silvershower

i'm unfollowing this topic now, have great lives all of you.

4 minutes ago, PinkElephant said:

Personally I don’t understand people who lament and doesn’t seem to find value - but continue to use the service, even paying for it.

You say you leave now - good for you, if the value proposition is not good enough any more. But this is not transferable to other users, with their own use cases.

Which is why I have cancelled my sub and I am migrating notes away. It is important the users of this forum see the reality, whatever the view. Your relentlessly pro-evernote stance in the face of real world evidence to the contrary is incredibly unhelpful. I have never found anything you have said even remotely valuable - all you have done is tell me i am using the product wrong or must be stupid. You have to really examine how you are spending your life as if you get a positive experience out of your presence on this forum then you need to get out of the house and experience life a bit more. 

3 minutes ago, PinkElephant said:

I explain my own uses, and hope this set es other forum users. Other, more experienced users have served me well in doing the same.

Any problem with this approach ?

the problem is that i am just not sure why you care whether other people like or don't like the product. How to use it, maybe advice, fine.... but why try to convince people who think the product is sh** that they are wrong? I am more confused than anything else by it. We've spoken before on here. 

you realise you aren't obliged to act as marketing for this company, right?

15 minutes ago, bmcl26 said:

I beg to differ, my use of EN has increased exponentially with the introduction of V10 (which I was not a fan of at first) Home, Calendar, Tasks and Widgets.

fine ok, I'll rephrase a bit... my point is really that surely everyone needs the note-taking part. Not everyone needs the other bits. 

8 minutes ago, PinkElephant said:

The current syncing is basically a design of the 2000s and more or less unchanged since 2008: A full note is synced, sync runs in cycles, preferably on a solid network connection.

The world has changed: More devices, more collaboration, mobile networks. I think that the redesign of the syncing will tackle all this. Since it is in beta now, it is something round the corner, not a distant hope.

sorry, but i have heard that all before really. When you say the world has changed - yes it changed a long time ago. To not evolve (or arguably, fix) something which is nearly 15 years old, whilst still taking tons of money off of customers is quite frankly astonishing. However if anything, modern data contracts and fast mobile connectivity should mean that the sync works better than it did before, not worse. I've moved everything to apple notes now and honestly it works like a dream, and I don't miss any functionality evernote provides. Why I didn't do this years ago I am not sure.

11 minutes ago, eric99 said:

I don't believe that Bending Spoons will reap the credit, but hopefully they will set the priorities to make the cloud functionality rock solid before adding more fancy features as the current management does today...

if you look back, every year that goes by people who for whatever reason are evernote fans have been saying oh yea just wait till this next release and big things are coming and it will all be great. It's a note taking app. This is not sending people to Mars. How hard can it be to just get this stuff right?

13 minutes ago, Mike P said:

What is your evidence for this?

whatever. This is what crappy product companies do. They focus all their energy on shipping new features in order to secure investment. They have no care about customers or their needs.

It's not useful for me personally to describe yet again the issues, but for the sake of clarity, I would make a change on iOS and it fairly regularly it wouldn't reflect on macbook at all until I either restart evernote for macOS, or until I make a change to the note (after forgetting I had made a change to iOS in the first place, and assuming it had sync'd down already) obviously then creating a conflict. Other times I would make a change to iOS and it would refuse to sync up at all despite perfect connectivity. I would have to restart the iOS app numerous times to try and force it. Any changes to mac in that time were obviously then impossible as they would have generated a conflict. Other times I would get a conflict when both devices were entirely sync'd for no reason at all, which was completely mystifying. Most recently, and the final straw for me was that sometimes evernote would entirely lose note edits on both platforms with no reason or error. Sometimes it would be there in the history (so it was clear that the new version had been overwritten with an old version) and sometimes it was lost forever.

Even for a free product this would be unacceptable (not losing data is requirement number 1 for a notes app), but for a paid product it is astonishing. I'm not asking for advice on how to avoid these issues, as no advice I was given ever worked. These are product bugs but were never fixed by evernote despite some of these existing for years, for me at least. Evernote seem to prioritise all these new stupid features no one ever uses rather than ensuring that the basics are solid. They've been acquired by another company now so I guess the relevant leaders in the company got what they wanted in the end, which is just money. 

i've cancelled my evernote subscription finally. The latest note edit loss was the final straw. After using this product for 10 years, I can say conclusively, what an genuinely terrible product this is. Sync still doesn't work well, no end of quality issues, and in the last few months it has been mysteriously losing my note edits. I won't be sad to go, and would encourage other users to do the same. Best of luck to the new owners of Evernote, I really think you've wasted your money.

Can we stop using the term ‘real time’ because sync on Evernote  is about as far from that as is possible to get. One issue is that the ‘sync up’ from iOS is a pain and doesn’t happen straight away. Sometimes you have to fiddle with it for ages to get it to work. Second issue is that ‘sync down’ to macOS doesn’t happen AT ALL until you edit the note which obviously creates a conflict. Clearly it doesn’t check the server periodically for changes or the period is so long it has no effect. The only way I can find around it is to close Evernote on Mac and reopen it when I know I have made a change on the phone. Totally stupid usability. 

15 minutes ago, PinkElephant said:

We can agree that syncing is at the heart of what EN does, and that it must work absolutely reliable.

