Evernote for Windows 6.5 Beta 2 Released

[Chantal Leonard 212]

Today we're releasing version 6.5 Beta 2 - you can download it here. We're excited to announce two new features.

• Shared view: can now quickly browse all notes you've received via Work Chat from the "Shared" section in the left panel.

 

• On demand sync: an option if you want note content to be downloaded only when you see the note in the note list. This is ideal for users with many thousands of notes who want to save some disk space. You can enable this by checking the "Enable on demand sync" option under Tools>Options>Synchronization. If you do not check this option, Evernote will download all the notes content in advance. 

 

In addition we've fixed many bugs between Beta 1 & Beta 2. We continue to work on stability and fixed 4 crashes and addressed a few localization issues. Let us know what you think about the above capabilities and if you spot any issues. 

Thanks,

Chantal and the rest of the Windows team! 

Evernote for Windows 6.5 Beta Notes

New:

• Easily browse notes and notebooks you've received via Work Chat from the "Shared" section in the left panel.
• Choose to only download recently and frequently used notes using on demand sync by checking the "Enable on demand sync" option under Tools>Options>Synchronization.

Improved:

• Improved handling of large resources on 32-bit systems.

Fixed:

• An intermittent error syncing when connecting to a business account for the first time.
• Issues with the printing of notes with tables.

[GiacomoLaw 128]

7 hours ago, Chantal Leonard said:

Easily browse notes and notebooks you've received via Work Chat from the "Shared" section in the left panel.

This is awesome! If the work chat is deleted, can I still access the notes? 

Thanks for the awesome work!

[gazumped 6,885]

On demand sync should make a lot of users very happy!  Thanks!

[DTLow 3,862]

4 hours ago, gazumped said:

On demand sync should make a lot of users very happy!

Demand sync certainly caught my interest; the description reads On demand sync: an option if you want note content to be downloaded only when you see the note in the note list.

Can someone add more detail to this

[gazumped 6,885]

Yeah - just getting my head around the idea that I have 30,000 notes already in my database.  Obviously the majority of those won't be frequent flyers.  What's the effect of my ticking the option now?  Will the disk size of my database go down,  or will only new notes be affected...?

[GiacomoLaw 128]

Is there an option to hide/unhide the shared notes block? Some people may want to hide it.

[Rob van Vliet 21]

Can the icon for "shared" remain in the sidebar when it is collapsed ("hidden")?

[jefito 5,320]

4 hours ago, gazumped said:

What's the effect of my ticking the option now?

Obviously it's too late for you...  

[DTLow 3,862]

21 hours ago, jefito said:

Obviously it's too late for you...  

How about deleting and letting the app rebuild your database?  To anyone trying this be warned the rebuild does not include Local Notebooks or unsynced notes

I'm thinking you may never look at many of your ancient notes

Each year, do the rebuild again

I'm really excited about this.  

If only I had a Windows device to play with  
However this gives me hope the feature will make it to the other platforms

[gazumped 6,885]

30 minutes ago, DTLow said:

How about deleting and letting the app rebuild your database?

Interesting... and a nice workaround.  I'm thinking I might try this on my 'backup' laptop first though.  (Travelling at the moment so it'll be a few days...)

[s2sailor 771]

17 hours ago, Chantal Leonard said:

On demand sync: an option if you want note content to be downloaded only when you see the note in the note list.

Would really like to understand this one better.  Specifically, what determines if a note will be downloaded or not?  Once it is downloaded, does it stay for good or is it removed after some duration of inactivity or other criteria?

[Austin G 293]

7 hours ago, DTLow said:

Can someone add more detail to this

When on demand sync is enabled, only the meta data of the note is initially downloaded (titles, tags, etc.). As you select the notebooks on the left panel, the notes that appear in the note list will "request" to download the remaining content (note text, attachments, snippet thumbnail image, etc). If you open a note that has not been downloaded, that note's request for content will take priority over other pending requests. 

The goal is to decrease the time of the initial sync and only give you the notes you need at the time you need them.

7 hours ago, gazumped said:

What's the effect of my ticking the option now?

I'm waiting for additional clarification on how it will affect a fully downloaded DB. There was no change in my exb file size after enabling it, so my assumption is that it will only affect newly downloaded DBs, but I'll wait to confirm that. 

 As @DTLow mentioned, you can enable the option and rebuild your DB to try it out. 

[pepr 12]

I can't customize my note toolbar, thus, i want to drag "reminder" but there is no location where it let me put the icon...

[gazumped 6,885]

13 hours ago, pepr said:

I can't customize my note toolbar, thus, i want to drag "reminder" but there is no location where it let me put the icon...

Try dropping the icon very close to the " i " on the menu bar.  There's a very narrow window in which to drop new icons.

[JohnLongney 76]

Anybody else pleased with the latest beta? Me, I am delighted.  

When it comes to using my 10 "Win10 baby the on demand sync option is the solution.  Well done, Evernote staff!  

Now, once you get around to fixing the web part of Evernote  ?

 

[jefito 5,320]

19 hours ago, Austin G said:

I'm waiting for additional clarification on how it will affect a fully downloaded DB. There was no change in my exb file size after enabling it, so my assumption is that it will only affect newly downloaded DBs, but I'll wait to confirm that. 

Makes perfect sense; you already have all of your content downloaded, so no change. New content that's added (via web clipping, web client, shared account, etc.) will probably be subject to the on demand sync rule, if it's enabled.

