jshafter

The new update is slow slow slow. Switching between notes has a major lag to show the new content. This is a major usability problem.

Kudos on the option-J feature. Its slick and really improves the Evernote navigation experience.

I currently run Evernote with a large database on an iPad 3. Does anyone have experience upgrading from the iPad 3 to an iPad Air 2? I'm interested if there are noticeable increases in Evernote app performance.

Whenever a try to open a large or complex PDF from my iPad into Iannotate or Goodreader the Evernote app freezes/crashes. Larger PDF handling has always been a bit iffy but the problem seems worse with recent app update releases. Is anyone else having these problems?

Apologies, this seems to be asked and if not answered then mused upon and discussed elsewhere.

I navigated to my Evernote database on OSX (com.evernote.Evernote) to do a disk backup. In parallel I happened to also backup all my notes to ENEX format. I was surprised to see that the total size of my ENEX notes is 3.7 GB while the size of the database is over 10GB. I know you have some metadata like tags in the database but the size of that should be trivial. I was wondering if anyone knew what the extra 7+ GB of data is in the database vs the individual notes and is that normal (or has something gone wrong bloating the database file)?

One feature I've always appreciated on the Desktop client is the ability to open attached files, modify them, and then have the saved version replace the original. Understanding that the limits of iOS sandboxing make this difficult, it is frustrating not to be able to open a PDF file in a program like iAnnotate on my iPad from Evernote and then have annotations saved back to the original note rather than having to export it as a new note. By analogy, the update in place aspect of Penultimate is what makes that handwriting app so nice despite it lacking the features of many competitors. It would be so great if this kind of bidirectional sync could be done for PDF document markup as well. As an alternative, some kind of basic highlighting and annotating tools could be added to the in-app PDF reader.

Every week that goes by without the Evernote team responding to these concerns is quite astounding. The issue here is that the very mission of Evernote - at least the old Evernote before it became to tool for recording wine labels on your cellphone - was a tool to organize your brain. While I hesitate to dip into the sometimes cult-like language of GTD, it is a "trusted system" which means once you nail down your system of working with ENote you need to trust that for all time your information will be there when you want it. This isnt some minor application you can just swap out and replace with something else. The anger here isnt just that the ENote team is eliminating many aspects of its old product which people relied on to organize their information - thus eroding anyone's ability to "trust" that ENote will be there for the long term - but that we are forced to guess where this software is going by anlyzing a few random podcast interviews. Come on ENote management - this isnt exactly Apple or Microsoft here. Evernote has maybe a few thousand users who care about its existence and a good proportion of them are here on this board. You face a proliferation of online note taking products (Google Notebook anyone?) run by competitors far better funded and with massive distribution advantages. I'm not a Mac user and while I dont begrudge the ENote team's sudden love for that platform, there seems to be a new "organize everything" application out for OS X every day. The one thing ENote has (had?) is a base of loyal users who trust the company will be there for them and do the right thing with a very critical product. Of course we "power users" arent your mass market opportunity but we are the voices who will blog/rant/evangelize for ENote and thus get this product critical mass buzz above the thousand other web x.0/cloud services launched each week. There is no other way for Evernote to break through the mass of competing products than grass-roots enthusiasm. And here is a cold splash of reality - your casual wine bottle photo clipper aint gonna be a grass-roots evangelist. This isnt a democracy this is capitalism. We dont get to "vote" for what happens to Evernote and we know that. But spending just a little time explaining what you are doing and where you are going on these boards will cut down a lot of anger. Even if you dont tell us what we want to hear at least we will feel that we are being treated with respect. A throng of angry disrespected product apostates isnt exactly a good buzz environment to launch a new product in. I have seen references made to Evernote opening its API. It is possible that everything people are upset about can be hacked back into ENote 3 via API plug-ins. If this is so, just let us know our concerns will be partially or fully mitigated once the API is opened. And if not, you will engender far less ill-will from this crowd by openly discussing the future of this product than by hiding in the background.

