When An Evernote Upgrade Goes Horribly Wrong

This is what my Monday was like.  I updated to Evernote 6 on my 10.10.1 MacBook Air from the App Store.  Evernote promptly broke.  The notes were blank.  Titles were missing.  It was not possible to edit existing notes.  Nothing was working.

 

This was bad.  Evernote has become my outboard brain.  Evernote is my equivalent to index cards or a notebook.  Every meeting that I attend I open an Evernote note.  Projects are organized into Notebooks.  My To-Do List is an Evernote note.  I’m writing this blog post in Evernote.  The reason that I like Evernote is because it provides a simple and clean writing experience, it is easily searchable, it automatically backs up to the cloud, and it makes copying documents or images into notes dead easy.  My Evernotes show up on my phone, and if I used an iPad they would be on that platform as well.  When Evernote breaks my system of working breaks down.  

 

The good news is that Dr. Google solved my problem.  A quick scan showed that lots of Evernote users are having the same problem with Evernote 6.0 installed from the App Store.  The solution is to download and install version 6.1 directly from the Evernote website.  I installed the new version directly over the faulty 6.0 version, and this seems to have fixed the problem.  

 

What is so interesting about this Evernote glitch is how unusual software problems have become.  Dealing with wonky software used to be the price of admission for personal computing.  How many of you spent your formative computer years managing Windows or pre-OS X crashes?  Remember editing the Windows Registry to get things to work?  Or worrying about your virtual memory?  

 

Nowadays, we expect that our OS’s and our software will be rock solid.  We expect that we will be able to move seamlessly between client and web versions.  (And that is what I did today, going to the Evernote browser version to keep working before I had time to troubleshoot the issue). 

 

We also expect our software to be free, or at least cheap.  I’m using the free version of Evernote.  Is it worth going to Evernote Premium?

 

The other software that I use on a daily basis is Google Drive.  Google Docs and Google Sheets are great tools for collaborative writing and sharing.  Google Docs are simple to use and simple share.  Evernote for my solo work, Google Drive for collaborative work.  I know that many of you use Evernote for collaborative work.  Why Evernote and not Google Drive?

 

Why do you think the App Store update of Evernote went so horribly wrong?

 

What should of Evernote done differently once they figured out that many people must be having this problem?

 

When was the last time that you had a software meltdown?

 

What was your worst software experience?