Tippis

It's an old one at this point, but you could probably include this gem: Things You Should Never Do, Part I as well, since it talks about some of the internal pressures to rewrite from scratch when it's often the worst thing you can ever do. Note the date — April 2000. And here we are, almost a decade and a half later, and people are still doing the same basic mistakes.

Hmm… just to be that annoying forum user: Another key question that I think needs to be answered is: What problem do you feel that you are solving by removing pages as the core unit of organisation within a document? In particular, what problem exists now that makes this removal a “good thing” compared to when the same idea was rejected years ago because it simply did not fit the use case of the app? What is the new use case that you feel has supplanted the tried and tested use case of organising thoughts by page?

For the record, the terms of service (https://evernote.com/legal/tos.php) offer this suggestion under the section “Right to Modify the Service”: You also acknowledge that a variety of Evernote actions may impair or prevent you from accessing your Content or using the Service at certain times and/or in the same way, for limited periods or permanently, and agree that Evernote has no responsibility or liability as a result of any such actions or results, including, without limitation, for the deletion of, or failure to make available to you, any Content. You agree that we shall not be liable to you or to any third party for any modification, suspension or discontinuance of any part of the Service. However, if you are a subscriber for Evernote Premium, Evernote Business or another paid version of the Service (each a “Premium Service”) and find that any such modifications or interruption of the Premium Service adversely affects you, you may notify our Customer Support team, explain the adverse impact the modification has created and, if you desire, request a termination of your Premium Service. Upon receipt of any such request, we will endeavor to promptly remedy the adverse impact caused by the modification, extend the duration of your Premium Service subscription for a period of time equal to the interruption and/or refund a portion of your Premium Service subscription fee equal to the remaining unused term of the Premium Service subscription, as we determine appropriate. Referring to the highlighted sections might help you in your communication with the support team.

A more common question that needs to be answered is: Why did you not release this new app as its own product, seeing as how it has little to nothing to do with the fundamental purpose of Penultimate? By the way, as a counter-breakdown of your feature breakdown, consider this: The skeumorphic design was fit for purpose. It allowed instant, easy, and intuitive access to everything. It was not distracting in any way. That is just a silly assertion with no apparent basis in reality. If you felt it was ugly, then that's one thing — aesthetics can be addressed without slashing and burning functionality. The metaphor of pages in a book works. It is used everywhere, and for a good reason.The new design is not immersive, since it requires you to take your focus away from the actual writing far more often and since it offers exactly zero means of doing large-scale document manipulation — you have to constantly worry about doing everything exactly right from the start. The new design also does not give you access to all the tools you need. Instead, it requires you to jump through more hoops every time you need anything, and woe betide if you are a bit clumsy in your tool selection since that creates junk on your page. Oh, and scrolls have not been fit for purpose since, oh, the first century AD or so — that is itself another immersion breaker. That metaphor is no longer used anywhere, again for good reason.The full-screen overlay zoom is perfect because it allows both large-scale input and constant overview of where are in the document. It does not make you lose your concept of space — it does the exact opposite since you always see what you're doing.The zoom box makes you lose your concept of space, and reduces your ability to control your position on the page. It does not improve your access to tools (since there is no real difference) and just puts you even further away from some common editing actions. It also makes the entire experience less immersive since you have a hard, unalterable, and not particularly useful split of your screen — suddenly, less than half of that touch area is actually useful for note-taking, and you're stuck in this confined space as if it were one of those POS/Tracking handhelds that DHL lugs around, where you always have to sign the dotted line in the tiny window or you won't get your package.By the way, not to be (very) mean, but I can't help noticing that in your illustration of the zoom in v6, the zoom box does not correspond to what's currently being edited. This was probably not your intent, but it is very indicative of the state of your app right now. The fact that you didn't notice this rather belies the claim that the new view somehow improves your spatial awareness on the page. Some counter-points to your FAQ Disabling scrolling is always bad — never take control away from the user. Oh, and there is no way to turn off drift because drift no longer exists in the app. Auto-scroll at a pre-determined and 100%-incompatible-with-everything speed is not the same thing as the drift functionality that made Penultimate a stand-out app.Disallowing landscape viewing is bad — again, never take control away from the user. It was previously possible to create landscape documents, for instance for interactive presentations, and that functionality is now gone for no apparent reason.Some required additions to your How-to How do I insert pages in the middle of a document?¹How do I remove pages from the document?¹How do I rearrange the order of pages in the document?¹How do I quickly navigate to the middle, end, or any other part of a 50+ pages document?¹How do I make the zoom follow my writing rather than force the opposite (and inevitably fail at it)?How do I select objects that exist at the edge of the page?How do I restore the line width of documents opened in v6.0?And, perhaps more importantly: How do I (legally) get hold of a copy of Penultimate that already does all these things, and which offers far better precision and responsiveness in writing — i.e. Penultimate 5.3.1.ipa?Alternatively: when can we see the vast array of missing functionality restored to version 6 in such a way that it can at least begin to resemble a proper Penultimate update? ¹ If the word “page” offends some design sensibility, just substitute with “a large, logically coherent section of notes”.

