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I just retested this version. 1. Reliability seems to have improved. 2. Apple Pencil support has improved from absolutely useless, to marginally useful. 3. The addition of Table support is enormously useful. 4. Scanning has improved. 5. PDF annotation still lacks zoom capability, but Pencil support is at least somewhat better. 6. Inexplicably for a note taking app, there is still no shortcut that allows resorting of outlines, bullets or numbered lists. I am still trying to figure out who the target audience is. For those of us who used Evernote as a place to store content produced elsewhere, speed and reliability were the keys— those are still diminished from the old versions which were rock solid and reliable in years of using them. For those who want a state-of-the-art note taking app, Evernote iOS lacks a variety of key features of other apps: 1. Real Pencil-kit pencil integration. 2. Excellent annotation 3. Powerful outlining. (Toggle outlines, keyboard shortcuts, etc. a la Craft, Notion, OneNote, Bear, Apple Notes) 4. Database features (a la Notion) I’m still hoping for major progress on both fronts. At this point, Evernote has state-of-the art search and a great web clipper— but they had those before this grand “experiment” began. They are starting to finally make some improvements— but then the first versions of Evernote for iOS v10 were fundamentally unusable and caused me to more my workflow elsewhere. It’s getting closer to a decent experience, but all Evernote “customers” are still Beta users at this point. Just try making a note in Craft, Notion, Bear, Apple Notes or even Evernote— you will be amazed at how much better the “note creation” environment is. Evernote has made some minor aesthetic progress while some of the alternatives have taken gigantic leaps. Just try Craft on the iPhone or iPad and you’ll see what I mean. Unfortunately, while Apple keeps rolling out new capabilities on its platforms (E.g., updated PencilKit), because Evernote has chosen to go the Electron route, they have to reinvent the wheel rather than leveraging capabilities that Apple has already created for “native” iOS apps. Unless Evernote think that they can outcode Apple’s huge teams of developers, this is bound to mean that Evernote gets further behind rather than catching up.

@jabaronThere isn't a great "all in one" solution to your problem. That was the beauty of Evernote in its legacy form. Unfortunately, the new iOS version is unreliable and who knows how long the "legacy" version of the desktop will last. I am exclusively a Mac and iOS user. I tried Devonthink. Its Mac experience was great, but the iOS experience was far less stellar. Right now I am using " Keep It." It stores your materials in their native format in your iCloud Drive, does OCR, has a decent tagging scheme, and a very good iOS app. The program is really an overlay onto iCloud Drive, to the developer doesn't have access to your data. The program itself is great, but it is occasionally slow-- I think because of the relative lagginess of iCloud Drive. I also looked at just putting my documents in the cloud with iCloud, OneDrive, Dropbox or Google Drive. Only iCloud supports native tagging-- but iCloud search doesn't do OCR search in iOS-- not even on pdfs-- and its desktop search is really limited only to pdfs. Google Drive has really powerful search-- certainly equivalent of Evernote. However, it doesn't have a tagging scheme. Dropbox is definitely the fastest and has the most reliable linking and sharing, but it doesn't do deep OCR and it doesn't have a tagging scheme. None of these solutions has a web clipper. You are left with three options: 1. Save the links but not the pages 2. Use OneNote or Notion (neither has a Safari web clipper). Bear also has a Safari web clipper-- but it really just pulls text and is in no way equivalent to Evernotes preexisting capabilities. 3. Continue to use Evernote

