Boot17

Evernote has changed quite a bit -- especially if you are now just coming from Legacy. For some it's ok and even great, for others, not so much. Sometimes we outgrow the software, sometimes it outgrows or changes too much for us.

As someone currently in the process of leaving Evernote, I can relate to the 3 points, but I still think I can be objective as overall I think Evernote is fantastic software:

3 hours ago, nippit said:

1) i missed my fast and zippy app, little to no bugs.

Definitely not as zippy. It's no longer distinct (and often pretty different) native apps that run on each platform. Instead it's based on a common framework that unifies the coding and UI/UX experience. Some blame that platform (Electron) for the slowness, but I've seen way faster implementations on Electron but the UI and Editors aren't nearly as rich as Evernote's either or they don't support offline or don't offer a web app. It can be fast enough though, and while it's not super zippy, the speed is mostly ok for me. As someone that uses Evernote on Web, MacOS, Windows, iPad, and iPhone I'd trade the zippy for the more unified experience... but I'd still like to see performance improved.

3 hours ago, nippit said:

2) Evernote is trying to be jack of all trades master of none, and SUCCEDED in this 

I think it's the master of some. It has the best web clipper and email to note features, as well as search and OCR. And I actually like Tasks. It's not a full replacement for every task manager, but it filled a niche pretty well for me.

I also like it's Note Editor better than any other note taking app that I've tried. Image resizing and annotation is superior to most.

The generous upload limits -- 10 GB per month for Personal -- with no overall cap. Way more than I needed. I'd call that masterfully well done.

I just mentioned a few, but I think there are other areas were Evernote excels.

3 hours ago, nippit said:

3) FED up of updates and bugs for the last two years, there is an update on every boot. i am turning on a computer or logging in to check a note I have to go all updates to be able to open the app and IT IS NOT FAST! just to look for an address or a note (ever "note") 

Yeah - lots of updates are coming especially now. Lots of cool things IMO, like collapsible sections and I was looking forward to syntax highlighting. The internal links implementation is ok and hopefully it will improve. So lots of good things, but also lots of minor annoyances for me personally too that I'm not a fan of. Many of those annoyances have since been fixed though. They are definitely experimenting a lot with different things and see what seems to work best.

So go looking around. Maybe you'll find something better, but maybe you'll also find that Evernote still beats others for what your personal needs are.

On 4/30/2024 at 7:22 PM, afflatus said:

FYI - IT ACTUALLY IS POSSIBLE! See here: 

I've confirmed it works. I can't believe it. 

That only hides the inline hint, it doesn't actually turn the slash command feature off altogether which is what I believe the thread is about.

They've mentioned that they are planning to fix it soon:

They've implemented (intentionally or inadvertently) several (IMO questionable) things in the last few months that have gotten negative feedback and they changed back. A few off the top of my head:

• table cell spacing. It used to be huge after the initial UI Revamp and they put it back to almost like it was.
• allowing only one image on a row when they pushed out the feature to center images. They've restored that ability.
• "Press / to insert an element" prompt. Lots of complaints about it and they added an option to turn it off.
• "AI Edit" constant popup button. Lots of complaints about that and it seems to be gone now.

Here is hoping that green internal links make a resurgence as well. (Green links team FTW 💪).

I noticed the pinch to zoom stopped working as well. I didn't really rely on it as much so this issue didn't particularly affect me so much as other breaking changes have.

I wish that we could set the default note text scaling on mobile as I think that would alleviate the need to pinch to zoom(?). (I've noticed on iOS that Evernote only honors the accessibility font size on the text in the note list, but not the note content itself.) While the font size worked well on Desktop and Web, I find it a little too small on my mobile device. (Thus just making the font bigger on mobile wasn't a solution as it would make it too big on Desktop.) Pinching to zoom was a nice stop-gap, but it meant you had to scroll left to right to read the content.

Download speeds depend on a lot of factors: the demand, capacity, number of files and server retrieval (serving up tens of thousands of files vs one large file). It's not just an unlimited server faucet because our ISP can support that much bandwidth. 

Yes - it has been this way for at least a year or so. It will update when you click the 'update now' or the next time you restart the app -- whichever comes first.

For many of us it was a quality of life feature to have internal links distinguishable from external links, but apparently at Bending Spoons it is purely a UI aesthetic and they think it looks better to be the same as external links? Just a guess as they've made no mention of this change publicly or in the release notes as far as I'm aware.

