We’re going to try a new experiment on the blog today. For the next six hours (11am – 5pm PST), I’ll answer all questions submitted as comments to this post. To ask a question, just leave a comment and I’ll reply in the conversation thread.
Three things to keep in mind:
- Before asking your question, please take a look through the previous threads to keep duplicate question to a minimum. Feel free to jump on any existing thread if your question is already being discussed.
- We have to manually approve all comments to keep out spammers and trolls, so it will take a few minutes for your question to show up.
- I’ll be doing other CEO stuff throughout the day (eating, making graphs, walking around) but will check in every time I have a few free minutes, so it might take me a few hours to answer your question.
I’m looking forward to hearing from all of you!
[Update: Office Hours are over. I'll work through all the questions by tonight, but we've closed the post to new comments. Thanks to everyone for taking the time to write!]
281 Comments
Thierry
I’m thinking of background colors to notes as another way to structurise and find notes.
Phil Libin
Thierry,
Great idea! I was just in Japan and someone did a presentation on something like this for Evernote. Basically, having different background colors make it easy to visually filter notes in thumbnail view. Doesn’t work as well for notes that are just one big image.
The new note structure CSS will support it, so maybe we can add it to the clients.
Matt
I’ll echo everyone else by saying Evernote is fantastic. Last year I had to PM a CMS migration and site design for a handfull of publishing sites all in a short time. The only way I was able to keep everything organized was through Evernote. Thanks for helping me keep my job!
With that said I have a lot of notes and other items in a couple of notebooks that I very rarely use. I don’t want to delete them because you never know when you’ll need something. Because I usually can’t remember which notebook I put something in I tend to search them all. Have you considered allowing users to “Archive” a notebook so that it won’t show up in search (and also wouldn’t download to mobile)?
Just a thought.
Also aside from bombarding you in this blog post what’s the preferred way to submit feature requests. I love Get Satisfaction but I don’t see many Evernote staff on there….they seam to acknowledge the forums more…what is preferred?
Phil Libin
Matt,
We haven’t considered an “Archive” notebook, but on the iPhone / iPad clients, you can select which notebooks are copied to your mobile device, so you don’t waste any space.
The best way to submit requests are through this blog and the forums. We haven’t really done much with Get Satisfaction, but a lot of people seem to like it so maybe we should.
Drew Vogel
I recall, during our pre-beta phone conversations, that you said that Evernote 3.x would be “able to do everything EverNote 2.2.x can do, and more”.
Please provide an update on the ability for Evernote 3.x to do everything that 2.2.x can do.
I’ll hold on asking about “and more” until another time…
Phil Libin
Drew,
Didn’t you already ask this on the previous page? Send me a prioritized list of features and I’ll give you the current best estimates. Also, happy to talk by phone.
Helene James
I would like to know when, in the Evernote version for Macs, it will be possible to use a tablet and do hand written messages. It seems to me it is possible in the Evernote version for Windows..Am I right? I really enjoy Evernote….I find it so helpful.
Phil Libin
Helene,
You’re right. The Windows version has “digital ink” support which lets you make nice handwritten notes and diagrams. You can view these notes on the Mac, and search through them, but you can’t author them yet. If you have a tablet connected to your Mac, you can use Apple’s “ink” application to create handwritten notes which will be converted to normal text and entered into Evernote, but this probably isn’t what you’re asking for.
This hasn’t been a big priority for us on the Mac in the past because relatively few people had touchscreen Apple devices big enough to write on. This all changed with the iPd, obviously, so we’re prioritizing drawing functionality now. It’ll be available on the iPad / iPhone this summer, and probably come to the Mac sometime later.
We’ll add drawing and writing support
Peter
Why don’t you use notes already synced to another client on the LAN instead of redownloading it from the Evernote server for each local client? Look at Dropbox, they are doing this now. Would save you some bandwith as well.
When will we see full AppleScript support?
When true hierachical tags and folders for notebooks ?
When shared notebooks in local clients and iPhone?
Phil Libin
Peter,
Good questions, thanks.
I tink the complexity of dealing with peer-to-peer synchronization probably outweighs the benefits for now. We’re pretty happy with our centralized sync model. Sure, we’d save a little in bandwidth costs if we switched to a hybrid approach, but we’d wind up spending it on additional engineering and QA. Dropbox (which I love and use all the time, BTW) deals with much larger files, so it’s more important for them.
We have pretty good AppleScript support now. If you’d like to see specific features added to that, just send them in and we’ll prioritize them.
We have hierarchical tags now. Nested notebooks are in big demand (see the previous questions), so they’re on the drawing board now.
Shared notebooks in iPhone / iPad are coming this summer and later in the year for the other clients.
