GrumpyMonkey

I think I might have requested a narrower option six or seven years ago. I don’t recall users or developers being terribly interested. I wonder why. On a Macbook, (an Air in the old days), it’s been terrible, and I don’t know what purpose the extra large window serves. I’ve learned to work around it, but I think it’s attention to little details like this (basically, how the app works in practice in different environments) that really gain the loyalty and respect of users, so I encourage Evernote to sweat the details. Competitors are, frankly, crushing Evernote in this respect — it’s just kind of annoying to use Evernote in conjunction with other apps.

I think that stripping the formatting is the best we are going to get, because Evernote has .html (actually .enml, which is a fork), and so it is impossible to have a truly plain text note short of a complete redesign of the entire service (a dedicated space for plain text notes, I guess).I don’t see that happening, If plain text is your thing, I doubt Evernote will ever be a comfortable fit for you. But, on the plus side, Evernote’s .html is pretty easy to convert to plain text, it isn’t a significant departure from it if you are just looking for some file type that will survive in the long term, and the tradeoff with .enml is that you can do some pretty convenient formatting across multiple clients without much effort — in most cases, it just works, and you can quickly go from just a few hurriedly typed notes to presentation-quality text in no time at all. As for competitors, Simplenote has been in it for the long haul (I’ve had unfortunate experiences with it in the past), and Bear is a beutifully done newish notetaking app — bothe of them are worth a look, but neither has anywhere near the power and flexibiliity of Evernote.

I don’t think there is ever a good time to try and upsell paying customers — I don’t know how the idea of inserting annoying ads into my app ever got out of any committee. And then, someone apparently thought it’d be a good idea to make it so that you get the same ad on each platform, and you have to dismiss each one individually. If I was considering spaces before, I’m not today! I don’t care if the editor becoms the gold standard in the industry, the marketing gimmicks will always annoy me. For reference, I’ve been around ten years now, I actually argued to keep the original ad scheme (very smart to assign it an out-of-the-way location and make it easily opt-in / opt-out). “Ads”aren’t bad, but the annoying implementation is.I think it can be done better, don’t you? The same thing goes for the editor. On good days, it works great, and then there is a rewrite from the ground up (how many times now?), lots of broken stuff that will get fixed on the way to great things (so we are told), and yet a simple bullet list still reliably fails on multiple platforms. After ten years, I think a lot of us are expecting a more professional, measured approach that has no tolerance for ironing out the bugs after the shiny new thing has rolled out — we’re paying professionals who want to get work done. I’m actually not in the least bit annoyed or troubled by the editor at the moment . I’m working around the problems. I just think it’s long past time for Evernote to change things up a bit. Try herding all of your cats into a room, working out the existing bugs, incorporating user suggestions, and releasing something solid that lacks any bugs (or , at least, no significant ones).Once is enough. It’ll blow our minds. I imagine the gratitude from users will also warm the cockles of your hearts. Wouldn’t you like to give it a try?

and, the ceo before him promised “sexy” encryption. the engineers at evernote are probably some of the best in silicon valley (judging by evernote’s reputation, the ones i have met, and their excellent product). i suspect it is more about lack of interest in seeing it happen. apple notes has it. onenote has it. devonthink has it. there is even a third-party plugin for evernote that has it. the only people without encryption for an entire note (at the very bottom level) is evernote. whatever the reason, i hope they sort it out.

I think I may have been requesting encryption for several years now, with various levels of urgency, but Evernote has not adopted the suggestion for some reason. I'd be interested to know why. As I've mentioned before, competitors have managed it, so it's technically feasible. Where there's a will, there's a way.

