The Evernote note-taking program is reinventing itself. When changing to a modern substructure, however, many functions fell by the wayside.

Evernote 10 in the test and Evernote CEO Ian Small in the interview Missing functions and test table Interview with Evernote CEO Ian Small Article in c’t 3 / 2021 read Evernote has been one of the most popular note-taking and information-gathering programs for twelve years. It saves texts, images, handwriting notes, file attachments, links, embedded PDFs and file attachments and organizes them in virtual notebooks. Because of the flexible keyword and search functions and also because it cooperates with many scanners, Evernote is sometimes used as a simple document management system. There are clients for Windows, macOS, iOS, Android and web browsers. The data can be kept synchronized on all devices via a cloud connection (Evernote uses Google servers for this).

With the version 10 the manufacturer has developed the clients from scratch. The Electron framework based on Chromium and Node.js serves as the basis for the desktop versions. Evernote for macOS and Windows becomes a web app and looks very similar to the web browser client. Unfortunately, it also took over the moderate speed from that. A few patches that were added quickly have alleviated the initial performance problems significantly, but the new Evernote still feels more sluggish than the previous native clients when leafing through and opening notes.

The surface looks a bit airier and more modern due to larger fonts and line spacing, but it also shows less information with the same window size. Some control elements have changed or postponed, which requires some getting used to. Unpleasant: Only six fonts are supported, two of which are decorative fonts. The previous clients could access all the respective system fonts. Notes designed with it can be seen in Evernote 10 now possibly different.

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