Will also shout out in support of this sentiment. Local file links are a trivial implementation exercise even if the developer team finds them conceptually at odds with their cloud metaphor. For those of us who use them, they are 50% of the value of Evernote - and a way to make this product much more useful without us having to keep actual file attachements on your servers.

I took a peek again at Onenote 2007 as a result of my sadness (much echoed in these forums) on the watering down of EN3.0. No good- OneNote feels clunky and bloated with an interface locked into the metaphor of a 3 ring binder (which didnt even do a very good job of organizing my life in Jr High School). Thus, there really is no competition for Evernote - at least if/until the BasketNotes project matures. Perhaps the Enote team could help us poor devoted and locked-in souls with a hint at when the API for Evernote 3.x will be opened up. Even if not officially supported, I have a feeling most of what people want can be re-implemented without too much trouble once this happens.

Onenote is an interesting program and it has the two things I need most which have been orphaned in this beta - note/category links and local file links. But Onenote has a frustrating design which forces you into the metaphor of a tabbed binder (I'm admittedly not a Onenote power user so there may be a way around this). Where ENote kicks OneNote's but is when you have hundreds of proliferating categories (er tags) and need to jump between them fast. Onenote just doesnt seem to scale well. Sadly there is no off-the-shelf replacement for 2.x out there yet.

Agree fully that the Evernote team has been oddly silent on these boards regarding their development roadmap - and that this is a very bad business strategy for Evernote. Much of the raw functionality in Evernote can be duplicated given a few months of effort using off-the-shelf components. Give me a month or two with Expression Blend, SQL-lite, etc... and I can have a text/ink notekeeping application synched to a local/remote database with handwriting recognition which is perhaps not up to ENote standards but good enough. Of course, I have no desire to do this and am happy to pay Evernote some $$ per upgrade cycle to do all this for me. In the past, Evernote has proven very responsive to the needs and wants of its user community. Now there seems to be an odd disconnect with the company either remaining radio silent on the future of many elements from ENote 2.x which were dropped in this version (file links, category manipulation, linking to notes, etc...) and acting oddly dismissive of the security concerns of its power user base. If this publication of tags is accurate and a planned design feature of the software rather than a Beta oversight it is likely the end of Evernote for serious users. I rely on Evernote to structure my thoughts and memory regarding critical matters of personal and business importance. My internal cognitive schema of tags is not exactly something I consider appropriate for public consumption. As a corporate strategy ENote may have decided the world of power users isn't exactly a massive market segment and their focus should be streamlining a simple product for mass consumer use. I would urge them to consider that the most likely future for this scenario is that one power user (it only takes one) grows sufficiently annoyed that they hack together an open source Evernote type-program (see Basket Notes for a start down this track). At this point a self-sustaining open source project emerges to drain both revenue and "first-adopter" buzz from Evernote. Yes, the consumer market is orders of magnitude larger than the power-user market. But the power-users are the blog writers, board posters, and general opinion leaders who establish the brand identity and credibility of Evernote for the consumer market. Microsoft may be powerful enough to keep rolling despite the complaints of computer power-users but Microsoft is a singular monopoly exception and no small application software shop has ever survived once serious users laugh at it.

Echo the sentiments here. The beauty of Evernote is its ease of integration with other programs so that it can be the center of your information life. Drag and drop file links is 50% of the value in Evernote. The ability to link to notes as hyperlinks is another feature which isnt in 3.x yet. I love the idea of having access to my data everywhere instead of manually making sure all my computers are synched but in this rush to the cloud concept it seems like much of Evernote's beautiful flexibility is being thrown out.

At present the failure to enter a password on the local client prevents synchronization but allows full access to the existing database. Given the sensitive nature of the data many of us entrust to Evernote, is this just a beta-level glitch? I believe under version 2.x a password encrypted database file could not be accessed without proper authentication. This is a critical must-have program feature. Going forward many of the issues people have with local versus "cloud" files might be dealt with with high level encryption and authentication mechanisms (ie, biometrics). I operate under the assumption (especially as a Windows user) that file systems are ultimately vulnerable and only encryption/strong-authentication can provide a real privacy defense.