[JMichaelTX 3,971]

On 2/9/2017 at 11:30 PM, Chantal Leonard said:

On demand sync: an option if you want note content to be downloaded only when you see the note in the note list. This is ideal for users with many thousands of notes who want to save some disk space. You can enable this by checking the "Enable on demand sync" option under Tools>Options>Synchronization. If you do not check this option, Evernote will download all the notes content in advance. 

This is a great option.  However, many of us have been asking (for years) for a "Selective Sync" option^[1] for the EN desktop apps that work much like the EN mobile app "Offline Notebooks".

Use Case for Selective Sync / Offline Notebooks for EN Desktop Apps

• Allows the user to download all Notes in a NB (in one action) that can be accessed without an Internet connection.
• Needed for laptops with small hard drives, or with low available disk space
• Would be ideal for laptops used for travel, where you expect Internet access to be limited.
• Using the "On Demand Sync" is NOT practical to download all Notes in a NB, if the NB has hundreds or more Notes.

Since you have already developed a type of selective sync, I would hope that simply adding a UI option to download an entire NB would be relatively easy to implement at this point.

Thanks for considering this, and please make all of this apply to both EN Win and EN Mac.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Footnotes/References:

1. Threads Requesting Selective Sync

• Selective Notebook Sync, Asked by csbrown, April 25, 2011 , 165 replies
• Please support selectively sync notebooks!, Asked by Hongbo-Miao, December 13, 2015, 63 repies

 

[AndyDent 76]

This raises questions about how Search is affected. 

1. Is searching currently implemented doing local searches on Windows?
2. Will server-side searching be used for notes you haven't downloaded?

The see the note in the note list criteria is a bit vague.

Does see equate to just the note title being visible in search results? If so, I think this needs a bit of refining or de-bouncing. Often I will do a search, realise it is either wrong or too broad, and do another one. The combination of doing many broad searches is likely to download a lot o notes, which I am not interested in reading.

[jefito 5,320]

On 2/12/2017 at 1:21 AM, AndyDent said:

The see the note in the note list criteria is a bit vague.

Most likely means that, as with the mobile apps, the note metadata is downloaded so that in whatever list type you prefer (snippet, list, card, etc.), the note can be displayed in that list (which would include search results). Then if you click on a note, you may incur a download of its content, if it's not already present on your device. 

Clarification on the local-vs-server search would be good; I'm pretty sure that Evernote maintains a local index to facilitate search-as-you-type; you'd hope that that doesn't depend on roundtripping to the service for the index parts for non-downloaded notes.

I'm guessing that the selective-sync squadron aren't going to be as thrilled about the on-demand sync as if they had the ability to control things themselves.

[GiacomoLaw 128]

On 10/02/2017 at 9:57 PM, DTLow said:

If only I had a Windows device to play with  

And there I am wishing I had a Mac 

[CalS 3,767]

On 2/10/2017 at 9:53 AM, gazumped said:

Yeah - just getting my head around the idea that I have 30,000 notes already in my database.  Obviously the majority of those won't be frequent flyers.  What's the effect of my ticking the option now?  Will the disk size of my database go down,  or will only new notes be affected...?

I guess I'm wondering if you have enough disk space why would you ever use this option on a PC?  

1. You have to wait to see the note when you select it, not bad for small notes, but a 25MB PDF could have a small lag.  
2. When you don't have an internet connection how do you know what notes are fully available and what are not?  
3. Once the note syncs does it stay synced or does space free up across time (I don't see an unsync everything option)?  
4. Sounds like eventually you end up in the same place, all notes downloaded.  
5. Selective sync I thought was always about never downloading the note content.  Different problem solved here.
6. EDIT:  per @gazumped below, how to get a complete backup of one's notes.

Or am I just missing it, as usual.  

Edited February 14, 2017 by csihilling
Add point from Gaz

[gazumped 6,885]

I have a couple of laptops with terabyte hard drives and my database is a puny 17GB as near as darn it.  I was initially tempted to try this sync thingy out on the backup laptop,  but the attraction of two laptops - one's the 'office' workhorse and the other is a carry-around that isn't quite such a hunk of junk - is that my backup laptop also backs up the database.  I keep backup copies anyways (paranoia is a wonderful thing) but by definition the backup laptop isn't in use when the main one is,  so I always have a second copy of my notes handy just in case...  although  it may be a little out of date.

For all the reasons you quote* I didn't eventually go there however - if I want to archive a chunk of database I'll export it or start another account or some such.  I'm still not clear on how (or whether) the new deal is actually a step forward.  Guess we'll find out from user comments in due course...

* and there's one more - if I don't download all my notes,  how can I get a complete backup?  They're my notes,  my precious notes... 

[CalS 3,767]

13 minutes ago, gazumped said:

* and there's one more - if I don't download all my notes,  how can I get a complete backup?  They're my notes,  my precious notes... 

But they are on the server.    

Seriously, a complete personal backup to protect against the dumb a$$ attack of accidentally deleting notes is an excellent catch, thanks.

[tavor 441]

1 hour ago, csihilling said:

I guess I'm wondering if you have enough disk space why would you ever use this option on a PC?  

Wondering the same thing. Even a relatively large EN database is tiny by modern disk size standards. On demand sync is useful on a phone or tablet, sure, but scratching my head as to how this would be useful for 99.9% of Windows app users.

[DTLow 3,862]

10 minutes ago, tavor said:

On demand sync is useful on a phone or tablet, sure, but scratching my head as to how this would be useful for 99.9% of Windows app users.

You should post in the Selective Sync discussion; it might generate some feedback  

Seriously, some user's have SSD drives which are significatly smaller than traditional drives.

