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Posted by Phil Libin at 11:18 am in Product updates

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Big Evernote for Mac Update

March 10th, 2009

We just released a new version of Evernote for Mac (version 1.3), brimming with more-features-and-less-bugs goodness. Here are the highlights:

New Safari Clipper

Evernote for Mac now has a speedy clipper built right into Safari 3 and 4. Activate it from the “Clipping” tab in the Evernote preferences window and you’ll see a handsome new elephant button in your Safari toolbar. You can do three things with the Safari clipper:

safariclipper2

Select a portion of a website (text and images), then click the elephant to make a new note with your selected text and images.
Click the elephant with nothing selected to clip the full contents of the web page.
Shift-click the elephant with nothing selected to make a nicely-formatted PDF of the current web page and send it to Evernote. Use this option if you want to preserve the formatting on a complex page.

safariclipper3

You can also configure the Safari clipper to show your new note, allowing you to quickly tag and edit, or just let it run inconspicuously in the background, so you can go on browsing and clipping uninterrupted.

Quick tip: you can easily find all your web clips by browsing to “Attributes->Source->Web page” in the left-hand navigation panel.

Safari 4 Support

Apple’s new Safari 4 beta browser is pretty sweet, unfortunately installing it caused some problems in Evernote, including a number of note editing issues and intermittent cursor jumpiness when searching through notes. This should all be fixed now. However, Safari 4 is still in beta, so other issues may crop up in the future. As always, please let our sleep-deprived support team know about any problems.

Growl Notifications

growl

Evernote now ships with Growl, which lets you configure background notifications for several types of events like clipping, synchronization and file attachments. You’ll also be notified when new images have been fully indexed. Your Evernote situational awareness has never been better!

Merge Notes

You can now select two or more notes from any view, right-click, and select “Merge Notes” from the menu. Guess what happens?! Your selected notes get combined into one longer note. This is great for tying a bunch of stray thoughts into a coherent narrative, or putting someone’s business card right under their picture. Your original notes will automatically go into the Trash, so you can fish them out if you made a mistake.

Promo Box

Keep your eye on the box in the lower left-hand corner. We’ll display tips, messages from Evernote and (eventually) promotions. We’ll try to make this useful to everyone, but Premium subscribers can always turn it off.

More Configurable Preferences

The Evernote Preferences window has been expanded and improved to give you more customization options to make Evernote conform to your every whim. Total whim conformation not guaranteed.

Many Bug Fixes and Usability Tweaks

Evernote for the Mac is now faster, more stable and just plain better.

We hope you enjoy it. Lots of other improvements are coming soon. Thanks for helping us improve Evernote!

113 Comments

Darrin
March 12, 2009
11:41 pm

I love Evernote. Or I should say I did until the new promo box feature you just added appeared. Sorry but that is going to bug me into looking for another note taking app. Im happy to purchase the software outright, but an indefinite monthly subscription to have the promo removed… I don’t think so.

Rus
March 13, 2009
1:20 am

I’ve just updated the program.
Oh my…
This promo box is really loathsome.
I love Evernote, but now I almost start to think about changing it to something else ((

Rhys Evans
March 13, 2009
4:45 am

Seems to be a huge overreactio to the Promo box – everyone wants something for free!

Maybe 1$ a month for 40/MB upload and no promo? then again, people will moan about that too!

Frederic Ducros
March 13, 2009
10:08 am

To Doug Farnes: If you want to save it as PDF, there is a bookmarklet that can do this for you. If you go to http://lifehacker.com/395697/top-10-useful-bookmarklets, and select “Download PDF” bookmarklet, it saves the web pages as PDF. I am pretty sure it would work with Safari

Erik Hansen
March 13, 2009
10:14 am

I’m also having issues with the Evernote Safari clipper plugin screwing things up with the Safari 4 toolbar. Actually, it runs deeper than just being unable to keep the elephant button in the toolbar between Safari relaunches. If I have the “Use the safari clipper plugin” box checked in Evernote, the entire Safari toolbar resets itself between Safari relaunches. So, for example, the “Open in Dashboard” button shows up in the toolbar. If I remove it, it shows back up when I relaunch Safari.

