If you haven’t upgraded your Evernote apps lately, for the love of anything you hold sacred, don’t.
Evernote did it again.
What did they do—again? They completely re-wrote an app that was working fine and made it unusable, while losing features.
When did they do it before? Their handwriting note app, Penultimate, was re-written in 2014, rendering it almost unusable and losing some functionality permanently.
… And what have they done now? In October, they released completely rewritten versions of their primary Evernote client app for every supported platform (see Unlocking Evernote’s Future.)
iOS is unusable. It takes 20 minutes to display a (large) plain-text note. Mac is unusable. I can’t select more than 50 notes at a time (I have a database of 2200+ notes. No more than 50? Really?) The iOS version no longer has a widget. The iOS version also lost its Watch app. (Full disclosure: I don’t own an Apple Watch. But if I did, I’d be furious.)
If the history of Penultimate is any guide, the apps will actually be usable by about April 2021. But it may take longer. I can’t do without my writing research, my personal notes, my brain that long. And some functionality may never return.
So I’m moving on. Enter Nimbus Notes. It’s fast. It has many of (old) Evernote’s features. It’s half the annual subscription price. It can import notes from Evernote, if you export them in .enex format.
The problem is that exporting Evernote notes in .enex format only happens in the Mac/PC Evernote apps. And at 50 notes at a time, exporting would take forever (see above.)
So I uninstalled the New Broken Mac Evernote, and went back through my Time Machine backups (you do use Time Machine on your Mac, don’t you?) and restored Old Working Mac Evernote. I’ve exported my notes, and will be building my Nimbus Notes database today. Expect a Nimbus Notes review soon.
A Study In Silver 