Tamagotchi

The strength of Evernote was that it was the old cloud. You could dump all your data in one place and get access to it on the move, from any device, independent of the ecosystem and hardware. The ubiquity of the cloud has made this redundant. Sure it works best if we choose an ecosystem (Apple, Microsoft or Google) and cheapest when we use fewer services more. With Evernote, you have one user interface and many data sources, but we are then limited to the functionality that Evernote provides, which has stagnated since 2018 - hardly changed. The alternate option is to choose the cloud and then find apps that work well with it. The obvious choice is those that make that come with that ecosystem. Apple, Microsoft or Google produce many good apps that work seamlessly with their cloud service. Examples: Microsoft Office365 works seamlessly across all devices and scales to different screen sizes and includes a full range of apps. Cloud space is cheap with Terrabytes of data included in the Office365 annual subscription. Adobe has created something similar for the creatives. Adobe is too expensive for the occasional use but heavy user would see an advantage in an effort to create a seamless cloud environment with content creation apps. The bugbear with Evernote is what do I do with my data. Many startups have built a good app that does one thing well. They have seen a need and produced an app for that need. Some apps are related to an ecosystem but many are not. Take for example project management. There is so much choice and solutions for every segment and scale. Finding the best option is the challenge. Similar to other fields of activity, service providers offer a way of doing that specific activity better online. One comment in this forum related to a professional mail service that better-suited mails in volume business model than consumer-grade services. So I come back to the question. What does Evernote do well? The information available everywhere is not a unique selling point. The CEO promised that he wanted Evernote to do something with data. It is still not clear to me after 9 months what that vision is. Evernote really should have work it out by now, what they want to do well. In the meantime, Evernote broke the tag search. That was the key selling point for Evernote. That I could have a massive database of things that I had no chance of remembering. With a few tags and incremental adjustments including and excluding tags, I could narrow thousands down to a handful, within less than a minute. This was a wonder. Without search, data is useless. For a specific task, w will find something that is likely to serve, some better than others. There is a solution, should we define the problem sufficiently. Evernote will have to choose a niche, a segment and do that very well. What does the green elephant stand for now?

I need to fish out an old note today that I wrote at the beginning of last year to do a quick job. I logged into Evernote in the browser as I was using a computer that I had not used for months. It was the quickest. I thought Evernote had improved since October 2020 but still felt uncomfortable using it. I was puzzled by this until I realise it is all about trust. When you buy into an app/software solution you lend the provider trust: that the company will be still around in a year or more and the product still useful to you. Without trust, you would never start on the project. Not least important is the belief that the company will continue to support your workflows and that they value you as a customer. We have a relationship with businesses. So do I feel so uncomfortable about using Evernote? Well, the answer is simply that I have been burnt once and when it comes to experiencing pain we have very long memories. As it turns out, I am doing very well now without Evernote. I would have continued to use Evernote if they had handled the transition better, but they did not. The goodwill is gone and there is now nothing they can do to get back. Some could argue that there are few technical reasons to use Evernote, but there is one psychological one: trust. In a few years, the value of the notes will fade, and the sun will set on Evernote.

Discussions, when they become emotional or political can quickly degenerate to a dichotomy: with us or against us, true or false, cloud or not cloud. Consider the problem of cloud security: admit or not? A cloud service is not useful if I cannot get access to my data. However, it is also not useful if everybody can get access to my data. It is not a dichotomy. In the modern world, it is hard to imagine a useful app without some form of connectivity. Some are all about connectivity - Facebook or websites - but this is one end of the spectrum. Do we build the system to keep everybody out (a fortress) and only let in exceptions (a guard at the gate). When in doubt, we err on side of caution and deny access. The alternate is to optimise for entry. We err, in this case, to allow access. The latter turns up in strange places. LastPass was shown to have applied it to second-factor authentication. If you disrupted the second-factor authentication validation on LastPass (pull the plug so to speak) it would let you in. I would presume this is now fixed. The question Evernote has to ask itself is whether is a web application that facilitates local access or a local application that facilitates web access. Engineering is a matter of compromise. In the first case, it will do connectivity well, but its usefulness with intermittent data is likely poor. Alternatively, they could err on the side local, in which case its local performance is optimised, at the price of connectivity. The underlying assumption of EN10 is the latter and Legacy the former. This has implications. If the paradigm for EN10 is connectivity, it will never do local data well. It may pay lip service to it, as did LastPass with adding second-factor authentication, but that does not make it good. There is something disingenuous about lip service. This is how marketing got a bad name. In simple terms, it will never become a replacement for Legacy. If EN10 is to work with intermittent and unreliable data, which is typical for the vast majority of people and businesses around the world, Evernote has to do a lot better. Their current assumptions are more than a little naive. I think the problem is software developers do not get out into the real world much. Sitting in the office, rain is not something they have to think about. However, rain does make a difference, EN10 does not work.

