Analysing Evernote's Year End Blog Post

Newsletter Housekeeping: If you’re looking for a free Evernote 2024 Calendar Template then head over here!

Right at the end of December Evernote published a new blog post called “At the end of 2023, Evernote’s technology is better than ever”.

Is it?

Like I do with most of their blog posts I want to dissect it a little, offer my own thoughts and maybe speculate a little.

If you’re interested, I wrote my own Evernote Year in Review a few weeks ago, and over the Christmas break published a fun History of Evernote in Screenshots.

Have the goals for 2023 been accomplished?

The first part of the new blog post talks about the goals Evernote set for itself which included making the service faster, more reliable and more secure.

Did this happen?

Performance and speed

When I think back to how the desktop apps were at the beginning of 2023 then I can safely say they are faster.

The Windows app I use every day is much more responsive than it used to be, and I haven’t seen a sync or performance issue with general note taking for a long while. Tasks are still a little rough though.

Real Time Sync works well. I can edit a note on my main work laptop and see changes instantly on another PC.

The web version of Evernote is MUCH faster. I mean, really quick. Changes that were made in the second half of 2023 increased speed by a huge amount.

I think the mobile clients still need work. I’m on Android and find the app a little clunky and slow to update. It’s much faster than it was at the beginning of 2023, but I want more.

My expectation is that whenever I open Evernote on my phone it already reflects the changes I’ve made on another device. This would mean syncing in the background when the app is shut. Right now, I have to open the app to sync, this includes widget updates.

So, is Evernote faster? For desktop and web, it’s a firm yes but mobile needs more work.

Reliability

Software reliability for me means that it works and does what I want when I want it to.

Is Evernote reliable?

Yes. I’ve never opened Evernote and my notes not been there. When I’ve wanted to work on client projects everything has always worked. I’ve never lost any note content.

There was some downtime back in October but in my mind the desktop apps were still reliable because the offline mode worked a treat and synced back to the cloud when the service was restored.

If I had to find something to pick on, I would probably say tasks were not as reliable as they could be. There have been a few times when I’ve completed a task and its reappeared.

From reading the Evernote blog post a lot of the reliability work has been done on the server side which looks like it’s future-proofing Evernote and making it easier to add new features.

For me reliability is good. Evernote is the first app I open in the morning and my notes are always there.

Security

I’ve never had an issue with security myself, touch wood, but my password is stupid long and I use an authenticator.

The decision to remove authentication via SMS was a good one and anyone who still has it set up will be forced to reset their password at next login.

One thing I didn’t realise is that Evernote have changed the rate limiting for back-end actions. I presume this is to prevent folks from trying to force their way into the service.

Vulnerable and weak passwords are also being reset and I like this proactive approach. I presume this means that anyone with a password of “password123” is reset and they are asked to create something a little more secure and use an authenticator.

I very much like a proactive approach to security.

Hints at future updates in 2024

From reading the Evernote post I don’t think were expecting any big new features any time soon. There’s a new user interface in the works and I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks, it’s very nice!

A small number of the development team are being moved into a new team to focus on itty bitty bugs within the different apps which I think is a great idea.

Maybe this is the start of a very gradual move from development being 90%+ focused on the back-end server stuff to a few more folk looking at the different front facing apps.

Back to the sever there seems to be a big project on the go called RENT that will eventually speed up the sync of Evernote meta-data which includes things like note titles, thumbnails, dates and note list content.

The apps are also going to get a new local database which I think is similar to what happened with the web application. The Evernote Expert Community had a presentation on this a few weeks ago and it looks like big job! Whilst I didn’t totally understand the technology I could see where conflicts and delays could happen. This new database and update should solve these issues.

I’m pretty sure RENT and the new client database will help make the apps a lot snappier.

It's only been a year!

How time flies! It was the first week in January 2023 that Bending Spoons got the keys to the elephant sized door of Evernote and the first few months were spent reorganising the company.

I think they’ve done well. I think we all knew that old Evernote was a bit long in the tusk, using very old tech and needed a refresh. This now seems to be happening.

I’m doubling down on what I store in Evernote right now (future article) and am very much looking forward to what happens in 2024.

Have a great weekend

All the best

Jon