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Evernote: a Landscape of Experiences



I’m going to take some time out of absolutely loving Evernote for keeping me on task and organized throughout the day to talk about what, I think, is absolutely the worse thing about it.
Evernote is a completely different application on every platform and device it supports.
For a product who’s main gimmick is keeping you organized and your data synced between all of your platforms and devices, that’s sort of a really hard knock against them. The Evernote for Windows application is great, but so is the Evernote for Mac application. These are quite different, and not just in the ways that usual differ between Windows and Mac to fit the platforms well. They are just fundamentally different applications which coincidentally happen to be sharing your data.
Beyond the two desktop Evernotes, the problem only gets worse. Evernote for Android is yet another experience, with yet other features different from the two Desktop versions.
The most jarring differences between these versions are differences in the editing of your notes themselves, something that (given the nature of the tool) seems like being consistent should have been priority number 1. How am I supposed to work on my notes everywhere if my notes may be different everywhere?
Perhaps the most frustrating part of all this comes down to what is definitely the most overlooked face of Evernote from their development team: Evernote for the Web. This version of the product has, by far, the most missing features found at least in some form in most of the other versions.
This Web version being so limited is especially troubling because, would it be better supported, the differences of all the other versions would barely scratch my notice. I’d just use the web version everywhere.
Moving forward, these discrepancies are killing my loyalty to Evernote and I can’t see there is anyway I’ll be able to continue as a user much longer. Honestly, I’ve gotten a lot out of it, and I’d hoped this situation would improve. That hope is what kept me around this long. As it continues to only appear more divergent over time, not less, it seems my hope was misplaced.
I’m still looking for the replacement, but I’m going to find it (or make it) and then it’ll be “so long” to Evernote, I’m afraid.
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