Soooo… how soon is “very soon”? It's lunch-time already; they've had four full days to respond, including two full work days, and more enough time to hold some crisis meetings to figure out, if not a way forward, then at least some immediate remedial actions. /me taps watch… On a completely unrelated note, I wonder how long it takes to call Apple and issue a recall?

Goodnotes has both zooming options though; zoombox, and full-screen zoom like penultimate. Ooh! Good to know. I don't know if I just didn't notice it or if they were focusing on zoombox because it looks fancier, but I'll definitely give that one a second look. It seemed very neat otherwise.

Notability has that horrible split-screen zoom, though, doesn't it? I've only looked through screen shots and videos of the various apps on the market, and the only one I've seen that does zoom “properly” (i.e. full-screen) seems to be Bamboo paper. The lack of a distinct and separate writing area is a large part of what made me choose Penultimate all those years ago, and I'd hate to go back to that.

He means that, inside of Penultimate, you could previously only access documents that were collected in the Evernote notebook called “Penultimate”. If you wanted to work with notes from any other (Evernote) notebook, you had to move them into the Penultimate “notebook” first in order to access them from the app. Now, they've unified the vocabulary across the two platforms: a Penultimate “notebook” is now an Evernote “note”; a Penultimate collection of notebooks is now an Evernote “notebook”; a Penultimate “page” is now just a segment of an Evernote note, since those notes are just long rows of mixed content. Since Evernote has no concept of pages, they have been eradicated from Penultimate as well. v6.0 allows you to navigate the entire Evernote document tree — from notebook collections down to notes, whereas before you were limited to just one notebook and the notes within it. So all you're missing by reverting to a working version is that tighter Evernote integration — i.e. the thing that makes notebooks not be books any more.

…and then immediately stopped when it became clear that they had a severe issue at their hands — long before most people probably had updated and started to pour in. Not even within those scattered few comments was there any suggestion that they were going to address the issues beyond some vague (and in every way insufficient) “doing something for next version”. So a handful of posts over a lunch break just after release doesn't quite qualify as a response to the mountain of user concerns that happened over the last four days. It was the weekend. I don't think they work on weekends. I'm not sure. At any rate, they don't post as much on weekends. Maybe this week we will hear more. The weekend started on Saturday; the feedback started trickling in on Thursday and became a flood on Friday. And really, the first reports of data loss and loss of functionality on Thursday should have put them on alert for the week-end so that they could at least give of a peep of acknowledgement of what people were saying. They had ample time to give more thorough replies and more than enough time to arrange for a watch (and preliminary replies). They may not work 24/7, but they run an 24/7 service and need to be able to at least show sign of life — it's a good idea after any big rewrite and release, and an especially good idea given the early indications that something had gone horribly wrong… What's not a good idea is to give some ineffectual and rather evasive replies to a few hours after release and then let the issue simmer for a day and a half before taking the week-end off.

…and then immediately stopped when it became clear that they had a severe issue at their hands — long before most people probably had updated and started to pour in. Not even within those scattered few comments was there any suggestion that they were going to address the issues beyond some vague (and in every way insufficient) “doing something for next version”. So a handful of posts over a lunch break just after release doesn't quite qualify as a response to the mountain of user concerns that happened over the last four days.

Me too. I was on there right away to voice my anger and my posts are still pending. There are only 35 posts - what does that tell you It's particularly funny how even among those few posts, the blatant astroturfing is being drowned out by people reporting (very early on) about the issues everyone else started seeing as more and more installs got updated. I'm guessing that it was that observation that made them put an end to the comment approval process.

No. If you have never used iTunes to sync your iPad and/or never used iTunes to download and install an old version of Penultimate, you're pretty much screwed — your computer will never have touched the app or downloaded the .ipa package. With a bit of luck, and some measure of cheekery, you might be able to find a pirated version of the app circulated on jailbreak sites for those who got themselves locked out of the app store. Short of someone hosting and linking their .ipa here, that's your best bet. The thing is that those answers happened very early before the deluge of complaints came rolling in, and they only addressed a very minute selection of issues (note disappearance and pen connection) — neither of which they were actually able to do anything about. They were some immediate answers to critical functionality loss that were jotted down during the lunch break just after release — nothing more. Everything that has come to light once people started upgrading breaking their installs en masse is left without comment. It's been two full work days and a week-end since then, and in fairness, the estimation that nothing has been answered is 100% accurate. While it may be understandable that they can't really do anything outside of office hours, a tiny peep to say that, yes, they've actually noticed that the current version is an abject failure would help a lot — it's crisis communication 101. This should have happened Thursday evening, not (as is the best we can hope for now) Monday morning.

