ehrt74

many thanks for the software, evernote! i rarely had problems with it and it helped me organise all my stuff. i first started using evernote in 2019 when i bought an old blackberry mobile phone to try it out. it came with an evernote app that hadn't been updated since 2015 and still worked perfectly for my use cases.

now i'm moving to joplin because:

* i want to support an open-source project (joplin offers a hosted solution for a fee)

* i want an android app i can install on all my android devices (not just on those with google play store)

* i want a native linux app

i've found that joplin is missing ocr, which i very much liked with evernote. to solve this i've installed paperless-ngx on my server online. 

from the above you can probably tell that i'm not the average evernote customer. 

it's been fun and i hope evernote continues to flourish! maybe i'll be back one day

The web client works on all operating systems that are supported by a modern browser. The desktop app doesn't 😕

This is quite a long thread and I may have overlooked something. Just wanted to add that SMS is not secure. It does not support end-to-end encryption but generally uses whatever the network provider thought was a good idea back in 1998. RCS is a lot better here, but apple refuses to support it.  So basically we're stuck at this stage with #SOME_ADDITIONAL_APP.

I personally use 1password because it seems not to have had a security beach (yeah, I know. This rock protects you from bear attacks). I can certainly see a strong case for moving to managing your own passwords and codes (for the tech savvy).

The reviews on the play store are pretty suspect, if you ask me. The last time I checked they were overwhelmingly of similar length: something I would not expect if they had been written by humans. 

On 11/12/2022 at 9:28 PM, KAGS said:

This is very true. My post is entirely an opinion piece. If it reads as objective, then it is my fault for presenting them as such (i.e., too bluntly). 

My argument can be boiled down to the very simple statement: Evernote does not need to be a database, spreadsheet, Kanban board, ect., but should have its fundamentals leveled up to match its competition. What counts as "fundamental" is highly subjective, and I have staked my point on the fundamentals being text editing and note navigation.

It does seem like the power users / long timers (who have seen competiton come and go) still using Evernote have a best-of-breed (use the tool that is best for the job) mindset. And I currently have this approach as well, using Evernote mostly as a

And best-of-breed vs. all-in-one (or many-in-one) underlies many of these "Evernote should do this" discussions. This debate will always be a matter of personal opinion. But ultimately, user-base and profitability will be the practical deciding factor which philosophy "is better." And I have worries there in the long run as the competition is feature-rich and highly competent.

Evernote offers an API so that theoretically someone could roll their own kanban board and store the data on the evernote servers. Practically speaking there aren't that many such things available because programming stuff like that is not so easy 😕

btw, have a look here: https://www.kanbanote.com/

On 10/24/2022 at 9:48 PM, PinkElephant said:

…. then just do it ! Just out of luck if you are still on a BlackBerry, you know, the status symbols of 10 years ago.

off-topic

am i the only one who finds it sad that blackberry no longer makes phones? i loved having a physical keyboard on my phone  i could type reasonably quickly without looking at the keyboard. nowadays there are of course so many phone keyboards with the ability to swipe over the letters for example, but physical keyboards were even better.

maybe not totally off-topic. blackberry is the reason i got into evernote. in 2019 i got an old blackberry os 10 device on ebay and one of the few apps on it that still worked well was the native evernote client. after that i got a blackberry key 2 which i used for about 2 years, but because its bootloader never got hacked i couldn't update the os to a more recent version of android (talking to all the CEOs of phone companies which are reading this post: please give me a way to unlock the bootloader! if your phone is any good, the community will port the latest AOSP to it and you won't have to do anything! There are android phones from 2010 which still get the latest version of AOSP ...).

On 9/18/2022 at 10:51 PM, Calion said:

Yes, but I'm writing a Shortcut to import Evernote notes into Obsidian.md, so importing is not a problem. I just need to be able to access tags somehow. 

you can access your evernote data programmatically. have a look here: https://dev.evernote.com/doc/

On 9/18/2022 at 3:09 PM, PinkElephant said:

We can agree to that conclusion: The first page on my Home Screen is pretty much occupied by messaging (and some widgets).

The EU is at the moment discussing to force every messenger service to provide an interface for a unified app (or several?) that would cover them all - enforced by law.

The problem: Nobody has a clue how to do this - but keep end to end encryption.

I don't see the problem here. if the apps all implement the same api then end-2-end encryption would run on the payload. 

21 hours ago, Calion said:

Not for my present purpose. I'm writing a Shortcut that exports single notes from Evernote to Obsidian…but I can't get Tags, which is frustrating. 

So does anyone know any way to extract tags from a note? Location data would be nice too. 

mm, exporting tags would probably be useless unless you know how to import them into the other software 😕 unfortunately there is no standardised format for note-metadata, as far as I know. The world seems to have coalesced around some-dialect-of-markdown for notes, however. it would be nice if evernote would offer a way to sort-of, half-export a note in markdown as well as it can. 

