I'm not sure I know exactly what you're talking about...so my guess is that I have NOT done what you're asking. Will what you're talking about fix my problem? If so, can you run that down again in more detail?
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Evernote Question
- Thread starter btrav13
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I'm not sure I know exactly what you're talking about...so my guess is that I have NOT done what you're asking. Will what you're talking about fix my problem? If so, can you run that down again in more detail?
1- In the lower right-hand corner of the app, you'll see a radar-dish icon with the label Sync. Tap that
2- That'll bring up the sync area. Sanity check: make sure under Account Type it says Premium.
3: Under settings, go "offline notebooks"
4: That'll bring up a list of all your notebooks. You can select the ones you want to offline sync there. Select the ones you want.
5: Note: the checkmark next to the name only means it's selected; not that it's done. For sync status, look under the notebooks name: if it's done it'll say for example "Book Research: 3.25 MB - Done" I it's not done, it'll say "waiting" or you'll get a progress bar.
2- That'll bring up the sync area. Sanity check: make sure under Account Type it says Premium.
3: Under settings, go "offline notebooks"
4: That'll bring up a list of all your notebooks. You can select the ones you want to offline sync there. Select the ones you want.
5: Note: the checkmark next to the name only means it's selected; not that it's done. For sync status, look under the notebooks name: if it's done it'll say for example "Book Research: 3.25 MB - Done" I it's not done, it'll say "waiting" or you'll get a progress bar.
Just for emphasis - the reason Brammy mentioned that "sanity check" is because the offline notebook feature is only available to premium subscribers so if the client isn't detecting you as being a premium subscriber then it won't allow you to offline (download every note) any of your notebooks and, when you have no network connectivity, you'll be at the mercy of whatever temporary local cache of individual notes the client happens to have available at the time.
- Julian
Yea, I'm not premium...and I guess that's my main issue. They want $45 per year to do something that most note taking apps would use as standard feature. I could understand an app charging $5 or $7 to give you these features, but not $45...annually... That just seems a bit insane to me. It's like they're giving the app away for free, but it's really not fee because it's stripped of it's real useful functionality.
Well, Premium also comes with additional bandwidth and more formats to clip notes from.
I've got about 1000 notes and Premium is worth it for me.
If what the above posters are saying is that not only to you need to pay $45 per year in order to have offline "notebooks," but you also need to mark which "notebooks" are stored offline, that is pretty nuts.
Just use Simplenote, and all your notes will automatically be cached offline. None of this nonsense is necessary.
I would say if Simplenote meets your needs, then yes, Evernote is not for you.
On the other hand, there people like myself clipping web pages, PDFs and the like into notebooks for research purposes. While offline syncing is what finally tipped me to premium, I was hitting walls with what I needed Evernote to do long before I paid for it.
Could you explain what the purpose of "clipping" web pages & PDFs into "notebooks" is, and what these Evernote terms mean. And perhaps what is the advantage of doing this compared to savings things in Dropbox?
I just did a little more testing with Evernote, to see if anything offline worked.
This Evernote blog post that I linked to above says that Evernote now has "Local note caching" and "Offline notebooks (w/ Premium)." At first I didn't realize what the difference is. But "local note caching" only means that the note is locally cached if you recently viewed it on your device. That means that if you put 2 or 3 notes in Evernote on your computer, pull up Evernote on your device, you must view each of those notes just to get them to be cached. This is what I find pretty ridiculous, and why I don't use Evernote. This is when I would need to view my notes the most. Being able to view your simple text notes is one of the fundamental features of a note app (not a "premium" feature. Without that feature, everything else doesn't matter ... it's worthless.
Here's an example of a note in Evernote if I don't have a connection:
Now, here is an example of a similar note in Simplenote when I don't have a connection:
In one instance I'm not able to view the note and in another I am. I would say that this is a pretty big difference.
I agree wholeheartedly with this quote from John Gruber "Simplenote is a perfect example of my primary guideline for iPhone UI design:
'Figure out the absolute least you need to do to implement the idea, do just that, and then polish the hell out of the experience.'
Evernote goes in a very different direction: a long list of features but a janky experience." (http://daringfireball.net/linked/2009/07/17/evernote)
I would definitely call the experience of using Evernote janky. You don't know whether you'll be able to view your notes offline or not. That is the opposite of reliable.
This Evernote blog post that I linked to above says that Evernote now has "Local note caching" and "Offline notebooks (w/ Premium)." At first I didn't realize what the difference is. But "local note caching" only means that the note is locally cached if you recently viewed it on your device. That means that if you put 2 or 3 notes in Evernote on your computer, pull up Evernote on your device, you must view each of those notes just to get them to be cached. This is what I find pretty ridiculous, and why I don't use Evernote. This is when I would need to view my notes the most. Being able to view your simple text notes is one of the fundamental features of a note app (not a "premium" feature. Without that feature, everything else doesn't matter ... it's worthless.
