decon

13 minutes ago, jefito said:

This is not made up, nor is it in any way making excuses for Evernote's development process. There are known reasons in the software development world why bugs/feature requests might not get addressed quickly enough for customers. It's all just information for folks who aren't familiar with the software development process (many users of software aren't). A question was asked -- maybe rhetorical -- and I offered an answer. But note that nowhere did I ever claim anything at all about Evernote's internal practices.

Thanks, sorry if I was too harsh in my reply. My point was that it doesn't have to do with the design or development processes as such, it has to do with the decisions made by the Evernote team. We seem to agree.

12 minutes ago, jefito said:

Of course forum feedback is important; that's why they have a forum (and it's one of the reasons that I participate). Nobody said that it wasn't important. So is collected quantitative data. It's all grist for the mill. Not sure what your point is.

My point is that it seems like you were making excuses for why Evernote haven't done this or that. You react to feedback posts and obviously very engaged in this community (which is awesome!), but don't really address the presented issue. Instead you defend, or at least, try to explain why the Evernote team hasn't come around to fix this or that. Such information is nice-to-have, but it doesn't address the problem posted by users. Example:

"As a company, you want to show that you're adding features with some degree of regularity, even if you're not able to solve the tough ones quickly (if they were easy to fix, don't you think that they'd have dome it by now?). Otherwise you look completely moribund. So we've been getting a pretty good stream of nice-to-haves (mainly popularly requested features). Hopefully they'll crack the hard ones some time soon but those can take time.".

I don't see how this addresses the real issue that people post here. However, you do explain (and well) how some companies handle design processes. It's not a common mantra for all companies to "(...) show that you're adding features* (...) not able to solve the though ones quickly (...) getting a pretty good stream (...). My colleagues and I at the Interaction Design group at Aarhus University, all agree that simple features like having the option to have more sub-notebooks rather than just one level should be essential. Is this a hard thing to fix? We stick to Evernote because it is great in many respects, but we all feel like it's been going down hill for quite some times... and yes, it is easy to say that we are a group of people blah blah, you decide if you believe me - don't care.

32 minutes ago, jefito said:

Non sequitur. Evernote Food never had anything to do with any perceived "bloat" in the Evernote application. My take is that it was more of a marketing/branding thing, as well as -- at a guess -- being another, separate testbed for their API, which is a cornerstone of their 3rd-party integration/development efforts. As a product, it wasn't useful to me, but some people liked it.

Fair enough, again we have to guess, but in my opinion is was bloat in the sense that the design team use time and resources on what things that don't really add to their main and great product: Evernote. Call it waste instead of bloat, dunno.

This is my experience from reading your posts, feel free to disagree - neither of us want to waste out time battling out this trivial issue (right?).

*not sure what constitutes a feature here. To me a feature is also changes like "we made huge changes to the editor, like adding new editing options for tables".

37 minutes ago, jefito said:

You're correct, but again, when forum users go past merely reporting problems in the software to speculating/opining about Evernote's development choices, they've opened the door to discussion on that topic as well. I would hope that I can add to that without it being taken as excuse making. But perhaps not...

I see your point. We should stop our discussion here as well, we won't get anywhere or help the future development of Evernote.

And yes Jeff, we can most def' agree on that, and that Evernote is overall a great product Thanks for your nice tone and fine points.

Correct - it is currently possible to change text in the cells, sooo, that works!

The problem is that I don't want to use 3. party software to do what is soooo basic for an editor. Look at Dropbox Paper to get an idea of how an online table editor could work. Dropbox Paper is a new product, maybe 6 months old atm, and still in "beta". How old is evernote? I know that sometimes, it's easier to start from stratch and design a new editor... But I think this is a needed feature. There are other weird editor bugs that pop up from time to time, will try and capture them when they happen in the future.

I don't suspect Evernote to change the editor anytime soon. Just wanted to put my feedback out there. They will probably add some kinds of integration with other services like the Drive thing they have worked on.

It's easy to make up reasons for why the development and design of evernote is going the way it's going. That doesn't change that the feedback provided in this forum is extremely valuable, probably more than collected quantitative usage data which is so populare with the Califorina ideology. The bloat thing is true, Evernote have even admitted this by closing down project like that weird food app. In other words, you don't need to argue and explain as to why Evernote haven't fixed this or that bug or feature. People are complaining that Evernote seem, at least from our perspective, to ignore  some basic community requests. Instead they focus on bloat stuff like Drive integration (my subjective opinion of course). I don't care about Drive, some might do, but I think that more people would benefit from having an update editor. Drive integration is only for people with Drive, updates to editor is for everyone. I could go on, but this thread is not about discussing development and design processes - instead it is a thread to discuss and provide feedback on the editor (please correct me if I'm wrong).

My feedback is specifically on the table editor in the current version of the binary client (using mac and win). It lacks options for styling (proper!), easily selection of rows and columns like in spreadsheet software, and tables needs to be editable on Android mobile app. It is currently an awful and stressful experience working with tables in Evernote. Please let me know if I'm missing something - if so, I'm sorry for providing ignorent feedback.