For the individual, there are things that we wish to keep private and as a business, things we wish to keep confidential. It needs a workflow that covers storage, synchronisation between devices and communication with trusted partners. On all levels, it requires encryption, where the service provider has ZERO knowledge (end-to-end encryption). The deciding point is that EN10 is not going to be very helpful. Adobe Lightroom is an app designed around a specific workflow, as does AVID ProTools and Sibelius (albeit they could be much improved). In the Evernote Forum, I have read the discussion from people who use apps that fill a niche segment: how to deal with hundreds of business emails each day in marketing or sales, or an app for project management within teams. Because Evernote is generic, it does not serve any particular workflow well. I have identified my PUBLIC workflow (web publishing) and my PRIVATE workflow, use specialised different tools (apps) that do it much better than Evernote. The goal of EN10 was to make it much more useful. The Legacy product had stagnated for some years. In a competitive environment where more and more apps, offer specific solutions for specific problems (workflows), Evernote still offers a generic solution. Evernote will not do anything well, and the market share will erode over time. A slow death. Evernote has not yet achieved the functionality of Legacy (not changed since 2018) and it certainly has not come up with a vivid new identity for the space it wishes to fill. The statements from Evernote would suggest that it does not know who it is. There are many companies out there with a clear idea of what their app is supposed to do. I am not talking about features but rather how it makes the life of my customer easier by solving real-world problems. Workflows are one way to approach this e.g. an app for musicians to write music or photographers to distribute content (commercially), are highly valued. What niche does Evernote wish to fill?

For most people on the planet data neither fast nor reliable. Assuming the opposite is building your business model on the sand. Local storage is essential. Some data needs to be encrypted before transmission. Business data is confidential and personal data private. If you live in a cloud, data is assumed. I have watched many people sitting around the office twiddling fingers and going out for coffee because they could not do anything because of yet another IT failure. IT reliability has become chronic as the systems do not have sufficient resilience in the real world. Let's talk about the real world - not the Evernote bubble where the assumption is that you will always have data. 🙂 This is worth a read: Brilliant Hardware in the Valley of the Software Slump — by Craig Mod

Yes, I have seen this too, the metric may even be displayed on screen in the public space. It becomes a game how you can manipulate what is displayed on this board. That is all the management really cares about. Eventually, somebody hits the jackpot, the screen spews out money for somebody. At that point the management realises they have a problem and decides they need a new metric. The cycle seem to take only 3 months. It takes 3 months for somebody to crack the system and driven to the absurd. Some people are remarkably clever and creative, and it just warms my heart. 🙂 The client is the loser of course, because the same game dictates the problems are not best solved but most importantly avoid. I have often wondered about management naivety, and it is demonstrated wonderfully in the design of tech support systems. The rats in the wheel are not to blame.

