Joe Pairman

Yes, this seems to be the case. By the way, I haven’t been having any luck with customer support - just one response saying I can’t have a trial of the Personal level and asking what I thought I’d get out of a paid subscription! I’m sure it wasn’t meant like that and the person was trying to help, but this does seem like an odd way of doing business. Surely a long term paying subscriber should have at least the same options that a completely new user has. At this point I’m feeling at the “just take my money” stage as I do need the tasks, etc, to use EN properly. But, I wonder if I’m being entirely sensible putting my trust in a company that seems to be struggling with some of the fundamentals.

I see -- it's reassuring actually to hear that it wasn't just me who got stuck in this state. As I mentioned, I have to assume this is just a lack of foresight or some technical limitation of the way the billing system works -- surely this can't be deliberate since EN would be losing some longterm paying customers if so. Yes, I'll post back once I hear from Support -- hopefully they themselves do have a way to fix this!

Thanks! I did contact support though I may just need to give them more time -- it's only been one business day so far.

So with the new plans, I realized that my old Plus subscription was fairly useless -- it certainly wasn't going to get me much of a Tasks feature and one or two capabilities had already dropped off with it. That's fine -- Evernote does need to make money, and I appreciate that the company kept me "grandfathered" on Plus for as long as I wanted to stay. However, what came next wasn't so great, and while it's partly a lesson learned for me, I'd recommend that EN adopt some customer retention practices from other tools. I was kind of interested in trying Tasks properly, and seeing how the Google Calendar integration might be useful. But I knew I didn't want to stay on Plus, so though I'd cancel first anyway (to avoid accidentally forgetting to cancel later, as has happened to me before). And then I assumed that I'd be able to try out the new features with a trial of Personal whenever I wanted, and that if I actually wanted to upgrade to that, I'd still get credited for the remaining time on the old subscription. This wasn't such an unreasonable assumption -- for example I recently cancelled my paid Dropbox subscription but it's running as normal until the billing date, and I got a nice note encouraging me to come back if I wanted. Not so with Evernote. Once you're in a "cancelled" state, it is actually impossible to trial a higher level plan or even to upgrade at all via the online checkout / trial features. They just don't work. And an email to Customer Support asking to be able to try out Personal hasn't got a response yet. I have to believe this is more a lack of foresight in the billing system design rather than on purpose -- which software vendor would actively, deliberately discourage at-risk customers from coming back? Still, it's frustrating. So, if you're on an older Evernote plan (or any paid plan for that matter), avoid cancelling it until you're absolutely sure that you don't want to return to being a paid customer!

Yes, I can see that now too. Thanks for pointing this out, and thanks of course to the Evernote team for fixing this!

Evernote isn’t designed this way. It’s geared around “notes like paper” with manual formats, as well as tagging and search, but not the kinds of standardized properties you’re describing. You could create a note template, containing a table with predefined rows or columns for the various criteria. But that’s not data in a structured sense, still just body text. A better tool for what you’re describing is Notion. You can add properties to a whole “database” of notes, getting an overview in a filterable table, but still being able to open any individual note and add all sorts of body content too.

@TonyLim, on my support ticket, @AgnesP explained that actually the order on my device is the designed behavior at the moment (though Evernote intend to add a sort order option in time). So you’re experiencing a bug that actually improves the behavior, at least from my point of view!

Thanks for sharing the screenshot! I've started a support ticket as this doesn't seem to be a product feature request as much as an issue, as it's working OK for you. I'll update my original post depending on the progress I make with Evernote support.

Thank you for the reply! That's very odd. I'm on 10.4 too, and I just tried deleting and re-installing the app. Still the same. Are you in the reminders view? Do you see any sort options? (I don't.) Here again is what I see – so you see a different sequence on the same view?

On iPhone and iPad, the reminders with the furthest away date show at the top. I would like those with the earliest date at the top, since they need focus first. Especially the overdue ones! This could be the default, or an option, or something that's picked up from the setting on the web or Mac version – I don't really mind which. But currently the order is fixed at the least useful one for me, unlike the Mac version where I can change the order to one that makes sense. I've attached screenshots. The first is iPhone, the second is Mac. I did do a search but the related ideas don't seem to be for exactly this request. These ideas mention the sort order but the main request appears to have been delivered? (I.E. non-dated reminders last.) This idea is about sorting search results, not the normal reminder list. This one mentions a sort option that I don't see at all now.

Although it's taking a long time for the unified editor to make its way from the web version into the "thick" clients – iOS, Android, Windows, Mac – it surprises me that more people don't realize that it is on the way already, and works perfectly well in the web version. Here's how it looks there: And you can also use Markdown-style hash characters to create these headers if you prefer (# = H1, ## = H2, etc). They don't stay as Markdown but they act as a keyboard shortcut in a way. Similar to Dropbox Paper. The outlines mentioned in the original post would be very nice. One of the "behind the scenes" videos from the Evernote team mentioned this as a future possibility. But I guess their first priority is to get the client tools using the new editor.

It’s good to hear that Evernote is hiring. A healthy sign indeed. I think the backlinks request will keep coming back, though to pick on a detail from your post, why would you need a graph database just to do backlinks? Roam takes a native graph approach, but that's because it does much more than backlinks; it supports sophisticated querying. And it was originally intended to do even more than that with Bayesian inferencing. Way beyond Evernote's ambitions I'd say and beyond those of most regular note-takers. Graph DBs are great for understanding relationships across heterogeneous data, inferencing, and more easily working with novel queries. But it would be expensive and burdensome to add one just to do backlinks. If you can do regular links (in any database) you can do backlinks. It’s just a question of priorities.

I don't want to minimize the distress and heartache that many people are experiencing, but I think it depends on the organization as to how well their software development processes hold up (or even improve) due to remote working. We are all strangers on this forum so your point is a fair one without further context, but I do have direct experience of this in a couple of ways. I would guess that the reason for the delay is just that fundamentally re-architecting Evernote turned out to be a far bigger thing than anyone expected. For any development, if the team hasn't done anything directly comparable before, then their estimates are likely to be off. But it would be nice to get another update at some point.

The web version already does it. And you can use Markdown to enter the headings if you like (one, two, or three hash symbols). This new editor is supposed to come to all the apps at some point.

I'm getting a bit more nervous. It's awfully quiet (apart from a few people here exclaiming loudly that they don't even want to hear about a new release if it doesn't have their favorite crusty old Windows feature that only they and somebody's dog use). I hope we are not moving into "Dreaming in Code" territory. Fingers and toes crossed now.