 

[tavor 441]

36 minutes ago, DTLow said:

You should post in the Selective Sync discussion; it might generate some feedback  

Seriously, some user's have SSD drives which are significatly smaller than traditional drives.

 

Sure, I get that. But even if you have a 128 GB SSD, you'd need a EN database several GB in size for this to be remotely practical, and I'd venture that less than 1% of EN users have, say, a 5GB+ database.

If we're building out features for such tiny segments of the userbase, how about full boolean search? I'd bet that even in this thread, there are more users who could make practical use of full boolean search than they could of on demand sync on their desktop.

But maybe I'm wrong about the size of average EN user databases and maybe EN attracts hoarders (the type whose homes have narrow pathways between the stacks of clutter and whose plumbing doesn't even work) who feel the need to capture everything they see on the internet into their EN database.

[DTLow 3,862]

1 hour ago, tavor said:

Sure, I get that. But even if you have a 128 GB SSD, you'd need a EN database several GB in size for this to be remotely practical, and I'd venture that less than 1% of EN users have, say, a 5GB+ database.

Or you can generate feedback here.  

My EN database is approaching 10GB.  Even so, I'm a long way from having space concerns on my Mac or iPad.

This is not a feature I'd be using until I have space issues

[s2sailor 771]

2 hours ago, csihilling said:

Different problem solved here

I'm still trying to figure out exactly what problem they were trying to solve.  It just sounds like a gradual download of eventually all notes.  

[JMichaelTX 3,971]

17 minutes ago, tavor said:

But even if you have a 128 GB SSD, you'd need a EN database several GB in size for this to be remotely practical, and I'd venture that less than 1% of EN users have, say, a 5GB+ database.

I have a Macbook Air with 128GB SSD, and it is nearly full.  I have 17,000+ notes which require ~15GB, or ~17% of my SSD.
I don't know what percent of users have > 5GB DB, but my guess is much higher than yours, particularly of users with paid accounts.

I don't have much use for this "on demand sync", but a selective sync of notebooks would be very useful.  
Did you see my use case above?

[CalS 3,767]

1 hour ago, s2sailor said:

I'm still trying to figure out exactly what problem they were trying to solve.  It just sounds like a gradual download of eventually all notes.  

Yup.  And what is the value proposition of that?  I mean it sounds good and it isn't a bad thing, but not clear to me as to why it would have a higher priority than other items oft discussed in these forums.  

[phils 217]

1 hour ago, s2sailor said:

I'm still trying to figure out exactly what problem they were trying to solve.

I think the key is to first remember that Evernote is putting an increased focus on Evernote Business, and then note this part of Austin's comment:

On 2/10/2017 at 7:07 PM, Austin G said:

The goal is to decrease the time of the initial sync

I think the biggest point is to improve the on-boarding experience for an Evernote Business (EB) user.  Imagine you're a new employee in a 100-person company using EB which has 150,000 notes in their EB account.  Without this new feature, it's going to take a long time for your Evernote client to populate with all of those notes.  If you just get the note metadata downloaded, you can be up and running productively on Evernote much faster, and your initial experience with the product will be more positive than if you have to sit and wait for a long time before you can use it.

 

[CalS 3,767]

 

38 minutes ago, phils said:

I think the biggest point is to improve the on-boarding experience for an Evernote Business (EB) user. 

Well if it is Evernote Business that would explain why individual users are scratching their heads as to its benefit.  Thanks for the insight.  

[Krzys 1]

Hi,

I found small bug (this problem is also in the last stable version)

 

[jefito 5,320]

7 hours ago, phils said:

I think the biggest point is to improve the on-boarding experience for an Evernote Business (EB) user.

Makes sense, so long as on-demand is set on by default or these users -- is that something that the Business admin can do when they set up new accounts?

Related: I wonder whether it's on by default for new installs for personal users as well: you're setting up your new machine, and install Evernote, and now you need to wait for that 10GB database to come rolling down the lines...

[tavor 441]

9 hours ago, JMichaelTX said:

I have a Macbook Air with 128GB SSD, and it is nearly full.  I have 17,000+ notes which require ~15GB, or ~17% of my SSD.
I don't know what percent of users have > 5GB DB, but my guess is much higher than yours, particularly of users with paid accounts.

I don't have much use for this "on demand sync", but a selective sync of notebooks would be very useful.  
Did you see my use case above?

You also have 9k+ posts on the Evernote forum.

I'm pretty confident you are on the extreme fringe as it relates to Evernote use among individual users (not a bad thing, as I've learned a lot from your posts here about how you use EN).

@phils point re: business use makes more sense than this feature being designed for individual user use.

[s2sailor 771]

9 hours ago, phils said:

I think the key is to first remember that Evernote is putting an increased focus on Evernote Business, and then note this part of Austin's comment:

I think the biggest point is to improve the on-boarding experience for an Evernote Business (EB) user.  Imagine you're a new employee in a 100-person company using EB which has 150,000 notes in their EB account.  Without this new feature, it's going to take a long time for your Evernote client to populate with all of those notes.  If you just get the note metadata downloaded, you can be up and running productively on Evernote much faster, and your initial experience with the product will be more positive than if you have to sit and wait for a long time before you can use it.

 

I saw the post about increased focus on EN Business and still didn't put it together.  Improved on-boarding makes sense.  Increased focus on Business also explains the additional development effort on Work Chat.  EN is not shy about yanking features and I was holding out hope that would be one of them ... I guess not.

[lisec 144]

Is this where we report bugs with this version? If so...

