This is how far Evernote's bugs have gone: locked out and subject to 'support loop of hell'

Today, while working with Evernote, I started having my daily dose of crashes. I was already expecting that, since my plan was to do something very out-of-the-ordinary: cutting and pasting a 33 page long text file from one note to the other... this is, of course, a very challenging task for a modern Macbook air computer, that should make my fans noisy and all. In 2013 (sorry, 2014). Yeah, look how far we have gone.

After 6 consecutive crashes and more then 10 minutes wasted on the attempt (I'm not exaggerating), I couldn’t log back in anymore in the desktop client. It showed an alert telling my password was wrong. SS is in portuguese:

It wasn’t.

I then tried to log in in the web interface. This prompted the following error message (Error loading this page, try again later or please get in touch with support):

This was, at the same time, good and bad news. Good because it hinted that, if I’m lucky, my desktop app didn’t decide to corrupt my entire database of 2000+ notes; it might just be an auth problem with the Evernote cloud.

At the same time, it meant bad news: I need my notes, and I needed them now !

Checking status.evernote.com shows what it always shows: everything is running smoothly. Yeah, right.

So, let’s do what the web interface tells me to do: contact support.

I’m a premium user, so I’m entitled to chat support, even tough most of the times it means a 15 minute wait. But I need my notes, I needed them now.

So I click on the chat button, and it opens a popup asking me to login … I think you can tell where this is headed.

Credentials typed for the 10th time, click on login and … I smile. I smile because of how ridiculous this situation is: I’m LOCKED OUT of my DESKTOP APP (why the hell can’t I open it on the first place when the servers are down ? just give my notes without sync abilities, handling conflicts afterwards), and when I try to login via web app, I’m told to contact support, and when I try to contact support, I’m told there’s an issue and that I should contact support …. WTF ?!

This is a joke for a company that aims to provide you with a tool that you are supposed to throw your “entire digital life” into. We’re becoming hostages of this tool, and we weren’t warned in advance where we were getting ourselves into. Actually, their marketing and nicely design websites told us exactly otherwise

And this is just ONE extreme example of how buggy EN has become. For me, I can list my daily problems with the app:

Tagging hangs the app for 5-7 seconds every time I start typing the first char of the tag; EVERY time

Copying text from other apps (Microsoft Word) crashes evernote if there are more then 40-50 pages involved. I did many tests until I found this number (sigh)

Searches inside notes for words that have " " around them doesn't work. So if I search for EVERNOTE in a note that contains "EVERNOTE" it won't find it. This also happens with some formatting (like colors and stuff, I don't know how to replicate but it happend thousands of times so far)

You're READING a note and suddenly your search that had 50 matches disappears and you're left with 0 matches. Simply repeating the search brings the notes back again.

Performance degradation: every once in a while you have to close / reopen the desktop app because it simply becomes unusable for typing anything, even on small documents

Evernote WebClipper works only 70% of the time. The other 30% I get notes with "..." title and they simple stay syncing forever

I use Evernote for Studying; in a couple of days I'm taking a test for a Federal Judge exam and I took the day off to review my notes before the biggest test in my life. Thanks EN for making my hard-earned vacation day completely useless !