Yikes. I'm not too keen on features that roll out unannounced, or features that are removed without an announcement well in advance, and I am certainly not interested in having Evernote try and suggest which photos I put into Evernote. In fact, I don't want Evernote in my photos at all unless I specifically ask for it to upload something from my camera roll (iOS). It'd be nice to see a bit more dialogue about such features, and hopefully a bit more interest in providing the many, amany features we have requested and have not yet seen implemented. In all my years here, I cannot remember a single instance (someone correct me if I am wrong) of a single user among the more than 200 million folks out there asking for this feature... I'm hoping this doesn't make its way over to iOS thanks to you Android guinea pigs

I don’t know who this GrumpyMonly guy is, but I agree with him I don’t agree with the explanation for Evernote’s price hike, though. As I understood it at the tiime, they presented it as an investment in the future — if you get something out of it, then pay so that we can make it better. https://blog.evernote.com/blog/2016/06/28/changes-to-evernotes-pricing-plans/ There was a great gnashing of teeth at the time, but I didn’t mind the price hike. It was the way they implemented it that seemed terribly clumsy. There was no sense (at least in my reading) that there was a switch or a re-alignment. Perhaps I missed something in subsequent discussions. The reason I point this out is that I think these users are right to hold Evernote’s feet to the fire —- we paid more and made the “investment,” but the clipper is (on every platform I’ve used) not terribly good, and sometimes downright awful (in fact, the *clipper* might not be as bad as I think; it may be that my iPad / iPhone have trouble displaying clipped pages from rather common sites, but whatever the reason, the stuff I clip isn’t appearing in my account as expected). Personally, I mainly use the print feature in iOS to save web pages into Evernote as PDFs, so I am insulated from the web clipper deficiencies, but that doesn’t make it any less irritating. I want the service to stick around, and if Evernote wants to charge more and keep its customers, it needs to deliver as promised. It’s no good for any of us if Evernote sheds users because it can’t follow through. Are a few rough edges in Evernote sufficient reason to switch to a more expensive copycat with fewer features, less integration, etc.? Not in my opinion. Perhaps Nimbus Notes and other competitors are more useful as prods to push Evernote to do better — it’s a great product, but if they don’t constantly polish and improve it (as promised), there are viable alternatives out there that people will use instead.

It depends on the plan, of course, but the price did go up for Evernote quite a bit. I‘m not sure there are many changes to justify it (on the user’s end), and I don‘t think they rolled it out very well. But, I’d rather have them adjust their business model as necessary to make sure the service not only continues, but also improves over time. It‘s a long-term investment. Hopefully, it is worth paying every year for the plus or premium plans. For my use case, at least, it is an easy choice to make. Nimbus Note, as far as I can tell, costs a bit more (for me) and does a lot less, so I don’t see the Nimbus option as a cost-effective one.

I recommend accepting Evernote as it is (warts and all) rather than waiting for it to be what you want it to be — as long as they are delivering good performance on the features they’ve promised (prompt bug solutions, etc.), they’re doing a good job, in my opinion. They could be doing better! Hoping and requesting is fine, but expecting them to go beyond what they’ve currently got in the app is bound to generate frustration. If this is a critical feature for you, I’d consider other apps. There are several nice ones on the mac. For example, if you are working with text, bbedit is amazing, and you can keep your notes in dropbox for access on any device.

Hi. Welcome to the forums. I don’t know if the feature is basic or not. There are other powerful notetaking / database on apps without a global search/replace, for example. But, I do agree that find/replace would be a really nice feature to at least have in single notes. And, if possible, a global search/replace would also be nice. This has been requested before, but it never hurts to add your voice. Thanks! Hopefully the Evernote engineers will consider adding it.

For photos, I don’t use the document feature of Evernote’s scanning features (artwork as opposed to an electric bill). And, I don’t see any benefits for PDFs. I take a photo (iphone camera app) , trimming or adjusting it before I export it to Evernote. One benefit of images is that text and handwriting will be recognized in them. Evernote does have text recognition for PDFs, but it isn’t optimized for handwriting, so the results won’t be so great. In addition, at least on iOS, images display inline, even when not connected to the Internet, so you can easily browse.

