jefito

Recently been running into situations where a note is marked as being "In Use", and unable to be edited. Seems to occur when I am jumping around between notes and possibly using the Previous/Next Page buttons. Happened just now: I was happily editing my weekly status note, needed to add a link to it to my yearly status note, copied the link, switched to the yearly status note and pasted the link in, and then used the "Previous Page" button to go back, only to find myself locked from editing. As far as I can tell, the note's not open in any other device (and if it were, why was I allowed to edit at all?), so that doesn't seem related.

Quitting and restarting Evernote does not resolve this situation. My only recourse at that point seems to be to duplicate the note and move the old one to the trash. I have a pile of these deleted locked notes now, dating from mid-July. I did try repeating the above scenario, but it worked fine this time, so it's not clear that that's the problem, but that's pretty much what I was doing when it happened just now.

Edit: Current version is Evernote 10.20.4 (just updated today, prior to the latest lock problem), but I've been seeing it in previous versions as well.

On 10/14/2020 at 4:51 PM, FFrozTT said:

Tags are meta-information, and the idea that EN shouldn't support notes in multiple notebooks because you can't do that in real life with paper is absurd.

Understood, but real-world user metaphors can be useful in UI design due to user familiarity. Why else is the notebook/note/{tag/label/keyword} so popular? Because it's concrete and familiar.

On 10/14/2020 at 4:51 PM, FFrozTT said:

All modern computer file-systems support symbolic links which is exactly what were asking for, and no, a note with a link in it is not the same thing because that's 3 clicks instead of 1.  Symbolic links are a perpetual mainstay because they are inherently useful. Just like notes in multiple notebooks would be.

Sure, that's all fair, but think about the audience -- do most computer users use symbolic file system links in their everyday computer experience? I've been a developer for nearly 40 years and have some technical facility,  and I have never used them for my own stuff. I'm pretty sure that that's the situation for most other computer users, the vast majority of whom are not technical by nature. Sure, at my work we use them some, but not really all that much -- I'm happy to let the build folks handle that kind of setup if they need it -- it rarely affects me. In any application made for popular usage, you try to balance usability with power; I think that's the case here.

Anyways, in Evernote, if I want multi-parented notes, I just use multiple tags, which are roughly equivalent in concept (though not in underlying implementation).

21 hours ago, stackers said:

Haha @jefito @PinkElephant, they implemented dark mode

 

suck it

Um, happy for you?

Me, I'm sucking on a nice Aeropress'ed cup of dark roast, Yum!

2 hours ago, Dave-in-Decatur said:

I'm sure this will slow a lot of folks down; but I have spent much, much time deleting the time after doing Ctrl+:. I like having distinct functions.

Maybe Ctrl+Alt+D for inserting Date+Time??  

I found it pretty reliable for that purpose as well. I seem to recall that it also replicated the note filters in play in the previous / next note history (can't check right now, need to install the Legacy version), but I relied on that a lot less often. Main use case was to load up my weekly journal, which contains a TOC for current projects, research captured in Evernote, and related notes. Start with the journal, click over to a project, add a note, click back to the journal. It'd be nice to have that back.

Not sure how this is supposed to work -- I was expecting something like the  Note History functionality in the previous Windows client, which I found to be super handy. But no matter what I do, clicking on the "Previous Page" arrow at the top left of the note panel always seems to bring me back to the first note of the current notebook (though a different note may be highlighted in the list. The "Next Page" arrow, if enabled, seems to do the same thing.

Can we get some guidance on how these are supposed to work, or whether they're just currently underbaked? Thanks.

1 hour ago, MayurH said:

Seven months later and no fix yet. Yes, Evernote for Android used to highlight text within images after a search operation. But now it doesn't. What will it take for Evernote team to bring back this feature or even get a half decent response from them? 

I can confirm the behavior. In addition, general search on the recognition text doesn't seem to find the note either (it does in the native Windows application, though it doesn't in the web version). I did check and made  sure that the desired text was in the recognition text.

You will likely not get a direct answer from Evernote here, as this is primarily a user forum, not an official support forum. For official support, you can try https://www.evernote.com/SupportLogin.action or https://twitter.com/evernotehelps?lang=en

19 hours ago, DavidPierson said:

According to the Windows standard, Alt+F4 should close all of the evernote windows, including the main window. It doesn't do this currently; should it? Possibly.

I'd like to see that standard, but from my experience, Alt+F4 closes the current active window. It's just the same as clicking the 'X' icon in the title bar, or clicking Alt+Space and then selecting "Close" from the popup menu. Internally, I think it just sends a WM_CLOSE message to the current window, and then that window does its thing. Some Microsoft documentation: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/learnwin32/closing-the-window. In particular, this means that you can do Alt+F4 t o close a child window of an application (e.g., a dialog), and it won't close the whole application. I believe that that's the intent, and anecdotally, that's the way that the software I work on behaves as well. As does the Windows Evernote application.

