bigtelco

I’ve observed this same behavior. At least it’s just annoying and not fatal . I found that of I type very slowly and keep my title short I can get to the end, or I type the title in the text field and paste onto the title line.

DTLow. Good point. This ain’t my first Evernote rodeo either. From now on, I will remember not to trust Evernote to properly test its software before releasing it. My work with the Desktop Beta gave me overconfidence that the iOS team were actually going to release something exceptional, ok, at least functional... So, it was my first update after I downloaded iOS 14. Lesson learned.

“First, do no harm” I have been an Evernote user for over a decade, used it to store data for my personal life and business, recommended it to friends and colleagues, and lived through a management team that consistently failed to deliver. My hope was that I would not have to go through the effort of transferring thousands of notes to a new system and that Evernote would finally get its act together. Under Iain Small’s leadership this finally seemed to be happening. The Company was communicating with its users. It spent an agonizingly long time on the Beta of its web browser which, from a user perspective, looked nice but didn’t add many new features. At least the editor window started to look better. We were told that the underlying infrastructure that supported our data was basically “a mess”, but that the team was working hard to create a clean and consistent infrastructure and that finally we could look forward to rapid releases of new features. I served as a Beta tester for the Mac desktop version, and it appeared that, while slow, progress was being made. Now this: A release so flawed that I am reconsidering my relationship with the Company. After experiencing the care that the team took with the desktop Betas, how did this mess make it to release? I do most of my work in iOS. I have begun using Apple Notes and OneNote because I lack confidence that data that I post through this app will actually be there tomorrow. ☹️ The good: The note editor looks better. There are standardized headings, but unfortunately there are no shortcuts to get to them. In fact, you have to tap 3 times to get to one. Better than the previous version but hardly efficient. In a notes editor you want to get your ideas down quickly. The button to add tags is helpful. It would be much better if there were a keyboard method to do this (one of the refinements one would hope for in an update). Formatting appears to be better and more consistent. And Now the Bad: Speed. Loading notes, search, and even going between viewing modes is noticeably slower. (This is also true on the updated version of the Mac desktop and web versions of the service). I have had several instances where the app stops and needs to be reloaded. Changing text format (E.g., using a header) requires that one tap the formatting icon, tap a text icon, select a text style, then tap on the screen outside the formatting box to hide it before returning to typing. That’s five steps to select a header. By contrast, in Apple Notes you hit one keyboard short cut, type your header and done, the same is true in Bear. Even in MS OneNote, you tap once to select a style. In Notability you can create three favorites which are available with a tap on the menu bar. My point is that there are numerous strategies Evernote could have adopted to make this process efficient. They didn’t. Search. Search seems to still work reliably. However, I encountered numerous glitches where I would see search results but the app would cease functioning when I attempted to select one of them. Sketch. Evernote began by embracing writing on the iPad. They built an app, Penultimate, to take advantage of this capability. Prior to the Apple Pencil they even sold and Evernote/Adonit stylus. The old Sketch had several issues: if you exited the app or responded to a notification without hitting “Done” while sketching your work was immediately lost, the canvas was limited in size, the highlighter/marker tool was ugly, there was no way to type in a sketch, and the inking experience was definitely subpar. But, the app did recognize the Apple Pencil, you could write short notes and there was a passable shapes tool. With this “upgrade” the shapes tool no longer functions at all, writing from the Pencil appears and disappears on a stroke by stroke basis, and the feature is no completely unusable. Typing in titles. If you type quickly the app will lose letters. I have not encountered this yet in typing in the body of a note. But, it is disconcerting that you cannot do something as basic as typing a note title. PDF Annotation: One key feature of taking electronic notes is the ability to annotate pictures and .pdfs, as one would with physical media. Here again, Evernote had a capability that was not great, but was functional. The new version? Not so much. I attempted to annotate a 4-page .pdf as a test. I could open the .pdf immediately in Preview from my note, however after I found and tapped on the tiny annotation button at the bottom of the screen (good luck new Evernote users) all I got was a spinning arrow that never managed to actually open the .pdf. So, I tried annotating a photograph. Fortunately, I was able to get to the annotation screen. However, to my disappointment the cryptic icons and clunkiness of the old version was still present. Still worse, the “disappearing ink” of the old version, which appears to be largely corrected on the Mac Desktop, is still here and worse than before. Try handwriting an annotation. At first, the ink is a dim trace which then darkens over a few seconds. Is this a feature???? If you write too quickly the app misses strokes, only you won’t be able to tell until the ink darkens. But, wait to long and your pen is no longer a pen— it turns into a selection tool and begins moving parts of your previously invisible handwriting around on the screen. Do the developers actually try to use this *****? Tables: Evernote made tables available in the desktop versions of their apps a few years ago. On the desktop, this capability is quite functional, pleasant to use, and performs well. This functionality was finally supposed to be available in this app with this release. There is now a button to insert a table. If you tap it you get a 1x2 table on iPhone and a 1x3 table on iPad. Need another column? Nope. Want to format a cell? Nope. This is actually non-functional. I guess the Table button is a peacekeeper that suggests that there might actually be a functionality someday. It sort of reminds of three years ago when Evernote announced a major release, only to discover the new feature was a redesign of Mads, the green logo elephant. This was a somewhat clunky but completely functional app. Now it is a better looking, but unreliable and even less functional than before. Meanwhile, the latest versions of Apple Notes, OneNote and Notion are super-stable and have useful new features.

