Evernote Development

Posted by Daly de Gagne
Jan 19, 2009 at 07:10 PM

A program no longer being developed, or a software company going out of business, are not the only perils for users.

For example, Evernote.

When EN’s developers launched EN3 it was to be a program for all platforms, plus the cloud.

EN3 dropped features from EN2. Users for whom those features were important have gone through a frustrating process of attempting to persuade the developers to add those features back.

An example is the question of sub notebooks.

Increasingly it became apparent there were fewer and fewer responses from EN in their heavily used user forum, especially around issues where ppl were adamant, such as sub notebooks.

Way back in 08 I voted with my feet, and moved over to http://www.surfulater.com, which had moved ahead very nicely since I had previously used it.

Today I thought I’d check the EN user forum to see if there has been any movement, especially given a heady statement made by the company about plans to focus attention once more on the desktop users of EN. I saw not much has changed since my last visit to the forum.

I sent the following post to the forum:

``I see the sub-notebook discussion is going on the same way it was several months ago when I last looked in on Evernote forum.

``I now use Surfulater, http://www.surfulater.com. It has notebooks, and tags, and a growing capability to handle metadata.

``It also manages to clip web pages with even greater accuracy than EN.

``And the developer replies to queries from users.

``From what I see the sub-notebook discussion is being ignored by EN.

``For saving to the web when that is actually important in my work I use Microsoft’s new, free program Thumbtack.

``If you all want to continue using EN, and want sub-notebooks, then express yourselves in forums outside of EN, such as http://www.outlinersoftware.com``

I have no confidence that desktop users of EN will ever be listened to the way they once were by the developers or that the program will fulfill the stated intention of refocusing on the desktop version of EN.

So…shift in corporate emphasis on future direction of software is also a risk we take as users, albeit a risk that is unavoidable.

Daly