Evernote gets a comments feature + disable slash commands
Newsletter housekeeping: The latest version for PC & Mac is 10.129.3. You can grab it from the download page. Latest mobile version is 10.129.2.
Many thanks to Anne and Anon person who supported Taming the Trunk over the last week, its much appreciated. If you find this article useful and have it in your pocket to support my efforts you can tip me a coffee here.
Something new to talk about this week that surprise some folk.
Leave comments on your Evernote note
Comments are rolling out to folks on version 10.129.2 onwards.
To give you a bit of history, comments were mentioned ages ago in one of the Evernote Expert calls around the time they removed the Work Chat feature.
Work chat was a very simple chat function that folks who has access to a note could use to collaborate. Hardly anyone used it and it was slowing down the app so it was removed. At the same time an idea for comments was floated as a better way for folks to collaborate.
I was one who thought this was a good idea as I use comments a lot in Word and leave myself comments on parts of a document.
So, it arrives.
When you highlight some text a little comment icon appears at the far right of the screen.
If you click the icon a little comment box appears where you can write some words.
If you share your note with different folk, you can have a back and forth with them around a certain part of the note.
One thing to mention. Comments only work if you have shared a note with someone who has an Evernote account and it only works from within the app. In the future comments will be working in the Lite editor as well.
If you want to edit a comment you've made then click the three-dot menu next to the comment and you can edit or delete it.
The three dot menu at the top right of the comment box lets you delete the whole thread.
What to use Evernote comments for?
Obviously, you can leave comments on various bits of text and collaborate with others but thinking a bit more about this I quite like the idea of leaving comments for yourself.
Leave yourself some Todo's around certain areas of a note
Highlight areas of a large document that may need more work
Leave yourself a note about a note!
I also quite like the idea of creating a chat area at the top or bottom of a note where you can chat in general about the note.
Right now, comments are in BETA and this is the first iteration so it’s pretty basic.
The Evernote team are looking to build on this by adding some sort of resolution system where you can approve/agree/tick a comment and see a history of resolved comments.
Leaving comments on images, hiding all comments, editing comments on mobile and comments in the Lite sharing editor are all planned for the future.
Will you be using comments? Let me know in the er, comments!
Disable / slash and @ at commands
This is going to please some folk.
I must admit I find both / and @ to be quite useful and use them pretty much every day.
Slash (/) commands help you create elements within your note very quickly.
At (@) commands help you create links to other notes quickly. I'm starting to use @ more for internal links than the keyboard shortcut right now.
If you don't like them, there's a new setting for disabling slash and at commands.
Head over to Settings -> Notes and near the top you'll find a couple of new tick boxes.
Uncheck them and it disables the commands.
Are you a slasher or an atter?? Leave me a comment.
You can now add the home page widget view to the navbar on mobile
A small update has arrived on Android and iOS from version 10.129.1 where you can add the widget home page to your navbar.
Head over to Settings -> Navigation -> Customise Navigation and you can select My Widgets.
You can also set My Widgets as your default launch page by heading to Settings -> Navigation -> Default Launch Page and tapping My Widgets.
My widgets used to be the default landing page in the phone app but it was slow and clunky, it’s been approved but it may take a split second longer than other pages to appear because of all the information it displays.
I don’t use this view on mobile but will you be going back to the widgets page as default? Let me know in the comments.
That's it for this week.
Have a great weekend
All the best
Jon
Liking the Comments feature better than I thought I would - the earlier announcements seemed to imply it was only for shared notes to allow collaboration, but as implemented it's going to be really useful for me to highlight/annotate sections of text which will need revision, etc. Wonder if they could add Tasks inside of a comment? I see at the moment in the latest Mobile version (10.129.2) that you can see comments that have been added to notes, but not as yet add, edit pr delete Comments in the Mobile app - guess that's something ro come in a subsequent release?
I use / mostly for headers and to insert tasks.
The @ command I did not know, and I copy a lot of internal links from note to note. So now @ is my new favorite tool :-)
I particularly like the fact that it lists notes by most recent, but the search works well as well.
On another note, I noticed that this is in progress, "Set your own personal default text size, font, and color for header and body text." This makes me VERY happy.