It is unlikely that the local drive support can return. The "new" Evernote is for all intents and purposes a "web app". Even if it were able to access your local drive, the "Evernote" part is in the cloud-- and thus you are no more secure on the local drive as you would be having your data on Evernote's servers. My main concern is what happens when the next MacOS update comes along-- is Evernote actually going to support it? Then what, stay on an old OS? Because of the web/server interaction needed to make v10 work, there are probably also some serious limitations on how fast Evernote v10 can work. Previously, Evernote was never very good as a "notes" app-- but it was fantastic as a place to store and maintain files in a way that they were fast and easy to find. The new Mac version is a marginally better note-taking app (use of blocks and standardized formatting) but an unambiguously worse storage experience (no local notebooks, substantially slower operation, losing data). In addition, the ability to annotate pdfs has been made far worse. In the companion world of iOS where many notes are taken, the new Evernote is unreliable and in the case of viewing and annotating documents, is now almost completely unusable. 6 months on, I harbor no illusion that the current management is going to awaken to what a huge mistake they have made. I continue to use the Legacy app while I search for a better workflow for my work. My mission, like so many other Premium users, is to have all of my data migrated to a new system and workflow, prior to the reup date of my subscription. If they had just implemented Pencilkit in iOS and cleaned up the editor in MacOS-- which they had largely done prior to v10-- Evernote would be far and away the system of choice. I never had a big complaint about inconsistent experiences on different platforms (this is much more of an issue in MS OneNote!). Instead, Evernote have thrown away their primary differentiators (speed, reliability, and customizability) in favor of making it easier for them to program exciting new features like a "Home" view, a mess of widgets I cannot imagine enhancing the productivity of anyone who actually understands how to use Evernote.

I keep checking in to see if Evernote is actually getting better. Unfortunately, every time I test if still fails. I‘m in the Apple Ecosystem, and I‘ve found that Keep It works extremely well, with reliable tagging, OCR and search, and a decent notes capability. I also discovered that Google Drive does a very good job of OCR and search. Good luck in your quest @normv8 , so far Evernote isn‘t it— and unfortunately unless Evernote changes course and builds native apps, it is never going to be the fast and reliable Evernote of yore. The Legacy version on the desktop continues to outperform the nearly 6-month-old „new and improved“ version, while iOS, for which there are no „legacy“ alternatives remains buggy, slow and difficult to use, despite its coat of fresh paint.

Despite its speed and great integration with iOS and Apple Pencil, the comments above regarding the lack of key features in Apple Notes were spot on. (See @stocky2605). So, my quest continued, since Evernote for iOS doesn't seem to be getting better and with the shift to non-native code, it may not be able to. For those tied to the MacOS/iOS ecosystem, there may be a better solution that incorporates multi-level folders, advanced tagging, OCR of all stored documents (including handwriting, photos, and text), the ability to store items like Word and Pages files in their native format. How about ultra-fast search? How about the ability to create notes in Apples Notes, Bear or Craft and have them transfer to the same storage system as other files with just a click? How about great PDF reading and annotation that actually works? Apple Pencil integration that doesn't look like a 2 year old stole a crayon? First, I tested Devonthink, a complex data management system that works great on the Mac. However, in iOS, where I do a lot of my work, the app is pretty poor. Some file types don't transfer over at all. No joy.... I had just about given up hope when I came across this article about Keep It: https://thesweetsetup.com/apps/the-best-evernote-replacement-app-for-long-term-research/ . It is a native app, it uses your own iCloud storage, so if the App is ever mothballed your files are still in your iCloud account and you can retrieve them. Keep It is basically an "on-device" file manager/note taker, so the developer doesn't interact with your data! Thus far I have found it to be fast, reliable, and it leverages the capabilities of Apple OS rather than trying to work around them. For example, it uses PencilKit to make sketches, and Keep It notes uses the same syntax as Apple Notes. Indeed Keep It is the file management structure that we can only hope that Apple actually implements natively someday. (Strange for example that you can tag everything in your Apple Files database-- but you cannot tag an Apple Note). However, unlike Apple Notes: You can use colors in iOS. You can change fonts You can export! You can even create tables, although that part of the experience isn't quite up to Apple Notes usability, it is still fully functional--unlike Evernote where that is true only in I have not yet tried transferring over my Evernote database yet, but so far this is the most promising alternative I have found to the swirling green arrow that greets me for 10-40 seconds every time I click on Evernote. So far, its longest search has lasted less than a second, its OCR has been just as good--and more reliable than Evernote, and it is much more flexible in terms of organization. While it is for Apple-only users, it is pretty compelling if that's your thing.

You might also check out Craft Notes. Although it lacks tags, the iOS interface is amazing, it has far superior Apple Pencil support and they just rolled out Toggle Outlines. I have found the platform to be extremely stable and the notes are, well, beautiful. Still, none of these options replace the storage capability of Evernote... provided of course that your note is actually stored. Maybe Devonthink and a tag system in iCloud, or search in Google Drive are the only alternatives. Ugh....

