Lessons from Evernote’s flight from .NET

I'm a long-time Evernote user, hater of the Evernote 3.5 client, and I write .NET code for a living.

There is no question that Evernote 3.5 sucked. It was slow, yes, but that was only part of it; using it one got the sense that one was using software without polish. The text editing experience was particularly broken, with formatting as simple as a bulleted list behaving strangely.

I've experienced some of the same WPF issues as Evernote reported, plus a few they haven't, and I'm sure those issues impacted the usability of their client. There is no question that WPF 3.5 has some serious issues. However, the lack of polish and poor fit and finish of the Evernote 3.5 client cannot be blamed entirely on WPF.

Having played very briefly with the Evernote 4.0 GUI, I can already tell it's better. It's back to feeling like a polished, performant tool. I imagine some of this is due to the use of native code, but at least a bit of it must be due to a team of great C++ developers working in an environment they know well.