Mike
Hey Phil, I love EN so much that I have two premium accounts (home & work). The only thing that *really* bugs me is the lack of a pin or passcode on the iPhone app. I sometimes lend out my phone to friends & family and I don’t really want them to have access to my notes. Plenty of other iPhone apps have this feature so it really can’t be all that difficult. Pretty please?
Keep up the good work!
Phil Libin
Mike,
Wow, two premium accounts! Double thanks.
We get this request from time to time, but have always been hesitant to duplicate functionality already present in the OS. You can already set a passcode on the iPhone in general, and if you want to lend your phone to friends you can just log out of Evernote before you do so and they won’t see your notes. When you log back in, your notes will still be there.
I know that a separate PIN would be more convenient, but this has the advantage of working now.
Andrew McGeachie
Are you an Andrew going to be around for dinner next week? Should we go out for Indian?
Phil Libin
Heh. This is “Geech”, the Mac client tech lead, everyone! Thanks for asking a question, I was worried that I wouldn’t get any.
Andrew and I will be in Boston next week. Dinner sounds great. We might have some kind of Evernote party and invite users as well.
Falula
Will there be options added to allow highlighting or sticky notes to texts note in the windows version of Evernote? Highlighting would be especially awesome!
Phil Libin
Falula,
See some of the previous replies. Highlighting is coming on all the versions in the next few months.
shawnna
Where did 3.1.2 iPhone compatibility go? Are you aware that your iPhone app homepage claims that 3.0 OR later is required? Any way to get the old version back for those of us who did not notice the new requirement when updating the app and are now stuck without our favorite app of all time? Are you ever going to re-support 3.0 – 3.1.2? Many questions, but really they’re all the same. Thanks!
Phil Libin
Shawnna,
The Apple developer docs say that 3.1.3 is required for all universal apps, but this doesn’t appear to be true. We’re looking into rolling back the minimum requirement to 3.0 for the next version which we’ll submit in the next couple of days.
Thanks for noticing the web site inconsistency, we’ll change it for now.
Eric
Well that’s disappointing… My question got marked as spam?
Phil Libin
Which question? I answered a question or two from “Eric” on previous pages, but don’t know if that was from you. Send me an email if it didn’t get through: phil at my company name dot com.
Paul
Lately there have been a bunch of Evernote releases one after the other. As someone in the software industry – this is usually the sign of bugs that were missed and then fixed.
This is a new thing for Evernote. When I first started using it, there were few updates. Now it seems there are regular updates across nearly every platform and they aren’t for new features.
On day 1 of the iPAD launch, the first app I downloaded was Evernote and the first updated app was Evernote with the change list being “fixed sync issues” or something to that regard.
It looks to me like you guys are moving too fast and quality control is not as good as it used to be.
What are your thoughts on this and what can we expect in the future? I for one would be happy with less releases but with higher quality. If you want to throw a feature in there go for it but I’m much more concerned with getting the quality of the existing features to where they need to be.
Looking forward to your feedback.
Phil Libin
Paul,
Nah, we just have a lot more engineers working on a lot more stuff than we ever used to have. We have eight major clients (Windows, Mac, Web, iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, PalmPre) as well as several smaller projects (Chrome extension, Firefox extension, Twitter gateway, email gateway, etc.) Once a platform gets into a steady state we try to have one release per platform every two months on average. That means that if you’re using Evernote on two platforms (which is the average for our users) you’ll see a new release every three weeks or so. Everything autoupdates, so this shouldn’t be much of a hassle.
On a brand new platform, like the iPad, we’ll do initial bugfix releases quickly for the first couple of weeks and then settle down to a normal schedule. Remember that we just got our first physical iPads two days ago!
Dave P
I have seen several comments on local storage for Android devices but nothing on ink notes. Having come to EverNote from the original Tablet PC world (back when the Windows program cost $19.95), I appreciate the power of the written word in EverNote. I now have an Android device with a big enough screen that I could ink on it if EverNote could accept it.
Any possibility of Android ink?
Phil Libin
Dave,
Yes. I just saw some very nice new Android devices with screens big enough to accept ink. We’ll add it to iPad / iPhone first (this summer) and then Android afterwards.
Phil Libin
Heh, I just got through answering the first full page of questions, and I see that there are three pages now!
I’ll get to all questions, as promised, thanks for your patience.
Colonel Kernel
I’m now using Evernote on my PCs and my Palm Pre, but almost exclusively for archiving. I can’t use it as my regular note taking app because I lose signal when travelling through Boston’s subway system. I noticed recently that the iPhone/iPod Touch app supports off-line viewing for Premium subscribers. I would GLEEFULLY pay that $45-odd dollars to enable that feature.
Evernote was the first 3rd party note application on Palm’s new webOS and it introduced me to your service. Since then you’ve been quiet. I still use the built-in Memos app to take notes quickly, but organization is difficult and the notes are not accessible from my desktop or anywhere else.