20 hours ago, DavidPierson said:

I might raise an enhancement request to have the Alt+F4 functionality corrected. What does everyone think?

I think that Evernote is working as it should with respect to Alt+F4. It should not be changed.

With respect to Escape, I think that it's a poor choice in general, though the stated problem, "I was just trying to de-select some text" isn't really valid as that's not how you de-select text anyways (the selected ext just sits there looking at you saying "So what."). For completeness sake, we should note that for using Escape for closing a dialog is certainly common practice in Windows (I think it's the default behavior), but in this case, it's surprising, as the separate note window doesn't look like a dialog, it just looks like a separate document window. That's what should be changed.

On 4/4/2020 at 4:31 AM, Manu Faren said:

A lot of people have been using evernote for their morning pages/journaling and an important thing in this case is to be able to count how many words, so that we need if it has reached roughly 3 pages. This is something so simple and yet has been a complaint since 2013 and evernote has ignored it. 

 I see word and character counts in the Evernote native Windows application. at the bottom of the note editor window. What are you using?

On 4/26/2020 at 2:18 PM, Birsealmighty said:

Yours still puzzled at Evernote's business strategy.

 I can't tell you what Evernote's business strategy is, but my any measure, they've achieved a pretty good market share in the note-keeping/taking market.

As far as I can tell, Evernote is most commonly used for collecting and organizing disparate sorts of information. It's great for research, record keeping, and many other related uses. As you found out, its tools for to-do list activities are on the light side -- in fairness, they've never advertised themselves as a dedicated to-do list application, and that's pretty clearly not been their business strategy. I use Evernote's reminders for light to-do stuff at home; for the real thing at work, we use dedicated software for that (though Evernote still plays a pretty good-sized part of my day-to-day).

So OK, you expended some energy figuring that out; that's pretty much what you have to do when looking for tools of any kind, software or hardware. And sure, a recurring reminders facility is a longstanding request, one of a fair number; many software companies have a significant backlog of feature requests, and they, like Evernote prioritize on things like level-of-effort, fit for their customers, and their own vision for what Evernote should be. Companies have limited resources, and must choose how to use them. Sometimes they're smart about it, sometimes not.

Moral of the story: you were looking for a tool that solved your need for recurring reminders. You expended a some effort and found out that Evernote was not that tool. Sorry that you feel like you wasted your time, but it also feels as though you let your own expectations override actual facts. As far as wasting time registering for the forum and writing a post here, you chose to do that. I'm puzzled as to why you even bothered.

You'll get better answers if you tell us which Evernote applications you are using, e.g. Windows, Mac, Android, iOS,or web...

Which Evernote applications are you referring to? Windows, Mac, Android, iOS, web?

The Windows application has some pretty nice UI for selecting tags.

On Android, you use the "hambuger" menu to pop out a panel from the left side of yout screen.  You should see a "Tags" entry in the list, underneath the entries for "All Notes", "Notebooks" and "Shared with Me". Tap it --> Tags!

On 4/25/2020 at 7:36 AM, Datamaiden said:

I got this today.  Really ticked me off.  I had some notes I needed to get to immediately and this thing help my whole evernote and browser captive.  I could not get out of or around it.   That is no way to make people want to pay for yoru product.  That is how you lose people.  Hijacking and holding captive is not a professional approach.  

This is not hijacking you or holding you captive. It is just part of the Basic, free Evernote plan. It looks like you ran into the device limit: you are limited to using a maximum of 2 synced devices at a time, plus the web version.  Here's some info on the device limit: https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/218558068-Understanding-the-device-limit

51 minutes ago, CalS said:

Well there's a way but it is cumbersome to the point of not making it a way.  Export a bunch of notes to ENEX, open the text editor of your choice, and search for -evernote-highlight:true to find each note.  Not happening on my watch.  

Right you are -- probably should have specified "though the Evernote application UIs", but it seemed to be part of the problem definition.

Even so, if you want to do this with ENEX files, you'd need to understand how to figure out which note each highlight markup belongs to, and then add a special tag to the note, and then re-import the note back into Evernote in such a way that it replaces the original note. Let's just say that this isn't going to win any UX prizes any time soon...

Is this Windows? Mac? Web? I see that the Android app has them, though they only appear when they apply.

To tell the truth, I always use Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Y; these are about as common in all Windows editing programs as they get, even in web-based applications. They're pretty hard-wired into my fingers at this point...

5 hours ago, JBKELLEY said:

You could always try to put a unique #tag on every Note that you make a highlight. Then you could do a search on the tag.

