With so many great apps constantly coming out of the woodwork (2Do, Pastebot, and MoneyBook being the most recent ones that come to mind), it’s basically impossible for me to say what apps I’ll be keeping ‘forever’ – and yet I thought that Evernote was definitely one of those apps.
They’ve released so many fantastic updates – both major and minor – and I got to enjoy all of them without ever paying a cent. The green elephant has become a landmark on my icon Springboard, so much so that I will often guide newcomers to the iPhone by indicating how far away from the “green elephant thing” they should tap.
The thing is, ever since Pastebot started copying ass and pasting names this past December, I just haven’t really needed Evernote on the iPhone for much of anything. It’s definitely a sad realization, since I’ve grown so attached to the service, the related podcast, and have tried to convince anyone and everyone who will listen to me to sign up for Evernote.
Better plain text treatment, and a better app
I know from the podcast that Evernote is working on fixing up the way that it handles text, as well as a new way to present the iPhone app. These are both great things, and they’re what are most likely going to bring me screaming back to the service when they go live. The problem is that they’re not out just yet.
So that means when I write a draft and sync it from my iPhone Evernote app to the Mac client, and then copy the text from Mac Evernote into WordPress, all of the plain text gets garbled together into one giant paragraph. Last time I checked, readers didn’t appreciate reading one giant block of text with out any spaces or paragraphs, so I’ve since learned that writing iPhone Evernote drafts is a bust.
The other thing that keeps me out of Evernote on the iPhone is the writing environment: having tried some of the other note-taking apps out there (Awesome Note, Notebooks, Appigo’s Notebook), I find it hard to forget how many cool features or neat UI tricks that other people have implemented. Simple features like full-screen modes, or easy shortcuts to paste text right into a new note. Evernote currently features a decent way to write or edit notes and drafts (you can now turn rich text into plain text to edit it on-device, which is great), but I don’t think it compares with the more specialized note apps available on the iPhone.
Robot replaces Elephant?
All of that used to be moot, because it was so much simpler to write a draft in Evernote and have it automatically synced to my desktop without having to move a muscle. The superior interfaces of other apps be damned. The same went with pictures: I’d use the Evernote Camera Roll feature to import my iPhone screenshots to the Mac, and then I’d drag them from the Mac client onto my Finder desktop, and upload them to WordPress from there.
All of this was simplified when Pastebot came about. Batches of pictures can now be copied from my camera roll and pasted right to my desktop. The same can be done with entire drafts, and they paste perfectly into WordPress or WriteRoom on the Mac (though Pastebot does seem to have trouble when I use dashes). We’re talking nicely spaced paragraphs, and not one block of text.
The extra taps it requires to copy things and put them into Pastebot actually ends up being less work, compared to the hassle of jumbled Evernote text and the extra mouse clicks required to get things onto my Mac’s clipboard.
As I said earlier on: all of this is likely very temporary. Evernote could surprise me with a fantastically huge 4.0 update tomorrow, and I’ll come screaming back here to tell you about all of the newest and greatest features, how the text is no longer squished into one block, and how much prettier everything got. In fact, I’m so sure something like that is going to happen that I’m not going to bother deleting the Evernote app. The elephant stays on the screen, but that part is likely going to stay fingerprint free while I’m off using Notebooks and Pastebot for my everyday needs.
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TAGS: Evernote, pastebot