Searching for a phrase is broken. It works if you search in the title, but it doesn't work when you search in the entire database.  Specifically, searching for a phrase  gathers the relevant results (you can see the number of notes in the status bar, bottom left) and then a second later disregards the quotation marks and includes all results of the word search rather than the phrase search. 

Can someone confirm this?

Example:

I search for "film of the day" and initially the status bar shows 409 notes, then increases to 1,372 notes

I search for film of the day (without quotation marks) and initially the status bar shows 7,892 notes then switches to 2,480

I search for intitle:"Film of the Day" and that works correctly, displaying 401 notes

Many of my saved searches are broken because of this.

[CalS 3,767]

Are you saying the film of the day expression does not exist within the body of the 1,372 notes?

[lisec 144]

Just now, csihilling said:

Are you saying the film of the day expression does not exist within the body of the 1,372 notes?

that is correct

[CalS 3,767]

4 minutes ago, lisec said:

that is correct

Ouch.  That would be worthy of a trouble ticket or going to Twitter support.  

In the meantime you could try Holding the Ctrl key and clicking on Help and then select Recreate Full Text Search Index.

[lisec 144]

Now I'm concerned that my database got weird, because I noticed that search results don't update the way they used to.  Example: I search for "film of the day" -tag:mubi. Results are fine. I add the tag "mubi" to the first entry in the results. Normally that item gets removed from the results list almost immediately. Now it just sits there. I repeat for the 2nd item in the results list. Again, it stays in the results list. I exited Evernote, ensured everything was closed via task manager, came back in, selected All Notes and redid the search. Now it is worse, as one of the results of my search includes the tag "mubi", which I've excluded in my search.

That much weird behaviour usually means a corrupt database...

 

[jefito 5,320]

16 minutes ago, lisec said:

Is this where we report bugs with this version? If so...

This is the place, yes.

17 minutes ago, lisec said:

Many of my saved searches are broken because of this.

Welcome to beta land, sorry to say. Good that you reported it.

[lisec 144]

Just now, csihilling said:

Ouch.  That would be worthy of a trouble ticket or going to Twitter support.  

In the meantime you could try Holding the Ctrl key and clicking on Help and then select Recreate Full Text Search Index.

Yeah, I've already submitted. I was just hoping someone here could confirm, that way I would know it wasn't just my database.

[CalS 3,767]

25 minutes ago, lisec said:

Normally that item gets removed from the results list almost immediately. Now it just sits there. I repeat for the 2nd item in the results list.

Go to Tools - Options - Search and make sure that Search when note is updated is checked.  This is a fairly new option.  If it is not checked you would see the behavior that you are seeing.

[lisec 144]

1 minute ago, csihilling said:

Go to Tools - Options - Search and make sure that Search when note is updated is checked.  This is a fairly new option.  If it is not checked you would see the behavior that you are seeing.

Thanks csihilling - I got excited there for a minute... but alas, it was already checked. Does it work for you? Just trying to figure out if I should report it.

I suppose I'll go ahead and take the hour or so that it takes to re-create the various indexes...

[CalS 3,767]

1 minute ago, lisec said:

Thanks csihilling - I got excited there for a minute... but alas, it was already checked. Does it work for you? Just trying to figure out if I should report it.

I suppose I'll go ahead and take the hour or so that it takes to re-create the various indexes...

Yes it does work.  I am on 6.5.3.4452 Prerelease just to be sure we don't have any version issues.  And as far as I know it was working in the earlier beta versions.

[DTLow 3,862]

2 hours ago, lisec said:

II search for film of the day (without quotation marks) and initially the status bar shows 7,892 notes then switches to 2,480

On general search syntax
The search ignores "of" and "the" (don't ask me why)
So now you're searching for notes that have two words,  film and day, in any order

I'd expect the exact phrase in quotes to work

[lisec 144]

16 hours ago, phils said:

Imagine you're a new employee in a 100-person company using EB which has 150,000 notes in their EB account.  Without this new feature, it's going to take a long time for your Evernote client to populate with all of those notes.  If you just get the note metadata downloaded, you can be up and running productively on Evernote much faster, and your initial experience with the product will be more positive than if you have to sit and wait for a long time before you can use it.

 

Forget Evernote Business, I like this feature, if this is, indeed, what it does, because a rebuild will be much faster. I hate the fact that every time I report something to evernote the first thing they tell me is to rebuild and then I just get mad at them and tell them I will not because it takes hours and the issue isn't one that a rebuild would fix. (Imagine that - every bug I report I'm told to rebuild my database!)

[Chantal Leonard 212]

On 2/14/2017 at 0:22 PM, lisec said:

Thanks csihilling - I got excited there for a minute... but alas, it was already checked. Does it work for you? Just trying to figure out if I should report it.

I suppose I'll go ahead and take the hour or so that it takes to re-create the various indexes...

@lisec do you have on-demand sync on? I can also PM you to get more details so we can troubleshoot - let me know! 

[Chantal Leonard 212]

On 2/11/2017 at 1:08 PM, JMichaelTX said:

This is a great option.  However, many of us have been asking (for years) for a "Selective Sync" option^[1] for the EN desktop apps that work much like the EN mobile app "Offline Notebooks".

Use Case for Selective Sync / Offline Notebooks for EN Desktop Apps

• Allows the user to download all Notes in a NB (in one action) that can be accessed without an Internet connection.
• Needed for laptops with small hard drives, or with low available disk space
• Would be ideal for laptops used for travel, where you expect Internet access to be limited.
• Using the "On Demand Sync" is NOT practical to download all Notes in a NB, if the NB has hundreds or more Notes.

