(Archived) Beta 2.0 Initial thoughts

[Vance 38]

Here are my first thoughts about 2.0.

LOVE the opening page.

It loads very fast, syncs fast and smooth and I love the synced, offline available notebooks. I am assuming that EN now keeps these folders synced with new notes in that folder and downloads them automatically to the SD card. That is very nice, and better than EN for my iPod Touch.

A couple of my notes, which were long lists of text copied and pasted off of web pages, went wacko. Rather than a long list of items, they just run on horizontally forever, without any "return". Basically unusable. I can point you to them in my account of you want to look at them.

Picture issue: jpegs do not scale to the screen in landscape, can only zoom out so far, and still not far enough to see the whole picture. If there is a way to "snap" it to screen size, I don't see it.

Need an indicator of which folders are chosen downloaded for offline viewing on the Notebook page (since I will forget which they are). Just some little thing in the corner of the icon/picture for that Notebook would be fine.

Sometimes the scrolling is not smooth, especially on the page of Notebooks or Notes.

The little alphabet letter pop-up is not very useful, doesn’t keep up with the scrolling anyway. Maybe just not enough notes for each letter.

So far, I LOVE it, but these are the few nitpicks!

[mads 0]

On my HTC Desire, Evernote 2.0 beta filled up the internal storage entirely. I have 12151 notes, so I'm guessing the header-information etc. is quite heavy. I hope future development will save all note data on the SD card.

[juwlz 6]

And mine ...

(Build: 104097, Version: 2.0a1, on Vodafone in the UK)

In general, it's also positive, but with some niggles.

I like the idea of the opening / home screen (6 icons), but can't find a way to get back to it from other areas of the application (other than by going back to my phone's home screen and choosing the Application shortcut)*, and I preferred the look and feel of the 1.5 screen (green background, with larger, more detailed (?) icons). The icons on this screen feel a bit sparse somehow.

*Update: I've just discovered that tapping the Evernote Logo gets you back there.

The beta version installed with no problems at all on my Nexus One (Android 2.2), without having to uninstall 1.5 (although I did have to delete and re-add my home screen application shortcut). I also deleted and re-added my widget, but I didn't try it before I did it, so don't know whether it would have been necessary. It took ages to sync (not unexpected), but during the sync process, there were times when the progress bar disappeared. Switching views, pressing the menu button, etc. all reinstated the progress bar, so not sure what made it disappear. The progress seemed to be updated in quite big "lumps" too - 16%, 47%, etc. (making me wonder whether it had stalled / dropped the connection), rather than a fairly smooth progress. Also, when downloading thumbnails at the end of the sync there wasn't a progress bar at all (just a notification at the bottom of the screen - and I can't remember now whether or not it went away once it had finished - I fell asleep during the process!). That may be because it didn't take very long, so there was no progress to report, and it's just that the message didn't disappear once it had completed.

The progress during initial sync and thumbnail download is one of those things that almost certainly won't be an issue after the initial update and sync, but might spook a few people during the update process.

I note that there is no Help available from the Menu buttons. It would be useful to have an on-board (or online) explanation of what the various settings do. I thought I saw something online yesterday that explained at least some of them, but can't find the information now. I know, I know, should have clipped it to Evernote :? )

Even with my small fingers, the action icons at the top of the screen (search, new note, switch view, etc.) are a bit fiddly to hit. I'm sure people with fatter fingers and thumbs (and/or smaller screens) will struggle to tap the correct one. Also, I think it would be more intuitive / consistent for the "Choose your view" icon to always be the eye with a drop down arrow, rather than an icon of the current display with a dropdown arrow. The bar immediately underneath shows what view you currently have anyway (and you could incorporate the icon for the view there instead. My suggestion would be to drop the word "Evernote" from that top bar, and leave the elephant logo (maybe within a "Home" outline, to signify that it takes you back to Evernote's Home screen), New note icon, Eye (view choice) icon and search icon, more widely spaced.

I LOVE having easy (i.e. visible) access to a list of my Notebooks, Tags, and Saved searches.

When offline (i.e. with neither WiFi nor GPRS connection), if I try a search, a message slides in from the right, and immediately slides out again, so I don't know what it says. It would be useful to leave that visible until dismissed by the user. It might be nice to offer an option to search locally - i.e. just through the headers and any offline notes - if that's feasible, for occasions when it's not possible to get a connection.