I discovered today a limitation of web applications. Because they run in the browser, they are taken hostage by the internet connection. Local applications are far less sensitive to this. It is most noticeable on a PC. A PC has a lot of CPU power and fast SSD storage to throw at a local application. This is demonstrated with Legacy, a software virtually unchanged since 2018, is much faster than the modern equivalent and intended replacement EN10. The irony of this was never lost on me. New is that the level of internet dependence that EN10. For the sake of testing, I did not use Evernote but rather Outlook. Outlook, like Evernote, has a local product that is part of Office 365 suite and a web client equivalent (browser), Outlook.com, of comparable functionality (but still less after 5 years of development). The speed of the later depends far less on the speed of the PC but rather on the speed of the internet. Copper Today was a bad internet day. About two years ago, copper cable for "the last mile" from the exchange was replaced by a cabinet sitting on the street. With this change, the length of copper was reduced from 4.3 km to less than 1 km. The change was the result of a network upgrade from ADSL to VDSL that occurred in the whole suburb at that time. Our internet was then 10 times faster, but it is still slower than two-thirds of the broadband connections in the country. Data speed increases in steps with the introduction of new technology - from dial up, ADSL1, ADSL2, to VDSL- but then will largely stagnate. Email provides an interesting benchmark, as a service, for it has not noticeably got faster as in two decades and the functionality has remained unchanged. Resilience testing It can be difficult to test the resilience of the environment in a working system. Economists have noticed this and relied on freak events as a laboratory for policy changes. Two recent examples of this have been COVID-19 when governments intentionally suppressed economic activity (for good reasons) and the temporary introduction of the price on carbon for half a year in Australia. Both had a similar effect to turning off the lights, a sudden abrupt change that propagates through the system resulting in a new equilibrium. The equivalent for VDSL technology is rain - lots and lots of it. Copper pairs do not like water. The insulation breaks down as the moisture invades the ground and with it the cables. It is impossible to stop once the rain has become sufficient that the stormwater system exceeds its designed capacity. Runoff sinks into the ground everywhere and some flooding may occur. A puddle on the ground may not seem like much to us, but this is not true of copper. Anything below ground level gets wet, including the copper cables. VSDL slows becomes intermittent and then eventually stops. The effect of web clients in a browser is the same: it slows becomes intermittent and then stops. Outlook local versus Outlook.com Work must go on. With the increasing failure of the internet connection, I switch from the web client, Outlook.com, to the local application, Outlook à la Office 365. Working with Outlook does not get slower when the internet is intermittent. Sure, the synchronisation is also intermittent, but you do not notice that. The conclusion from this test is that local applications are resilient to rain (data unreliability) where web clients are not. Given sufficient rain, a web client reduces you to the tech of a bygone age, before the introduction of the internet, without a local application replacement. Better data I would hear the reoccurring objection, that the problem lies with better data and not putting all your data and applications in one basket, the cloud. While this is true, it is not possible to improve data connections quickly and a small business can certainly not do this without moving. (There a certain points in the city that are nodes from which large-capacity data is distributed. I have heard of businesses finding commercial premises in the same building as these nodes thereby overcoming the "last mile".) For most of us, this is not an option. Others would claim mobile data is the option. When the data goes out, a router can reroute the data to the mobile data network. This is great with local issues, but with heavy rain, the whole area goes down. It becomes a network failure. The mobile data network will become quickly overloaded and seize up. We see this with road closures. The traffic from an already overloaded network reroutes to the few available routes and the traffic comes to a halt. There is no substitute for network capacity. Building a better data network In the long term, the copper data network may be replaced by an optical fibre network and the "last mile" problem can finally be buried as a historical oddity. Unfortunately, such changes require large investments and long periods to build these networks. Unless the network is being built now, you will not see improvement soon. If there is no discussion of this then it could take a decade or more to see the improvement, should the upgrade from ADSL2 to VDSL be indicative. Conclusion Web applications such as EN10 are not resilient to rain compared to Legacy. This is another reason to stay with Legacy as long as possible. It is not just a question of functionality and privacy, but also the resilience of the workflow itself. Data disruption for many is a real threat. My response since October 2020 has been to develop workflows that cut out Evernote. For web publications, I have developed a workflow that does not require Evernote at all (Instapaper, Readwise, Grammarly, WordPress). If I need a "note taking" software then I use a Joplin local client which uses markdown just like WordPress. I see this trend continuing. I have no way to improve data. Legacy will fail eventually (threat). Until then, I have to remove my resilience on Evernote (risk mitigation). My workflows were a symbiosis with Evernote and this must end. Every app has its day. Companies come and go. The work, however, must go on. I have become indifferent to Evernotes plight but conclude that the management is not all that smart. What did Darwin have to say about this sort of thing?

Customer service in the current decade has become rather curious. Help pages usually give you instructions for the most basic functionality, which you can usually work yourself. More advanced functionality is often poorly documented. There will come a time when help pages help no more, and you need to contact support. Support often refers you to the "basics" page as that is easier and quickest. When there it is tricky, they will get right back with "we have passed the suggestion off to our dev team". This phrase has become a euphemism for "no idea and not my job." You know you have hit the limit of support with this message. Worrying is that it seems to happen so quickly. I have memories of support having a more "can do" approach and trying to find an answer for me. The good news is that the forums can be more help. Some people take pride in knowing things in the forums and can be the most help. From having got lost in different forums, Evernote is one of the better ones. I would congratulate the Evernote forum participants for that. The limitation is that even a capable forum cannot compensate for a limited product. It must be frustrating to have to say, again and again, that the product cannot do it yet. My inspiration for this post was my experience with customer support that all too often gives easy answers and gives up too quickly when a real problem arises. Have others experienced this?