Since you have already developed a type of selective sync, I would hope that simply adding a UI option to download an entire NB would be relatively easy to implement at this point.

Thanks for considering this, and please make all of this apply to both EN Win and EN Mac.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Footnotes/References:

1. Threads Requesting Selective Sync

• Selective Notebook Sync, Asked by csbrown, April 25, 2011 , 165 replies
• Please support selectively sync notebooks!, Asked by Hongbo-Miao, December 13, 2015, 63 repies

 

Hi @JMichaelTX - as you can probably intuit, this is a first step that helps us clear the way for these types of scenarios. Keep watching the Beta forums for more feature work in the future. 

[kvitekp 292]

On 2/10/2017 at 8:49 AM, DTLow said:

Demand sync certainly caught my interest; the description reads On demand sync: an option if you want note content to be downloaded only when you see the note in the note list.

Can someone add more detail to this

 

Normally Evernote Windows client will download new and updated notes' content (including pictures and attachments) during background sync. With on-demand sync option enabled, only the note's meta information (title, tags, created/updated dates, source url, etc) will be downloaded during background sync. The rest of the note info will be downloaded when the note appears in the note list view. For example, you just installed Evernote on a new computer and logged into your existing 10K notes / 10GB account. Before you'd have to wait a few hours for all your notes to get downloaded, however, with on-demand sync enabled, all your notes meta info will be downloaded in a few minutes and first dozen or so notes will appear in the note list view which will detect that these notes are not fully synced and request their content/resources from the server. These requests are served on multiple threads each having a dedicated connection to the service, so a few large notes won't block smaller notes from downloading. If you click on a partially synced note to get it into the note view, it will be downloaded with the priority higher than the notes requested from the note list.

Now let's say you started scrolling the note list down, so each note that appears in the note list view is added to the note content downloader request queue. This downloader is smart enough to confirm with the note list that the note it is about to download is still in the note list view and disregard requests for the notes you quickly scrolled away from. This way the client only downloads the notes you are actually looking at.

Since Evernote Windows client Search uses locally indexed note content you may wonder if you can search for notes that are not yet fully synced. No worries, you certainly can: search engine was updated so that if it detects that the current search scope contains partially synced notes, it will automatically start server side search (the one that is  used by mobile and thin clients) and when it returns split second later, the results of the server-side search will be merged into the search result displayed in the note list, which in turn will cause found notes to be downloaded if, of course, they happen to fit into the note list view, thus closing the loop.

As some of you guessed, the primary driver for this feature is Evernote Business: joining large notebook and waiting for it to fully download before you can really use it is not a good experience. However, non-business users may also benefit from this feature because it speeds up initial sync and optimizes the local database size. The latter may not seem that important because disk space is cheap these days, however, it has been proven that local database performance degrades when its size increases, so it's good to have it minimized.

Moreover, on-demand sync feature enables us to implement long requested features going under names like "Selective sync", "Auto Archiving", "Offline Notebooks Sync", etc. For example, imagine that Evernote Windows client would keep track of the notes' access time and automatically purge note content/resurces from the notes that were not accessed for more than a configurable amount of weeks or months unless these notes belong to notebooks specifically selected for being always available. Long time users will certainly appreciate seamless access to all their notes without maintaining a huge local database file.

 

[kvitekp 292]

On 2/10/2017 at 8:53 AM, gazumped said:

Yeah - just getting my head around the idea that I have 30,000 notes already in my database.  Obviously the majority of those won't be frequent flyers.  What's the effect of my ticking the option now?  Will the disk size of my database go down,  or will only new notes be affected...?

 

Only the new notes will be affected. Your existing notes will stay and database file size will not go down. This will only happen if / when we implemented Note Auto Archiving feature.

[kvitekp 292]

On 2/10/2017 at 9:49 AM, GiacomoLaw said:

Is there an option to hide/unhide the shared notes block? Some people may want to hide it.

Not at this point. However, Shared notes item won't be shown if you don't have any shared notes / notebooks.

[kvitekp 292]

On 2/10/2017 at 1:20 PM, Rob van Vliet said:

Can the icon for "shared" remain in the sidebar when it is collapsed ("hidden")?

It should, however there seems to be a bug that prevents Shared item in the NavBar.

[kvitekp 292]

On 2/10/2017 at 1:57 PM, DTLow said:

How about deleting and letting the app rebuild your database?  To anyone trying this be warned the rebuild does not include Local Notebooks or unsynced notes

I'm thinking you may never look at many of your ancient notes

Each year, do the rebuild again

I'm really excited about this.

 

 

This is exactly what I did to my 20GB personal database... well, after stashing away an archived copy, of course. Starting with the fresh database, I've seen notes being requested from the note list for a few days, after that it all stabilized and now my database file size is < 2GB. Now I'm only seeing note list note loading only when I search for some old stuff.

[kvitekp 292]

On 2/10/2017 at 3:24 PM, s2sailor said:

Would really like to understand this one better.  Specifically, what determines if a note will be downloaded or not?  Once it is downloaded, does it stay for good or is it removed after some duration of inactivity or other criteria?

 

A note is downloaded when it is shown in the note list view. Once it is downloaded, it stays. Future version may implement Auto Archiving feature that would purge the rarely used note content to optimize database size.

[kvitekp 292]

On 2/11/2017 at 1:08 PM, JMichaelTX said:

Since you have already developed a type of selective sync, I would hope that simply adding a UI option to download an entire NB would be relatively easy to implement at this point.

 

Exactly, we are approaching this in steps. Implementing Selective Sync feature w/o on demand sync would require too much manual notebook status management when you search for something in "non selected" notebooks.

