New Evernote CEO Vows To Spend 2019 Fixing Note-Taking App's Long List of Problems (venturebeat.com) 53
Rather than serving up platitudes about innovation, the man charged with saving former unicorn Evernote says his priority this year is addressing the long list of user complaints. From a report: Despite some progress, Evernote continued to struggle last year, cutting 15 percent of its staff and losing many top executives.So what doesn't work? Lots of stuff, much of it very basic, new CEO Ian Small says: "Frankly, it's a bit disingenuous for me to try to get our most dedicated users all fired up about inventing the future of Evernote when exactly those same people are the ones who know best that sync doesn't always work right. Or that Evernote on Windows is a bit tired, and is missing features that are found on the Mac version. Or that each version of Evernote seems to work slightly differently, and exhibits its own unique collection of bugs and undesirable behaviors. Or that Evernote on mobile devices sometimes feels like a pared-down version of a powerful desktop app, instead of a mobile-first view into a powerful cloud-enabled productivity environment." Small says these problems have lingered for years and were well-known, but he didn't want to get into why they weren't fixed sooner. Instead, he promises the main focus of 2019 will be dealing with these and numerous other issues.
CEOs gonna CEO (Score:1)
"...Or that Evernote on mobile devices sometimes feels like a pared-down version of a powerful desktop app, instead of a mobile-first view into a powerful cloud-enabled productivity environment."
Man, he went from zero to buzzword bingo in record time.
lolwtf?!? (Score:2, Interesting)
How does a company that makes a note taking app need hundreds of people? *head asplodes*
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Ah, but then someone says "hey, who can fix this OSX code?" and they say "Frank is the only guy who understands it, but you laid him off a couple weeks ago." Eventually the VP of engineering (who after layoffs is also VP of IT and Facilities) says "just hire an intern, how hard can this stuff be?"
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Like many problems with corporate America its an Wall Street problem.
Evernote is a progam that does one thing really well. It lets you keep a list of things in the cloud so you can access it from all your devices, no matter what their operating system. I access my Evernote account from Linux, Windows, Android and could access it from iOS and whatever OS Apple computers are now using. It works great and does everything I expect.
The problem is that only so many people need this functionality. There is no reas
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A team for backend, frontend, Android and iPhone, devops, and then sales, accounting, HR, and managers.
Also Andrew, the guy who does all the programming. The first Evernote updates will start appearing when he gets back from holiday next week.
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Because they grew fast. They've got a nice building too (not sure if leased). But after awhile you end up with many more users than you expected, more revenue than you expected, and you have to expand to get more servers and and more support and more sales. And because people want to see new features and such, you need more devs too. Then one day they find out they should have stopped growing a few months back.
Dead (Score:1)
It's dead, and it's going to get deadder. The new CEO has the "mobile-first" cancer in his brain.
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Note taking is one area where "mobile first" is a good idea. The best note taking device is the one you have with you. And most of the times, it is a mobile device.
And unfortunately, most note taking apps are terrible on mobile. In particular, the only app I know does hand drawing correctly is Squid/Papyrus, but it is the only thing it does well. Mobile phones take pictures, have a touchscreen you can draw on, but they are terrible for text input, and yet, most mobile note taking apps rely on the latter.
Sti
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Note taking is one area where "mobile first" is a good idea. The best note taking device is the one you have with you. And most of the times, it is a mobile device.
And unfortunately, most note taking apps are terrible on mobile. In particular, the only app I know does hand drawing correctly is Squid/Papyrus, but it is the only thing it does well. Mobile phones take pictures, have a touchscreen you can draw on, but they are terrible for text input, and yet, most mobile note taking apps rely on the latter.
Still, "mobile-first view into a powerful cloud-enabled productivity environment" doesn't sound good. The problem is data entry, not the "view", the "cloud" or the "productivity environment".
I half agree with this, but I think you're missing the GP's point. I agree that making it easy to jot down notes and get the information out of one's brain and onto a more permanent form of storage is something mobile devices are good at, and I agree that the mobile versions of most note taking apps could stand to use a bit of improvement.
However, what I think was the original point, is that while mobile devices are great for taking notes due to their availability, desktops are great at helping to categoriz
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No, that's the bullshit line they use for cameras. The best note taking device is paper and pen/pencil. A runner up is a real keyboard. Behind that is dictation you later transcribe (or have someone else transcribe). You also have your digits and your asshole with you all the time. Why isn't sticking your finger up there then smearing shit on your forearm the best note taking device? (Hint: It's not because poop smells, it's because the usability and the end result is awful.)
As far as handwriting rec
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Doesn't that depend on the kind of notes you're taking? I'm an Evernote user and I can already tell you that text notes are a minority of the notes that I take.
What's in my notebooks? One has a large number of what are effectively bookmarks. If I see a device I want to buy on a webpage I clip that page and put it in one of my Evernote notebooks. If I see a book referenced in an article I look up that book and clip the page from Amazon or B&N in a notebook of books I might want to by. My granddaughter se
That's what happens (Score:4, Insightful)
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90% of the bugs are the p1 and p2 bugs and are budgeted to take 90% of the time. The other 10% of the bugs are the little annoyances, and basic math [wikipedia.org] describes how long that ends up taking.