I know Safari 4 is in beta, but I just wanted to let the Evernote team know!

Thanks a lot,
Erik

Marcelp
March 13, 2009
10:41 am

Hello,

I really enjoy using Evernote, helps me a lot for organizing my work !

I get the same problem with the toolbar button which doesn’t stay in Safari (on version 3 as well as on version 4) in OS X. Any idea where the bug could be ?

Thanks !

DPJ
March 13, 2009
11:00 am

Adware ! Ugh.

JasonQ
March 14, 2009
6:09 am

I agree with all those loathing the promo box in the corner. Especially since screen real-estate on a laptop is scarce and I’d like to have more space for my tags and atttribute.

It’s seems unfair to make users pay a subscription just to get rid of that annoying distraction. I have no need of more than 40mb a month. I’d pay for a one-time serial to use the App and get rid of the ad space.

Can’t there be a middle way?

Andrew Sinkov
March 14, 2009
11:29 am

Hi folks. We’re aware of the Safari clipper issues: disappearing elephant and elephant stampede. We’re working on it, and should have a solution very soon. Thanks for your patience.

MarcelP
March 14, 2009
12:01 pm

Cool ! Keep on the good work ! We’re looking forward to it

Bruno Santos
March 14, 2009
5:52 pm

I’d like to know why I am seeing ads on my Evernote app if I have a Premium account paid to December this year. Please? I should pay for it again? Such a hassle.
Love the PDF feature. Love it beyond words. But the plugin button keeps disappearing on Safari. Not nice. Every other plugin stays, but Evernote.

Andrew Sinkov
March 14, 2009
6:14 pm

@Bruno If you have an Evernote Premium account, you can hide the promo box by clicking on the “X”

Sohail Ahmed
March 15, 2009
6:08 am

Usability Improvement Suggestion:

Even with this release of the updated desktop client for the Mac, the cursor jumps around when I’m typing in a note.

For example, I may use the Evernote Note window to type in a note that requires some thought, over the course of 15 minutes. As I’m writing, I’m frequently interrupted with Evernote doing a background save and/or sync and I lose my cursor position (and my train of thought). This is annoying! I’d fire up a separate RTF editor and then paste in the contents when done (shouldn’t have to do this) but then I’m also stuck with the problem of formatted text not preserved between Evernote as coming from other Cocoa based RTF clipboard contents.

Please, please…do your update/sync/save in a thread that doesn’t disrupt a user typing in a note!

Thanks!

RL
March 15, 2009
7:38 am

New release is fabulous but I agree with others who have been requesting easier export on the Mac client for a long time now. At minimum, other Mac apps like Eagle Filer, DT Pro, etc all support easy drag and drop from one app to the other. Evernote should at least support this. Citing the xml api is kind of a cop-out for most non IT savvy users (which seems to me to be the best audience for Evernote with it’s ease of use).

Also, just to emphasize, many of us will be happy to pay for Evernote Premium once we know that we can move our data around easily. It makes sound business sense to provide this portability as it will only increase the market for Evernote — not reduce it.

Nathan Meyer
March 15, 2009
12:49 pm

I have been using evernote for about 3 months now and I really like it.

Unfortunately, I too can not stand the “Promo Box”. And to really make it bad, they added a “Promo Close” button which only pops up another promo and says, “You can’t make the box go away unless you pay.” I would be willing to pay something for Evernote and I really appreciate the service. (I don’t however have anywhere near the needs that justify a premium account).

I understand the long-term benefit to having regular recurring income, but as a consumer, I really dislike that model. It’s sad to see evernote this way. I’d rather pay for a lifetime subscription, than pay every year. I suppose I can see the ongoing fee structure in-light of the data storage requirements. As my data increases the cost of storing it would go up, so…

Anyway, I’d like to see some middle ground offering between the free and premium. $1-2 month/$12-24 year. That sounds like something I’d be willing to pay. But I’m not paying $45 a year not to see that hideous promotion box and the box only creates bad-will and dislike among users. Most likely a rather bad move in the end. (Unless, the free-loaders, like me are taking up server side space with out paying and they just want to tick us off and get us to switch to another service so they don’t have to store our data anymore.)