[kvitekp 292]

On 2/11/2017 at 10:21 PM, AndyDent said:

This raises questions about how Search is affected. 

1. Is searching currently implemented doing local searches on Windows?
2. Will server-side searching be used for notes you haven't downloaded?

 

Yes to both questions.

[CalS 3,767]

3 minutes ago, kvitekp said:

A note is downloaded when it is shown in the note list view. Once it is downloaded, it stays. Future version may implement Auto Archiving feature that would purge the rarely used note content to optimize database size.

Cool.  I would ask that you guys consider that some folks may want to be sure and have all their notes available when without a connection (those not concerned with disk).  But they would like to have an archived search option.

[kvitekp 292]

On 2/11/2017 at 10:21 PM, AndyDent said:

The see the note in the note list criteria is a bit vague.

Does see equate to just the note title being visible in search results? If so, I think this needs a bit of refining or de-bouncing. Often I will do a search, realise it is either wrong or too broad, and do another one. The combination of doing many broad searches is likely to download a lot o notes, which I am not interested in reading.

 

Please see my first reply to this thread for the details on how partially synced notes requests are handled and let me know if it addresses your concerns.

[kvitekp 292]

On 2/12/2017 at 4:58 PM, jefito said:

Most likely means that, as with the mobile apps, the note metadata is downloaded so that in whatever list type you prefer (snippet, list, card, etc.), the note can be displayed in that list (which would include search results). Then if you click on a note, you may incur a download of its content, if it's not already present on your device.

 

Evernote Windows client is a bit more proactive comparing to the mobile clients: it will start downloading a partially sync note content when the note is shown in the note list view. However, if the user clicks on a partially synced note, it will be downloaded before other notes in the note list view.

[kvitekp 292]

On 2/12/2017 at 4:58 PM, jefito said:

Clarification on the local-vs-server search would be good; I'm pretty sure that Evernote maintains a local index to facilitate search-as-you-type; you'd hope that that doesn't depend on roundtripping to the service for the index parts for non-downloaded notes

 

Local index based search-as-you-type is still there, however, if the current search scope (all notes, selected notebook / tags notes, etc) contains any partially synced notes, the client will initiate server-side search and merge its result into the note list when it returns.

[kvitekp 292]

On 2/12/2017 at 4:58 PM, jefito said:

I'm guessing that the selective-sync squadron aren't going to be as thrilled about the on-demand sync as if they had the ability to control things themselves.

This is expected at this point, however, we hope to cover their use cases with future updates.

[kvitekp 292]

On 2/13/2017 at 5:20 PM, csihilling said:

I guess I'm wondering if you have enough disk space why would you ever use this option on a PC?  

1. You have to wait to see the note when you select it, not bad for small notes, but a 25MB PDF could have a small lag.  
2. When you don't have an internet connection how do you know what notes are fully available and what are not?  
3. Once the note syncs does it stay synced or does space free up across time (I don't see an unsync everything option)?  
4. Sounds like eventually you end up in the same place, all notes downloaded.  
5. Selective sync I thought was always about never downloading the note content.  Different problem solved here.
6. EDIT:  per @gazumped below, how to get a complete backup of one's notes.

Or am I just missing it, as usual.  

 

1. Yeah, but this happens only once when the note first appears in the note list view.
2. Partially synced notes are marked in the note list with an italic text saying "Pending...", "Requested...", "Loading..." and if you don't have  internet  connection you'll see "Pending..." on all those incomplete notes.
3. Once the note syncs it stays, however, this may change in the future.
4. Yup, however during testing we found that most people don't visit all their notes all the time
5. We hope to cover Selective Sync use cases in the future releases
6. You may want to use ENSyncApp.exe utility -- it will download all your notes once or periodically, as configured.

All good questions, you are not missing anything!

[kvitekp 292]

On 2/13/2017 at 5:49 PM, gazumped said:

* and there's one more - if I don't download all my notes,  how can I get a complete backup?  They're my notes,  my precious notes... 

You may want to use ENSyncApp.exe utility: it will sync the specified database once or periodically, polling the server for changes with the specified interval.

ENSyncApp v1.01, built on Feb  8 2017 10:30:08
Copyright (c) 2007-2017 Evernote Corp. All rights reserved.

Usage: ENSyncApp [options] <basefile> <username[#host[:port]]> <password>

       /n - create new database
       /v - verbose mode
       /m - enable messaging logging
       /r - disable connection reuse
       /b - set http request batch size
       /p - poll sync state periodically, optional parameter <num>{s|m|} overrides server specified polling interval
       /? - show this help text

 

[jefito 5,320]

@kvitekp : Outstanding run of replies, Peter. I understand why you can't do this all the time, but certainly appreciate it when you can. This is a big and complicated feature, and as you've said, it's a gateway to even more good things. Good stuff. Thanks.

29 minutes ago, kvitekp said:

You may want to use ENSyncApp.exe utility

Didn't know that this existed; I seem to remember having seen it in the application folder, but never ran it -- didn't realize it was a standalone.

[jefito 5,320]

1 hour ago, csihilling said:

Cool.  I would ask that you guys consider that some folks may want to be sure and have all their notes available when without a connection (those not concerned with disk).  But they would like to have an archived search option.

Leads to the question as to whether on-demand sync is on by default or not.

[CalS 3,767]

@kvitekp

Thanks for the reply to the 6 questions.  Incremental load at startup makes sense.  

Personally I view resources on a PC as a non issue so am not concerned with saving space.  But I don't want to find myself disconnected without all note data on my laptop.  Not that I am without a connection that often, but the one time....   Nor do I want to have to have to execute a download to do periodic ENEX backups.

