Evernote 2024 Half Year Recap

Newsletter housekeeping: The latest version for Mac & PC is 10.100.3 and its available on the download page. At the time of writing the release notes say 10.99.3 is the latest but this is incorrect. Just download the file and install. The latest mobile version is 10.100.1.

Half the year has gone and it'll soon be Christmas! So much has happened in Evernote world over the last six months and I've sometimes struggled to keep up to date with the new features.

This week I thought I'd do a quick recap of what's happened during the first half of the year.

Note: The list below is in no particular order and sorry, it’s a big one this week!

New user interface rolled out

The first update for the new year bought us a brand new look. The user interface changed quite a bit, but not too much. Six months in I can't even remember what the old one looked like.

I did save a copy in my history of Evernote by screenshots article which is always worth a look.

Evernote Legacy shut down (finally!)

It was death by a thousand cuts wasn't it! Finally, the plug was pulled on the old versions of Evernote. I remember during a call with Evernote around a year or two ago they mentioned that there were around 100 different versions of Legacy in the wild including some versions made just for phone and PC manufacturers. What a mess!

With version 10 development is much easier to manage and we see this by the pace of updates.

Controversially, I was never a fan of the Legacy app. I left Evernote in 2017 and came back when version 10 was launched. I found Legacy old fashioned and my notes looked different of different devices.

The RENT project is rolling out

From my calculations the Evernote team have been working on the RENT project for over 12 months. It’s been a huge job and it’s in the process of being rolled out now.

As far as I understand it, RENT is a brand-new sync system for everything that is NOT in the note editor.

Things like the sidebar list, notebook views, note lists, tags, note created times etc.

All the stuff inside the note editor pane syncs super-fast as it uses Real Time Sync (RTE) which launched over a year ago.

As far as I know RENT should be fully rolled out over the next month or two. Going slowly as it includes a new local database and it’s a big change.

Full width tasks section & some new functionality

This was a huge improvement for my workflow and I've written about how I use tasks quite a bit.

Tasks went full screen and also arrived with a new description box and importance flags.

We can also search and sort tasks much easier and view them in many ways.

Full width calendar & lots of improvements

The Evernote calendar is slowly starting to become the only place I go. I don’t visit my Google Calendar anywhere near as much as I used to.

Going full width helped a lot and then the addition of week and month views really did improve things.

Evernote also launched a standalone calendar for folks who don’t want to use Google or Microsoft. You can add/edit/delete events in this calendar.

Another small improvement was being able to set the week start day which is in the calendar settings.

Two-way sync is happening with Google and Microsoft calendars and I'm using it right now, it works well. If you don't have this feature yet it’s rolling out.

I'd love to see drag and drop event creation arrive sometime but right now Evernote is where I look for my schedule and being able to connect events with notes is a huge positive for my workflow.

New mobile home screens. Choose your launch screen.

This was a controversial change!

The every-widget in the world display which used to launch when you opened the mobile app was slow and clunky. It basically tried to emulate the same experience that the desktop app had when most folk use their phones differently to their desktop computers.

I personally liked the change and I have my launch screen set as "Create" and the menu bar has shortcuts in the middle.

You can change which page launches from Settings -> Navigation->Default launch page.

If you want to change the icon in the bottom menu from shortcuts to notebooks then its Settings -> Navigation -> Quick access.

For folks who still want all the widgets showing you can get to them by tapping your avatar at the top left and tap "My Widgets".

Better sharing pop up

The sharing pop up box was redesigned to make it a little easier and more obvious how to share notes with others. It’s made a difference and you can expect sharing to get even better over the next few months.

Collapsible and linked headers

This was something that folks had been asking about for years!

When you create a Heading 1, 2 or 3 in your note you can collapse it using the little arrow to the left. This lets you hide big chunks of text and content.

On the far right of every header is a little link icon, click this and you'll get a link to the header. You can use this to link directly to sections from other notes.

Lots of folk loved this improvement.

Table of contents

This is one feature that I'm not using. I thought I would but I don't think many of my notes are long enough. Maybe I should try it with project notes a bit more.

It’s a feature that folks have been asking for and it creates a table of contents based on the headings 1, 2 and 3.

You'll find it in the Insert menu at the top left corner of the note editor or you can use a '/' command.

New files section

Something else I'm not using a lot.

We got a new Files section in the sidebar menu earlier in the year and it lists all the files that are in your notes and gives you the chance to search for them and sort them by media or docs.

Have you found a use for files?

Slash command launched

Something else folks had been requesting for years and years.

Slash commands arrived so when you can type '/' you can insert whatever you want into your note.

The idea is that you can keep your hands on the keyboard and away from the mouse.

I use this a lot! Many other apps like Slack and Notion had introduced slash commands years ago and it was a feature lots of folk asked for.

Pin notes to the top of notebooks

Oh boy! This has revolutionised my workflow.

Such a simple little feature. I'm pinning and unpinning all day every day.

Right click a note and you can pin it to the top of your notebook. You can do this for multiple notes and I tend to pin the notes that I'm working on that day, unpin when I'm done.

Syntax highlighting in code blocks

I'd been waiting for this. A huge improvement on what was there before and I'm using it a lot.

Advanced Code Blocks lets you paste code into a note and have the syntax highlighted so you can easily spot classes, functions and variables.

I use the shortcut ``` to create a block whenever I want it. If you copy code from Visual Studio Code it pastes directly into a code bock in Evernote.

New quote block in the editor

You can add a quote block to your notes by typing > and space or using the slash command.

It gives us I nice way to define a section of text as a quote.

New '@' keyboard shortcut to add internal links

This was a big new addition which makes it much easier for you to add a link to another note.

Just type '@' and start typing the name of the note and you can add a link to it very quickly.

This has significantly improved internal note linking in Evernote.

New note and notebook limits for paid plans

You may have missed this one. Note and notebook limits changed for paid plans.

It used to be 100,000 notes and 1000 notebooks but a few people hit the limit this year so they increased it to 150,000 notes and 2,000 notebooks.

Audio & video transcription

If you're a big voice note taker or store audio or video files in Evernote you can now transcribe them quickly and very accurately. I was very impressed with how accurate it was.

Check out this article where I did a quick test.

It’s now really easy to record a voice note on your phone and then transcribe your thoughts into text.

Daily Notes feature

I won't say too much about this as I wrote about it last week.

I'm using it every day for keeping a list of my main goals for the day and adding small notes when I'm on the phone. Very useful.

Changes to note/app links

This confused me and a few others. There's been a change in the way that shared note links are created. Terminology has changed to "Note Link" and "Internal Link".

When you share a note with someone or you copy a "Note Link" you now get a web link to the note and when you click it you have a choice to open that link in Evernote web or in the desktop application.

You can set a default for this in Settings -> Application -> Preferences and scroll down a bit to Open Links.

The phrase "App Link" has changed to "Internal Link" and its now only accessible through the keyboard shortcut ALT+CTRL+SHIFT+C in Windows, Mac is Ctrl ⌥ ⌘ C. They win a gold medal in finger gymnastics for this shortcut! You can remap it if you want.

Ai Edit now using GPT-4o mini

A very quick update on Ai Edit. It’s now using ChatGPT-4o mini so it should be a little quicker and possibly more accurate, or as accurate as Ai can be!

Conclusion

OMG it’s been busy! I've lost track of some updates and to put this together I've been going through old release notes and whatnot.

I was on an Evernote call the other day and I can tell you the improvements are not going to stop. I've seen some of the things that are coming up that I can't talk about right now and they are really going to improve workflows for folk.

Let me know in the comments if I've missed anything.

Have a great weekend

All the best

Jon