Skip to main content

Evernote: a Landscape of Experiences



I’m going to take some time out of absolutely loving Evernote for keeping me on task and organized throughout the day to talk about what, I think, is absolutely the worse thing about it.
Evernote is a completely different application on every platform and device it supports.
For a product who’s main gimmick is keeping you organized and your data synced between all of your platforms and devices, that’s sort of a really hard knock against them. The Evernote for Windows application is great, but so is the Evernote for Mac application. These are quite different, and not just in the ways that usual differ between Windows and Mac to fit the platforms well. They are just fundamentally different applications which coincidentally happen to be sharing your data.
Beyond the two desktop Evernotes, the problem only gets worse. Evernote for Android is yet another experience, with yet other features different from the two Desktop versions.
The most jarring differences between these versions are differences in the editing of your notes themselves, something that (given the nature of the tool) seems like being consistent should have been priority number 1. How am I supposed to work on my notes everywhere if my notes may be different everywhere?
Perhaps the most frustrating part of all this comes down to what is definitely the most overlooked face of Evernote from their development team: Evernote for the Web. This version of the product has, by far, the most missing features found at least in some form in most of the other versions.
This Web version being so limited is especially troubling because, would it be better supported, the differences of all the other versions would barely scratch my notice. I’d just use the web version everywhere.
Moving forward, these discrepancies are killing my loyalty to Evernote and I can’t see there is anyway I’ll be able to continue as a user much longer. Honestly, I’ve gotten a lot out of it, and I’d hoped this situation would improve. That hope is what kept me around this long. As it continues to only appear more divergent over time, not less, it seems my hope was misplaced.
I’m still looking for the replacement, but I’m going to find it (or make it) and then it’ll be “so long” to Evernote, I’m afraid.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My Software Job Transition Strategies?

I’ve been spending a good deal of the last two days preparing mentally for starting a whole new challenge as a developer. New things aren’t new to me, but this is different and big enough really call for some Deep Thoughts ™. For one thing, I’ve made a big move from the world of Python web development to totally other Python work and while web development has never been the only thing I do, it has been the only work that paid the bills. That transition isn’t one that bothers me or daunts me, though. Instead, I’m thinking about transitioning to the scope of the work I’m getting into. For a long time, I juggled multiple clients and client projects every day, so no single project usually took up most of my time. Every developer juggles time through the day, but exactly how that works in each company and on each project varies a lot. I was looking for a place that I could really focus in a way that I haven’t for a long time. I think I found that, but now I have to deal with the consequen...
Post a Comment
Read more

CARDIAC: The Cardboard Computer

I am just so excited about this. CARDIAC. The Cardboard Computer. How cool is that? This piece of history is amazing and better than that: it is extremely accessible. This fantastic design was built in 1969 by David Hagelbarger at Bell Labs to explain what computers were to those who would otherwise have no exposure to them. Miraculously, the CARDIAC (CARDboard Interactive Aid to Computation) was able to actually function as a slow and rudimentary computer.  One of the most fascinating aspects of this gem is that at the time of its publication the scope it was able to demonstrate was actually useful in explaining what a computer was. Could you imagine trying to explain computers today with anything close to the CARDIAC? It had 100 memory locations and only ten instructions. The memory held signed 3-digit numbers (-999 through 999) and instructions could be encoded such that the first digit was the instruction and the second two digits were the address of memory to operat...
1 comment
Read more

The Snake Pit is About to Burst

The signs are all over the place. I can count at least five implementations of Python today: CPython, CL-Python, Jython, IronPython, and PyPy. The use of the language is sky rocketting and set to grab real mind-share as the hype over Ruby subsides. Things are looking good for a favorite green snake and british comedy troop reference, aren't they? Trouble is on the horizon in the very ingredients that could push us into true success. Our community and our very language is in danger of segregation, unless we all do something about it and learn to get along. One of the most visible dangers (to me) is being ignored for various political, cultural, and non-technical reasons. IronPython's users are increasingly pushing IronPython-only recipes, libraries, and tutorials. No one is talking about the transition of the alternative implemenations to CPython 3.0 compatability. To make matters worse, we still can not define the language without refering to an implementation. This is very un...
11 comments
Read more