Bending-Spoons
Evernote Templates are broken and driving me crazy. But there's a solution!
I believe that the Bending Spoons deal was the best thing that ever happened to Evernote, but some new features may be adding even more confusion to old problems. For example, I would love Federico’s team to tackle the huge mess Templates is already making before it turns into an uncontrollable snowball.
Customizing Evernote is a must-have option because everyone uses it differently.
Every so often, I get the impression that Bending Spoons is following some of the same problematic routes that have already been attempted before them.
I love how fast the new mobile experience is, and I’m sure people who create notes mostly on their phones are happier than ever. But what I’m feeling is discomfort. It’s now 5 days since I started using the new Evernote home for mobile, and I’m yet to use the main screen as intended.
Stacey Harmon said it best: “I have to think about it a lot more than I used to”.
(…) I’m really struggling to embrace the new Home. It is not clicking for me. (…) I’m missing the customized create button. The options there don’t reflect my preferred capture ways. (source)
I also am just struggling to navigate the app and get to what I want. I’m not finding it intuitive… I have to think about it a lot more than I used to. (source)
If we go all the way back to 2014, when Evernote 7 adopted a modern interface to replace the previews skeuomorphic design mimicking a Rolodex, some complaints were about the lack of customization. Which the company ended up addressing.
When Evernote 8 for iOS came out, customization was gone again. And, as inevitable as gravity is, I remember people asking for many settings. One of the more prominent among my community was a way to turn off the recently used notebooks from the top of the notebooks list. Which, by the way, I didn’t felt the need to remove. In fact, I liked it. And that’s precisely my point.
Customizing Evernote is a must-have option because everyone uses it differently. So much so that Evernote 10 brought back many ways to personalize the app. Unfortunately, that’s now gone again.
But credit has to be given when it’s due. Bending Spoons was able to put together a user interface that has the best elements from many older iterations.
The creation buttons that were used on the first versions of the app are back. Then there’s the dock from Evernote 8, which makes it a breeze to switch from one view to another. And there is even a widget borrowed from the original version 10. To top it all off, this might be the fastest Evernote app ever released.
There’s just one missing piece: customization. And that’s something they could’ve learned from history. Evernote users need options simply because each one of us has a different vision of what makes the perfect Evernote experience.
And talking about history, in the second part of the video below, you can see a glimpse of how I try to keep Evernote’s history intact. Ironically, I do that using Obsidian.
Will 2024 be my first year without Evernote?
I think it’s fair to say that everyone was a bit astonished when the news broke on the third day of 2023. Bending Spoons, a company barely anyone knew about, had acquired Evernote.
For the past 15 years, I have never considered leaving Evernote. To be more precise, the thought never crossed my mind. Now it looks like 2024 will mean more to me than just a new year. Maybe it will be a year without Evernote. But it’s rare for something so big to happen suddenly. We have to go back to the beginning of 2022 to understand what’s going on.
I was already experimenting with Obsidian for my video production workflow when some of my clients asked me to help them build their workflows on Obsidian. That ended up starting a feedback loop of fresh ideas and more experimenting and teaching. Long story short, by the end of 2022, this learning and teaching system was at full speed. Then, boom! The acquisition news in January 2023. And, let’s not forget the chaos Twitter was in because of its own acquisition. What if Evernote experienced the same fate?
There you have it. It was a perfect storm forming before my very eyes.
What I’m trying to say is that it’s rare for only one event to cause a big change. It is usually the culmination of many small things happening simultaneously that creates the perfect conditions.
Most of my notes—about 80% of them—are still in Evernote. But if I’m quoting Pareto, the 20% of notes I’m using 80% of the time are already in Obsidian. And this makes all the difference. When I need to find something, chances are that Obsidian will have it. Which ended up helping me create the habit of opening Obsidian first. Oops!
Another important aspect of Obsidian is the fact that the mobile clients are fully functional. During short trips or vacations, I do not bring a computer with me, and I can still use Obsidian on my iPad as if I were at my office computer.
It’s not all roses, though
I was an early adopter of Postash.io back in 2014, and I loved the fact that I could convert any of my Evernote notes to pages of a website or blog posts. Sadly, the service never worked properly, and I ended up going back to a conventional website hosting service. Obsidian Publish seemed like the perfect opportunity to try that again, but although it is a very reliable service, it came with its own set of problems. As you already know, I went back to a traditional website hosting service. But this is a story for another day.
For the moment, I will leave you with this. It’s more likely than not that 2024 will be the year I switch from Evernote to Obsidian.
Happy New Year!
What went wrong with Evernote? How did we get here?
I expect negative comments on every video or article I publish about Evernote now. Sadly, talking about it makes me feel anxious.
I don’t think Evernote is doomed, but there is a profound shift in perception going on. It used to be that going to the Evernote Conference was the most important moment I looked forward to every year. It was great to see my friends, clients, developers, and the Evernote team.
Furthermore, sharing news from the conference or anything else Evernote released throughout the year had such positive vibes. Now, it’s hard to ignore all the negativity out there.
But the mood didn’t shift at once; it rarely does.
It all started many years ago
In July 2015, Phil Libin stepped down as CEO, and Chris O’Neill initiated a series of changes that made many of us, myself included, uneasy with the future of the company, or, in other words, our notes.
Evernote had a family of companion apps, and the new CEO gradually discontinued most of them, making many of us unhappy. But moving Evernote’s database to Google Cloud and the layoffs kicked off the first negative wave I’ve ever seen. At least, I do not recall anything similar during the Libin years.
I have to believe that from a financial standpoint, moving to Google servers was the best course of action. Even Apple used Google’s service in the early stages of iCloud. And I think they still do. However, the public’s perception was distorted by the way the media covered all the other CEO decisions.
For instance, I recall reading articles that referred to Evernote’s headquarters as a “ghost town.” I was furious about that; it made no sense. Back when Libin was CEO, or, in other words, before the layoffs, I visited the company and can attest that the building was not fully occupied. As far as memory serves, floors one and two were completely empty. Not even desks! The idea was to have enough room to grow in the future.
Nevertheless, I can relate to the anger and frustration people felt. The way the story was told made it hard to tell the difference between noise and reality, which leads me to the topic of communication. I’ve always found Evernote to be terrible at conveying decisions to its users. And the problem is still present. For instance, I believe that transferring operations to Europe was an excellent decision, but again, the public perception was different.
When you are hosting people’s memories, you don’t have the luxury of being as secretive as Apple or carless as a cable TV announcing the new version of its app. Every decision has to be over communicated.