I've tried Apple Notes (and more recently Craft), because of Evernote's issues since October. Depending on your use case, Apple notes does a have a lot of features that the current version of Evernote doesn't do very well. With Apple Notes you get: A much faster experience on all platforms Faster and more reliable document scanning A much better iOS experience: "Instant" note taking on the iPad Inline viewing of PDF attachments Vastly superior document annotation Ability to reorder lists with drag and drop (in the case of tasks) or using iPad keyboard shortcuts Apple Watch integration Drag and drop Multiple instances Excellent Apple Pencil support, with shapes tools Beautiful dark mode Ability to create legible tables on both iPhone and iPad An app that never crashes or loses data. Decent OCR of handwriting You can add information to existing notes However, it isn't a replacement for the more "Devonthink" file management features. To get those, you would need to create a file management system using iCloud & Apple system tags (fast but no iOS OCR or any OCR of handwriting), or Google Drive (the only Cloud system that reliably does OCR of handwriting on stored documents-- concerns about privacy aside) or Devonthink. Devonthink, (I hear you @stocky2605)which I have also looked at, has some great document storage and management features, as long a you are on your desktop. The mobile experience is not great-- which file attachments are available is not consistent. But, they seem to be focused on making this a better experience. Plus, it allows you to save contents-- in their native form-- in an organized way. In Apple Notes You Will Miss: No Mail in or API OCR of scans and photos is hit or miss. No colors in iOS No web clipper - Linking function is not as robust and is more difficult to use No tags No saved searches No interface customization Document storage The BEST experience would be a fully-functioning and reliable Evernote. I should be able to compose outlines and notes and save them, as well as store them long-term. Evernote was previously a great storage solution: It was fast, allowed easy organization, had fantastic search and I used it reliably for a decade. BUT it wasn't that great from a note editing standpoint. I tended to produce a lot of content externally and then drop it into Evernote for storage and search. In the latest "upgrade" the desktop editing experience improved markedly but speed, the mobile experience and reliability got blown up. I've also had real problems with the web clipper. Why am I still on this forum? Evernote should/could be the winner. If Evernote manages to pack together speed, reliability and a modern note editing experience they would be the greatest productivity app on earth. But, I didn't need a new "Home" feature....yet , I need to be able to: Not wait for 30 seconds before I can begin composing a note Not have the green arrow spin for a minute when I click on a .pdf. Print my notes Export notes to other applications like Mail and Word. Annotate a PDF Use the Apple Pencil with my iPad Create outlines and manipulate them (impossible in iOS). Still no toggle outlines or other outlining supportfeatures Create tables in iOS-- its there... but not really. See attachments inline when I'm using the app Feel confident that ONE copy of every note I create will still be there, just as I left it, a month or a year from now. In other words some pretty basic things are holding Evernote back. If they focus on these rather than shiny objects this could be great. One of my gravest concerns is whether they can achieve the speed and reliability needed without building native apps. Notion has done it with Electron--- but Notion isn't a document storage solution and it really doesn't have any of the interface issues of a note creator (E.g. use of Apple Pencil, or Samsung stylus).

1. I already paid. I don’t see EN offering customers their money back. 2. This post was about iOS. @ArjenC is correct, the iOS application still loses data. I’ve experienced it on multiple occasions. Until this “update” you couldn’t see many of your saved .pdfs. Or, try to scan a multi-page document, a feat that Evernote used to be the best at— the scanner just starts taking photos of your documents, the walls.... One solution: use Scanner Pro or some other scanner— but EN no longer reliably accepts data from 3rd party apps.... 3. It is interesting that you are defending Evernote, yet you aren’t running v10 either. So, I guess that you are in agreement that it is Beta software. What other company does that to its customers? BTW, that was not EN management’s original intention. Their communication was “come on in the water is fine”— it was only after the uproar from customers that we heard that their real plan was for “power” users (a.k.a. Customers that needed the app to work) to remain on the “legacy” version. “If only we had communicated better.” What utter BS. 4. The “core” concept of Evernote is still better than most of the alternatives, and there are no perfect substitutes. That is why they still have customers. Migration, with tagging and workflows is not easy— or the entire customer base would have defected last October. 5. I don’t need an apology from EN, I need a plan. EN is essentially the outsourced IT department for my business and many others. That’s what EN was selling. They are at least— because of pressure from customers— starting to indicate what they are working on. But, this is far from a plan. For those of us who rely on mobile devices for all or a portion of our work, there is no “legacy” version to revert to— we are stuck with the bug ridden mess where 5 months on the “new” feature is that you can see a .pdf— although it may be so small you cannot read it. 6. The glass is neither half full nor half empty. The glass is broken and leaking. Pouring in more water in the form of additional features doesn’t change that.

