Manipulate (i.e. manually change) date of a note?

[kthesun 101]

Hi

Is it possible to manually change the date of a note? On evernote legacy on Windows you could do that through the note information screen. 

 

Regards

[Mike P 2,643]

10 minutes ago, kthesun said:

Hi

Is it possible to manually change the date of a note? On evernote legacy on Windows you could do that through the note information screen. 

 

Regards

You can still change the creation date through the note information screen. You cannot change the update date.

[kthesun 101]

Damn you are right. I missed that! Thank you!

[PinkElephant 8,118]

Just for completeness: Only works on desktop, not possible on mobile.

Changing the updated date wouldn’t make sense - it is updated Automat after many actions, so it would likely be overwritten very fast.

[kthesun 101]

On 8/8/2023 at 9:02 PM, PinkElephant said:

Just for completeness: Only works on desktop, not possible on mobile.

Changing the updated date wouldn’t make sense - it is updated Automat after many actions, so it would likely be overwritten very fast.

That's bullshit. But that's typical for the new, bad product vision of Evernote. Why do you think you can decide what makes sense for me and what doesn't? 

It costs 5 cent for Evernote to allow manual change of the updated date and no user without a need for that feature would ever care if the "updated at" field is read-Only or Read-Write.

Evernote Premium has recently doubled its price and is now as expensive as Netflix. For Powerusers that price is still justified and I assume they still pay it. But Evernotes product vision doesn't focus power users but casuals. By the way, haven't noticed a useful new feature in the last 12 months. It's so obvious what the strategy is: Make as much money as possible out of the existing locked in user base while reducing the costs as much as possible.  

[Boot17 1,452]

4 hours ago, kthesun said:

By the way, haven't noticed a useful new feature in the last 12 months.

Backlinks and RTE both came out within the last year. Those are huge improvements for me. Huge.

Also - FWIW - I also would like to be able to change the modify date of the note in v10, but now even more meta-data changes change the modify date so there is also that to take into consideration as well. (e.g. What constitutes an update to the note?: Renaming a tag, adding/removing a tag, moving notebooks, etc. This has been a point of discussion for years before v10 as well but now even more metadata changes update the modify date.)

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,963]

9 hours ago, kthesun said:

That's bullshit. But that's typical for the new, bad product vision of Evernote. Why do you think you can decide what makes sense for me and what doesn't? 

It costs 5 cent for Evernote to allow manual change of the updated date and no user without a need for that feature would ever care if the "updated at" field is read-Only or Read-Write.

Evernote Premium has recently doubled its price and is now as expensive as Netflix. For Powerusers that price is still justified and I assume they still pay it. But Evernotes product vision doesn't focus power users but casuals. By the way, haven't noticed a useful new feature in the last 12 months. It's so obvious what the strategy is: Make as much money as possible out of the existing locked in user base while reducing the costs as much as possible.  

Lots of opinion presented as fact here. I assume "5 cent" is metaphorical, but how could any of us know what that programming change would cost? A number of people here seem to think that Evernote's business strategy is based on irritating them. And, of course, assume that "useful" only means useful to them. Please allow the rest of us to have a purpose as Evernote users.

Leaving all that aside, I'm trying to envision how a feature to manually change the updated date would work. I assume that would mean also preventing the program from actually updating that field when the note is edited, otherwise how could it work reliably? But then the field name "updated date" no longer has any meaning. Since there are a number of people who want this, maybe Evernote should simply introduce a separate date metadata field, something like "tracking date," so that it would be possible both to do what some users want to do with date metadata, and to know when the note was last updated.

[PinkElephant 8,118]

Some people don’t use the app as designed, but as their personal pet project, envisioning „creative“ ways of doing things that are not part of the concept. It is always the same story line, somebody telling he is more clever than all the rest, but for all his cleverness he needs a change in the app.

If this group of users would get what they want, we would experience the most heated discussions here, because by default these users can’t agree with one another - even less so than with how the app basically works.

Clever is who uses an app within the existing feature limitations to reach his goals. Because this doesn’t depend on unfounded changes, but only on making creative use of the existing features as they are. Fields under system control should not be used to store any personal information.

