A Needle in my Bread
I am a heavy user of both Evernote and Omnifocus. They are on all my bits of glass. I use them hundreds of times a week. They are deeply integrated into my life, my workflow and other apps.
And I loathe them both.
Of course I use them because they both do valuable things for me.
Evernote lets me have all my reading and note taking in one place. It is the only ‘read later’ app I know that can accept email attachments and sync them. Except that the background sync never works, it crashes on me whenever I try to do something complex, and the screen layouts are thoughtless. I would move in a clock tick, but there’s nothing I can move to.
Omnifocus is the same. Cross-device syncing works well, it is loosely GTD which suits me, and I can get things out of my head and into the app in seconds. But processing things in my task inbox is a nightmare. I have to tag everything with Context and Location before they get tidied away. The views are Quixotic to the point of making me want to smash a windmill. And for some unknown reason Projects keep showing up in lists that should only have tasks. And don’t try and do anything remotely difficult in the mobile apps.
FWP of course. My point is that I would move if I could, but some of the features that matter to me aren’t done well anywhere else.To steal from Christopher Logue’s unbelievably out of print Kings, they are ‘a needle in my bread’. I try new apps all the time, but keep coming back to these two like a dog to its own vomit. (Which I thought was (Beckett)[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proust_(Beckett_essay)], but is, I assume, Beckett referencing Proverbs.)
I wonder if their user research is giving them any clue that this is happening? How could you design telemetry to capture heavy and heavy-hearted users?