Great feature to add: (as commented above) useful export function to RTF. (not just PDF).

Dale
March 15, 2009
1:58 pm

Nice job on the update. Ideally I’d like to see the clipper updated in Firefox as well, but it’s still a nice feature that I’m making use of. Love the Growl notifications.

Dale

Paul Sham
March 15, 2009
10:21 pm

After updating to this version, I thought that I’d be fine with the promo box. I understand that I’m using a free version. But, after using it for a few days, I’m finding it too distracting, especially when the external ads showed up. The green Evernote ads at least go with the colour scheme of the application.

As awesome and useful as Evernote syncing is for me, I don’t feel that the text features are good enough for me to pay yet. I mean the most basic text editors have better features. I still find the lists to be glitchy.

So at this point, I’m disappointed.

Nick
March 16, 2009
5:24 am

Not real happy on the ‘promo box’ guys. It feels like the 1990s dot coms all over again. The ‘promo box’ didnt work for Opera and is now gone. The ‘promo box’ at the bottom of the screen in exchange for free internet didn’t work for NetZero. I don’t think it’s going to work here either. The gentle, “The feature requires Premium …” model works way better and politely reminds me that theres more to Evernote than meets the eye, and eventually I’d pull the trigger to premium. If they don’t pull this out by next version, I’m pulling out of Evernote.

Csiszi
March 16, 2009
6:08 am

I’m having problems with the toolbar icon too.

If I enable it in evernote, after safari relaunch, the evernote icon disappears AND 2 safaristand icons apper. Very annoying.

Michael Czeiszperger
March 16, 2009
7:13 am

I’ve been using Evernote since 1.0, and the new 1.3 upgrade has me stumped. How do you get new notes into the system? I’m using the paste to Evernote OSX pulldown, and instead of pasting into Evernote it opens a little window where the only things you can do are format text and “Email”. There’s no save, or sync, or any way at all to indicate that its being saved anywhere, and the notes don’t show up in the “Notebook”.

WTF!

Jean-François (DigitLife)
March 16, 2009
3:26 pm

Evernote is a great application, and I even recommended it to French users on our website.
However, as much as I love it, the promo box is a mistake: it is simply huge, to the point that it renders the soft unusable in some cases!

For instance, on netbooks with limited vertical resolution (600 pixels), there is simply no place to view the different notebooks, let alone the tags! This is unacceptable!

To finish, I am becoming skeptical towards the pricing scheme. I understand that you need funds to finance R&D, but 45$ is quite an amount per year, especially if we sum up all other online services.
I’d rather either pay 45$ once for a lifetime licence, or less each year (max 25$) if you prefer a reccurring scheme.

I’m looking forward for your answers. Keep up the good work and please address those shortcomings.

Cheers,

JF, from France

Terry Wang
March 17, 2009
3:59 am

I love Evernote for Mac and iPhone. But I have to say that I was disappointed to find that advertisement window is finally introduced to free users.

At least give free users an option to turn it off. Or you may lose some of the users.

It’s really a shame.

John M
March 17, 2009
5:59 am

I’ve just upgraded to the Premium version on the grounds that EverNote is a really useful app – I use it every day and feel that $45 per year is a realistic cost for something that I find improves my productivity. I agree that the promo box is annoying (I’m glad to be rid of it) – perhaps the developers should think of either another pricing strategy based on a more restricted upload total or just bite the bullet and leave out the promo box altogether as they build their business.

fred
March 17, 2009
6:17 am

nice update. still want drawing tools like on the windows version. Also get rid of the promo box or give us users who don’t need premium and 500 mb storage some way of buying the app or switching off the stupid promo box. Very disappointed when I saw that…. might look at other options now sorry.

