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Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

jasonkincaid.net

51–60 of 253 posts

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#51
post #49

I evaluated Evernote once two years ago. The iOS app crashed as I was appending to a text note. The app lost a half hour of unsaved meeting notes. I never trusted Evernote again. In my mind, a shoddy rich text editor cast serious doubt on the durability of Evernote's distributed revision control.

Same thing happened to me. I don't even try to use to ios app any more, unless its absolutely dire. Just opening the app, navigating to a note, waiting for it to load then trying to edit it takes forever.

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#52
Yep. Lost 3 hours of writing once. No chance of recovery apparently. Now I've learned to not edit existing notes on mobile devices if I can avoid it. Copy the note to a new one and edit that so I have a backup.

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#54
I've had a lot of the same issues in the Windows client. one particularly annoying bug is how a simple slip of hitting backspace in the wrong spot can delete an audio recording with no possible way of undoing the operation. I've started using the service less and less over the years to where I barely open it at all anymore, relying on services like git and drop box instead.

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#55
I've been an avid Evernote user since the beginning (one of the first few thousand users). I use it to record all sorts of ideas, thoughts, notes, reminders, research, and references.

One year ago, my girlfriend was using Evernote (on my suggestion) to write her travel journal on our trip to Southeast Asia. I saw her note sync a bunch of times (the iOS app shows a little blue arrow when it's uploading). But one day she opened it and the note was gone. I contacted support but they couldn't do anything. (They offered her a year of free Premium service and "apologized for the inconvenience".)

Since then, I've stopped recommending it to people because I don't want to feel personally responsible if they lose notes too. I also have a tinge of doubt every time I record important information. My biggest worry is Evernote quietly losing a note, because once I record something in Evernote I typically push it from my internal memory.

On top of that, their iOS app is incredibly slow. When I want to quickly jot an idea down, it's very inconvenient.

I've started using SimpleNote lately, which is far faster, but I don't know to what extent I should trust it to keep my data safely.

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#56
I'm a premium Evernote member, but I've also had lots of problems.

The iOS app is slow and clunky. I hate using it. It crashes all the time, especially when I'm trying to take snapshots of a document with many pages (and all previous snapshots simply disappear).

The desktop app is better, but they really could improve the writing experience. Pasting HTML blobs is impossible, and so is formatting my notes the way I want (I use TextExpander for sanity).

Evernote is great when it works, but they really need to fix their stability and bug problems.

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#57
Definitely thought some of these issues were just me. My hypothesis is that Evernote gets increasingly unstable the more notes (and data) you have stored. Which sucks because I have over 1200 and I pretty much need Evernote at this point. The desktop app is damn near unusable, takes forever to create a new note.

I no longer trust that they will always have all of my notes, so I started to back them up to Dropbox via the HTML export. But I'm lazy, haven't done it for a while.

Perhaps this is an opportunity for a new company to do what Evernote is doing, better. Automatic backups to Dropbox, lighting fast no matter how many notes stored, reliable and instant syncing, etc.

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#58
You suck. Let God make the melodies, a muse. You have no business playing with chords.

Write lyrics.

I don't worry about delusional bug reports.

gosh ice_cream sad never_happy wanna_bet guilty epic_fail impossible gosh Yes_you_are what_would_Jesus_do just_lovely genius mission_from_God smurfs failure_is_not_an_option It_grieves_me That's_my_favorite run_away busybody humility ice_cream abnormal money Icarus guilty awful special_case threads taxes thats_right that's_no_fun genius the_enquirer hard_working no_way_dude Oh_Hell_No have_fun Angel Russia Bam so_let_it_be_done taxes you_think_I'm_joking atrocious

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#59
post #47

While this post must be pretty distressing for the Evernote team, their response time is pretty impressive! Within a couple hours of this post being published, Phil Libin has already contacted him. See the edit at the end of the post: "Update: Evernote CEO Phil Libin contacted me and we spoke about the issues described. He apologized, saying the post rings true and that there is a lot of work to be done both on the a…

Another paying anxious victim here. I'm anxious to the point that I've kept a separate copy of notes I add to evernote on my local machine as well. Recently, I've limited myself to using it as a glorified bookmarker and am questioning my own sanity in paying for a service like evernote.

The kind of response you're talking about is not enough. This kind of speed of response in addressing the issue must have been given when the OP filed the report, not only when he decided to go public with it.

Given that the technology required for evernote isn't advanced or cutting edge or experimental researchy stuff, I find the bug rate appalling.

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#60
post #49

I evaluated Evernote once two years ago. The iOS app crashed as I was appending to a text note. The app lost a half hour of unsaved meeting notes. I never trusted Evernote again. In my mind, a shoddy rich text editor cast serious doubt on the durability of Evernote's distributed revision control.

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