Thanks for the information. I don’t think it is open source, is it? Yes, it does look like a clone, and even has “ever” as part of its identity. A business that works like this, basically stealing the work of others, is not very appealing. But, leaving that aside and just comparing the apps on their merits, it seems to me that there aren’t any superior features for my particular workflow, so I don’t see the appeal. The web clipping thing is a little more understandable, because a lot of people rely on Evernote for that, but that isn’t a big issue for me (everything works fine for me on iOS). Perhaps this thread would make a bit more sense in a feature request area — it would be nice if Evernote had X, Y, and Z like Nimbus Note? At any rate, good luck with the service. Drop by in a few months after you’ve spent some time sith it and let us know how it is going.

I’m not so bothered by threads like this IF they contain information for fellow Evernote users to make an informed opinion. In my experience, a discussion about the merits / demerits of an alternative usually ends up highlighting Evernote’s strengths, whatever the elements of friction might be (in this case, the clipper). Just saying that X exists, or that you are going to use X instead of Evernote seems closer to spam to me than a substantive discussion; hence, my questions to your original post.

Hi. Thanks for the suggestion to leave Evernote and use another service, but I think it'd help more if you gave reasons instead of posting again and again in the forums about it. It seems to closely mimic the Evernote UI, but is missing a ton of features for a similar price, so I don't see the appeal myself. Is there a Nimbus community like this? Anyhow, best of luck with Nimbus. Thanks for joining the community here.

Hahaha. I'd forgotten about that post

Yeah. It is what it is. Until it isn't. It's up to Evernote if they want to change it, and I doubt that decision has a whole lot to do with technology or capacity. As with many other feature requests / improvements, it seems to be more about priorities.

I prefer to use apps suited for the task (assuming we are still talking about committing words or phrases to memory). My favorite app for flashcards is Flashcards Deluxe, because you can pretty much fine-tune anything in it, but, more importantly for my purposes, you can easily share word/term/phrase lists (text files saved in Dropbox) with people. Evernote, though, might be more appropriate for larger chunks of data. For example, a review of some historical event (if you are a historian) that you took notes on a while ago but haven't seen for a while. In this case, if you date the notes (as I do) in the title, on a day like today (the 24th), you could review all the notes you've made on the 24th of the month. This spaces out the repetition without the need for a complex system of tags and so forth.

Unfortunately, I have no idea what would or would not be required on the backend. What you said makes sense. But, other services I pay for (Dropbox, for example) have no such limits and seem to be doing just fine. Google, as I understand it, has no such limits, and Evernote is stored on their servers, so from a technical standpoint, this is a solved issue. Much like other things (encrypted notebooks, a higher limit for the total number of notes, a higher limit for the number of notebooks, etc.) this seems to be an arbitrary limit rather than a technical one. Perhaps it has something to do with cost, but if we are going to go there, we are talking about priorities, and as a paying customer, I prioritize this higher than a new iOS interface.

I've got a lot of PDFs that exceed the limit, and I am not interested in going through them all to break them up, so It makes Evernote a lot less useful for me than it could be. I'd like to see them raise ut, especially for paying Premium customers.

there is not necessarily a loss in features like search. devonthink and voodoopad have had full database zero-knowledge encryption and searching for a while now (years?). if evernote wanted to do it, they could.

Hi. Personally, I'd prefer if they didn't waste time with cosmetic protections (if someone has access to your user account on the computer, they can easily find everything in Evernote without even opening the app). I'd recommend creating a separate user account on your computer. You can switch users in just one or two seconds. It's fast, convenient, secure, and already built into your computer

yes. that is correct. theoretically, you could have one default notebook with 100,000 notes in it. the 100,000 number, as far as i know, is a hard limit that includes notebooks you have joined or are sharing, as well as local notebooks. in other words, at any one time, you can only have a maximum of 100,000 notes in your account. i think that business users might be an exception. they should be able to have up to 500,000 in a single account, but now we are in territory with which i am unfamiliar. i used to be a business account member, and could test this kind of stuff out, but no longer.

