Evernote 6.25

[Barton Ostby]

Beenpaid user with EN for 10 years last April, currently storing about 20k notes. Hate that I'm seriously considering moving on after all that time invested in my processes within EN, but maybe this is a wooden door closing and an iron door opening.

EN version count is simply driven by the fact that all clients are now based on the same "framework", which means shared code independently from the OS it is running at. So a common version count is nothing to bother about.

What I did: I am running my day to day EN account on legacy, and have opened a new Basic account set to v10 to play with. It is not all bad with v10, but one needs to review every workflow to see if it works or can be adapted.

I too have been with Evernote as a premium paying customer since January 30th, 2010. It has been a huge part of my everyday workflow and I have jokingly said my entire life is in Evernote, personal and business. I began desperately searching this forum for answers to questions/problems and after several days, I am exhausted.

I don't want to jump the gun so quickly after a release and say I am leaving Evernote but (and I never thought I'd say this) I am looking seriously at Notion and getting my ducks in a row just in case. In other words, it's not looking good for Evernote right now.

I keep pondering which of the missing features that I need. For me there are just two things that don't work and significantly affect my workflow. Import Folders and the associated stuff connected to scanning. So far I haven't found any other application I could switch to which would provide me with those features. Other stuff that I'm missing at present is announced as being in the pipeline so I should, eventually, be content with the new EN - at least resigned to having lost the one thing that is truly useful. But I have easy workarounds.

I do think that this roll-out could have been better managed and presented. Perhaps announce v10 as a public Beta rather than a full release. A clearer communication of what is being worked on, what has gone for good, and what might be kept if enough folk make a case.

I also realise that re-launching a product like Evernote which is mature in its market means that there are thousands of users all doing things just a bit differntly and the changes don't work for any of them. For some things like the position of the TAGS dialogue it isn't a major issue. I've already found the habit of looking to the bottom left corner. I'd have kept it top left but it isn't a big deal.

So I think I'll probably be staying with Evernote only because nobody else offers what I'm missing. I have my life invested inside Evernote and shifting to OneNote/Notion/Nimbus/Joplin etc will all give me more work to learn and develop new workflows. So I might as well stay where I am and take short-lived pain of transition made easier by having both versions running side-by-side.

100% agree. I am so so disappointed in this release. Too many changes. Some of us use this tool for work, at home and everything. I cannot use this new release efficiently at all and Nimbus is looking like a better option.

Totally agree with you here. Speed is 90% of the issue for me. I was willing to keep it loaded on one of my two machines in order to give v10 a chance and learn it better. But the lack of speed keeps me from doing so. I can be patient with a lot of things in my apps, but not massive lags between when I tell it to do something and it finally gets back to me. When that is resolved, I'll give a new test, but at arm's length until it's confirmed speed is up to par.

v 6.25 is basically instant most of the time--not including searches. I can click any note in my present view at any time pretty much and I'll get instant data in showing in the note. If I change the view, I'm willing to allow a few moments for things to re-settle, so to speak. But after that, responsiveness needs to be pretty much instant.

Yes, we are Task/Process Nerds. But I think this may be a larger cohort than EN may realize. the Get Things Done type folks, I mean. I think that would be the "parent cohort" if you will. And there's a subset of those type people who are outgoing enough to get in here and nav the forums to post their complaints. But how many of the larger group are just saying "well, that's it. I'll go find another app...", especially given that the app has slowed by a factor of 3-5x (in my estimation)?

Do you think it will be resolved? I mean this is probably a fundamental issue with the app right? It is not like they released it on purpose to be slow and then they can "open it up" to be faster? I am not a software developer so I don't know but it does worry me.

Speed issue can be caused by a number of factors. I guarantee you they didn't release a slow app knowingly. No developer ever would, especially one like Evernote where speed would be a driving factor for customer satisfaction. E.g., you might have some other app where the app is expected to take x seconds/minutes to do whatever it is doing. So speed is of course relative to expectation within any given context.

Hard to say what that might be (could be a line of code or it could be a deep architectural issue, or even some hardware, although that's much less likely...point is: lots of factors make an app "fast" or "slow"...]

Three decades of software experience tells me: these things happen. We can make judgments at this stage as to how it shouldn't have and so on (not you, just speaking generally here) or we acknowledge that it has and now see what EN does or doesn't do.

Not sure we the users will ever know what the problem is (they probably won't give us whole story, especially if it would reduce goodwill or public relations somehow). So don't expect to "read all about it..." necessarily. Just look to see what happens to this specific problem.

In other words, we'll just have to see how this goes over the coming weeks. They have everything to lose on this so they are either going to get this speed thing fixed or they aren't. Slow apps won't be tolerated, typically. A slow EN app, due to its very nature in terms of function for the user, would be even less tolerated.

But I won't pretend that other factors don't exist, too, such as pressure from the Board or the need to commit everyone fully to a path by "burning the boats", perhaps. Probably some of that going on in one flavor or another as well.

For sure. a new world. Just saying even as senior management has changed across the last ten years EN has not improved in testing, roll outs, or communications at all. Not learning from past mistakes is what gets you where we are today (even without considering the gutting of function). I wonder if root cause is in their vocabulary?

I have used the Send Feedback option to send them many comments. I've also tried hard to have it be constructive feedback, not "you're a bunch of idiots", that doesn't help at all. Count me as someone who's not happy with this new version, it's a giant step backwards in my opinion. I'm hoping they are listening to everything we are saying and will either update this version to have all the missing things or realize they made a mistake with this version and roll back to the previous version.

Looking at this thread feels like history repeating itself. I remember suffering through Evernote bloat during certain release stages before (either 4.x or 5.x) among a lot of ongoing annoyances that I traded for a lot of ongoing new perks and improvements over the years. Leaping from 6 to 10 sounds like a very Microsofty thing to do when forcing users to part with the versions they perfected. I can't even imagine how many issues I'll have with it beyond the obvious and already mentioned.

Last I checked, the alternatives did not suit me at all. Every time I toy with importing into Onenote I come running back before 50 notes even sync. If they kill support for this it'll be a disaster for me. The way their ship is running these days, it looks more like a "when".

I got a beta invite. I thought I signed up, but didn't do anything with it since I only heard about it maybe once then thought I've got enough bugs to wrestle with official stuff. Not that it would've made much of a difference. They have a history of overlooking some of the most basic yet chronic complaints over the years. Still plenty of bugs in the "legacy" family. Still have lots of random hangs there too despite a speedy setup. On my laptop shared notebooks just stopped syncing out of the blue. I could've reinstalled, but it probably would've required a fresh sync and at this point those are pretty painful for oldtimers, especially on a laptop.

The whole reason I checked the forum to begin with was after the webclipper started trying to capture the entire screen before i have a chance to use the selector. After 3-5 tries I can manage to drag the selection without that happening. Another issue I pretty much have to wait out and hope it disappears, that started out of nowhere.

imo Evernote has never been sexy, but functional ... like tagging notes, cross-platform availability and offline (killer feature comparing to all other software in this area). basic things were always missing (like different highlighting colour, choosing which picture should be the thumbnail, adding table rows on iOS, multi-level folder etc.).

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