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90% of the bugs are the p1 and p2 bugs and are budgeted to take 90% of the time.
Then you suck at programming? I don't know what you are doing wrong that causes you to spend all your time fixing bugs. Improve your skill, take a class, do something, but don't keep writing such crappy code.
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Amen. This is why I insist that once we hit a certain threshold of p3 defects (for a piece of functionality) that we bundle them up and treat them as a single p1.
It's not perfect by any means, but does mean that we avoid having a tonne of little annoyances lying around.
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Never heard of it.
Cool story, gramps? On the other hand, the product has hundreds of million of users.
Slashvertisement...?
If it was, it's a pretty poor one. Why would an advertisement contain stories about how the company has being doing poorly, laying off people and how the product is buggy and crappy?
Finally! I hope they actually do... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Finally! I hope they actually do... (Score:4, Informative)
When Evernote started charging money to run the native app on more than 2 devices, I immediately switched to SimpleNote [simplenote.com] and have never looked back.
It lacks the fancy rich-text & media stuff that Evenote has, but for plain text (which is all I want) it's perfect. Uses tags for organizing notes, which I actually prefer over notebooks.
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Yup... that's when I dumped them as well. I liked to use it on three devices; my cellphone, my tablet and my desktop... all for different uses. And the price for just that one extra device was more than I felt like stomaching... particularly when OneNote and others just work. In fact I've found a preference for OneNote at this point.
I did play with a few others... SimpleNote looks cool and I hadn't actually tried that one. But there are no shortage of good note taking apps out there.
It's a shame because I r
I too find OneNote flaky... (Score:4, Interesting)
OneNote I used on an iPad and my desktop for a while, for a client.
However one day, it just started crashing on the iPad, on login. Reinstall - still crash. Wait a month for an update or two, still crashes...
I gave up at that point. I now use Notes.app for most things, I can have shared lists with my wife very easily, and It syncs well enough between desktop and other devices. It has just enough features...
I had looked at Evernote and even used it for a time, but it was too bulky for most of what I needed.
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I eventually switched to OneNote, after I decided not to pay for Evernote's Premium features. I do miss Evernote, but I found OneNote to be adequate for the work I needed to do: not great, but good enough for me. I also started getting concerned about losing my content in Evernote, if the company ever went under, given the lackluster management team that they had in the last few years. I figured Microsoft had a more stable footing.
Hopefully the company can find its mojo back, and return to their initial dec
Free Software Solution (Score:1)
Emacs + Org-Mode + Git + VPS
I can git clone my org-mode repositories (notes, personal wiki, todo lists, contacts, etc.) from my VPS and edit them in a consistent way across Windows, Mac, Linux, and BSD.
No solution for mobile but I don't do anything but text messaging, emails, and light browsing on my phone.
Works for me.
Too expensive (Score:1)
I liked EN a lot, but it appeared that the premium account is too expensive for simple thing like sorting notes. I haven't even noticed the bugs. Switched to OneNote and spent the saved money for buying Office 365 available to multiple home users. OneNote is a bit sluggish and not the best UX, but does the job quite well.
Maybe they should listen to the users... (Score:5, Interesting)
If you check their support forums, people had been begging for a "dark mode" setting literally for most of a decade. Users requested it over and over and over, and even came up with hacky workarounds to approximate it. Evernote would occasionally post some "we take feature requests seriously" platitude. But they refused this most simple request. I'd actually given up for quite a while and was using Sublime Text to take notes. Unfortunately, there's no iPhone app for Sublime to sync to; and I found myself in need of multiple-device solution so I had to go back. Even after Apple themselves finally forced the issue by creating a system-wide dark mode; Evernote dragged their heels for months, continuing to blast that awful bright white rectangle in our faces. Why? Who the hell knows? Some asshat at EN just decided that their personal preference should trump those of their users; eyestrain be damned.
Plus, they refuse to fix even the most simple bugs. Lately, I've had to fight with the damn thing to keep my plain text notes (With code snippets that get borked by bullshit unicode garbage characters like "smart" quotes, emdashes, and ellipses.) in plain text mode. I'll frequently add to an old note and lo-and-behold; Evernote switches back to "rich" text and Helvetica and "smart" formatting; no matter how many times I try to kill all that crap. Bug reports and support requests? Ignored.
The stink of it is, for what it is, Evernote is still unfortunately the best solution... hell... the only decent solution, really. But as arrogant and unresponsive as the company is; they're a prime target for some startup to come and do it better. I, for one, will not likely weep a single tear when they fall to their own hubris.
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As a developer, being able to paste notes as plain text is crucial. Losing indentation, and being forced to deal with "smart" quotes is a big pain in the ass. If you agree, please up-vote the relevant issue:
https://discussion.evernote.co... [evernote.com]
Compromises had to be made (Score:4, Funny)
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Evernote was once unique on OS X (Score:2)
Just as Evernote began charging for the application, Apple beefed up the stock Notes application with matching features. A lot of Evernote installations got deleted at that point.
Google Docs (Score:2)
I was a light user of Evernote for years - IIRC, it's what I moved to after leaving my old Palm Pilot. I only used maybe a dozen plain text files. Eventually I started using Google Docs for larger documents that were shared and all that, and it just made sense to consolidate away from Evernote. Plus, I think they tried to start charging?