Thanks. It is good to see that some of the defects in the “updated” software are being remedied. However, many remain. For example: If a pdf has a non-standard page length it will not open for editing. If you click on more than one tool annotation locks up completely. You still cannot zoom a pdf. The sketch feature now works, sort of. The inking quality is worse than Penultimate prior to the Apple Pencil. The inking tools are crude and not thought out. The plus button allows you to create a table which works only if you need a table exactly three columns wide and you never want to perform any table functions. A “fake” feature in a production app? I have heard that this will actually become a feature...someday. Overall app speed, while somewhat improved from last October, is still ridiculously slow. There is still no shortcut in the iOS editor that allows one to change the order of items in a list (In a Note Editor????) So, you now have a note editor in which you cannot even create and manipulate a basic outline. This is the “improved” editor? We have now been stuck with this buggy feature-depleted mess since October—. Is there a plan and a schedule to fix these defects? I have seen a bunch of “new feature” announcements— but the app is still broken in fundamental ways that make it nearly useless for creating, viewing and annotating notes. Isn’t that more important than a cool new “Home” view???? I am having nightmares from back when we users were told to wait for the “New Evernote” only to discover that the only thing being changed was the design of the Mads logo. It wasn’t an improvement, but at least that didn’t make the performance of the app worse. Here’s to watching the green swirling arrow every time I need to do something in Evernote. It should say, “This delay brought to courtesy of our decision to switch to Electron”. The real truth is that app performance is probably never really going to get much better, because the apps no longer run natively....on anything. Evernote’s previous message to users was that Evernote was meant to be our “private, trusted, lifetime memory” and was intended for our “most important work.” Evernote no longer allows access to local notebooks, the data sits on servers that Evernote doesn’t control, the apps have been unstable, data has been lost and mangled. After years of asking, Evernote still doesn’t have a feature that allows users to encrypt and protect a note. I personally have wasted countless hours because of this unconscionably irresponsible rollout of beta-quality software into a production environment. As paying users we deserve better, and we also deserve a plan with actual milestones for working out of the mess that Evernote management created.

To get the horizontal line, type the blue “+” insert button and choose “Divider”. That said, I share many of your frustrations.

Unfortunately, Evernote seems to think that their system is well-functioning and they are already hard at work on new features like the "homepage." However, two days ago, I attempted to annotate a pdf on my Mac and I couldn't save the annotations--the Save button is grayed out, another 30 minutes wasted. Meanwhile, the iOS apps remain a complete disaster-- and there is no legacy option for these. The only positive differentiators I can find for Evernote right now are the "Mail In" feature and the Web Clipper. The system is slow, the "new" editor is inferior to Apple Notes, Bear, Notion, and Craft. I.e., just about every alternative I've tried. In iOS, the sketch and table features are apparently not yet fully realized (i.e., they are inferior or simply don't work) My problem is not that the "new" version doesn't have all of the features of the old one. The problem is that the "new" system is unreliable and doesn't work. There is still a lot of potential here, but if their strategy is to plunge ahead with new releases with new interfaces rather than fixing basic functionality, then this company is doomed. I don't see them offering refunds to customers for wasting vast amounts of their time. Particularly disconcerting are their statements that "oh, only 5% of users need this feature". However, the vast majority of Evernote users aren't paying. What percentage of paid users are going to leave because of the mess they have created? Those paying customers were waiting patiently FOR YEARS as Evernote management promised improvements. Instead, we now choose between a de-contented and unstable version with "new" features, or a stable "legacy" version with a limited life and no new features. I, and virtually every Premium customer I have corresponded with are already at least halfway out the door. Of course they cannot tell you which features they will "add back," they didn't plan to add any back. The most amazing thing is how "amazed" they seem to be that their most loyal users are unhappy. This Electron thing is a HUGE strategic blunder-- I don't know that they will ever recover. Native apps will always work better, even if they are harder to program. Evernote's view seems to be that even if the apps are worse, slower and less functional, at least programming them will be easier. In a competitive environment this is losing strategy. If Craft, Apple Notes, Notion, or Bear implement a decent web clipper and mail in features there will be a stampede out the door. While this won't be an option for many users, I have moved the majority of my work to Apple Notes-- which is--despite missing some of Evernote's legacy features-- amazingly less stressful, more coherent, and everything works like it is supposed to.

