{"id":11,"date":"2010-07-18T16:40:58","date_gmt":"2010-07-18T23:40:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/icanthascheezburger.com\/?p=11"},"modified":"2022-10-29T13:24:01","modified_gmt":"2022-10-29T20:24:01","slug":"evernote-feature-requests-that-really-are-thinly-veiled-complaints","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/icanthascheezburger.com\/wordpress\/2010\/07\/evernote-feature-requests-that-really-are-thinly-veiled-complaints\/","title":{"rendered":"Evernote Feature Requests (that really are thinly veiled complaints)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One software program I use every day and would be lost without is Evernote. \u00a0I use it as my second brain and it faithfully stores all of the information I gather throughout my day that I find worth keeping for later. \u00a0The best part of it is that Evernote&#8217;s available for pretty much any platform. \u00a0You can get it for OS X, Windows, Linux (via the web, but someone&#8217;s developing a native app), iOS, Android and Blackberry. \u00a0Possibly even for webOS. \u00a0By being available on all of those platforms, it&#8217;s very likely Evernote is always within an arm&#8217;s reach for you, which is the beauty of it, because that makes it very easy to quickly capture some piece of information you&#8217;ll need later, saving you from having to scramble for a scrap of paper, then wonder where you put it later.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Recently, Evernote got me really excited by saying they were going to unveil a new, secret thing this week that would change the way I thought about Evernote.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;\" src=\"http:\/\/icanthascheezburger.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/07\/NewImage1.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"NewImage.jpg\" width=\"630\" height=\"315\" \/><\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>I was pretty excited. \u00a0What could be under that red velvet (maybe even velour?) cloth? \u00a0Of the many feature requests I have, I figured the odds were pretty good that this surprise announcement would give me one of those features.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>It ended up giving me none. \u00a0But, at the same time, it kind of gave me all of them.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>You see, instead of actually implementing much desired features and putting them in Evernote, Evernote is now becoming a platform instead of a tool that holds its own. \u00a0Evernote launched a service called <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.evernote.com\/2010\/07\/14\/the-evernote-trunk\/\">Trunk<\/a> which is basically a collection of services that can be used in conjunction with Evernote.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>There are two problems I am seeing so far with these programs and services:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>They often cost money on top of my Evernote Premium subscription (and are often subscriptions themselves)<\/li>\n<li>Many don&#8217;t offer very meaningful integration with Evernote.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s an example one:<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"float: left;\" src=\"http:\/\/icanthascheezburger.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/07\/NewImage2.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"NewImage.jpg\" width=\"192\" height=\"123\" \/><\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Ooh, I can <em>save<\/em> my PDF into Evernote? \u00a0Wow, adding that option must have required <em>oodles<\/em> of effort! \u00a0And think of all the work it&#8217;s going to save me now! \u00a0Instead of saving my PDF and dragging it into Evernote, I can just save into Evernote! \u00a0Wow, if I do that enough times a day, that could save me&#8230; minutes in the long run.<\/p>\n<p>And sending to Evernote is the extent of its integration. \u00a0If you wanted to open a PDF already in Evernote and annotate it or mark it up or edit it, you&#8217;d have to send it to Evernote again.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s one that made me laugh:<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"float: left;\" src=\"http:\/\/icanthascheezburger.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/07\/NewImage.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"NewImage.jpg\" width=\"177\" height=\"140\" \/><\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a paper notebook. \u00a0No, really, that&#8217;s what it is. \u00a0And its &#8220;integration&#8221; with Evernote is that you can just scan those pages right into Evernote when you&#8217;re done!<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>There are a few diamonds in the rough (Egretlist looks really promising), but fundamentally, I want to see Evernote get more cool features to let me use it in new ways, and seeing that Evernote developers are pushing Trunk is sending me a message that Evernote&#8217;s not interested in actually adding new features to Evernote. \u00a0Instead, they want others to do that work. \u00a0And being reliant on other companies for your own success is just not a good position to put yourself in.<\/p>\n<p>I want to see Evernote investing in making new features. \u00a0They&#8217;ve got access to their core elements and can make those kinds of fundamental improvements. \u00a0They can change the mobile versions of their apps to do more (iPhone apps can&#8217;t really have third party plugins).<\/p>\n<p>So, here are my Evernote feature requests:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>You know how Evernote can OCR images (which is amazing)? Why not transcribe audio recordings?<\/li>\n<li>Evernote has the ability to make things to-do items. \u00a0Improve upon this! \u00a0Minimally, let me specify due dates and give me some ways\/views to manage the things I have to do (controlling that by location would be spiffy)<\/li>\n<li>Make search work with characters that aren&#8217;t alphanumeric. \u00a0Seriously.<\/li>\n<li>Let me doodle on Evernote in places other than the Windows version of Evernote. \u00a0Doodling in iOS version of Evernote would be sweet.<\/li>\n<li>Let me record audio while also editing a note in another way (like typing or drawing). \u00a0And while you&#8217;re at it, keep track of when I write certain things so that I can go back to that part of the note and play back the audio, so I can remember context and maybe catch what I missed the first time around.<\/li>\n<li>Instead of making me highlight text to clip from the web, let me select a box and capture that, similar to how LittleSnapper handles it. <\/li>\n<li>Let me annotate web pages right from my browser, then save those annotations in Evernote. \u00a0This would go great with the web site memory feature.<\/li>\n<li>Give me the ability to link to other sections of my notes and other notes in Evernote.<\/li>\n<li>Give me some drawing tools so I can circle important things, make diagrams, etc. <\/li>\n<li>Create a watch folder I can save stuff to that will auto-import into Evernote.<\/li>\n<li>Give desktop versions of Evernote feature parity.<\/li>\n<li>Give mobile versions of Evernote feature parity.<\/li>\n<li>Fix image drag &amp; drop in OS X so that I can drag images from notes into an Open dialog box and get the image.<\/li>\n<li>Work harder on improving performance of Windows Evernote. \u00a0It&#8217;s a little pathetic.<\/li>\n<li>Let me edit notes in the mobile version of Evernote.<\/li>\n<li>Sometimes I like to keep code snippets in Evernote. \u00a0Let me define notes as being plain text, then let me edit them in my favorite text editor.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One software program I use every day and would be lost without is Evernote. \u00a0I use it as my second brain and it faithfully stores all of the information I gather throughout my day that I find worth keeping for later. \u00a0The best part of it is that Evernote&#8217;s available for pretty much any platform. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/icanthascheezburger.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/icanthascheezburger.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/icanthascheezburger.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icanthascheezburger.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icanthascheezburger.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/icanthascheezburger.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/icanthascheezburger.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icanthascheezburger.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icanthascheezburger.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}