I am a tagger and for tagging and tagging searches Legacy is the best - faster and more functionality. The EN10 has a ridiculous 50 note selection limits. If you compare the function of Legacy and EN10, I think you will find it much smaller. I have little doubt about this. EN10 may look pretty, but the beauty is more than skin deep. Functionality is more important. It is only two years of development. Perhaps, they just need a few years more. 🙂

Many have moved on and left Evernote. It was a good product and it was destroyed. Only the Evernote Legacy holds me there. A refuse to pay for this limited functional product. I have a decade of notes in it and is serves as an archive. I use other things now. If Evernote should go bust we know why.

Same here - a static database. It has no workflows attached to it any more. It is a curious case study. Will Evernote survive? In what form? They are not selling socks any more. Legacy still works better than anything and its features are over two years old. 🙂 PS This discussion started with Evernote 10 not working in a browser for me. It works again now (and no I am still in the locked out period - "Your monthly limit resets in 3 days"). I did not change anything on my set-up. (Regular updates of the OS was about it.) Evernote 10 comes and goes, it is in continual movement.

I suspected this. Thank you for the clarification.

If you are refering to value for money proposition, then you are correct. Anything divided by $0 gives you big numbers. On the other hand, if the comparison is in absolute terms - features, upload, in fact most things - the new free plan offers less than the old free plan. I think this is easily demonstrated. In this sense, it is a retrograde development. Again the savour is Legacy. It was always good. The recent 6.25.2.9198 and that from last October is so similar that nobody is going to notice. The advantage of the free plan is that you get to use Legacy 6.25.2.9198 on a single PC and it is fast, stable and familiar. There is nothing wrong with that. The fate of Evernote 10 is in the stars. Where it is going in the future is not something I would hope to guess.

I agree. The free version is more restrictive than the old one. The Evernote 10 experience has been in many ways a retrograde one.

Confirmed. Works in Chrome but not Edge - both Chromium. Strange but works.

Thanks. I will investigate this further

Yes, try to log in with a browser (Chromium), and you get a blank white screen. The app download of Evernote 10 in the tab never takes place. No error message appears in the browser, just a blank screen. It would be helpful to have on the splash screen to indicate that the limit has been reached and a prompt to change to the Premium offer, but it does not do this. I would not take Premium at this stage but if it is not offered, people are unlikely to think to buy it. The current set up simply disables E10 in a browser. I found this interesting and a little surprising. As previously stated, I expect the notes to still be visible, that a block may be implemented disabling the web clipper and creation of new notes. This is not the case. More sensible would be at least a banner prompt to change to the Premium offer. From a marketing perspective, reward customer interest of any sort.

Thanks for your comment. Because Legacy works locally, it works independently of the upload restrictions. The Legacy product is popular with many people because of its functionality. I would argue that although Evernote 10 is new, Legacy is the better option for people who only want to work locally, and cannot afford, or do want to pay, for a plan. Legacy is therefore not just the bridge between old and new products (until Evernote 10 catches up) but rather an alternate product for those that work on ONE PC only. The design is not modern but stable, but it makes Legacy an interesting option for now. The question of uncertain of its availability is quickly dismissed by the transient nature of all Evernote products. Evernote has a history making sudden product changes. Those that are unhappy with that would be best to find something else anyhow. By the way of comparison, I find the feature set of Legacy superior. There may be new features of Evernote 10 that Legacy does not have, but I have no use for them. 🙂

I downgraded to the free plan. I have been testing Evernote 10 (browser) by clipping things to it. Nothing, critical though for my work. I was aware that there was a data upload limit on the free plan and this applies to the Evernote Clipper too. Interestingly, when you hit the limit after two warnings (50 than 95%), Evernote is locked. The problem is not that you cannot add new notes but rather you lose access to Evernote for the rest of the month. I find this rather surprising. It is another good reason to use Legacy as your notes, once downloaded, can be blocked. Unloading is still then impossible, but that is only temporary. Long live Legacy, as they say (and ignore everything else Evernote has done in the last two years). 🙂

