing users didn't want, leaving the existing bugs and design flaws in place. It's a poor decision, to always look forward at what you don't have and never look at what you already do have.
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3 hours ago, EdH said:QuoteWe believe that people should spend more time on the things that matter most to them.
They clearly spent a lot of time on the rebranding. I hope that doesn't mean that rebranding matters the most to them. As opposed to, say, fixing all of the little things that have been bugging us users for years.
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I always hit the neo Notes "sync to Evernote" button after loading in notes from my pen. Then I go through the EN Neo Notes folder and do whatever I need to (tag the notes, move them to the right folder, etc), as if they were in my Inbox. I never leave the notes in my EN Neo Notes folder, though.
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? Had a quick look at the mfrs website - there's no mention of Evernote sync that I could see. What does your Android pen actually do when it syncs with Evernote? Does it create a new note in a special notebook? And if it uses a bluetooth link, is it paired with your laptop? Do you have your phone nearby when you try to use the pen with your laptop?
I just got myself an N2 a few days ago, so I can answer some of your questions:
What does your Android pen actually do when it syncs with Evernote?The N2 syncs to their own app, Neo Note. You can configure Neo Note to sync to Evernote.To use the pen, you have to have their special notebooks, which have some sort of tiny dot pattern on the paper that's recognized by a camera at the end of the pen. When you write, the pen and app know which page of which notebook you're on, and the strokes end up on that page of that notebook in their app.The in-app pages are vector images of some sort, and there's a decent little editor built in. It can also transcribe text, which you can then copy and share.Does it create a new note in a special notebook?When you do a sync to Evernote, you end up with a notebook stack called "Neo notes", with an EN notebook for each Neo Note notebook, and within those, an EN note for each page, containing an image (non-vector) of the page. Within EN, it looks like you can add text, tags, etc and any changes you make with the N2 will still update the image when you sync again.If you move or rename the EN note, it confuses the sync. Given that I don't pay all that much attention to EN folders (I do most of my organization via tags), I don't think this'll be a problem for me.And if it uses a bluetooth link, is it paired with your laptop?I'm only using my Android phone, but yes, it pairs with that.Do you have your phone nearby when you try to use the pen with your laptop?This doesn't really answer your question, but may get at the spirit of the question. You don't have to have the phone nearby or paired while you're writing. The pen has onboard memory (something like 8G), so you can write offline, and when you bring it near, or re-pair, it'll upload to the phone.All-in-all, this is a nice pen, and has met my expectations so far. There are a few features I'd like to see and will be requesting from the manufacturer:- Every notebook page has an email icon in the top-right corner. If you check it, the page automatically gets emailed to a predefined address. I'd like an EN icon as well, such that only those pages with the icon checked get synced.
- I'd like an icon in the bottom-right that says "the next page goes with this one" so I can combine pages when I'm in a single note-taking session.
- I'd like a way to sync the vector image to EN instead of the pixel image, and for EN to recognize it as if I'd done a handwriting note in EN. That way, I could fully edit the note in EN. I know this would have to make the note unsyncable from NN, but that's OK. Does anyone know whether EN's handwriting notes are in SVG format? (NN can export as SVG, so I imagine they could sync across to EN as SVG)
Devs: Post a full roadmap for users
in Evernote for Windows Requests (Versions 10.0 and above)
Posted
Words to live by!