Say Hello to the New Evernote for Windows

Product updates | 21 Jan 201021 Jan 10 | By Andrew Sinkov

192 comments

You know that amazing feeling you get when you cross the finish line after running a full marathon? Me neither, but I imagine it’s similar to what we’re feeling right now. After over a year of development and months of extensive beta testing, the new Evernote (version 3.5) for Windows is here, it’s out of beta, and it’s pretty awesome.

Download the new Evernote for Windows »

We’re staggering the auto-update process. If you have been using the Windows 3.5 Beta and want to upgrade, go to Tools>Options>Upgrade to pre-releases. Evernote 3.1 users should download the new version.

Why this is huge

The new Evernote for Windows is…well…new. Completely new, in fact. We rewrote it from the ground up to make it faster, more reliable, and just plain better than Evernote for Windows has ever been. The first thing you’ll notice is its revamped interface. The new look, complete with thumbnails, is great for quickly browsing and searching through your notes. Once you start using it, you’ll notice improvements to text editing, tagging, screen clipping, digital ink support, and tons more. Our goal was to use everything we’ve learned since our launch to make a great Evernote experience on Windows.

Ideal for switchers

Lots of people move among multiple computers and devices as part of their daily routine. The last thing you want is a wildly different Evernote experience on each platform. A major consideration for us in developing this application was uniformity—making sure that you could go from using Evernote on your Windows machine to Evernote on your Mac and back again without thinking about it. Now you can.

Latest and greatest

This means that not only it is more functional and stable and works great on Windows Vista and Windows 7, but we’ll be able to roll out continuous improvements faster than ever.

So, so, so much more…

Here’s an (almost) complete list of all that’s new and better in Evernote for Windows version 3.5. If you’ve been following us through the beta process, then you may have seen some of these already.

Three different ways to view your notes

Thumbnail view: Rendered thumbnails showing the contents of your notes, images, and PDFs for easy browsing and filtering
List view: Multi-column “List View” with sorting on any column
Mixed view: Mixed thumbnail + detail view
Zoom thumbnails to see more detail
Display thumbnail or mixed views in visual groupings by date, size, source URL domain, and start of title

Note editing

Auto-complete tagging and easier tag creation
Spell checking as you type
Better support for advanced markup
Create tables within notes
Specify default font size for text in notes
Better handling of longer text notes
Creating ink notes in easier with the new canvas-like layout
Detailed note information and attributes

Searching

Editable and descriptive search filter
Ability to add or remove individual criteria from current search filter
Save the current search for use later as a Saved Search
Extend note search capabilities with ANY or ALL search criteria
Support for advanced search grammar in the search field

Other stuff

Find and Find next/find previous (both within and across notes)
Better consistency across the Mac and Windows versions of Evernote
New icons and buttons
More user-friendly “Folder Import” feature to automatically create notes from a watched folder–great for scanner and other integrations
“View on Map” button opens geo-tagged notes in Google Maps
Evernote for Windows introduction video included on launch
Multi-lingual spell check included in application
Quick access to your online account information
Improved screen clipping requiring fewer steps, with on-screen explanations
Menu options for attaching files to notes without requiring drag-and-drop
Remove tags from notes with a single click
Advanced note text editor based on Google Chrome
Improved synchronization performance via networking optimizations
Improved database performance for faster searching and sorting of notes
Full multi-language support (English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Japanese, more coming soon)
Single binary for all supported languages
Synchronization is improved, it is now both faster and more memory efficient
Drag and drop files onto the application icon
Informational popups alerting users to synchronization and clipping
New, re-mappable global hot-keys
Search support for Asian characters
Improved auto-import dialogs
Improved copy/paste support
Incorporated more standard keyboard short-cuts
Improved task tray with easier access to clipping and short-cuts
Email notes via the Evernote Service to remove email client dependencies
Configurable auto-update to pre-release versions
Improved installer

And that’s just the beginning

You can expect to see tons of new features and enhancements soon. Stay tuned.

Download the new Evernote for Windows »

UPDATE: Evernote 3.5.1 is out. This update introduces major improvements and enhancements. Read about it here »

http://psdesignzone.com Jordan Garn

Man, I hate the screen clipping “features” added to 3.5, 3.1 was much better and easier to use, plus you could press ctrl+s to save the note to anywhere on your computer (not just the desktop) or ctrl+c to save it to your clip-board, and that was alot more intuitive for me.

Is there anyway to go back without down-grading?
http://www.ordinal.fr Philippe Allot

We also stick with Evernote 3.1 (3 premium users). As software designers, we know that it is not easy to improve a product which is well born, without in fact disappointing its users.
It was simpler in the old version to drag tags, to filter with them (just count the clicks), to have a synthetic view of all of them, and so on.
To have thumbnails can seem attractive but is not so efficient for (our) intensive usage (the major part of our notes are text or are software screenshots which appear very similar). As some users have said above, can you consider delivering the old interface with the enhancements on text editing ? That will be nice…
james

I installed 3.5 but I didn’t like it. I tried installing 3.1 and I like the simplicity and speed.
Sheree Young

I can’t install. Keep getting the error “Not a valid win32 app”. My OS is Windows 7. I’ve tried compatibility mode.
Suggestions?
- Andrew Sinkov
  
  Sheree, please contact our support team: http://s.evernote.com/support
  - stephen
    
    I have windows 7 64 bit and I have tried everything but it wont install
  - Chris
    
    Nice. I click the link to submit a ticket and it asks me for a username. I haven’t installed it yet because of the error message above! What now?
    - Heather
      
      Username is not a required field on the submission form. You can leave that blank to submit your ticket.
Sean

Why is Evernote SOOOO SLOOOWWW these days??? (Specifically, desktop Windows client). This is really gonna kill the product amd service offering. I purchased my v2.2 long time ago and loved it, used it all the time for everything. Now having installed this new 3.5 version, I tried so hard to tolerate the speed…and gradually find myself avoid using the product. It’s just too damn slow.
http://www.joereger.com Joe Reger

Totally agree. The Windows client is so slow that it makes Evernote a challenge to use. A notes app needs to always be there to catch data as you need it to. Waiting for startup and dealing with app stutter breaks my workflow when I try to simply jot down a note. Can’t tell you how many notes I’ve not taken because I try to avoid Evernote. The only thing keeping me there is the fact that I have a lot of notes already in the system and I don’t want to spend the afternoon it’ll take to research alternatives, install/test them and then convert existing notes over. Hoping that things speed up in the next release.
Öner

I like Evernote but Evernote for Windows keeps crashing when I double-click an even slightly larger text note and try to edit it. I use Google Chrome and Vista for Business. It happens every time I use Evernote for Windows which makes it impossible for me to use.
Marcus

Second the comments about speed. Windows standard GUI elements might be ugly but at least they’re quite snappy. I couldn’t believe it when I changed some preferences in Evernote 3.5 and even the checkmarks _fade_ in and out. For a tool like this, speed of response _always_ trumps looks. Sorry, I really like Evernote but this is a complete re-do.
dante

this software is not compatible to my window 7 64 bit
DJ

desktop version is bulky and slow. i have given up. for now accessing my notes from my phone or the web till i find a better alternative to evernote

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