Except that the original request was how to search and pull up only highligted text  So before you can tag a note that has highlighted text, you have to be able to find those notes first. And in Evernote, there's no way to do that.

4 hours ago, CalS said:

Kind of six of one half a dozen of the other depending upon your preference.  For whatever reason I like the dialog.

Yep. If I was doing anything particularly fancy, especially with use of different font faces, I'd use the dialog, as that lets you get everything in one fell swoop. But since I generally just do simple boldface, italicization, increase/decrease of fonts, bullet-pointing, and simple stuff that has keyboard shortcuts, that fits my workflow better. Choice is good.

14 hours ago, himanshu219 said:

+1 I really miss this feature no wonder it's second most voted feature request. Any ETA for this request, it's been six years since the thread creation. Also would urge the admins to atleast put a feature-request tag. 

I think they already know it's a feature request...

8 hours ago, himanshu219 said:

After 7 years since the thread is posted still there is no update, I don't know why Evernote is not taking privacy seriously

Just because they haven't implemented this request doesn't mean that they don't take privacy seriously. Their security focus is mainly on security of your notes when they're being transferred over the Internet, and on their servers. More info here: https://evernote.com/security. 

Currently, if I want stuff encrypted in Evernote, I just use an encrypted container attachment (.zip file, PDF, etc.). For the short term, while Evernote sorts out its platform re-org and infrastructure, that's probably going to have to suffice. Once that's done, then maybe they'll address this feature request.

8 hours ago, himanshu219 said:

(Hope it does not end up like Zoom)

Zoom is still wildly popular, as far as I can tell. They've had some security stumbles, no doubt, but they've been working to address them. See e.g. https://www.tomsguide.com/news/zoom-security-privacy-woes. Not sure what you mean by 'end up'; they're still in business.

Quote

Even the open sourced "standard notes" have this feature.  

Hadn't heard of these folks before. Hard to tell how well they're doing or how well it stacks up against Evernote, feature-wise. I guess is privacy is a pressing concern, they might be worth checking out.

7 hours ago, Eser K said:

I dıdnt know this functıonal'ty already exists. It doesnt have to be a button in the UI, but the functionality. if the function exists it is enough for me, but if there will be buttons for it it can be very useful for fast text editing like MSWord.

Keyboard combinations are generally acknowledged to be faster for typists; you can obviously also to it via the note editor formatting menu as well (or the formatting dialog, as pointed out by @CalS).

3 hours ago, dcon said:

We're (darn it - they're) a Win32 app (that refers to the API we're built on, not 32v64 bits - microsoft has such wonderful (confusing) names for some things). The application could be converted to 64 bits far easier - I'm guessing that wouldn't take more than a week, assuming all the 3rd party libraries in use are available. (no, don't suggest doing that - because now you've increased the installer complexity by more than 2. you've increased the testing effort by 2x. And frankly, it's not that memory constrained except in a couple particular places (import/export of enex files for instance).)

Where I work, we've supported both 32- and 64-bit versions for some time.  But this year, we'll be dropping the 32-bit version finally. Doesn't make much sense any for us to keep it -- we do GIS, and mapping data can be really large/dense (e.g. billions of Lidar points), so we often need as much memory and processor as we can get. Easier for the installer person, for the testers, and for us devs, too. So hooray (for us)!

4 hours ago, Eser K said:

Hi, I didnt mean that. I mean changing the size of only selected text in the note.Not changing the zoom.

Ctrl+< and Ctrl+> (or more precisely, Ctrl+Shift+, and Ctrl+Shift+.)are available in the Windows program for decreasing and increasing the font size of the currently selected text.

Just using the plain + and - keys for this functionality would be a poor UI choice, because that would be ambiguous with replacing the current text with '+' or '-' characters.

9 hours ago, Kynareth said:

I don't understand why implementing dark mode takes so much time. It should be added years ago. There are no technical limitations making it exceptionally difficult to do. It can be done and ought to be done.

Honestly, do tell. Please supply technical details, and be sure to do so in light of the fact that a former Evernote developer who worked on the Windows code, and did the estimates for his bosses said that it would be a lengthy process. His posts are right here in this thread, look for posts by @dcon and @dconnet.

6 hours ago, DavidPierson said:

Would we expect that Alt+F4 behaviour for Evernote? I probably wouldn't, so it goes to show how hard it is to be consistent. What do you reckon, jefito?

No idea. It can certainly be difficult to be consistent in different applications. Personally, I think that having Escape close the separate windows is not a great UI choice. But Alt+F4 is a reasonable choice; it does exactly what people want, which is to close the separate window. If they could disable Escape from doing that, it would be fine with me.