What's new at Evernote? 🎉 December / 2024 recap

Okay, so it's evening, it's December 31st 2024, and what better moment to record this video! Let's go together through what happened in December and then, in the second half of the video, I'll also tell you all about what we— like a little recap of what we did this year. Okay, first of all we have Spaces for individuals.

It's a feature that's in beta. It allows you to have a separate space where you can post your notes and notebooks so that you can have better separation between all your notes and content, for instance a home space, like the one you see here, or a workspace. It's just another layer of organization and a hierarchy that you can use to better share your notes and archive your notes.

Currently it's in beta, it looks very much like what people have been experiencing for a couple years now in the Teams offering. We observed that it's a very powerful tool and we thought why not allowing individual users to use Spaces as well. Many people told us they could find it useful and so we brought it to to individuals as well.

Keep the feedback coming and we'll work on it and iterate on it as usual! Then we have draggable paragraphs. Now, some types of paragraphs were previously already draggable.

We are working to make every piece of content on a on a note draggable, so basically, I think it's pretty easy to understand, you can now grab a paragraph and move it somewhere else you can also can grab the collapsed header and move it around and it will move both the header and the collapsed content that it's inside it. Standalone Evernote tools. Now, if you're a casual user you might care a lot about this.

if you're an advanced Evernote user and you have Evernote installed on every device of yours, probably you don't care as much about this. And, especially if you don't use evernote much you might get to know Evernote because of these tools. So, recently, we started building these tools which are basically advanced features that we offer in Evernote and we make them available for free on the web.

We have AI transcribe: basically we took the AI transcription feature that's inside the Editor and we built a small product around it with, like, a super simple UX, you can just navigate to it on your browser, upload a file, click a button and it will give you the transcription of that file, be it an audio file a video file or an image then we have PDF editor now you can basically have a standalone  tool where you can just like quickly upload a PDF draw a few arrows maybe a few like text boxes and stuff and you can just use that and then download it. It also works on images. And then we have File converter: you can basically take PDFs, images and convert them to other file formats.

We saw that this was a pretty requested feature, so we built this. Now, as I said, these things are useful especially because we want to show people that Evernote offers tools that leverage either AI I or super easy to use UX so that they get familiar with our brand, they get familiar with Evernote, and they also have a direct path to start using Evernote as as their tool. And then we have a few quality of life improvements.

Now we've all come to love these. First of all, is that you can now access content that is shared with you immediately previously you had to go to your email, find the email from Evernote that told you person X shared the note with you, and then click on 'Accept'. The flow was also pretty broken, so it was kind of clunky, slow, etc.

Now, you'll just see it immediately in your 'Shared with me' note list, and so it's just like much better UX. We are now syncing the sorting preferences across all your devices. So, if in a notebook you want to sort notes by date updated, you will also see the same sorting option for that notebook in your other devices.

Now we wanted to leave you with this section, where we go through our favorite features that we released in 2024. So many of you may not know this, but in the beginning of the year we gave ourselves the ambitious goal of releasing 100 improvements on Evernote in 2024 because we were coming from 2023 which was all about, like, the foundations, the architecture, and more longer and harder work that required us to focus deeply on those things, and we didn't have as much time to dedicate to the actual improvements that we wanted to to to build. But then, as soon as we could build those, we decided okay let's be ambitious and let's try to hit 100.

And I'm very happy to announce that we did hit 100 in December and there's a whole blog post with the whole list, I'll just go through my favorites which are not necessarily your favorites, or the most impactful or interesting ones it's just a small selection of improvements that mean a lot to me. The first one is the new Mobile Home. The whole team is very proud of how we transformed Evernote Mobile from a version that was hard to understand, potentially powerful for some people (and in fact the functionality is still there), but it was pretty slow when it came to, like, raw performance, loading times, etc.

To what you see on the right that's much, much faster, like a whole new level of performance that we unlocked. And we also now added the possibility to customize both the navbar and the launch page, so basically now Evernote is both more customizable and much, much faster, so I'm very, very proud of the team for this one. And then we have AI Transcribe.

This was a feature that we brainstormed and we thought, 'okay why not building these? ' Because many of the features that we build are things that we source from user requests —so we just read feedback on customer support tickets, online, on social media— and most of the things we build come through those channels. But this one was a feature that we just said 'okay, I mean, we can easily build this and make it good and we don't think other not taking tools have this and so let's build it, let's build it', and the feedback from our customers was just amazing.

So we were all very happy to see how people appreciated voice-to-text and image-to-text. And then we have slash commands. This was a feature that we released a bit earlier, it just made creatin notes so simple: you now don't need to reach for your mouse.

Also, it offers a very scalable way for us to add building blocks to Evernote in a way that doesn't clutter the user interface, so advanced users are loving it, people who who don't need it can just ignore it without having the whole UX messed up. And then we have collapsible sections. It was relatively easy to build compared to the others but it was so obviously a huge improvement and people were crazy about it, rightfully, and so it's, like, a reminder for ourselves that it doesn't need to be complicated.

This is, in my opinion, the quality of life improvement by definition and so we wanted to have this in the list. Yeah, this is it! Thank you very much for staying with us through, all the way from March 2024 when we first started releasing these videos and I hope we'll have many more in 2025.

Happy New Year!