Here's an example of a note in Evernote if I don't have a connection:
Now, here is an example of a similar note in Simplenote when I don't have a connection:
In one instance I'm not able to view the note and in another I am. I would say that this is a pretty big difference.
I agree wholeheartedly with this quote from John Gruber "Simplenote is a perfect example of my primary guideline for iPhone UI design:
'Figure out the absolute least you need to do to implement the idea, do just that, and then polish the hell out of the experience.'
Evernote goes in a very different direction: a long list of features but a janky experience." (http://daringfireball.net/linked/2009/07/17/evernote)
I would definitely call the experience of using Evernote janky. You don't know whether you'll be able to view your notes offline or not. That is the opposite of reliable.
The thing that I don't think you're factoring in here is that Evernote is not designed to be a simple note taking application, it's intended to be much more. For instance you can set up Evernote to "watch" folders on your PC and automatically upload anything put in them. So what? Well, there are people who scan all their documents and let Evernote upload them. These, and other people, have data in Evernote that in some cases is over a GB of data and I'm pretty sure that the hope at Evernote is that, as people use the product for more and more of their data and have been using it for more and more years, people with multiple gigabytes of data stored in Evernote will become the norm.
So yes, if it's a simple note application with a few hundred text notes then it is nuts to not automatically save them all on the device. If however the data in the database is a few gigabytes with tens of thousands of notes comprising PDF scans, voice memos, photographs etc then do you really want the client to automatically download all that onto your device or is it not sensible to have the option to decide that for yourself? Once you know that you actively have to select a notebook to have offline access then is it really too much to go and set that option once every two years when you change your phone? Also, having to manually set the option means that you do it when you know you are on a WiFi connection rather than triggering a multi-gigabyte download on your 3G connection.
It's pretty clear that Evernote isn't the solution for you but to call their design decisions "nuts" just isn't fair because the decisions are targetted at a different usage patterns to yours.
- Julian
Valid points, but what I am saying is that the most basic function (or the first function) that is desired doesn't even work properly. It could have a bunch of different features, but if the primary feature fails me, then the entire app has already failed.
The main reason I went with Evernote originally was that I could type up a note on my iPad and then see it online in my account later. My immediate assumption was that I'd also be able to re-read what I had typed ON MY IPAD at any other time LOL. What a stupid assumption to make I guess.
Just a heads up that $45 is steep for what others do free or for less money is somewhat an errant assumption, as in my experience I haven't found anything close to evernote yet. Evernote's synching isn't quite the same as simplenote or taskpaper, synching just to the server or manually synching just text notes to a few pc's. Evernote automatically synchs our notebooks (and new notes) within minutes to: a Mac, powerbook, Windows Vista, two ipads, two iphones, Windows XP, and a Fujitsue Tablet PC, without us really having to do anything. Plus we have access to all of it via the web.
Not only does it synch notes, but we attache spreadsheets, word docs, pictures, capture web page clippings (graphics, text, layout), PDFs, etc.. I can't tell you how many times we have saved time and effort using this feature. Could dropbox/box.net do something similar with these type of files? Close, but why have a place for notes, a place for files, etc. and dropbox/box don't allow for tagging, searching along with notes, etc.
And premium also gets you SSL everywhere, which I am not sure simplenote/taskpaper does.
You may be able to cobble together several apps and services to do something akin to what Evernote does, but it won't be as easy, your stuff will be spread around, you won't have some of the capabilities. $45 isn't much to pay for the convenience of "it just works" that evernote at least provides us.
Yeah, as a non-premium user with the sole need of just taking text notes on an ipad/iphone I would say evernote fails compared to taskpaper/simplenote. With the possible exception of I think it is called Awesome Notes, which lets you take wonderfully quick notes that stay on the ipad/iphone but also can synch that data to evernote in it's own anotes notebooks. Not sure if Awesome notes is updated for the iPad or not, I just know one person who uses it a lot on their iPhone and loves it.
I was an evernote user across multiple computers and laptops long before iphone/ipad came out (and used Microsoft's OneNote before that), so maybe I just use it different / with different needs than a simple notetaker on the iphone/ipad.
But evernote is a place for everything for me. One spot, one application, where I pretty much find everything I want to keep. And have access to that stuff from pretty much any device or web connection. All with organization and searching that seems pretty robust to me.
There is some big evernote event in the next couple weeks, don't remember what day. I don't know if they are launching a new product or rolling out a major new version of everything, but I am looking forward to it. I am hoping they are making their ipad/iphone apps more robust (inking for one!).
You can have more than one notebook in Evernote. In my case, I have one for each research project I'm doing, two folders for technical information (Apple and non-apple), one on writing and productivity, one for images, and, well, you get the idea.
"Clipping" is when I go to a web page, want to capture the information on it, and use their extension/safari tool to "clip" the page. What that does is grab the page and shove it to Evernote. You can also e-mail stuff to your Evernote account. It's pretty much replaced bookmarking of static pages for me.
