Evernote 4.0 for Windows Touts Increased Speed and Improved UI

As a longtime user of Evernote, I can say without a doubt that it has become an integral part of my daily life and workflow, right alongside Dropbox. I won't waste space here explaining what it is or cataloging its myriad uses, because plenty of others out there have already done that. What I want to discuss is my experience thus far with the latest version that released today, Evernote 4.

From the Evernote blog:

«While 3.5 added tons of great new features, there were some problems we simply couldn’t fix: the blurry fonts, slow startup times, large memory footprint, and poor support for certain graphics cards [...]

So we decided to start over from scratch, with fast, native C++ [...] As you'll see, the results are amazing.»

This was obviously great news, since their previous Windows client was notorious for its slow response times and huge memory footprint. It looks as though the $20 million that Evernote Corp has received recently will be put to good use, and I think that customers will soon find most of their concerns being addressed in a big way, starting with this latest update.

Since the announcement earlier today, I have downloaded Evernote v4.0 to both my XP and Win7 machines. They weren't kidding when they said it was faster. The previous app (v3.5) used to take me 2-3 minutes to open, while this latest release takes 5-10 seconds before it's ready to go.

Everything feels extremely smooth and polished, with less UI clutter than in previous versions. There is a greater emphasis on the search bar, which has been removed from the upper right-hand corner and then intuitively relocated to the header bar of the notes list for easier reference. While in 'List' view (my view of choice), the search bar becomes elongated, useful for seeing long search queries in their entirety.

The speed of the search functionality itself has been boosted tremendously, as I can now see search results become narrowed as I'm typing, instead of waiting for several seconds after the entire search query has been entered (I'm looking at you, v3.5). This is a pretty big deal, because Evernote has always bragged about how easily-searchable your notes are, and now those claims have become reality. No matter how fast I've typed, Evernote has been able to keep up effortlessly while bringing up search results. Color me impressed.

The Firefox web clipper has also been updated to have Evernote 4 compatibility. Now, upon clipping web content into Evernote, you are presented with a simple popup dialogue that allows you to give the note a title, assign tags, and choose the destination notebook where the note will be saved. Unfortunately, this popup only allows a maximum of 3 tags to be assigned, which sometimes forces me to go into Evernote itself to add more if needed.

The Quirks:

Part of the new-and-improved look of Evernote stems from the fact that the menu bar and note buttons have now integrated into one simple toolbar that keeps all that crap out of your way while you work with your notes. A curious side effect of this new bar is that when you click on one of the menus at the top-left (File, Edit, Tools, etc), you cannot simply drag your mouse to a different menu and have it open it automatically, like in most Windows applications. Each menu has to be clicked individually as you move between them, which adds a needless step to your workflow. The only current fix for this is to switch to the old Windows toolbar style (the setting for which can be found at Tools > Options > Show Standard Windows Menu).

There is also a bug that prevents images from being drag-and-dropped into a note directly instead of doing a copy/paste. Bit of a drag, really (pun completely intended).

The last interesting thing I noticed is that it appears note titles no longer support unicode characters (such as the star icon used by Gruber), something that was possible in v3.5. What appears instead now is an empty square icon.

Overall, I'm very happy with this release, but there are still some features that I would like to see in the future. For one, it would be incredibly useful if notes had their own "addresses" within Evernote that could be linked to from other notes, such as in an instance where [note A] references content in [note B] and you could click a "URL" of sorts that would take you from one note to the other.

Another good idea would be to include image resizing, for the times when you've clipped web content that contains a needlessly enormous picture. I'm sure this would be fairly simple to implement.

Disclaimer: I am in no way affiliated with Evernote, nor am I being payed to write this content. In fact, I'm positive that they don't even know I exist, apart from my Premium subscription :)