Chris Huston

Side note: Just watched this interview with Ian Small. It looks like he fell into a trap filled with the dead bodies of companies past. The book “Crossing the Chasm” is all about the fatal mistake of polling 10 different kinds of users, making a list of their most valued features and then having a committee determine “if we do these X features we meet 80% of everybody’s needs” - missing the point that you’re failing to completely satisfy anyone’s needs. The book goes on to talk about the different market segments and how they respond to incomplete or promised features: turns out that very few users are willing to accommodate an 80% solution (early adopters and visionaries that see an opportunity). The rest of the market (pragmatists and laggards), representing something like 80% of your users, just want to get their work done. A partial solution means some part of their work is blocked - so they’ll be pissed. I’m old enough to know not say “no way they’ll pull it off” but the choices, motivations and the fact that Small seems to have a hard to time listening even to the host of the podcast - puts me deep into the skeptical category. FYI: Apple notes is working out so far. Yike

Thanks for the feedback. Note on shared Notes.app notes: use a shared folder. We have 3 kids, my wife and I use a shared Notes.app folder for each kid which is far easier to manage than individual notes. I think where I’m landing now is that I really want to be able to do my markup in any third party app (PDFExpert, GoodReader) and be able to save directly back into the original note (avoiding an export, edit, re-import loop). Even more fun would be a note taking app whose native format is PDF. That would solve the problem of what happens when Evernote goes apathetic, or Apple breaks Notes - just move all your notes (PDFs) to the next new tool - no loss of formatting, tags, etc.. GoodReader and PDFExpert are 90% of the way there already - they both just need a decent text editor and syncing. For now, it looks like I’m going to try living within Apple notes, backfill the 200-300 notes that are WebClipped HTML with Safari “export as PDF” single page PDFs. — Chris

@stoppa What’s your assessment of GoodNotes?

@bigtelco Just updated my post on Apple Notes. My markup is successfully syncing but it’s taking hours not seconds. I’m used to the near live updates in Notes.app. Often my wife and I use a shared Notes.app shopping list that sync so quickly it can become a surrogate chat app. All of my Notes.app PDF markup are now synced to all of my devices but it took several hours to happen. I can’t tell for sure, but it might be that syncing is only happening when the app is in the foreground. Still hoping Evernote revamps their product management and brings the tool to it’s full potential, but going to try to get by on Notes.app for now.

@bigtelco I thoroughly agree with your bill of harms and the poor outlook for Evernote. This is a dispiriting moment. I’d much rather have a functional, prosperous Evernote than try to move all this work to another tool. Yet, as you state, we’re not in the first inning of Evernote’s decline - we’re deep into the game. I’m actively looking for replacements. I’m trying the Apple Notes.app. Although, Apple is horrible about just dropping technologies that people have put immense effort into content creation (OpenDOC, iWeb, Aperture). What I’ve found so far: The import was very fast Syncing between devices is good Search, including within the attached PDFs, is very fast even with 1000+ large PDFs. Sketching is a pleasure. Web clipping works great from Desktop Safari via export PDF and on iOS using the “print...” panels ability to generate a PDF who’s share sheet will store directly into a note. Problem: the generated “single page” PDFs don’t preserve the hyperlinks. PDFs exported with “Print...”/“Save as PDF...” do preserver hyperlinks. Giant Problem: It doesn’t appear that annotations made to PDFs with the “Markup tool” (which is excellent) get synced back to iCloud. The modifications persist on my iPad but do not sync back to Mac or iPhone. Markup may take a long time to get synced between devices - but it does show up eventually. The markup tool edits don’t appear to show up under Preview.apps’s “Highlights & Notes” sidebar section. Notes imported from HTML/Evernote Web-Clipper aren’t terribly usable The source URL in the note attributes doesn’t survive import so you have a mangled note and no link. There’s no versioning - if you mistakenly nuke a part of your note, there’s no getting it back. No tags It doesn’t appear you can search a PDF that you’re viewing from within Notes.app It sure would be great if Evernote would work.

I’ve been on Evernote premium for 5 years. I have about 1200 annotated PDFs in Evernote. I have been frustrated for years that if I leave Evernote while annotating a paper on the iPad (for a chat message or a web lookup) Evernote will crash in the background and lose all of my work - the same is true for sketches. But I’ve kept using Evernote in the belief this will be resolved eventually. Now we have this “upgrade” that has utterly mangled the PDF annotation functionality. I am baffled that product managers at Evernote thought this was releasable software. I spent a few hours looking at OneNote. Unfortunately, while it seems strong in many other areas, it doesn’t really annotate PDFs - just images of the pages. And even more troublesome - you can’t search for content within attached PDFs. Evernote: had the OneNote worked out - there’s an Evernote import tool - I would be gone today, never to return. I don’t have time in my schedule for this nonsense - but I also, most certainly, can’t afford to be without the functionality to manage and annotate my PDFs/notes. Evernote: you have my attention until I find a reasonable replacement. Please offer an option to rollback to 8.x or get this resolved immediately. In the meantime, you’re going to bleed professional customers. If the moderators don’t block it, I love to hear what you all are finding for alternatives. — Chris