Evernote reduced the number of top-level shortcuts and enlarged their iconography slightly. The biggest shakeup was the formatting toolbar. The different versions “interpreted user’s content a little bit differently,” Nate Fortin, VP of design at Evernote told Engadget, “and resulted in an experience that we didn’t think was good enough.” To solve the problem, the company built a new editor that could be implemented with minimal changes across all five platforms. That meant the editor - the place where people actually craft notes with text, sketches, images and checklists was a little different on each platform. The company had built five distinct apps that followed the design philosophies behind Android, iOS, Windows, MacOS and the modern web. The editorĮvernote’s big redesign started with the note editor. Update your settings here, then reload the page to see it. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences.

The 'remember everything' company was no longer the king, but the grandfather of note-taking apps.

As Evernote tried to stabilize its business, a slew of fresh note-taking apps including Notion and Bear entered the market.

The company had expanded needlessly, some felt, instead of improving and better monetizing its core product. The not-quite-a-startup then killed its merchandise business, raised prices and implemented a privacy policy that was quickly reversed following widespread user backlash. In 2015, the company shut down Evernote Food, changed CEO and fired 13 percent of its staff. It launched a food-specific app and offered a whole range of merchandise including desk tidies and socks. It partnered with Moleskine to produce paper notebooks which, through a combination of stickers and scanning, could be easily tagged and ported into Evernote. That popularity allowed the company to expand into new areas. “As a company, we had invented the personal productivity category,” Ian Small, CEO of Evernote told Engadget. The obvious go-to, regardless of the hardware you owned and what you were trying to store. Evernote used to be the king of note-taking apps.

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