Summary
After giving it a review, I’ll admit It looks a lot cleaner and more modern, but they moved a LOT of cheese.
Not real happy with it yet.
I’ve been with Evernote for 10 years as of last April and I have about 20,000 notes buried in there. I use it to run almost everything.
What I’m missing already
- Saved Searches are buried under Search now. What was one click for me is now several clicks and scrolling. I used Saved Searches to run my LIFE.
- Views. I often would pivot between the 4 or 5 views you could us to see your notes different ways (with images, less data, more data, preview pane on/off). That appears to be gone. No idea if it’s coming back.
- Speed. I’m getting 3-6 second lags when I do something simple like click on a note or using Ctrl+N for a new note. That’s gonna add up for me. I move fast in this app (or used to anyway).
- Tags are at the bottom of the page now. Hopefully I don’t start forgetting to tag since the feature is kind of “out of sight, out of mind”.
- My tags are not autocompleting for me either if I use F3 to start the tag. I’m typing tags I know I have and they aren’t showing up. BIG problem here. I probably have 200 tags or more. No WAY am I going to scroll through those hierarchically. Fortunately it seems I can click to add a tag and autocomplete works in that case. So this seems to be a bug.
- Presentation mode appears to be gone
- I’m still exploring so we’ll see what else comes up.
What I like
- Dark mode
- Note editor is much better.
- Drag blocks of text
- Full editor features (like header sizes, more colors
- Sketch feature seems pretty great. Like this:
- Drawn by hand using Bamboo tablet
- Evernote only inserted the part it should have, which is excellent
- This means I can do more “whiteboarding” right within Evernote, instead of using MS Whiteboard and then Snagit to capture and place it in Evernote.
- Only better would be if I could copy/paste it here and then edit it. Let’s try:
- Nope. I had it pasted here fine, but Evernote could only display. Instead I edited the original.
Update: went back to version 6.25 for now. Going to look for alternatives just in case this new version doesn’t show signs of speeding up and backfilling some of the important missing features. https://discussion.evernote.com/forums/topic/129307-back-to-version-625-i-go/
I used EN casually for many years. Last summer I installed it (6.25) on my work computer and began using it for my work consistently for the first time and quickly became a convert. Prompted a few months later (around October IRRC) to install V. 10, I did so and was immediately disappointed. The two most important features for me: I put a date/time Stamp on almost every note (I know EN can do that but I wanted it in the note itself)… V. 10 just puts the date, written out instead of 3/5/2021… and not the time … The other feature is that I routinely put hyperlinks to folders on my hard drive into individual notes. This works because I don’t normally use it on the web at all. And that function didn’t work satisfactorily in V. 10. I kept the new one for maybe a day or two and then said **** it. dumped V 10 and found the installation file on my computer for 6.25 and went back to that. Happily….. I came here to read this and then offer my rant because this morning I did a search on ‘Evernote 6.25’ just to see what was out there aboute 6.25 vs. 10, found your blog and also the threads on EN’s forums expressing the frustration w/ the change. I was prompted to do that search because I was annoyed to get a pop-up from Evernote saying that my version is no longer updated and Wouldn’t I just LOVE to see all the nifty new features in the latest version? Been there, done that, Not interested. Thank you for letting me vent…
Hiya Erik, Thanks for your comment. Sorry I didn’t see it until just now. I’m not used to getting real comments in my blog, haha (so much spam in the WordPress interwebs).
Definitely know how you feel re the frustration. I’m starting to come around a bit in the last week or two. The feature set is just barely up to what I need and the performance has gone from “completely unusable and now I want to break something…anything!” to “maybe…just maaaybe this might work out…”. Still a long way to go but I do like they are iterating quickly to try and catch up.
I’m personally fully in support of their reason for a total rebuild. I get that part of it, having been in software for a long time (but never something of this scale, number of users, etc.). If they didn’t do this, it was all going to come crashing down anyway. I truly believe that. Maybe we would have all been fine for a few more years, but the meltdown was coming.
It’s a monstrous effort, too, so I have to give them a wide berth as they try and bring this ship into port (I feel some metaphor collisions coming…this could get ugly).
Having said all that, I also believe I need to patiently observe whether their intentions to catch up the new app are actually being meaningfully executed. I believe they are at this point, so that’s good news to me.
Meanwhile, I need to be able to function, so Legacy 6.25 is vital while EN quickly iterates through v10 and beyond to do the catchup game.
I’m in this for the long game still. Might literally take a couple years before I’m ready to release my white-knuckled, kung-fu grip on Legacy. I talk about it a bit more in this thread on Evernote’s user forum in case you’re interested at all. https://discussion.evernote.com/forums/topic/134566-catastrophic-slow-and-improductive-update/?tab=comments#comment-610613
But I spent the last week only using v10 for about 90% of my day. So that was interesting. I may plan that for a new post soon. It ended poorly but worked for most of the week.