jasonkincaid.net
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Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant
To say this post pains me would be an
understatement. More than any other technology,
Evernote is part of me, having evolved from habit to
instinct over several years and nearly seven
thousand notes. Every day ideas flit through my head,
ideas for essays, for characters, for jokes. Just now I
catch a glimpse of one, without thinking I am talking into my phone like a
Star Trek Communicator, telling myself that maybe I should title this post
Leaky Sync. Maybe not.
Because I use it so often, I am unusually familiar with the service’s warts.
Evernote’s applications are glitchy to the extreme; they often feel as if
they’re held together by the engineering equivalent of duct tape. Browser
extensions crash, text cursors leap haphazardly across the screen — my
copy of Evernote’s image editor Skitch silently failed to sync for months
because I hadn’t updated to the new version. Most issues are benign
enough, but the apps are so laden with quirks that I’ve long held a deep-
seated fear that perhaps some of my data has not been saved, that
through a syncing error, an accidental overwrite — some of these ideas
have been forgotten.
As of last month, I am all but sure of it.
I’ve been learning how to write songs. It’s terrifying because I stink, so I
trick myself, diddling around without actually intending to record
anything. With any luck I reach a fugue state, vaguely listening for my
fingers to do something interesting; sometimes instinct steers me toward
the green elephant’s ‘record’ button and I play for a while.
And so I find myself on December 5, when a meandering session results in
an 18 minute Evernote audio recording on my iPhone labeled “not bad
halfway through” — high praise, for me. Some of the chord changes are
sheer luck, no idea what I did but they sounded good the first time.
I decide to give it another listen with more discerning ears, self-loathing
eagerly waiting in the wings.
And — nothing. Zero seconds out of zero seconds. It’s a blank file.
Alarmed, I tap record again, make another note. It won’t play, either.
Another. This one works.
One more. Zero out of zero.
I check the Wifi signal (fine). I let the phone sit for a while to sync, just in
case. I head to the web app, which — thankfully — shows the note intact,
with its attachment as an 8.7 megabyte .m4a file.
I try to open it in iTunes — it shrugs. Quicktime spits an error. Time to
bust out the big guns. VLC.
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