If You’ve Never Tried Evernote, Now May Be the Perfect Time
By: Darryl Brooks
Tags: Technology, Software, Productivity, Review, Evernote

Anyone who has read my recent articles (linked below) may be surprised at this title. After all, I went from stating that Evernote was the best at what it does in July, questioning that theory in October, then asking, basically, WTF and telling people how to get out in December.

As many of you know, the problem is that after two years of bluster, they finally released the ‘new’ version of Evernote in October with a lot of fanfare on their side and not so much on the user’s. As a former developer, I kind of get why they did it. Their position was to bring the app forward, they needed to release it on a common platform. And while that isn’t necessarily true or the only way to get the job done, it is, as they say, what it is.

The result of this common platform, ‘Electron,’ for those interested, is a stripping away of features that weren’t common to all platforms at that time. This is partly why so many people began ranting on the forums and looking for alternate solutions, myself included. Most people had a favorite feature or set of them that was now missing. Workflows were disrupted, and users that relied on those features were pissed.

Buried very deep in the announcement that the new version was ready for prime time, and even though it uninstalled your old version was an odd discrepancy to everything that was said before. Some of the features you relied on may not be in this version, so feel free to use the old version. Sort of a pre-emptive strike to the reaction they must have known was coming.

The bad news was, you had to have or find the old version and reinstall it. Eventually, the din got so loud, they announced the ‘Legacy version’ and made it more accessible. They also allowed you to test the new version if you had the time and patience without uninstalling the legacy version.

Since then, they have released frequent updates, fixing bugs that shouldn’t have been in a production release, and replacing a few missing features. They have also backed off on some things they initially said wouldn’t return and placed them in the future release category. My primary way of getting data into Evernote was one of those features and, to me, the one that set it apart from the competition.

Needless to say, I am running the legacy app and only give an occasional cursory glance to the new one after each update.

So, why I am I recommending that it may be time for you to try it? Well, recommend, maybe too strong a word, but I stand by the title.

If you have never tried Evernote, now may be the perfect time.

Why? Simple. You have no expectations. You don’t have a workflow you have followed for a decade that has been flushed down the crapper. You are starting with a clean slate. And the good news is, (hopefully) things will only improve from here.

Depending on what you have been using for document storage and retrieval, Evernote may, at the very least, be a lateral move. I need to state here despite what you have seen in many posts on the Internet, Evernote is not a ‘note-taking app.’ Sure, you can take notes with it, but why would you. There are much simpler and mostly free apps that do that perfectly well. Evernote is for storing and finding any document you want, including, but certainly not limited to, notes.

It was, and I hope it will be again, the best at doing this. It had a simple interface that got out of your way. The search feature was flawless and lightning-fast. Many people used tags, and others used notebooks, but the speed, thoroughness, and accuracy of the search engine made that, for the most part, a moot point. And most importantly, it had more and better ways to get your data into the system than all of the competition. The web clipper was state of the art. The input folder mechanism made getting existing or scanned files a seamless method of loading your data.

Some of that is gone now, but hopefully, not for long.

But, if you are using something else that you aren’t happy with, or even better, don’t have a system in place for this, try Evernote. You don’t have a bar that needs to be lowered. You don’t have high expectations of the app that created this entire genre. And you don’t have existing workflows that have been broken.

If New Coke had been the first cola you ever tasted, it probably would have been just fine.

So, if you are looking for an app in which to store your documents, notes, articles, recipes, or whatever, now may be the perfect time to try Evernote. Don’t be dissuaded by all of us nay-sayers out there. If you are new to the app, give it a go. If you have been using another app and have become dissatisfied with it, moving to Evernote now would be much better than having done so a few months ago. Try it out.

If you left Evernote sometime in the past because you were unhappy with the slow development, this may or may not be the right time. If you didn’t like things that were missing before, you certainly aren’t going to like this version. But if you were unhappy with virtually non-existent updates, now is a great time to come back. I hope.

If you left Evernote when they changed the free plan, I’ve got bad news. It is now even more restrictive. One workaround to the two device limit if you had three devices was to use the web app on your computer, freeing up the other two for your phone and tablet. But now, the web version counts as a device.

However, I have little sympathy for people who use an app so much that they need it on every device they own but won’t pay the fee for it. And don’t whine to me about your limited income or whatever. Add up the total annual cost of ownership of your three or more devices, including connectivity and other services you use, plus the annualized cost of new hardware. Now add $100 to that number. By what percentage did it go up? But I digress.

The point is that, if you are investigating Evernote for the first time, you probably see a lot of negative posts. For the most part, I recommend you ignore those. Give Evernote a try. The free version is more than capable of letting you figure out if it’s right for you. If you are happy with it now, I think you will like it going forward.

It will only get better.