Unfortunately, unlike for YouTube links, there is currently no preview of what is in the Google Drive file. What will iFrame style link be introduced that allows one to see the contents of the linked file on Google Drive without opening it. Notion can do this. Thank you

Here is an example of how rapidly some apps and possible substitutes for Evernote note are developing. 🙂 Here is one release: RemNote | Updates Confident developers offer road maps. There is a sense of "we know were we are going." Product Hunt - new product information Not surprisingly, dedicated website are popping up to discuss new and upcoming apps. Here is one: Product Hunt – The best new products in tech. Quote: Product Hunt Launch! Product Hunt is a social platform for startups and creators to showcase their products to the world for exposure and feedback. It’s the bazaar where the hottest upcoming apps are discovered. For RemNote, this means a very important opportunity to get feedback not only from our beloved community, but from thousands of others who might not have heard of us before. Aliases - a type of tag I have argued that tags are useful for aliases which can be synonyms, acronyms, abbreviations, spelling variations, different languages and more. Anything that useful can be implemented as a feature in itself. Here is an extract from the update notes. Quote: Alias Examples Synonyms. Example: Alias “Myocardial Infarction” with “Heart Attack” Acronyms. Example: Instead of always typing “Deoxyribonucleic Acid” as a Rem Reference, use the Alias “DNA” Topics with multiple names. Examples: (“Image processing” and “Computer vision”) (“Imitation learning” and “Learning from demonstration”) Abbreviations. Example: Alias “World Wide Web” with “WWW” or “www” Spelling and Tense Changes. Example: Alias “Humble” with “Humbled”, “Humbling”, “Humility” Multilingual Notes/Rem. Example: “Dog” and “Perro”

Coming are many new apps that require no local storage or installation but they are not without weaknesses. Evernote has for the last months promised much but delivered little. Promises can mean little. What do the new world apps have to offer? Here is an analysis capture in stand formatting with RemNote. The post is, in itself, an experiment. https://www.remnote.io/a/-new-apps-for-old/5febbc61b502740036b184b7

I would agree that life is much easier if the keyboard shortcuts were standardised within the ecosystem. It was therefore a surprise to find that each app developer has gone their own way. I refer here to Notion and more specifically Obsidian, Roam Research and RemNote. Notion is most flexible with mouse, typed commands (following a /) and keyboard shortcuts. RemNote offers these three to but the mouse support is limited. Roam Research is the worst with many undocumented keyboard shortcuts and changes. Welcome to the world of permeant beta. What is lacking is consistency between apps. Using a native app the keyboard shortcuts are laid out around a scheme that has become the norm. Swap to a browser app and that scheme is different. Swap to another browser app and it is different again. P can have the meaning "print" or "search" and H means "help", "hide" or "substitute" depending on the app. It gets worse with different language keyboards. Some symbols disappear from the keyboard to be replaced by more commonly used others. The forum would suggest, that Roam Research has chosen keyboard shortcuts that do not work well on a Spanish keyboard. We have CSS libraries that allow us to change the appearance of an app in a flash. I am waiting for the day when the app designers have a library of keyboard shortcuts layouts which are optimised around the ecosystem and keyboard language. Currently, time-consuming reallocation of keyboard shortcuts is the only option.