So, hopefully as other functionality is added you guys can create options so as us Luddites can keep a full data base locally.  And not much overhead in the currency checking.  

[CalS 3,767]

1 hour ago, jefito said:

Leads to the question as to whether on-demand sync is on by default or not.

Yeah, definitely keep it off if one wanted a complete database.

[JMichaelTX 3,971]

3 hours ago, kvitekp said:

Exactly, we are approaching this in steps. Implementing Selective Sync feature w/o on demand sync would require too much manual notebook status management when you search for something in "non selected" notebooks.

Many thanks Peter  (@kvitekp) for responding to my post, and for the many great answers you gave to our questions about On Demand Sync.  They really help to clarify this feature.

[raroos 2]

Love the selective Sync! My database (10K notes, 9gb) shrinked to 326 mb (after deleting it and rebuilding) 

It seems remember view settings doesn't work anymore on saved searched (that I added as shortcut.)

Furthermore, the note list is sometimes messed up.. see the attached screenshot.

[kvitekp 292]

@raroos Wow, I have hard time trying to figure out what part of the UI those white rectangles in the note list belong to! Please let me know what kind of text you had to erase from both rectangle footers? Was it note title, tags, or some kind of prompt or status string?

[gazumped 6,885]

@kvitekp - Many thanks for the detailed comments in this post.  Like @jefito says - I understand why you can't do this often,  but it really helped us (well me, anyway) to understand this new feature better. 

[lisec 144]

18 hours ago, kvitekp said:

search engine was updated so that if it detects that the current search scope contains partially synced notes, it will automatically start server side search (the one that is  used by mobile and thin clients) and when it returns split second later, the results of the server-side search will be merged into the search result displayed in the note list, which in turn will cause found notes to be downloaded if, of course, they happen to fit into the note list view, thus closing the loop.

 

Ah, this must be what I am seeing in my bug report - the search for a phrase works briefly and then a split second later the results expand to include all notes that include the words in the phrase (rather than the phrase as it is within the quotation marks). Happens when the 'enable on demand sync' enabled or not. I'll add this info to my open ticket.

[lisec 144]

On 2017-02-15 at 5:31 PM, Chantal Leonard said:

@lisec do you have on-demand sync on? I can also PM you to get more details so we can troubleshoot - let me know! 

Chantal, I did (must have gone on by default when I installed the beta).

I recreated my 'full text search' yesterday and since then the issue of the list not refreshing immediately is fixed.

Searching for a phrase is still broken though (with on-demand sync enabled or not)

Edited February 16, 2017 by lisec
typo

[jefito 5,320]

19 minutes ago, lisec said:

Chantal, I did (must have gone one by default when I installed the beta).

Curious; it was off for me. I wonder whether they're A/B testing this as well.

[raroos 2]

4 hours ago, kvitekp said:

@raroos Wow, I have hard time trying to figure out what part of the UI those white rectangles in the note list belong to! Please let me know what kind of text you had to erase from both rectangle footers? Was it note title, tags, or some kind of prompt or status string?

You lost me...

I erased some text from the notes and the footer where a tag was (With a company name)

I can make a new screenshot for you tomorrow, and send it to you privately? Is that what you want to know? 

[kvitekp 292]

13 minutes ago, raroos said:

I can make a new screenshot for you tomorrow, and send it to you privately? Is that what you want to know?

That would be great! Thank you.

[CalS 3,767]

2 hours ago, jefito said:

Curious; it was off for me. I wonder whether they're A/B testing this as well.

Off for me as well by default.  Still off.

[lisec 144]

8 minutes ago, csihilling said:

Off for me as well by default.  Still off.

Hmm. Maybe I did turn on the feature. It would be unlike me, but it is possible.

[CalS 3,767]

3 minutes ago, lisec said:

Hmm. Maybe I did turn on the feature. It would be unlike me, but it is possible.

Well, in theory if all your notes were already on your PC it shouldn't have made too much difference, unless you did a reload from the servers..  

[lisec 144]

This tiny bug is still around:  When you have an item selected in list view and then you grab the tiny square in the list's scrollbar and move it up to the top so that you can view the first items in the list, the scrollbar does not permit the action.

This only occurs when the list is populated as a result of selecting "All Notes" or "Notebooks" or the default Notebook in the tree. It works fine when any other notebook is selected.

 

2017-02-16_19-19-41_Evernote_Scroll_to_Top.mp4

[kvitekp 292]

@lisec Are you using Win10 or Win8 ?

[gustavgi 295]

8 hours ago, kvitekp said:

@lisec Are you using Win10 or Win8 ?

I am using Win10, and this bug was introduced in 6.2 back in August. I thought it might have something to do with two finger trackpad scroll support being introduced in the same release. Since then I've been using the Home button on the keyboard to get to the top of All notes.

[Wilkster 1]

Using 6.5.3 Beta 2 there are a couple bugs/issues I am seeing on three different Windows 10 boxes:

1. When saving an attached file from a note to the local disk  I am not prompted to overwrite an existing file. It just blindly overwrites an existing file (using Save As dialog...) This started happening in Beta 1. In prior version it would ask to overwrite first.

2. Instant Sync doesn't seem to be working very "instantly" like it was in prior versions (even though it is enabled). Seems like it is only syncing on the interval set in Synchronize Automatically settings.

Cheers

[CalS 3,767]

2 hours ago, Wilkster said:

. Instant Sync doesn't seem to be working very "instantly" like it was in prior versions (even though it is enabled). Seems like it is only syncing on the interval set in Synchronize Automatically settings.