Alfred
March 18, 2009
10:44 am

Ads on my screen? Definitely not. If it remains, I’m going to uninstall Evernote.

Sean
March 18, 2009
8:09 pm

The new clipper is par for the course for the “new” Evernote–i.e. remove features and tell you it’s better and that it does more. The old clipper used to clip the entire page automatically. That’s what it did. It was a WEB CLIPPER. But now, the web clipper is NOT a web clipper first and foremost. Instead, it’s a quick post extension thingy. So, if I have to cmd-A to select all to be able to clip the page, why don’t I just use the universal clipper and bypass the (non)web clipper entirely?

And there’s the issue of claiming that there are new options under preferences that allow the user to configure Evernote to “conform to your every whim.” Uh…actually, preferences look the same as before. And even if there is something different, it certainly doesn’t allow me to make Evernote conform to my every whim. Conforming to my every whim….I think you are confusing your new product with your old product–i.e. EverNote vice Evernote; i.e. a highly customizable application that was awesome…before you screwed it up, removed most of the features, and then told us it was better.

Finally, speaking of the old EverNote….”merge notes” is NOT a new feature either. Merge notes was a beloved feature of the old EverNote, one of many beloved features that you took away and told us it was for our own good. Now you give the feature back and call it “new.” No, sorry, not “new,” just rectifying a prior screw up.

Thomas
March 19, 2009
12:40 am

Isn’t there a lot of overlap in functions between the safari clipper and the web clipper?

The only thing I can figure out that is different is that the safari clipper can clip a webpage exactly how it’s supposed to look.

tim
March 19, 2009
3:48 pm

I’m quite impressed by the new Safari clipper, and I do like Evernote very much – especially the synchronisation between my phone, home and office computers. But the advert panel is NOT cool. I know that you guys have probably got to make more money to pay the bandwidth bill, and I know that you’ve got to feed and clothe your families, but surely there’s a better way to persuade me to spend some money on you?
I don’t yet store enough stuff in my notebooks to justify the pro upgrade, and if I’ve got to look at ads every time I open the app, I think that I’ll be cutting and pasting my stuff into something else (even though it’ll be a bind).

Hate the Ads
March 20, 2009
9:37 am

Please kill the advertising box. Many other excellent products find revenue models that work without putting advertisements on users desktops.

Rich
March 20, 2009
2:24 pm

Bad choice on going with the ads. It makes the app look cheap and makes me wonder if Evernote is making enough money to stay afloat which leads to the inevitable question, should I store important things with them? Premium accounts should be spared this annoyance.

Tricia
March 21, 2009
6:26 am

Will Evernote be available for the Kindle2?

Gary Turner
March 21, 2009
2:15 pm

Clipping works great with Firefox but not with Safari 4. There were several websites in Safari I tried using the clipping features and received an error message.

I opened Firefox and went to the same websites and was able to clip fine. It looks like Firefox is going to replace Safari as my favorite web browser unless there is a future fix for the clipping service in Safari.

fred
March 21, 2009
6:22 pm

How about this for a compromise? I’d be happy to pay for 1 year pro upgrade if from then on my version(s) of Evernote are unlocked for ALL point releases even if I go back to basic after the year is up. Because at the moment I do not need the pro features or the extra storage at all! What I do need is a great cross-platform note syncing service, with nice and professionally polished desktop apps to access this. Evernote is exactly that… except for the fugly promo box in the lower left corner.

Promo Box Hater
March 21, 2009
8:12 pm

Farewell, Evernote! Things were going along so well, but then you ruined everything with your promo box. As my needs increased, I saw myself voluntarily upgrading my account, but your bullying ways have changed my mind.

Also: a heads up notifying me of this obnoxious new intrusion would have been much appreciated. No thank you for this sneaky move, so unexpected from your otherwise excellent product and team.

I’ll be back once you remove the box or show me how to revert to the previous version. Until then, I am shopping around for alternatives. Enjoy your newfound greed.