Still no response from Evernote. An example of me trying to print in sketch. Embarrassingly, comically bad, and superlatively disappointing.

I see that Evernote for iOS and iPadOS appears to allow the creation of tables. However: There is no mechanism to create additional columns No mechanism to change formatting (background color) in cells. Scribble doesn't work properly in table cells (like it does in Apple Notes for example) The same is true in iOS. Was this released without Evernote actually completing the feature?

Macsarule: I have been using Notability while waiting and hoping. If all they changed was to eliminate the glitch where sketches would be lost if you switched to another app that would have been an improvement. However, if looks like they started revising the rest of the code and sent out something half-baked. Here's hoping that they at least give us an explanation and a plan. I've started using Apple Notes and OneNote for some of my work with good results. It is painful because of my embedded base of notes in Evernote, but other apps are making leaps forward in both UX and features while Evernote is still struggling.

Lol. Actually, I did pinch to zoom here. I just exited to take a screenshot. No matter, As you can see from the top line where I actually wrote: “This is an intermittent issue?” , this is completely unusable. Ugh....

BTW. This is not an “intermittent” issue. Apple Pencil does not work. I am using an iPad Pro 12.9”, Apple Pencil 2, iPad OS 14: i.e., it isn’t older hardware that is the problem. While the previous version of the app did have one huge glaring issue: sketches would be lost immediately if you left the app without tapping “Save” and many small ones: messy ink, horrible highlighting. However, it did have some usefulness: the ability to draw, a shapes tool, and decent handwriting. The new version fixed the glaring issue but removed all usefulness. Writing is intermittent, as is recognition of shapes. It is also very low resolution. In short, it went from really bad to completely unusable.

I see the ability to add a table in iOS. Good. But, there is no apparent support for adding columns, color fill or any of the features of tables in Evernote. Is this simply not built yet, or is this the actual product?

An Epic Total Fail I am a long-time premium member. I have been holding on for a long time hoping that the new management would finally start adding features that users have been requesting for years. I had been hoping that with all of the feedback, complaints and requests, annotation would be improving. Annotation in the Mac Beta has gotten very slightly better--but is still very clunky. This is supposed to be the new "improved" Evernote for iPad OS. Apparently, they have been working on it for so long that that they missed the fact that the Apple Pencil was invented. I agree, this is a "Total Fail." Wow. Even Bear, developed by a massive team of 3 people has Pencil support. This is actually MUCH WORSE than the previous version of Evernote for iPad, and sketch in that version was already comically bad. Free apps like OneNote and Apple Notes are way ahead of a supposedly "premium" Evernote experience. Extremely disappointing. ☹️

My solution so far has been to use Notability and send to Evernote. Totally amazed that Evernote would not fix such an obvious flaw.

They have actually improved the handwriting and created shapes tools. But, still lack: 1. A better highlighter tool that doesn't show "layers". 2. The No Autosave function is crazy. Why go to all the work of making a nice tool and then no autosave? I get a phone call when I am writing and everything I have written is lost. 3. Sketches were a "thing" 5 years ago. Today, with an iPad Pro and Apple Pencil, these are real note taking tools. We should be able to handwrite pages of notes inside the app. (Don't get me started about how bad Penultimate is), plus it is external to the App. Apple Notes and OneNote allow one to create notes in the app. BTW. I'm doing the same thing as DTLow, creating content in Notability or Apple Notes and then sending it to a note in Evernote. Slow, but more reliable.