I’m just wondering what the experiences of other people have been who’ve downloaded the beta Version 5 of Evernote for Windows.
I’ve found it so unsatisfactory that I’ve gone back to version 4. Problems I found in my brief experience of it are:
1) I could no longer scan directly into Evernote from my scanner. I use a Doxie but I gather the problem applies to at least some other scanners too. I assume (and hope) this is not a deliberate change, but considering the emphasis Evernote puts on the convenience of scanning directly into Evernote you’d think they’d get this right before releasing the beta.
2) They seem to have abandoned the extremely useful feature by which only the tags relating to the current search/notebook/tag are shown.
3) The Shortcuts have been relocated from the top of the screen, where they were always accessible, to the top of the left-hand panel, where they are only accessible if a) you have the left-hand panel open and b) you are at the top of the panel.
4) They have removed the Thumbnail view, which was great for sorting and displaying photos in particular, and replaced it with a prettier but less functional “card view”.
5) They have redesigned the display to remove all the contrast between the different sections. This may look prettier, but can be confusing. In particular you can no longer see at a glance which notebooks you are sharing on-line.
Altogether it’s considerably reduced the speed and ease of use of Evernote for me with no real accompanying advantages.
It’s not the first time that Evernote have removed features which formed one of my major reasons for using Evernote. I’m still waiting for them to put back the feature by which items on a task list which have been ticked off are no longer displayed. That disappeared if I recall correctly when they introduced Version 3, and I’ve never used Evernote for task lists since.
Other people’s experiences welcome in the comments.