Evernote … time to say goodbye …

Evernote is an absolutely great note-taking service and application.

Or at least it was once …

You see, they have decided to push the freeloaders away and extort encourage us free users to “upgrade” to the premium service. Now, had they ever managed to do a premium feature that was worth the money, that might have worked.

But no, they did not. All the really useful features were already available for free.

So some genius at Evernote realized that the only way to get some of us to go over to premium was to start taking the really useful features away.

Some months ago they remove direct email forwarding to Evernote. That really stung, but I can always use Office integration and so it is manageable.

But today … wow … they just announced that in a few weeks they will restrict the free service to two devices, period. Evernote’s biggest strength is ubiquity across all devices and platforms. And they are now bring that into the paid service.

It makes sense. They obvious have a weak product management team and possibly weak development, so they are taking things that have worked forever and simply shutting us off.

Well, screw that.

I’ll be moving to OneNote rather than pay for what I already had for years. What a joke …

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/migrate-evernote-onenote/

Quicken Cash Manager 2016 – *updated* Painful Process, Finally Working

Remember that post a few weeks ago where Quicken extorted be to buy the next version of Cash Manager in order to continue downloading from my bank?

http://kimletkeman.blogspot.ca/2016/05/shameless-quicken.html

Well, I finally caved in because (and they know this) I really did not have a choice.

And the install went well enough.

But it turns out that the product will not run. I have to have a Quicken ID, which apparently started in 2014 and was hardened in 2015. I finally created one and successfully authenticated it in email.

But it still won’t run. When trying to log in from the application, I get a vague “something went wrong” error. Googling about leads me to realize that this is very common. Also that Quicken has no email support. You have to phone and only during business hours.

* update *

Technical support on the phone dropped my call after waiting 20m in the queue. The chat session they suggest you start would not do anything and no pop-up warning showed up. So effectively, Quicken technical support does not exist.

The community, on the other hand, does exist. I tried the standard manual and mondo patches they recommend ad nauseum and neither would install on my version. I tried to follow a link to a Canadian version of the patch and it just showed “file not found” …

So I finally posted the exact same question with a lot of bitter vitriol and within less than an hour I was up and running. There is a new Canadian patch that updates the product just fine.

https://assistant.quicken.com/patch/CAN3955ASD13/QWCA2016R2Patch.exe

Conclusion

Quicken continues to be the 800 pound gorilla … but the shine is coming off the star. The product has been sold to some management group and who knows what they will do with it. The technical support is weak, although the community did respond with the correct info once I bluntly complained, so kudos for that.

Cash Manager 2016 seems to be running, but I will update this if I have any trouble with the bank downloads. I have seen stories …

Published as the Father’s Day Edition header for Ourtown in the Ottawa Citizen

Thanks go to Robbi Hay, the editor of the Ourtown section of the Ottawa Citizen.

Pick one up this Thursday to get the scoop on all the goings on around these parts …