As people have mentioned, if you're taking simple notes, then SimpleNote is perfect. However, where Evernote shines is when you think of it more like a repository. I do a ton of research, on a variety of computers. Evernote lets me capture information from any of my computers easily.
I'm not "pissed off" about it by any means. When I read the description of the app, and saw all the people that said "Evernote rocks", I had ZERO idea that the simple "syncing to your online Evernote account, and then re-utilizing that data" was something you could A) only do online or B) only do offline for almost $50/year.
Unfortunately for me, the rest of the stuff (clipping web pages, attaching Excel sheets, pictures, etc etc) isn't really something I want. So I guess I'm back to square one of a simple note taking app that will sync them online, but let me access them offline since I have a WIFI only iPad.
I need to re-read some of these posts above this one of mine, because I think someone mentioned one that will do this. Anyway, I am enjoying the debate about this topic. My personal opinion is that Evernote should offer a premium app that would allow you to do just the syncing and accessing offline...but they could still offer the upgrade feature to provide all the other crazy stuff that people in this thread actually use and find to be worth $50/year. I know I'd pay a small fee to have just the ability to access offline if they let me.
I find the entire UI of Simplenote & Dropbox to be much better than that of Evernote. They are both free (for the regular options). With Dropbox, I can easily "pin down" files to my iPad to be viewed offline, and Simplenote automatically stores notes locally.
Awesome Note is not a universal app at this time.
So, in other words, these "notebooks" are like folders. Seems like a lot of that could be accomplished with Dropbox.
How do I get my entire Dropbox to sync for offline storage on my iPad in one easy step? Also, without making PDFs and saving them to my Dropbox, how do I clip a web page to my Dropbox? What if I don't want my Dropbox to sync to my work computer?
You have to star files to have them saved for offline on iPad in Dropbox.
What is the benefit of "clipping" a web page?
If you don't want it to sync to your work computer, then don't install it on your work computer.
I do a TON of online research. "clipping" a page lets me store it in Evernote for future reference.
Evernote lets me sync to the iPad with one app launch. I'm sorry, I just don't see how Dropbox is a suitable substitute for Evernote. From what I've read on how Simplenote and Notational Velocity work, that could be done.
Again, heavy Evernote users aren't using it as a Finder replacement or quick notes on what we need to grab at the store.
Dropbox and Evernote are to products that can be used as compliements to each other. This is how I use them. I use Evernotes to gather information (say for a report or research) from websites (the actual website, the pdf's relating to the research, any Word, Powerpoint or Excel documents that I find relating to) and books from the library (taking a photo of the book and anything I need to reference my source). All this would be put into a "notebook" in Evernote.
Then I still use Dropbox to make my actual, publishable documents. That way I can work on the table of contents, the body, the bibliography, Excel spreadsheets/charts, and Powerpoint presentation until I get to a final product. Dropbox allows me to do this anywere there is a computer. So whether working at home, during my lunch break at work, at the library, or even at the pool with my laptop or iPad, I can still access all my documents.
Don't look at these 2 as replacements for each other. They are compliments.
Evernote free offline notes?
As a new Evernote user, I thought I would chime in here with my usage and thoughts.
I find the lack of editing rich text notes on my iPad an issue, but not a deal breaker. Most of my rich text notes are check box lists that I keep, so being able to see them as a reference without the ability to edit them is not completely useless.
As for the offline notes, I've noticed they are viewable and editable when I don't have a wifi connection on my iPad. If I make a change to a note and save it when I have no connection, it syncs the changes when I reconnect and sync with the Evernote servers. And I am just using the free service.
Not sure why the Premium service touts the offline notebooks.
As to why some of the notes do not show up when offline, I have found then on the iPad, if I do a refresh on each note while online, then go offline, the note is viewable.
These are my experiences so far with rich text and offline notes. At some point, I would hope that Apple and Evernote can get editing support for rich text on the iPad. It would make this Evernote user happy.
As a new Evernote user, I thought I would chime in here with my usage and thoughts.
I find the lack of editing rich text notes on my iPad an issue, but not a deal breaker. Most of my rich text notes are check box lists that I keep, so being able to see them as a reference without the ability to edit them is not completely useless.
As for the offline notes, I've noticed they are viewable and editable when I don't have a wifi connection on my iPad. If I make a change to a note and save it when I have no connection, it syncs the changes when I reconnect and sync with the Evernote servers. And I am just using the free service.
Not sure why the Premium service touts the offline notebooks.
As to why some of the notes do not show up when offline, I have found then on the iPad, if I do a refresh on each note while online, then go offline, the note is viewable.
These are my experiences so far with rich text and offline notes. At some point, I would hope that Apple and Evernote can get editing support for rich text on the iPad. It would make this Evernote user happy.
yes, you just answered your own question.
I don't consider having to load each note while online (right before I go offline) just so I can view them offline to be a good experience. In fact, as I have said before, I consider it to be a horrible experience.