I have been a longtime user of Evernote, the popular note-taking application. Over the years, I have been swayed by attractive options from rivals like Google’s Keep, the arrival of Simplenote from iOS, Microsoft’s OneNote and a few others. I’ve always come back home to Evernote at the end of the day because, well, home is best. Even when the home has been hostile like Evernote has been to us who love taking our notes with us everywhere we go and have more than two devices. It has forced us to choose between our devices. Like forcing a parent to pick a favourite child.
Still, despite all that love-hate relationship over the years, I have only ever used its built-in share feature to share a note with a colleague once. I never liked the process. Like the Evernote app had become lately – bloated and all – it was cumbersome and not worth the struggle and I have never bothered to go back to it. Now Evernote wants to change all that. In fact, it is starting with us Android users (awww) because, “Note and notebook sharing should feel more natural, the way you would expect it to be”.
The new Evernote sharing menu allows users to share notes with others through an app of their choice (messaging and what have you) without ever leaving the app. Plus, one can invite even those who don’t use Evernote to view a note as well. By default, Evernote offers to share one’s notes to his/her friends and colleagues directly using their Evernote username or their email address in instances where they are not on Evernote. In this case, they get an email granting them access to the note in question. Users are also free to share notes “another way” which is where messaging apps come in. For instance, I live off Telegram Messenger and this looks like something that was designed with me in mind. I don’t want to have to leave the comfort of my Telegram “personal cloud” to go back to email while all my collaboration happens on that messaging app.
The Evernote app is also getting a new Shared section that lists all the notes and lists that have been shared with a user and allowing them to sort and filter them as they please.
Evernote and its many unnecessary features (we just want to take down notes for Christ’s sake) usually makes quite a number of people sick but this new Share feature may be just what the doctor ordered. Or is it?
