I can't has cheezburger

I’ve known about Evernote since its early days, and after seeing it evolve quite a bit, I started using it myself back in 09.  In the almost two years I’ve been using it, I’d like to pay tribute to how it’s changed how I collect information and reflect a bit on the things it could do better on.  Let’s start with the positives, because I think you all know I’m better at bitching about stuff and I like to save that for later.

The Good Things

1. Evernote is everywhere.  If I’m at my computer, there’s a version of Evernote for the Mac and for the PC (and the latest Windows version is vastly better than the previous one in terms of performance and its interface).  At any given desktop web browser, chances are there’s an Evernote web clipper.  If I’m not at my own computer, I can easily log right into the Evernote web site (which is really nice, by the way) to see my notes. iPhone app? Check. iPad app? Check. Blackberry? Check. WebOS? Check.  Android? Check.  The Evernote team has been phenomenal in making versions of its app for every platform, so I feel very comfortable putting my data in Evernote.

2. Evernote is my brain.  Looking through my Evernote notebooks, I can see that Evernote has quickly become the place that I dump little snippets of information that I might need later.  Whether it’s a memorable quote, funny images from the internet, or whole web pages, it all goes in there.

3. Evernote adds great metadata.  I love data.  But what I love even more is data with context.  Evernote gives me that.  If I make an Evernote note with my iPhone, Evernote will store the location I made the note from.  If I clip something from the web, Evernote embeds the URL automatically.  Those things all add a nice touch, and you can use powerful searching based on attributes which can include these metadata as their fields.

4. Evernote is great for pack rats.  If your’e a little anal about keeping all your receipts and papers you get, Evernote will add order to your life.  Buy yourself a Doxie scanner, and whenever you receive something paper, just scan it into Evernote, recycle the paper thing and forget about it (until perhaps you need it again).  Evernote has OCR searching (which is reasonably accurate) so chances are you’ll have a better time finding that receipt in Evernote later on than you would looking through pants pockets.  It’s also great if you get someone’s business card, or some other piece of info you want to remember photographically (a sign on a building, perhaps? You could even combine that with location feature to find a business).

5. Evernote will let you dump just about anything into it.  You can e-mail it to Evernote or just stick it right in there, but you can embed just about anything into your notebooks, which is great if you happen to have a document in a nonstandard format that you’d like to store unchanged (Dropbox is also great for this, but sometimes it’s nice to add a note to it too).

6. You can make Evernote data actionable.  Just add a check box to a note in Evernote and you’ve got yourself a to-do item, which you can quickly and easily identify.  And when doing that, the to do is sitting right there with the pertinent information.  Great for you GTD people.

Those are great things.  But still, there’s stuff I can’t stand about Evernote.

1. Limited ways to make notes.  If you want to take notes that are simple rich text and maybe some graphics, you’re golden.  But as soon as you want to do something fancy, like add a diagram or maybe a hyperlink to another Evernote note, you are absolutely fucked.  Your only recourse is to make the diagram in another app, save that off as a PDF or image and put that into Evernote.  Ew.  I never thought I’d say this, but Evernote, look at how Microsoft did OneNote.  Evernote should be like that.  Except for the diagramming stuff.  Look at what OmniGraffle does for inspiration there.

Waiting for that to get implemented is probably not worthwhile, because Evernote’s prolific existence on all platforms puts their developers in a bit of a pickle when it comes time to add a user facing feature to how you take notes (read: no consistency for you).  The mobile versions of Evernote can basically take plain text notes, whereas the desktop versions can do richly formatted stuff (but not quite the same depending on what version your’e using).

2. Can you take notes? Sure! Can you do recordings? Sure! Can you take notes combined with recordings?  Nope.  What would seem like a really freaking logical next step for note taking is apparently too mind blowing for Evernote to handle.  There are a few programs out there that let you record and take notes, and they have the added benefit of letting you go specifically to a particular part of your notes and listening to the corresponding audio, which is great if you zone out during classes and stuff sometimes when you should be taking notes.

3. Search is great, until you want to search for something that isn’t alphanumeric.  That makes Evernote relatively useless if you want to use it to save code snippets to search later.  Or if you want to do any sort of source code related note taking.  When I reached out to support to see why they have this limitation in place, I was told it was for performance reasons.  But if you can’t make search that includes more than just 36 characters perform well, you’re a goddamn idiot and shouldn’t be developing software.

4. Views could be better.  It would be nice if you could get a view where you just saw all the images of your notebooks (this is particularly useful for me because I use Evernote as a storage cache for images I find funny and want to use later).  I just feel like overall the way I’m presented my notes could be a little more elegant and fun.  I don’t know what I want to see, but I’m sure someone creative could make a view of my notebook data that’s more flattering.

5. Dragging images out of Evernote is an exercise in futility.  If you have an image in Evernote and want to use it in a document or blog post or whatever, it tends to require the intermediate step of dragging the image into the Finder and using the newly created image file to put in my target document.  Fuck off, Evernote. Give me proper drag and drop!

6. Give me site annotations, please! In the summer you announced a feature called site memory that would let you see other notes clipped from a particular site while you visited it.  The Evernote people seemed to think this would change you you surfed the web.  I’m not totally seeing that, but seeing how you have that technology, it would be doubly amazing if you allowed me to add notes and annotations to web pages inline and have that saved to Evernote.  Then, when I came back to look at those pages, my notes would be right in context.  In fact, let me do that to all sorts of things!

7. To-dos have so much more untapped potential.  Evernote may not have initially thought of itself as a to-do manager, but as long as it’s considering itself to be an external brain, managing things I have to do is a natural part of that.  It’d be nice to add contexts and due dates and other information to my to-dos, while at the same time allowing them to live inside the original notes for context (if they’re created there).

 

Evernote’s a tool that brings me great excitement because it already has changed the way I work in many ways, but it also brings me a lot of frustration because of what it can do but doesn’t.  And while I like to be an optimist, it doesn’t seem Evernote developers have much interest in changing Evernote’s user facing feature set. Instead, they hoped that third party developers would fill that gap via the Trunk, which doesn’t seem like that great of a solution.

Evernote people, I know you’re listening. Give these features some consideration!