Andrew Sinkov
March 22, 2009
12:05 am

@Rich As a premium subscriber, you can close the promo box.

Brent
March 22, 2009
8:38 pm

Adding my voice to those wishing for a middle-of-the-road option.

I love the application, but I’m not going to rent it. Especially at $45/year, as I’m never going to come close to the 40MB usage cap, let alone needing the space provided with the Premium account.

I won’t put up with ads on my screen either.

For now I’m sticking with a previous version, and exporting my data in case that somehow ceases to be an option.

How to bet *my* money? Offer a one-time fee to remove the ads. Something like $15-$20 would seem more than reasonable. Keep the 40MB cap, lose the ads.

Philip
March 23, 2009
6:51 pm

I am mad as you-know-what about the promo box! I thought Evernote was above that kind of trashiness. It is an annoying, cheap distraction. I have no need for the higher storage or other features that require a paid subscription. So, I need to pay a fee just to get rid of that brash advertising? I HAVE loved Evernote, but the new promo box has just cheapened the product in my mind and I’m looking around for an alternative now. Regardless of any new fancy features, the promo box ruins it for me.

Dave – one more who could do without the ads
March 26, 2009
5:49 am

great job overall, but you should have said you were turning evernote into adware, I would not have upgraded . Not the best way to convince me to switch to premium. Rather, I am now switching to other alternatives.

Nick Wreden
March 27, 2009
3:56 pm

Add my voice to the chorus asking for middle ground. Don’t mind a one-time fee, or even a lower annual fee. But $45 for life?! Also, you could add more features to the premium. I’m a text, not a visual guy, and the additional storage doesn’t make my nipples hard.

BTW: Really like the capability of merging notes.

Brian
March 29, 2009
9:09 am

I’m really annoyed with growl taking the focus from my note where I’m editing. This seems to happen about once a minute. I’m disabling Growl from Evernote for now, but if you add a setting that keeps growl from taking the focus away from the editor window, I’ll re-enable Growl again. I looked through the Growl settings, and couldn’t find a way to adjust the cursor or application focus. An interesting note is that this doesn’t appear to be an issue with Safari, since I just saw an Evernote upload notice from Growl while I was typing this message, and it didn’t steal my focus the way it does when I’m typing in Evernote.

Fred
April 1, 2009
5:25 pm

another annoying thing about the bloody Ads are that they are US of A focused. So even if I found something useful in the Ad (very unlikely and not likely to placate my annoyance) most likely it would be available to USA customers only!!
Please give us a middle-of-the-road option for getting rid of the ads! You have until the next version revision and if something isn’t offered I’m jumping ship.

Marko
April 7, 2009
2:12 am

Just uninstalled Evernote from my Macs. Don’t care for the advertising or the subscription model. Pity. I would have happily paid $50 to own it.

armorix
April 9, 2009
3:29 pm

I am as mad as everyone about that promo box, but you know what? They just don’t care…

Jon
April 12, 2009
2:50 am

Just to let you know I will be buying Yojimbo instead of Evernote for 1 reason, that promo box.

armorix
April 12, 2009
3:28 am

My previous post has been removed although it was not agressive. Nice censorship ; maybe I had a point, then?
Therefore I repeat myself :
“I hate the ad box as much as everyone, but you know what? They just don’t care.”

Detritus
April 14, 2009
10:25 am

I would like to be able to make a one off payment for this application to remove the promo box. I do not need the online services, can this be arranged please?

Name
April 22, 2009
5:43 am

Hey, Evernote people, anybody out there?
Could someone just pay attention to what we all say?

Ria
April 23, 2009
9:11 am

Can I switch back to the old version? Pretty please? I hate that Promo box so much, I don’t want all the cool new features of I can have evernote without that box. Thanks!

Jim Brown
May 9, 2009
4:06 pm

I’ve been also trying to figure out how to remove that ANNOYING Promo box. Anyone???

Elaine Ormund
May 9, 2009
4:08 pm

Only Premium subscribers can turn off that promo box.

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