I KNOW that offline access is done by using a specific Notebook on other (i.e. iOS) platforms, but I would find it more useful to be able to designate what to store offline by Tag (or even a completely separate Offline flag - although that wouldn't give me the flexibility to store different offline notes on different devices with different storage capacities), so that notes don't have to go in a particular notebook just because I always want to be able to access them on my phone. If I want offline access, I could then simply tag appropriately, and only sync certain tags. This approach would also work better with shared Notebooks (once they're available in the clients) - i.e. I wouldn't then have to either have or not have offline access to an entire shared Notebook on my phone. Since notes can have multiple tags, but only one Notebook, controlling offline storage by Tag would give much better and more granular control, which seems important to me on devices with limited storage. Otherwise, I may have to add my vote for hierarchical Notebooks (which I've never had a use for before) purely so that I can create a sub-Notebook in which I can keep the subset of Notes in a particular folder which I want to sync Offline - and again, like an offline flag, that wouldn't give the control for different offline sync on different devices with varying storage capabilities). For the record, I currently have 1111 Notes in 8 Notebooks, with 471 of them in what I consider to be my "default" notebook. 220 of them are unfiled, and the vast majority of THEM should probably go in that notebook too, which would give me 691 (62%) of my notes in one folder. I don't want to sync all of that, but there will be notes in both that one and some of my others which I WOULD want to sync offline.

Can you please explain why one of my Tags seems to be animated? Does it signify something?

I'd like to be able to choose a Detail-style display view for Notebooks and Tags, as well as for notes (i.e. an icon on the left, and Notebook / Tag name and number of notes, plus perhaps any other useful info such as date of most recent note). I prefer the Detail display for notes, and switching between that and the icon view for Tags / Notebooks is somehow vaguely unsettling.

I like the little slide-up scrollable list of other notes with the same Tag / in the same Notebook as the note I'm viewing. Nice touch.

I'm not sure if the Upload Notifications setting is working, but I haven't seen a notification yet, even though I have created a note which has synced.

Keep up the good work!

Julie

[juwlz 6]

Have seen responses from Evernote staff on other threads, but not the comments in this one. Did you miss it?

[shimra 14]

On my HTC Desire, Evernote 2.0 beta filled up the internal storage entirely. I have 12151 notes, so I'm guessing the header-information etc. is quite heavy. I hope future development will save all note data on the SD card.

The sticky says you can install on SD card. I haven't tested it myself, but I think it should work in android 2.2.

[engberg 89]

You raised some good points, thanks for the feedback!

[juwlz 6]

On my HTC Desire, Evernote 2.0 beta filled up the internal storage entirely. I have 12151 notes, so I'm guessing the header-information etc. is quite heavy. I hope future development will save all note data on the SD card.

The sticky says you can install on SD card. I haven't tested it myself, but I think it should work in android 2.2.

That's the application, not the data (and Evernote currently isn't enabled for moving to SD card - or at least, I certainly don't have the option in Settings | Application | Manage to move it there on my Nexus 1). However, my understanding was that the data ALWAYS gets saved on the SD card, not internal memory.

On my phone, Evernote claims to be using 4.04MB for the application, and 2.23MB for data (with 1115 notes, none of which are currently offline). Unfortunately, Android doesn't tell me WHERE the data is being saved. Or at least, not in the summary screen in Manage Applications. However, the Evernote directory on my SD card takes up 38,599,866 bytes, and contains 1163 files, which corresponds quite well to the number of notes I have, plus a few bits of extra stuff, like a notethumb directory ;-).

Julie

[Philip Constantinou 11]

On my HTC Desire, Evernote 2.0 beta filled up the internal storage entirely. I have 12151 notes, so I'm guessing the header-information etc. is quite heavy. I hope future development will save all note data on the SD card.

The latest version allows you to move the application to the SD card.

[GaUser 0]

After getting an Evernote account, I got the Android Beta and a premium account, because I really wanted access to some of my notes at times when I don't have data access on my phone. But I have noticed following things that I didn't expect.

When I select a specific notebook, and its shows the content, then I do a search it doesn't just search in that notebook but all notebooks. It would make more sense to me at least if that search was automatically limited to the notebook being shown. A user could pick "All Notes" if that is what they really want.

At work there are certain areas with no phone reception at all (which is why I want offline access). I can access my offline notebooks which is what I wanted. But the search is a problem. If I select a notebook and then do a simple search, apparently due to the fact it is setup to search all notebooks a window pops up which says "Search Error The data connection is unreachable at the time. Try again later". So I thought I would add the "notebook:name" to the front of the search to limit it to the offline notebook that I really wanted. But it still gives the same error, maybe it uses the data connection to get the names of all notebooks.. So it looks like even with offline notebooks you can only access them not search in them without a data connection. I think I should be able search an offline notebook when I don't have a data connection.

Note I have been able to reproduce all these here at home by putting my phone in "Flight mode". I think I should be able to search my offline notebooks in this mode.

A much less important comment, I wish at times I could change the sort orders, like created or updated in ascending order instead of descending and maybe title in ascending .