With browser apps, keyboard shortcuts are an alternative the reliance on the mouse and menus. Forum discussion of Ian Small's plans for Evernote would suggest that many lost features will not be coming back. Evernote 10 does not adequately support keyboard shortcuts but this should change. Would Evernote 10 be usable with good keyboard shortcuts? RemNote suggests it might be. Learning keyboard shortcuts requires you to learn arbitrary associations. Approached a specific way, learning 65 shortcuts over a week and required 30 minutes a day. What is RemNote? RemNote is a note taking app. The user interface is different for it is not designed for the mouse but controlled from the keyboard either through commands after typing the character "/" fast but best with keyboards shortcuts. Many shortcuts Over 65 commonly used keyboard shortcuts which are a combination of the special keys and characters. The easiest keyboard shortcuts are already assigned to the operating system, followed by the browser. Both Edge and Chrome have similar shortcuts. This leaves a browser app such as RemNote with many awkward shortcuts. Active recall, sequenced learning and spaced repetition Keyboard shortcuts steepen the learning curve but it can be flattened again with using the right approach. active recall - we remember things better by testing our memory sequenced learning - starting from the simple and then add complexity spaced repetition - long term retention of rarely used commands are best ensured through intermittent testing over longer periods Analysis of the keyboard shortcuts Ranked from least common to most common: Ctrl + Shift + Alt - 7 commands Ctrl + Alt - 7 commands Alt only - 9 commands Ctrl only - 17 commands Ctrl + Shift - 18 commands The learning sequence The learning sequence starts with the shortlist first Ctrl + Shift + Alt and progressively add later lists each day. Accumulatively lists that test, each day, what has been learnt previously: List 1: ctrl-shift-alt, ctrl-alt - 14 commands List 2: ctrl-shift-alt, ctrl-alt, alt only - 23 commands List 3: ctrl-shift-alt, ctrl-alt, alt only, ctrl only - 40 commands List 4: ctrl-shift-alt, ctrl-alt, alt only, ctrl only, ctrl-shift - 58 commands Complete list of all shortcuts: - 65 commands. Conclusion Learning all the keyboard shortcuts takes about a week. Some of the keyboard shortcuts are similar or the same as Microsoft Office. Many shortcuts are, however, specific to RemNote. Learning all the shortcuts takes about a week. They will be forgotten again if not used regularly. Intermittent revision of the complete list is required to retain all shortcuts and maintain fluency.

Historically before the introduction of graphical user interfaces driven with a mouse, keyboard shortcuts were popular. The mouse has proven so persuasive that for many keyboard shortcuts have not played much of a role. But that was before Electron. Electron has come to dominate SaaS apps. Electron has poor mouse support compared to native desktop apps. Apps are run from browser tabs and a data connection a must. The priority on smartphones and tablets puts keyboards second. The mouse support of apps is more limited and selection of multiple paragraphs or multiple notes with a mouse cannot be assumed. Selection of multiple notes in Evernote 10 is not possible, at least in the browser, which seems to be the only version with any future. Is there another way? My observation is that Electron SaaS apps better support the keyboard as the mouse. Commands through keyboard shortcuts are hard to learn but quick to use. I have spent a week learning 65 keyboard shortcuts for RemNote. It has thrown new light on Evernote. Evernote always has had keyboard shortcuts. The recent Evernote roadmap would suggest they are coming back. Not all keyboard shortcuts from the Legacy software are currently supported by the Evernote 10. An update including the keyboard shortcuts documentation is also planned. When this work is completed, Evernote 10 would be faster to use. Currently clicking through multiple menus to complete a task for every note makes this app laborious. This why I currently find myself doing the work elsewhere. RemNote demonstrates that even with mouse support for only the most basic commands that an Electron app can still get the work done. As keyboard shortcuts steepen the learning curve, some may not welcome it. Once the keyboard shortcuts are learnt, however, there is considerable convenience. There are also problems with the implementation. In Chromium browser, the keyboard shortcuts for the apps best not conflict with either the operating system or Chromium. The operating system and Chromium have many shortcuts and they can be difficult if not impossible to disable. The Google Chrome forum is frustrated that keyboard shortcuts are hardwired into Chrome. For apps in a kiosk, keyboard shortcuts are unwanted. For developers working in a tab, accidental closure of a tab can mean loss of work. The OS has the first choice of the best keyboard shortcuts. The browser reserves the best of what remains. This leaves the Chromium app to pick up what is left, often the lesser of the evil. The app shortcuts will be used more often, leaving them at odds with the operating system and Chromium shortcuts. This is far from optimal. None English language keyboards are a weak point for many apps. English only has 26 letters. Many languages have many more - particularly vowels. Keyboards have a similar number of keys in most languages. Symbols are move to unlikely places and useful vowels added in their place. Keyboard shortcuts are usually designed on a US English keyboard. Different keyboard shortcut maps for each language are often not provided. RemNote app permits the simple relocation of keyboard shortcuts. Still the changes are significant. Just adding three vowels and one consonant for German results in the reallocation of the almost half of the 65 keyboard shortcuts. Relief may be in sight with function keys making a comeback. Many keyboards have function keys which are rarely used but could be assigned scripts for keyboard shortcut sequences for common workflows. This proves remarkably helpful. It will be interesting to see what Evernote does with keyboard shortcuts.