@rmeadow Use quotes around your tag with spaces like this: 

tag:"Statements of Decision" interrogatories

Obsidian doesn't have huge server/bandwidth costs like Evernote. Those people using free sync services aren't using Obsidian server resources and get zero support and don't even have an Obsidian account. Compare this to the millions of Evernote users that were using the Free version of Evernote and Evernote (paying subscribers) were footing the server bill and Evernote also had to manage the accounts (and give account support to millions of free users).

Those people using Obsidian sync services are paying for it too. Obsidian storage/sync services aren't near as generous as Evernote's either. 10 GB total of sync/storage costs $99 USD per year for Obsidian. Compare that to 10 GB per month upload you can get paying $129 USD per year for Evernote.

6 hours ago, asismartinoar said:

until before the latest update, on the web version, I could easily double click on one of the notes

You mention the "web version". Are you talking about the version that runs in a web browser - or a downloaded desktop client? I don't believe you could ever open a note in a pop-up box in the web version, but you can in the Mac or Windows Desktop client (which is what both PinkElephant and Gazumped are saying works for them).

6 hours ago, Dundika said:

I wonder why pay Scannable when iPhone has a built in scanner, just as good as Scannable

I wish it was as good as Scannable, but it's really not is it? The way Scannable can flatten the document and fill in the gaps and hide the shadows make it look like you actually scanned a piece of paper vs auto-cropping a photo of paper. 

I only have two plugins that I really rely on: Dataview (1.6 million installs) and Tasks (1.2 million installs) -- two of the bigger plugins. I have 6 others that I use as niceties, but I don't really rely on them.

If the plugins or Obsidian changed so much, I'd migrate to something else. It's already happened to me with Evernote and I am surviving, so I think I'd be ok.

19 minutes ago, Jon/t said:

I just need to get stuff done and not spend my life fussing with systems and workflows.

What's ironic about this comment to me is that the changes Bending Spoons has been making lately has been making me fuss and worry about my systems and workflows in Evernote.

With Obsidian, I have way more control over how things look and function. Sure, there was an initial learning curve and getting settled, but now I'm on cruise control with way less disruption. 

Edit: so actually I agree with that comment, but I'm just on the other side of the coin. 

42 minutes ago, Jon/t said:

Biggest issue here is that folks don't.

I saw one just the other day where another developer picked up and carried it on. It wasn't a big one though -- not one that I depended on. Trying to remember which it was.

Can you name just one highly popular plugin in Obsidian that people were dependent on (not just cosmetic plugins) that went kaput with no one picking up support? I haven't heard of any. 

Not to say that it couldn't happen, but the bigger point of my comment is that with Evernote the community has zero control over changes (naturally) and things have changed (e.g. green color to blue internal links, UI revamp, mobile UI A/B testing, etc) and been taken away (e.g. Legacy). So worrying about a plugin or two going away in Obsidian is no different in comparison. 

19 minutes ago, Dave-in-Decatur said:

The other thing is the need to depend on 3rd-party add-ins. (If I'm understanding this correctly.) What happens if the add-in developer moves on to something else, decides they don't like Obsidian anymore, or just gets too busy to keep updating the add-in? It's a little tough to be heavily dependent on one app and its developers, like Evernote, but I'm very shy of being dependent on a developer and a community of add-in programmers who may range from committed to just hobbyists. Just my thoughts

You'll have to adapt or move to another product, just like people have had to do for v10 not satisfying features and workflows they relied on in Legacy - or other changes that Bending Spoons make that we get stuck with (e.g. green to blue internal links).

The plugins in Obsidian are all open source. Somebody else can pick it up and run with it. 

We're actually more "stuck" with Evernote in that regards IMO. 

10 hours ago, chikega@mac.com said:

Has it really been six years since this post was created? Markdown should not be that difficult to implement. If little apps like Bear app(mac) can support it, Evernote with much more revenue, can certainly pull it off. Why the delay? 

That's because Bear is only a markdown editor. Markdown editing is much more basic than the rich editor features that we get with Evernote. Why should Evernote dumb down their editor to markdown? (Saying this as somebody migrating to Obsidian.) Or why should Evernote have to support two different kinds of editors?

More markdown-like shortcuts could maybe be nice, but we already have most (if not all) of the common ones.

On 4/17/2024 at 2:47 AM, WCG-Taskforce said:

* Automatically formatting Markdown formatted text that was pasted into a note.

This is one of the few requests in this thread that makes sense IMO. Importing a markdown file (which is nice and is coming soon) is close, but not the same thing. Native exporting to markdown would also be nice, but there are tools like YARLE that can already do it.

