Evernote Moves to Europe + A Look at the Feature Roadmap
Newsletter Housekeeping: A new Triple 'T' Productivity Podcast episode is live. I’m chatting with Fitz Koehler about how exercise & fitness can help us improve our overall productivity. Loved this chat!
So what’s been going on at Evernote?
If you believe social media(!) and the minor technology press then it’s all doom and gloom with Evernote closing up, shutting the door and running off with all your notes into the dark depths of the Italian Alps. That’s if you believe social media!
Seriously, nothing like this is happening at all.
What is happening is that Bending Spoons, the owners of Evernote have laid off a lot (but not all) of the their staff in the US and Chile with operations and development moving to Europe.
Bending Spoons are based in Milan, Italy and they took control of Evernote last January. They have over 400 staff here in Europe, including lots of developers who have had 7 months to make the transition, learn the code Evernote is built with and they are now taking over future development.
Work on Evernote has not stopped.
How do I know this?
I’m lucky to be part of the Evernote Certified Expert Community who have multiple meetings a month with the staff of Evernote. In fact there was a meeting yesterday with the CEO, comms, product & community managers. Experts share ideas, thoughts, bugs, pain points about the app and help, in some small way to move things forward.
In all the meetings I’ve been at, Bending Spoons have shown total commitment to the development of Evernote into a powerful productivity tool. Right now a lot of the development focus is on stability, sync and performance. Bending Spoons have said they want the app to work better and faster and it will.
So ignore the doom and gloom mongers and the social media folk who think up things up in their heads and say it as if its true.
I’m telling you, Evernote is very much alive and development is continuing
The Roadmap
Evernote has never been a company to share any sort of public roadmap and I don’t blame them as it can lead to “why isn’t this on the roadmap” conversations that just waste time.
That said there are a few things that I can mention with the permission of Evernote.
Ai Cleanup Improvements
Its been a couple of months since Evernote launched the Ai Cleanup tool and it’s pretty cool. It will re-format and tidy up meeting notes, web clips and other things really quickly.
Coming soon Ai Cleanup will also be able to summarise, translate, fix grammar and change the tone of your note all from inside the note itself.
No date has been set for the release but it is coming soon and something I’m looking forward to.
Outlook Calendar Integration
It’s been a while since Evernote integrated with Google Calendar and at the time I didn’t think it was useful. How wrong I was. I use the Calendar and link notes to events everyday now. Its great.
If you use Outlook calendar, then integration is coming soon.
Code Block Syntax Highlighting
This is a big one for me. Code blocks tend to be used by developers, coders or folk who store snips of HTML/JavaScript/PHP/C. It could be any code.
Big improvements are coming with the code block turning into a basic code editor with syntax highlighting.
No date set but its in development.
New Metadata Sync
This is part two of the big sync update. Part one was all about Real Time Editing within the note itself. Metadata sync is about making sure things like new notes, shared notes and all the little things outside of a note are sync’d just as quick.
The Real Time Editing sync works a treat now and is super fast. The rest of Evernote will be performing the same very soon. No date set but its on the way.
So there you go. Some things to look forward to over the next few weeks and months and I’ve not mentioned Ai Search which was announced a few months ago, development of this new feature is ongoing.
There is so much drama and hyperbole about Evernote on the web and socials and 99% of it is folks made up day-dreams but the truth is out there!
Have a great weekend
All the best
Jon
Thanks for the update. I use evernote privately and for work (2 different accounts).
At work I use Outlook as calendar - and I'd love to sync this one with evernote, since I write down my meeting notes in Evernote. Currently I sync Outlook to Gmail and then to Evernote... however this doesn't work well since the syncing between outloot and gmail isn't really working well on updates e.g.
I hope Evernote will continue to make the user experience "fast" again.
Thanks for the updates Jon! It's great to know that Bending Spoons is continually working on new updates, and also thinking what else to improve on!
After trying out several oft-recommended names in the Rich Note Taking space, I've come to the conclusion that Evernote is a very polished and complete product, and it has a corresponding price tag as well.
I love supporting underdogs as much as anyone else, but honestly bugs, half-baked features, and workarounds are very disruptive when it comes to note-taking and productivity.
I mentioned Evernote is a mature, complete product. I would honestly not mind if Evernote maintained the same price point and offered the same features as it did now. What I'm worried though, is that Evernote takes on more features, and starts charging even more.
But for now, I see myself enjoying some of these benefits, like the real-time sync updates. So it is still alright.