I don’t know you and can’t assume you’ve been following along with the many advances Palm has made to the platform. One of the biggest is their Plugin Development Kit which allows C/C++ code to run side by side with Palm’s Mojo SDK.
Thank you for your time. Please enjoy your day and please consider enabling this feature for webOS app.
Phil Libin
Colonel Kernel (great name, again),
Thanks! We’re still developing for PalmOS, but not as actively as before. Local storage of notes is on the roadmap for all mobile platforms since it’s such a popular feature on the iPhone. I’ll look into the new developer enhancements that you mention (I wasn’t aware of them personally) and talk to the dev team about the schedule.
Tony B
I’m tring to use EN instead of OneNote – the table capabilities w/i EN are very weak – tough to add a row / manage the table in general – is this on the priority list?
Thanks!
Phil Libin
Tony,
Table creation (as well as clipping, cutting-and-pasting and editing) is going to get better in the next few versions, but we’re not trying to match OneNote for rich-note creation in general.
tcullen
Would love to be able to add tags, comments, etc., to an Outlook item (email, specifically) using the “Add to Evernote 3.5″ button JUST LIKE I do when clipping web content to Evernote. Is this feature on the roadmap? I LOVE EVERNOTE! Thanks
Phil Libin
Good idea. I don’t think it’s on the roadmap, but I’ll talk to the team. Meanwhile, take a look at our expanded tag and notebook support for mailed in notes: http://blog.evernote.com/2010/03/16/emailing-into-evernote-just-got-better/
Jake
Since you’re running a great company with a freemium business model who build a product I love and use everyday, my questions are:
1) What is the most important thing you learned in running evernote
2) What are the most influential people/experiences/books that inspired you
Keep up the good work!
Jake
Phil Libin
Jake,
Wow, tough questions. Let’s see.
1. The most important thing I learned at Evernote so far is that whenever you have a choice to either spend a dollar on making your product better or to spend a dollar on something else, spend it on the product and the other thing will pretty much take care of itself.
2. Evernote is most inspired by the work of Gordon Bell, Ray Kurzweil and the Foundation of the Long Now. Google those three for their books as well.
Todd Weidman
First off, love Evernote.
Next up – the folder hierarchy. I struggle with this greatly. I’m only allowed to associate a note to a single folder. My thinking process, though, is different – I may want to associate a single note to multiple folders – for instance, if I capture a quick interview with my son at a baseball game, I would like a one-yo-many association to Family Events, Baseball, Sports, Life Events, etc etc.
This is a more intuitive process for me, and would allow me to see the logical connections from one entry to many different categories.
What are your thoughts on this?
Thanks in advance.
Phil Libin
Todd,
Thanks!
I think what you’re describing is best served by tags, no?
Felipe de Montagut
Hey, excellent idea to answer all users in one day. I’ll be brief
I love evernote app multi-client for my GTD (Getting Things Done) system . One of uniqueness of evernote is the availability of multiplatform clients. I have a Mac-iphone for personal use, a PC-Blackberry at work
Some features that I miss in the mac client, which are great in the win client:
view tags column in the list view
keyboard shortcuts to create a new tag or a new search
Create a child tag when you click create (current behaviour is that the tag is created unnested)
I probably miss a few more.
as summary, it would be great to get same level of usability in both computer clients.
Thanks and enjoy blogging
Phil Libin
Felipe,
Thanks!
We’re working to make the Mac and Windows version closer in terms of functionality. If you remember what they were like a year ago, you’ll see how far we’ve come!
I’m not sure about the automatic child-tag creation, but your other two requests are in the works. In fact, I’m surprised that there’s no Mac shortcut for New Tag, since there is a menu item. Seems like an oversight that we’ll correct.
Greg
any update re HTTPS for non-premium to ensure security? Eg ETA?
Phil Libin
We’re testing it now on the new Windows client. If it works out without costing us too much, we’ll try to add it everywhere by the end of the year.
john f
This may sound a little strange but I’d like to able to tag my tags. Let me explain. I have found several uses for Evernote but my principle use is to save information on companies that I am interested in investing in. So my list of tags consists primarily of company names, most of them mining and exploration companies. I’d like to be able to tag the company names by the metals that they are producing or exploring for.
Phil Libin
John,
Woah, that broke my brain. Let me think about this in the morning and get back to you. Maybe what you’re really asking for are note links, which are already in the works.
barbara
Still love evernote. When are we going to get “Evernote for Dummies”?
Phil Libin
Barbara,
You’ll have to ask the “For Dummies” publisher about that, but there are already two Evernote books in Japan and at least one ebook is about to be published in English (I’m reading the transcript now).