12 hours ago, Gazebo said:

Respect to anyone who disagrees

As someone migrating away from Evernote, I think what you wrote is solid. I felt the price increase was fair and think Evernote had been underpriced for a while. I think what Bending Spoons has done to tighten the freemium model and increase prices is sound. I'm just migrating away for similar concerns that @MvdH is waiting out on a little bit longer. I couldn't wait anymore and the implementation and side-affects of some things left me perturbed. Still, I think Evernote is a fantastic product.

I'm on 10.86.2-mac-ddl and I'm not seeing the AI Edit popup button at the moment. No mention of it's removal in the release notes -- unless I missed it. Anybody else seeing similar?

(And who knows when it could be back... and in greater numbers. 🤣)

Hrm - and (if it wasn't a mistake) they'd have to allow decryption of encrypted content else we'd be locked out of part of our notes. Then would they not allow it to be edited or anything? Will be interesting to see.

And being on Personal, I had earlier wondered "Well, for those of us on Personal, perhaps the AI Edit will be a Professional feature only so it will go away." Hopefully we don't see in-app adverts to try and get us to upgrade to AI Edit like this: 

Edit: I'm on 10.86.2-mac-ddl and I'm not seeing the AI Edit popup button at the moment although I can still use AI Edit on Personal for now.

Can you not install a Desktop client somewhere? That would be the easiest way.

There are other 3rd party products (some free, some not) that can also export them. Here is a free one that I see mentioned quite often that several people on the forums use: https://pypi.org/project/evernote-backup/ -- but it's pretty technically involved. You have to install this on your local computer and run some commands and it will login to Evernote's servers using your user ID and password and it will download your Evernote data to your machine into ENEX format.

Maybe the 3 months refers to roughly the point in time where they finally got their feet under them having tackled a lot of the technical debt and feeling comfortable enough with the domain knowledge to start shaking things up a bit and pushing out a lot of new features. But, yeah, they were making some changes before 3 months ago. The initial AI Note Cleanup came out like almost 10 months ago or so?

I was starting to be on my way out due to the v10 UI Revamp from January/February. The 'Press "/" to insert an element', AI Edit Popup, Files Feature, Green to Blue internal links, increased line spacing and probably more (that I can't remember off the top of my head) just confirmed it for me.

I loved v10 and I was actually fine paying up to $200 a year because I got so much value out of Evernote up until a couple of months ago.

However, I need a stable Evernote to be productive. Probably 90% of my usage is for productivity work and 10% usage is for archive/file storage. I'm sure if those numbers were flipped it might be a different story for me. The constant churn, bugs, and beta and A/B testing on users gives me a feeling of loss of control and unproductiveness and some of the recent changes just aren't for me. I feel like I'm on shaky ground and I keep wondering what is going to change or break next? Maybe it works for their bottom line and they should do what is best for them, but I have to do what is best for me too.

Perhaps I'll be back if and when the dust ever settles.

Yeah - ignoring it is the key. It takes the same number of keystrokes to enter a date as it did before. Slightly annoying though.

They could tweak the slash command menu so that it doesn't appear if the '/' is preceded immediately by a number. This is the case in at least one other app that I currently use that supports slash commands. In that app, it seems more intuitive when the slash command appears and it can also be toggled off altogether.

I hope/suspect we'll see some minor tweaks for improvements in the coming weeks/months.

Pardon the US formatted date.  🤣  I generally type dates in YYYY-MM-DD format, but that's not a good example for the slash command menu. 😃 

3 hours ago, fsigworth said:

I am a professor and use Evernote as a lab notebook, where I am keeping track of the steps in my data processing using the university's computer clusters.  These computers use the Linux operating system, which has lots of use of '/' to mark directories. It is a disaster now when I want to put in something like

cp ~/big_data_file.mrc tmp/archive/20240415/

and the text gets automatically converted to a TO-DO ITEM! I haven't found a good way to recover from this.

And, by the way, I also use the Terminal app on my Mac and have to deal with the same syntax.

This situation is entirely unacceptable. PLEASE allow us to turn this 'feature' off!

I support the feature request to disable slash commands entirely, but is there no way for you to copy and paste a directory path? 

Not sure what terminal type you are using on Linux, but with Terminal on Mac, it's faster to copy and paste the directory path and less prone to typos and you'll also avoid the slash command menu while you are at it.

I share similar thoughts. This recent constant change of how my notes look and sometimes function (blue internal links anybody?, press '/' to insert an element?, AI Edit, AI Edit, AI Edit) along with A/B and beta testing on users and sometimes buggy releases has been somewhat of a turn off for me personally. 

You can't turn off auto updates and so installing a slightly older version will only be a temporary reprieve.