I can confirm this, instant sync does not appear to working in 6.5.3.  I wasn't paying that much attention during 6.5.1 so I don't know if it happened then or with this release.  Added 3 z's to a note 2 minutes ago and it still has not synced.

[dlu 628]

Demand sync is amazing. Round of beers on me?

[kvitekp 292]

1 hour ago, dlu said:

Demand sync is amazing. Round of beers on me?

Anytime

[CalS 3,767]

1 minute ago, kvitekp said:

Anytime

Maybe after instant sync comes back?  

[kvitekp 292]

11 minutes ago, csihilling said:

Maybe after instant sync comes back?

Instant sync will be back soon, however, if you want it now, please set registry variable HKCU/Software/Evernote/Evernote/InstantSyncDelayOverride to a nonzero value that specifies the number of seconds to wait before uploading a new or updated note. If you set it to 0xffffffff, there will be no delay and the changes will be uploaded immediately.

Note that setting InstantSyncDelayOverride to a nonzero value may affect your quota usage. If it is zero, the upload delay will be automatically managed for you by the service. This server feature is yet not enabled, waiting for other clients to catch up. When enabled, all clients will enjoy shortest possible upsync delay time calculated automatically given a bunch of dynamic parameters which include your current quota usage, server load and more. The "[X] Enable instant sync option" will go away.

[CalS 3,767]

4 minutes ago, kvitekp said:

Instant sync will be back soon, however, if you want it now, please set registry variable HKCU/Software/Evernote/Evernote/InstantSyncDelayOverride to a nonzero value that specifies the number of seconds to wait before uploading a new or updated note. If you set it to 0xffffffff, there will be no delay and the changes will be uploaded immediately.

Note that setting InstantSyncDelayOverride to a nonzero value may affect your quota usage. If it is zero, the upload delay will be automatically managed for you by the service. This server feature is yet not enabled, waiting for other clients to catch up. When enabled, all clients will enjoy shortest possible upsync delay time calculated automatically given a bunch of dynamic parameters which include your current quota usage, server load and more. The "[X] Enable instant sync option" will go away.

Thanks.  I gave it a spin.  I set the value to 5, then did a File - Exit in EN to save, restarted EN and the value is back to 0.  Doesn't seem to want to take.

Does the 0xffffffff make it the same as before, assuming it will take?  It is currently 0 and management by the service seems to mean next sync cycle.

Not the biggest thing in the world, I just got used to not worrying about syncing changes on my Windows machine.  Can hit sync if need be.  

[kvitekp 292]

6 minutes ago, csihilling said:

 I set the value to 5, then did a File - Exit in EN to save, restarted EN and the value is back to 0.  Doesn't seem to want to take.

When tweaking Evernote registry, you always File/Exit first, then change the registry, then restart the application. Sorry for not mentioning this.

[CalS 3,767]

11 minutes ago, kvitekp said:

When tweaking Evernote registry, you always File/Exit first, then change the registry, then restart the application. Sorry for not mentioning this.

Thanks, my bad, I should have remembered, haven't had to make that many registry hacks of late.

That works, I entered decimal 5 and did a mental 5 count.  To the other question, is there a value that simulates what it was before? 

[CalS 3,767]

@kvitekp

FYI, instant sync does not appear to work for me if you do a bulk change like add a tag to a group of notes.  

EDIT:  In fact a bulk change seems to break instant sync from that point on until you File - Exit  and return to EN.

Edited February 18, 2017 by csihilling

[kvitekp 292]

40 minutes ago, csihilling said:

That works, I entered decimal 5 and did a mental 5 count.  To the other question, is there a value that simulates what it was before? 

Great! The previous value was 5 seconds, unless you've changed it.

[kvitekp 292]

22 hours ago, csihilling said:

EDIT:  In fact a bulk change seems to break instant sync from that point on until you File - Exit  and return to EN.

Could not repro no matter what I tried -- multiple note updates instant sync nicely here. Will keep trying...

[CalS 3,767]

1 hour ago, kvitekp said:

Could not repro no matter what I tried -- multiple note updates instant sync nicely here. Will keep trying...

Thanks Peter.  Rather than muddying up this thread I will send you some screen shots in a PM.  Net of it all it takes a minute plus for instant sync with 5 seconds set.  There is also an error message in the activity log which I haven't seen before.  All in the PM.  

[kvitekp 292]

55 minutes ago, csihilling said:

Net of it all it takes a minute plus for instant sync with 5 seconds set.

If note size exceeds 100KB, it's instant sync delay is multiplied by 10. You can change threshold by changing registry value HKCU/Software/Evernote/Evernote/InstantSyncDelay10xThreshold that specifies it in bytes. Setting this value to 0 completely disables this behavior.

[CalS 3,767]

1 hour ago, kvitekp said:

If note size exceeds 100KB, it's instant sync delay is multiplied by 10. You can change threshold by changing registry value HKCU/Software/Evernote/Evernote/InstantSyncDelay10xThreshold that specifies it in bytes. Setting this value to 0 completely disables this behavior.

BINGO!  Thanks.

Is this a new registry value with v6.5?

[kvitekp 292]

36 minutes ago, csihilling said:

Is this a new registry value with v6.5?

Yes. Since we're moving to the service managed delay time and server has no knowledge of the local note size, we've introduced this setting.

[CalS 3,767]

26 minutes ago, kvitekp said:

Yes. Since we're moving to the service managed delay time and server has no knowledge of the local note size, we've introduced this setting.

Thanks.