Month: December 2010

Four Reasons Why I Cancelled My Angie’s List Subscription

I just cancelled my Angie’s List subscription.  Here’s why.

1. The navigation structure makes Facebook’s navigation seem crisp and intuitive.  I was going to do a screen shot, but then, um, I just carried on living my life.  It’s just too hard to find what you’re looking for.  I could probably live with that, but there are 3 more reasons.

2. They auto-renewed my subscription.  Sure, I probably agreed to that when I signed up a little more than a year ago in an unsuccessful attempt to find a home theater guy.  But it pisses me off when sites do that without sending me an email in advance.  It makes me think they don’t really believe I would knowingly choose to re-up.

3. Worse than the unannounced auto-renew, I just went to cancel my account, and there’s no easy way to do it.  It reminds me of my Rhapsody nightmare.

image

 

 

Notice that there isn’t even an email address listed.  You have to go find it.

So you’ll auto-renew me as a convenience, but I have to call, email or fax (fax?  seriously!?) to cancel.  Hmmm.  Angie’s List should take a page from Hulu Plus, where it is super-easy to cancel (which I just did because I’m simply not going to watch ads).  Hulu even sends an instant email acknowledging the cancellation.

4. Google.

Adios Angie.  They can’t say we never tried.

Christmas Comes Early: Evernote Has Folders!

evernote

I’ve moved from an Evernote evangelist to an Evernote activist and back to a happy Evernote customer, all thanks to the inexplicable absence and now presence of folders within its desktop app.

Without rehashing the dark and bloody past, and asking what in the hell took so long and whatnot, let’s move straight to the good news.

The just released version 4.1 of everybody’s favorite information storage and retrieval app finally lets us organize notebooks in folders.  They are called Stacks in the app, but that is just semantics.  Folders are here, and I am happy!

image

See the little white arrow to the left of “Work” up there?  Click on it and the Notebooks in the folder magiciliously  expand.

 

 

image

Wonderful!

The process is a little kludgy.  When you create a Stack, by right clicking on a Notebook, you don’t get the opportunity to name it right away.  The selected Notebook gets added to a generically named “Notebook Stack.”  You can then select (important step), right click and rename the Stack.  It’s not elegant, but doggone it it’s folders.

The upgrade process was also a bit of an adventure.  I upgraded at work, and things went swimmingly.  After updating, I quickly made some Stacks.   When I upgraded at home, things went a little amiss.

First, my app somehow ended up in an Asian language very much indecipherable to me.   So I deleted that installation and reinstalled from scratch.  I got my English back, but the Stacks I created at work did not sync over.  I am apparently not the only person having this problem.

Someone suggested deleting your local Evernote database and resyncing (IMPORTANT NOTE: copy and paste or otherwise preserve your local, non-synced Notebooks somewhere before you do that; I learned that step the hard way when I reformatted my hard drive a few months ago).  I tried that, but it didn’t work.

So I had to recreate my Stacks.  That’s a little bit of a drag, but it doesn’t change the fact that…

Evernote has folders.

Hallelujah!