This is just one more example of why open standards are a good idea. However, open standards tend to evolve slower than the applications that use them, so lots of incompatible extensions to the standard tend to be created 😕 Take for example chat apps. in the old days there was an open standard called XMPP (or Jabber). Google used this for its first chat app, found that the standard didn't cover all the functionality google wanted to offer, so they added an open extension to it. Nobody implemented the open extension apart from Google. The immediate result was that every other messaging service offered ways to import your contacts from google while making it impossible to export contacts from their own service. The end result is that there are now hundreds of different messaging services which are either a/ trying to get others to implement their open-source protocol (google) or b/ trying their best to remain as incompatible as possible with other messaging services (facebook, apple, microsoft ...).

Sorry, that last paragraph was rather off-topic. the state of messaging services is something that really annoys me ... 

On my device the android app opens links in chrome. There doesn't appear to be an in-app browser used.

On 7/12/2022 at 8:02 AM, PinkElephant said:

Your whole account is encrypted, password protected and if you activate it protected by a 2 factor authentication.

Just to try to make something clear here, because i misread PinkElephant's comment the first time i read it. Data stored on Evernote's servers is to the best of my knowledge stored in a way so that the large Evernote server applications can read it. This is necessary to allow indexing and OCR to run (this is still done on the servers isn't it? Not locally on the clients)

I still have the sharing problem every now and then. Do you get this too, @agsteele ? if not, maybe i can delete the cache and reinstall (I'm on a pixel 6 btw)

I've never tried to sort a notebook, but i only have a couple of thousand notes, so it will probably be a lot quicker for me anyway.

i just want to say that it's really rare for a software to be "done". quite apart from bugs or performance improvements (and it's fairly likely that every non-trivial app can be updated for one of these reasons), there is often new functionality to add and software Evernote interacts with could change something about their interfaces.

For this non-trivial programs will either change with time or they will become superseded by other apps. The question is, what different strategies are there for a software team to update the program they work on? 

Classically there are two popular models. These are called "waterfall" and "agile development". To simplify greatly, waterfall involves larger changes happening rarely while agile development consists of many small changes. For SAAS (software as a service--for example, a web site or a piece of software on a device with package management), agile development is generally regarded as a superior method. For large stand-alone software products which are evaluated over months by corporations before being deployed (like microsoft office), the waterfall model has advantages.

Evernote stands somewhere between the two. The web interface can update itself everytime you refresh the page, the android/iOS (and i hope Linux) versions get updated automatically by the package manager built in to the operating system. Do Windows or OSX have package managers nowadays? I really don't know, but they didn't the last time i used them.

Personally i prefer the incremental update approach, but i can imagine IT departments being annoyed by it. 

On 5/23/2022 at 6:26 PM, eric99 said:

It doesn't matter whether electron or React, the promise that device specific stuff is properly handled by these frameworks is an illusion (illustrated by your examples above).

That said, I'm happy with the windows implementation. I think it's as good as the mac client...

yep, it's only as device-independent as the framework. Had Evernote decided to rewrite in Flutter or with Jetpack Compose we wouldn't have these problems and the UI would be much faster on all clients.

If there's one language I really dislike it's JavaScript ...

That being said, i've never had performance problems on Evernote v10 on Android and unless the framework they are using is doing things it shouldn't (somehow calling native code) Android devices are enormously similar for programming purposes (more similar than two different generations of iPhone).

14 hours ago, Paul A. said:

I think we have to be careful how we define the problem. It seems that the small percentage of users experiencing severe performance issues (whether on Android or possibly also the other clients) could have their issues resolved by Evernote support fixing something on the back-end.

But it's also true that the Android app, even on a good day, performs noticeably worse than a fully native app. Personally, the performance has increased enough over the last 18+ months that I find it acceptable, although what I don't find acceptable is the long-standing bugs that for some reason they refuse to fix, such as this one:

 

 

I'm not so sure. I've never had performance problems with the v.10 app on Android 😕 however i agree with you about the bugs. there are still a couple of them involving sharing of data to evernote on android which i run into every now and then. i wonder how many of them come from the framework evernote is using and how many can be fixed by evernote?

15 minutes ago, kkarasu said:

Update: I have reached out to support and although my hopes were not high due to the comments here on the forum, they actually solved the issue. I need to say that in addition to the general slowness of the app, I also identified sync issues during the process. Some stuff didn't get into Evernote on Android nor out. I didn't realized it earlier because basically I stopped using it since the new version first came out on Android. 