you can have up to 100,000 notes in a single notebook. that is the only limit i know of, so if you are doing about 10 to 20 notes per day, it will take you about three decades to fill it up. by then, i hope they will have raised many of the limits

It's looking like iOS will probably be my "workaround" for the limitation. I am not terribly keen on the separate account (I've got four or five now?) workaround for the limitation, because my problem is that the Premium account has a 10 GB monthly upload limit, and my computer only has about 40 GB of free space left, so in a few months, I'll have to spend another 1300 to 1400 dollars to get a computer with more space, or cancel the Premium subscription (the lack of selective sync is one reason my record of Premium membership has been so uneven over the last 8 years). Using a very limited Basic account on my most powerful device (my Mac) and my Premium one on the weakest device (my iPad) is unappealing. But, we'll see what happens. The iOS app (with the exception of some rather severe bugs I recently encountered and reported) is a pretty good app that can handle uploads (send PDFs into an app on the iPad and upload from there). The question is whether I can do everything I need to do in Evernote with a combination of the Web and iOS app. Maybe. Maybe. Of course, from my perspective, the existence of selective sync on the iPad but not on the Mac is a glaring gap in coverage, and a disappointing lack of parity across devices. I also think encrypted notebooks should have been developed years ago, when everyone else started moving that direction. Evernote's competitors can accomplish these two things (selective sync and encryption), so I think it is about time they get it sorted out over at headquarters. But, as mentioned above, we aren't steering this ship, and we have to do the best with what we have. Evernote is a pretty amazing service, and it is worth at least considering workarounds to keep using it.

The unlimited uploads would have been fine if they meant it and were prepared to handle it, but apparently they thought unlimited would just be understood as "a lot," and they started cutting off folks arbitrarily if they thought they were using too much (whatever that is). naturally, that was infuriating for customers who paid for unlimitd but got just a lot. eventually, they abandoned the scheme and went to 10GB. The lesson here for Evernote, in my opinion, wasn't to avoid "unlimited." It was to do a better job with the planning, and not to do stuff just because it sounds good. If you go paperless (as Evernote often advocates) and you do your work in Evernote (as Evernote often advocates) then you are going to find people (like me) who are going to take you at your word and use the service for files that are easily several hundred megabytes. If you offer 10GB a month without selective sync on the desktop, then you are going to have people (like me) actually using it, and expecting some solution to the rather obvious storage space issues on our computers. In other words, Evernote needs to make plans, build a service that can handle those plans, and implement them. Right now, we have plans, a service that can kind of / sort of handle them, and partial implementation. It's that gap between what they say ("remember everything," 10GB per month, etc.) and what they do that irks me. In my case, 10GB a month is actually pretty nice, but 200MB chunks at a time isn't, so I want to see that a bit larger. I don't have too many 500MB+ PDFs, so that is a nice number for me. And, we already have selective sync (on mobile). It works fine. Evernote just has to plan well for its implementation on the desktop. In my case, I'd actually download LESS, because I don't want or need a lot of it on my computer, and every install I would have the download turned off. Business already has selective sync on the desktop. They've got a bunch of notebooks in their libraries that they are encouraged to download as needed. Pretty sweet. And, if the notebooks were searchable while online, it would completely solve my selective sync problems, and I would pay for the business service (true -- I've said this for years). In other words, I (as an individual) would be paying nearly double what regular folks (plus) pay for the service just to have this feature that would probably have very little impact on anyone else (I want to use them and keep them there for my use online, not pull huge chunks in and out of the servers). I'd be funding a better service for everyone. You're welcome Anyhow, this is all just a bit of early morning blabber on my part. At no point would I recommend that Evernote adopt my ideas if it would negatively impact the experience of my fellow users. I want them to plan better, build better, and implement better so that it improves for all of us. If 500 MB limits work, great! If not, OK. The same goes with all of the other limits I would like to see regularly raised.