Out of curiosity: How did you check everything had synced up and down ? There are several ways possible - maybe I can learn a new trick.

on the iOS notes list there is a green marker against un-sync'd changes. When it disappears, it is sync'd up. On the mac, it is literally a case of waiting for the changes to visibly reflect in the client, or to be doubly sure, exit the client and reopen it. Both sync features are massively annoying as you can't force it to sync, you just have to wait until the next time it is scheduled to do it. It also doesn't flag in either the mac client or the iOS app when there are changes yet to be sync'd down. I actually hate using evernote now but i am stuck with it as i have so much stuff in there.

2 minutes ago, gazumped said:

Hi again.  Didn't say you were actively editing on two devices,  just that Evernote was active on two devices and maybe - just maybe - the slow sync process from one to the other meant your editing got interrupted.  - If you were saying by the way that Support reply to Forum posts,  you are wrong;  they might comment on general outages but rarely if ever will they respond to a single-user issue.

Sync by the way is being actively upgraded as we speak,  and now I think of it there's a warning around about users being unable to log in for brief periods because of server maintenance - maybe the ongoing work affected your syncs too.

Apologies if my previous reply was overly condescending,  but we don't get any indication of user competence when reading a post so it's usually best to start basic.

mate, i just said that I ensured the sync process was complete. It has given me so many issues over the years that I have drilled it into my brain to ensure any edits are synced up and down. That said I think the way it works leaves a lot to be improved, i have just learned to cope with how rubbish it is. Every time I have raised sync with support they say the same as you just said - that it is being upgraded or improved. It should work perfectly between multiple devices providing the user is able to ensure the latest version is always the one being edited. Anyway I have raised it with support by a ticket. 

1 minute ago, gazumped said:

Hi.  You presumably had the note open on more than one device,  and took some time editing one version - during which period your other device updated the 'old' version of the note back to the server,  which then replaced your current editing when the device you were using received the sync.  So: largely a self-inflicted issue.  It can be avoided by not using two devices,  or by doing any active editing in a third party word processor and copy/ pasting the end result into the updated note.

- And by the way this is (mainly) a user-supported forum;  if you have any technical issues,  please contact Support.   

Thanks, clearly you've assumed I am a bit mentally challenged, so thanks for that, but i've been using this software for years and I know the pitfalls. I did not edit the note in 2 places at once. I edited on iOS, ensured the sync was completed (which is a pain by the way on a phone but that's a separate gripe), and then waited for the change to come down to the mac (which again is a pain as they did away with the sync button), and then later made some changes. Later still, the changes were lost. 

The means by which I edited the note is entirely supported and legitimate. Edit one, sync, sync down, edit again. Nothing wrong with that at all.

I haven't contacted support (yet) as they often fail to respond, but equally often they do reply to forum posts. 

Twice recently my note edits have been lost at sync and overwritten with an older version. I was able to look in the note history and see in the previous versions the version that I needed to restore, but this very much is not the point... this is 100% the only fundamental thing you need to get right every time, otherwise what the hell is this product??

2 minutes ago, PinkElephant said:

iOS devices may not be syncing until in use again. iOS (for saving battery charge) restricts background activities of apps.

Not sure whether this plays a role in your case, but when taking up an iOS device to work with EN, you can force a sync by dragging the notebook list down a bit, and let go. It should update everything then - or simply after using it a bit.

Not in this case. On iOS finish editing, return to the notes list and pull down, and only leave the app when the green syncing icon disappears. Every single time. 

12 hours ago, PinkElephant said:

No issues, even if I have several EN clients open.

What I don’t do is editing a note in one client, leave it there untouched (and maybe not syncing) and start working on the same not in another client. It is obvious that this will create a conflicting situation - no way the server can now decide which change precedes the other. 

But beside provoking it: No syncing issues, since quite a  while.

Thanks but that is definitely not what I am doing. I said the device with the edits DOES sync. It’s the other device that does not sync those edits down. It just sits there out of date. 

does no one else care about this? Basically if you've been editing on phone and want to resume editing on mac, you have the kill the mac app and reopen it to force sync... and most of the time you forget and it creates a conflict.... it's pretty poor...?

I use iOS and Mac. Maybe this never went away, but it felt like when v10 came out i was getting sync conflicts ALL the time. Then it seemed to improve, but now has returned. If I edit on iOS and then mess around forcing it to sync manually before i minimise the app (because if I do then it never syncs until i go back to Evernote, but that's more iPhone behaviour i guess), then I later go to Mac... it just sits there not syncing so it doesn't ever get the latest note... until you make a mac change, and then if you do you get a conflict. Why does it not just poll the server for changes every so often?? Esp as they got rid of the damn sync button!!

I notice the really annoying by bug still exists, where if you are in read mode and click in the note to edit it, it just takes you to whatever point in the note it feels like. Sometimes the bit you clicked (which is the desired behaviour) but mostly somewhere else entirely. Get it fixed Evernote it’s really annoying. 

The niche specialist features are pointless if the basics don’t work. I can’t see any further than that. 

i have noticed that the sync (or whatever it is referred to now as) functionality from iOS sometimes stops and refuses to work until you restart the app. You can keep editing and editing but it  never pushes then changes through until you kill the app. This happens A LOT, and i believe it is the primary reason for the more frequent sync conflicts across multiple devices.

how do i tell it i want the note list at the top.... again... why do they always force layout changes that are worse when they do a new release