They told me they did some backend changes. Not sure what they are, but for the first time since Evernote 10 arrived on Android, it became usable. I still would not say that the new Evernote on Android is an outstanding experience overall. But now, notes sync both ways, notebooks and home view load faster than before (significantly less than a minute as was the case before), and the app became somewhat more responsive in general. 

I had tried everything previously, deleting cache, and app data, re-installing the app all to no avail. I wasn't ever able to use the new version of the App on Android since it came out but now it will be useful definitely.

yep. this was my experience too with a synching problem. support did "some backend change" and then things worked. this adds fuel to the hypothesis that the problem with evernote on android is a backend problem and not a problem with the app or the OS.

19 hours ago, PinkElephant said:

I don’t know of any dev who would have been blocked to issue an Android version.

The Epic lawyers have digged deep, and nothing like that has come up in the court case Epic vs. Apple.

About tiny market shares: From the last published figures the AppStore revenue is on par with the PlayStore. It pays for the devs as much to release an iOS version as something for Android.

About saving energy: In iOS you can control Notifications per App pretty detailed. If they are active, they go through. There is not an additional energy saving switch that cuts off activated notifications (what a weird idea …).

New with iOS 15s focus mode is an option to decide if a notification will show directly, or only in a notification block. There are 2 blocks per day, at 8h and at 18h. Very nice to stop the permanent „I am important“ terror. And saving energy as well.

ah so with ios15 apple has once again copied an Android feature, good to know. 

There are enough reports about devs being threatened with a ban from the AppStore if they create an Android version. You just have to look for them. Epic vs. Apple was about if the AppStore is worth it. They found some truly shocking things about the AppStore. For example hundreds of thousands of downloads of compromised apps able to steal credit card details and Apple waited two weeks before removing the apps and never told the people who downloaded them. 

Mobile devices tend to have some form of battery optimization. Because Android is a full multi-tasking operating system as well, it is very careful about which apps are allowed to hog the battery. The nightmare scenario is that an app could do things like issue web calls a thousand times a second in the background. 

There could be legitimate reasons for this, so the play store doesn't prohibit this sort of behavior by default.

Android also has an API which says "run this bit of code in the next time slot the OS gives me" this is usually once every minute or something like that. This is useful for background activities. The evernote app should be using this API. 

However evernote 10 is written using a cross-platform framework and i have no idea how things like task-scheduling are handled. It's quite possible that the framework has been optimized for iOS devices (despite their small market share) and not for Android. Certainly Apple has threatened software projects in the past with blocking them on the AppStore if they dare to also support Android.

The windows ecosystem is about ten times as large as the Mac ecosystem, so i imagine there are good note-taking programs available, just don't ask me what they are. I've been a Linux user for twenty years now. On Linux one major note taking program is Joplin. 

Also there is a very large number of note taking apps for Android. In general Android development is a lot easier than iOS development so lots more people and companies write apps for Android. 

As for apps that run on windows and iOS, i can imagine apple being against this. Certainly they place stones in the way of anyone writing cross-platform apps (much like Microsoft does) by having things like secret APIs that only they are allowed to use. As an open-source advocate i find these power games absolutely ridiculous, but so is the modern world 😕

I wonder what the difference is between your account and mine. I've never had performance problems in evernote 10 😕

i must admit i have no idea how that works on iOS. is it possible on iOS for an app to register itself as a target for images or webpages? how do you share a webpage to evernote on iOS?

10 hours ago, Alxa said:

Thanks @ehrt74 for this hint. As I am also suffering from the lag and loading times since EN10 I opened up a ticket refering to the potential backend update (long time user). Will report here.

Thanks for the reply! do keep me posted! i'd be interested in hearing what evernote says. I had a problem a while back with notebooks appearing twice in the notebook list and they fixed that with a back-end update.

On 4/20/2022 at 6:41 PM, Merrow said:

Evernote still slow unusable on android takes minutes open a doc for months

This is not a general Android problem. In my Android devices i have not ever had this problem. My current hypothesis is that a back end update is necessary to speed up evernote on version 10 clients. Could you contact support?

On 4/19/2022 at 9:31 AM, agsteele said:

But I do notice that many reports of slowness on Android come from Samsung users. If course that could also be because Samsung had a corner on the Android market

I think Samsung has a market share of about 25% of Android devices.

On 4/15/2022 at 1:14 AM, bleep1234 said:

Yes me too desperately slow on Android

for some people evernote is really slow on any device. I'm beginning to wonder if data need to be migrated on evernote's servers to make the evernote 10 clients fast. it would be interesting to see if people who have slow evernote on android also have slow evernote on the desktop or on iOS for example. 

personally i've never had problems with evernote's speed, neither on the web nor on android (my two clients), however i started using evernote only 2 years ago on the beta web client, which was the first version of the software which later turned into evernote 10. maybe my data was "optimised" somehow for evernote 10?