K. M. Peterson
Hi Phil,
This is all great – thanks – I’m a premium subscriber for over a year, and I’m a big fan, too.
My question is this: as a Mac user, I use a number of different applications to keep track of things, notably OmniFocus. It’s really easy to put things into Evernote, but my pet peeve is that you can’t reference notes from elsewhere.
I’d like, ideally, the ability to drag a note to the desktop or another app to create a link, so that when I need to refer to a note from another application, I just launch the alias/link and Evernote opens with that note. From what I can tell, you don’t really have a unique identifier per note, so I understand this is a different level of problem. But, this has been asked about on the forums for a while now, and I think there was an acknowledgement in Spring or Summer ’09 that this was forthcoming.
Like I said, it’s so wonderfully easy to put information in… if we could leave it there, with a handy way to reference it, that’d help a lot of us on the integration front. Thanks!
P.S. I hope you get to go home soon!
Phil Libin
I’m at home now, but still answering question! This is a lot of fun.
Note links are coming this year for exactly the purpose you just stated. I don’t have an exact date right now, unfortunately.
Joseph
I’m using Evernote premium for mac and a ScanSnap scanner. I hope this isn’t a stupid (or repetitive) question. When I scan directly into Evernote, is the scan actually on my hard drive somewhere while also being in the “cloud”? The reason I’m asking is because i’d like to scan something, run it through Acrobat OCR (so that it’s searchable from my desktop) and then load it into EN. I know EN scans the files and they’re searchable but I want to be able to search some docs *without* EN running but also some while it *is*. Does that make any sense?
Generally, i’m skittish about loading my life into EN, tossing all my paperwork and then in a year (or 5?), not being able to have the original scans.
That being said, i’m LOVING Evernote and keep finding new ways to use it every day.
Thanks.
/joseph
Phil Libin
Joseph,
Great question and thanks for being a premium user. I have some good news for you.
Everything you scan to Evernote on Mac or Windows is stored on your local disk as well as sent to the Evernote servers. As a premium user all of your PDFs are indexed on the server and then synced back down to your computer. You can actually get the modified PDFs with the recognition data out of the desktop clients at any time, and Spotlight will find them whether or not Evernote is running.
You can run Acrobat OCR on the files on your desktop, but you really don’t have to if you’re a premium user since they’ll be OCRed on the service and synced back.
We have a very strong “no data lock-in” policy at Evernote. You always have all of your original documents on your desktop and in the service and you will always be able to get them out in any format you want.
Shelly Middleton
I suddenly can’t get to Evernote using the Evernote app on my Storm 2. It won’t log into anything on the Evernote servers. I thought there was suddenly a problem with the app, so I deleted it from my Storm 2 and now AppWorld is saying that Evernote can’t be used on the Storm 2 9550. It did before! Did something happen? Was the app pulled from being used on the Blackberry Storm 2 on Verizon? Please help!
Phil Libin
Shelly,
I’m not sure. Both BB and Verizon sometimes change their profiles which causes our app on AppWorld to sometime be unavailable. Try filing a support request and we’ll see what’s going on with AppWorld, Storm 2 and Verizon.
Phil Libin
That’s all folks.
Thanks for all the questions – I’m very excited that so many of you would take time out of your day to write. Your involvement helps us make Evernote better every day.
We’re going to close the thread to new comments in about ten minutes. I’m about half way through the answers and will finish them all by this evening. Check back in a few hours for the complete transcript with answers.
If you asked a question during Office Hours, you’ll get an answer. If you didn’t get a chance, we’ll do this again soon. It was great to talk to all of you.
Thanks again!
Damian
HI – any plans to integrate with Canon printers? I have a MP150 with an awesome scanner that doesn’t feed into Evernote!
Phil Libin
Damian,
Yup. We announced Cannon 150 integration a couple of weeks ago in Japan – they’re actually putting Evernote right on the box. The US announcement is coming soon.
Adrian Morgan
Previous Evernote versions had an option for a portable version – the current Windows version seems like it doesn’t? Is evernote still commited to maintaining portable versions?
How do you plan on keeping all the different versions in sync? it seems like the more versions you have the more disparate they seem to get – what are the plans in this area?
Phil Libin
Adrian,
The current Windows version uses .NET which is difficult to deal with on a USB stick. Basically, it’ll work as long as the host computer has .NET installed, but this is hard to guarantee. We’ve got a potential workaround to this that we’re exploring, so official support for USB drives may reappear soon.
Keeping our different versions conceptually and functionally similar is very tough. We have eight major clients and several smaller ones! There’s no silver bullet here, just a lot of work. This is one of the reasons we’re actively hiring now.
Phil Libin
Ok, I think I’m done! That was about 150 questions in one day. If I somehow missed your question, please email me directly. I’m phil at name of my company dot com.
Thanks to everyone!