For iPad Evernote should just integrate Apple’s PencilKit— vastly superior writing experience and virtually no coding....

Sorry you are having so may problems, you have plenty of company. But No, don't blame yourself. There were many Beta testers-- I was one. I can assure you that many of the issues you see, and dozens of others were brought to the developers' attention and were not addressed before this horrible thing was released. I too used the dividing line, there is a shortcut-- just type three dashes and hit enter, and voilá, you get the solid line. In addition, on the desktop version you can type a "#" or "##" or "###" and get large, medium and small headings. It would be great if at "launch" Evernote actually provided users with a guide to what had changed. Many, many user hours are being wasted because of this poor communication. I am much more concerned about the lethargy, instability and bugs in the new version. Yesterday I annotated a pdf I had saved months ago, just by highlighting a passage and saving. The entire pdf disappeared and is unrecoverable! There were lots of things I didn't like about Evernote, but the things that kept me were: 1. It was super fast on my Mac and iOS, and 2. In numerous years of use, it never lost any data. The developers have tried to address some of the other shortcomings, but in the process have made the app buggy, slow and unreliable.

I annotated a pdf with a couple of highlights in Evernote 10 with Big Sur. It caused the entire pdf to disappear from my note with no recovery. I have the old Mac version on my desktop alongside the new version- the pdf is gone there too. I was testing to see if things were improving. Within 2 minutes I had already lost data. My advice: don't even test out Evernote 10 with your live database. After working with Evernote for over a decade, I am migrating to Apple Notes, I cannot afford to wobble through this nightmare as Evernote figures out how to operate their own platform--I am trying to run my own business. At this point it isn't a comparison of features any more. Evernote have a few features, like the web clipper and mail-in that are great. The new editor looks good. But, if you cannot trust that it won't lose your work, what's the point???? At this point OneNote, Bear, Apple Notes all have one HUGE feature advantage over Evernote-- they do what they are supposed to and generally don't destroy or lose your data.

DanielKT, I agree with your point about designing software to exploit the unique capabilities of the device and software architecture. iOS, especially with the addition of keyboard support to the iPad, a now occupies a space very close to "Desktop Class" and for some functions, like annotation, iOS actually exceeds the capabilities of the desktop platform. Example: In Apple Notes I can format docs, create tables, view pdfs in-line inside a note, annotate pdfs, and photos with the Apple Pencil, and draw and diagram effectively, I can move items up and down in an outline or in a list. (OneNote for iOS has similar capabilities) I use this functionality all the time. I can do virtually none of these things in the "new" Evernote. The things that Evernote used to do better than anyone else: Tagging, Annotation, Scanning, and OCR are now not unique-- competitors are doing them effectively. While other apps, including OneNote, Bear, Apple Notes, Notion and others are striding forward in leveraging the new capabilities of iOS, Evernote's "update" so far is a giant step backward. Evernote no longer identifies search results inside a pdf., scanning is slower, tagging is changed, annotation is virtually impossible, and the system is buggy and it lags and often freezes. The workflow, storage capabilities and search capabilities of Evernote should have allowed them to outdistance competitors. Instead of just fixing the well-known problems of the Evernote editor, they have become internally focused on making everything "the same" and, I fear, they are a few advances by competitors away from becoming completely irrelevant. Homogenizing is great if you are in front of your competitors in terms of features on all platforms-- not so good if you are homogenizing toward the "least common denominator" (aka a "web app").