So using my last post as a newly registered, I thought I'd do something constructive and offer you a head-start on the work that you will undoubtedly be doing come Monday. First of all, and as should be abundantly clear by now, you should probably get on the horn to Apple and issue a recall of v6.0 due to “bugs effecting catastrophic data loss” — it's close enough to the truth of all the document breakage that is occurring that no-one will question it or get into trouble. Well, not with Apple, at least. Then, while working on a re-release of 6.0, here is an approximate MuSCoW of the issues presented in this and other threads (except that the “won't” actually means “will never do this, now or in the future” here, rather than the more common “won't happen in this version, but possibly later”): Must Reinstate per-page viewReinstate page navigation (thumbnailed)Reinstate page editing (moving, deleting, clearing pages)Massively improve sensitivity, speed, and precision of writing detectionBugfix the writing position to match the pen positionBugfix the line width increase between zoomed-in and zoomed out writingRetroactively fix all documents affected by above bugRetroactively split documents collated by the toilet-paper document designInvert toolbar behaviour (always showing by default, option to hide in full-screen mode)ShouldReinstate page borders to offer run-off areas for selection tools etc.Reinstate auto-prune of empty pagesReinstate respect for the user's chosen paper orientation, rather than suddenly make off-axis writing impossibleReinstate more precise eraser controlsReinstate combined pen settings (size, colour)Reinstate a pen-centric UI navigation (everything instantly available with 1–2 pokes, no need to release pen to do gestures).Reinstate full-screen zoom w/ see-through paperReinstate drift in zoomed-in viewReinstate second-screen “audience” view for presentations on projectors and the like.Redesign all tool icons to be distinct and intuitiveReinstate a clear and concise document browser view (names shown by default, current page/editing position shown on front).Drastically reduce the UI path between document view and collections of documents (1 button as opposed to 3–4 zoom-outs)Clearly separate tool area from editing area.Ensure that split-screen zoom UI elements (really, the only buttons at the bottom of the page) are subject to wrist protection from all angles.CouldKeep full-screen as an optionKeep toilet-paper navigation as an optionKeep navigation gestures as an optionKeep constant-speed drift as an option, perhaps as a “read mode” with auto-return at the end of a line or some such.Keep split-screen zoom as an optionHave an option to turn gestures OFF.Include a toggle-able feature discovery mode that clearly demonstrates and highlights all gestures and touch hotspots in the different views.Won’tHave the same gesture not do very different things (“zoom out” is not the same intent as “close document”).Have very similar gestures for different things (scroll-swipe most be solidly distinguished from drawing a line; both most be solidly distinguished from pinch to zoom).Ever call it “focused on writing” again while forcing the user to jump through more hoops to do basic writing and hiding fundamental writing tools from them.As people suggest more issues, I'll add them to this list.

It is. It's probably just a spambot prevention measure, to be honest, but those of us who just registered to take part in the discussion on this downgrade were allotted 5 posts for the first day. It shows up in our reply boxes as a nice green heading saying something along the lines of (in my case) “You can make 2 more posts until Today, 09:11 PM. This restriction is in place until Today, 08:34 PM”

Oh, and one more thing I just noted… Did you reinterpret my old notes to add OBESEPEN PHATSCRIPT to everything?! Any note that I opened in 6.0 now has four times the line width on everything compared to an older 5.0 document that is blissfully unopened and unaffected. You've made my new notes illegible. Compare the following (and no comments on my handwriting please…): Both snippets are written in the same version, using the same pen size at the same zoom level, and now displayed at the same zoom level. The upper one has been… ehm… let's call it “creatively reinterpreted” (because the correct description would contain course enough language to leave marks on people's monitors) by 6.0 into a smeared mess. My scribblings are messy to begin with, but as long as I can read them, it's ok; add in the app's decision to make everything bold and suddenly, not even that criterion is met. Other posts around here suggest that any note touched by 6.0 is irredeemably lost even if it's possible to revert to 5.0, presumably because the underlying file format has changed. Even if that wasn't the case, they'd be unretrievable due to this very odd and unalterable change in the pen size of the lines drawn. I'm lucky — I've only lost three fairly recent and short notes due to this; I can't even imagine the mass loss and destruction others will have suffered.