Short version: Mac users who got Evernote from the official site, go back and get the new one. If you got it from the Mac App Store, the update will be with you soon.

Longer version. If you’re an Evernote user then you tend to think that it is great but you have either one or two specific concerns. The one that everybody has is that starting a new note is slow. This is why there are a slew of iPhone apps that do nothing but quickly launch so that you can type something, then squirts your text into Evernote while you go off doing something else.

It’s also why a very welcome iOS 8 Extension is own controls for creating new notes. By itself, that doesn’t make the process much faster but we’re talking nuances here anyway: if it were that slow to start, we’d never start it.

The second concern is chiefly for Mac users. Evernote for Mac could get in knots and become frustrating to use for its speed issues, for how fiddly its tables were.

But I get to say could, past tense, because I’ve been running the updated release all morning and it’s great. From the Evernote blog:

You know what’s better than adding a new feature? Making a bunch of existing ones a million times better. That’s what today’s Evernote for Mac update is all about.

For months, our Mac team has been quietly rebuilding every underlying aspect of the app. This allowed us to tackle speed, sync, and editing in a holistic way rather than piecemeal improvements. On the surface, things look more or less the same. Hidden beneath is an entirely new Evernote, designed to put a smile on millions of faces.

Evernote for Mac: Better Note Editing, Faster Sync and 100s of Fixes – Andrew Sinkov, Evernote blog (22 September 2014)