And I pay my 5ct for posting this …

[s2sailor 2,205]

One of the advantages of Evernote has been the flexibility it provides.  Over the years I’ve enjoyed reading about how others have adapted it to meet their needs. Some of the user cases seemed extreme and may not have made much sense to me but I always appreciated how others used the tool.  V10 was built from scratch and is not yet at the same level of flexibility and efficiency it once was.  Personally, I would like to be able to manually change the updated date and also be able to select which metadata changes trigger the update date to automatically change.  Recently, for a while there, just viewing a note was changing the updated date which wasn’t helpful at all.  User ability to control what affects the updated date field would be must welcome, at least by me.

[Mike P 2,643]

9 hours ago, Dave-in-Decatur said:

Since there are a number of people who want this, maybe Evernote should simply introduce a separate date metadata field, something like "tracking date," so that it would be possible both to do what some users want to do with date metadata, and to know when the note was last updated.

I suppose you could use reminder date, and then you could use all the advanced search syntax built around that.

[kthesun 101]

10 hours ago, Dave-in-Decatur said:

Lots of opinion presented as fact here. I assume "5 cent" is metaphorical, but how could any of us know what that programming change would cost? A number of people here seem to think that Evernote's business strategy is based on irritating them. And, of course, assume that "useful" only means useful to them. Please allow the rest of us to have a purpose as Evernote users.

Leaving all that aside, I'm trying to envision how a feature to manually change the updated date would work. I assume that would mean also preventing the program from actually updating that field when the note is edited, otherwise how could it work reliably? But then the field name "updated date" no longer has any meaning. Since there are a number of people who want this, maybe Evernote should simply introduce a separate date metadata field, something like "tracking date," so that it would be possible both to do what some users want to do with date metadata, and to know when the note was last updated.

You remember that Evernote had this crazy feature  until Evernote 10, right? 
 

Evernote will surely vanish in a few years. Look at the App Store ratings. There are dozens of better apps for new users. Only reason Evernote still exists is because they can blackmail their existing users who are locked in due to many years of usage and thousands of notes 

 

[PinkElephant 8,118]

Oh, today is the „We count Features day“ day. Let’s count, but instead of a one sided, biased way of counting we count all features. Oooooops, poor legacy ….

AppStore rating is 4.1 as of today, below Obsidian, better than Notion, just to name two others.

Just to mention: There is no app that offers that many ways to export. The format established by EN for a full export called ENEX is the most widely accepted format with other apps to import note data. If you look at the exporting tools of most apps, they don’t offer anything comparable. What means that anybody arguing with being „blackmailed“ by a „lock in“ is just showing to be either incompetent or badly informed.

[agsteele 2,950]

38 minutes ago, kthesun said:

You remember that Evernote had this crazy feature  until Evernote 10, right? 

Yes, we remember but I have chosen to make the best of the current software. Both it's strengths and it's weaknesses.

Life is too short to fall out over the need or not for the ability to amend the updated timestamp. 

I have no need for it. I realise that others might. So I wish them well in their advocacy and hope we don't need to fall out when we take a different view.

[gazumped 11,667]

4 hours ago, kthesun said:

Only reason Evernote still exists is because they can blackmail their existing users who are locked in due to many years of usage and thousands of notes 

As others have already pointed out,  there is no 'lock in' to Evernote.  Exporting is easy - or you could downgrade your account to free and still have access to all your notes.  Simply start a new account elsewhere and import history from Evernote only when you need it.  Note that ease of export and continued access to large notes in a free account are not necessarily features you'll find elsewhere ...

[AlbertR 532]

18 hours ago, PinkElephant said:

Clever is who uses an app within the existing feature limitations to reach his goals. ...

Yep - but we've to go through a possibly long time to reach our goals with EN10 (goals that we already had been reached with <you know> 😉) 😞
And I pay my 2ct for posting this …

[Dave Green 210]

I just include a line near the top of the note

Last updated: 2023-09-03

to cover the scenarios where I want to distinguish between significant and file churn changes.  It works for most of my use cases (not searchable in a "changed since" sense) and in most of the use cases, I want the visibility of the date.

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,963]

18 hours ago, s2sailor said:

One of the advantages of Evernote has been the flexibility it provides.  Over the years I’ve enjoyed reading about how others have adapted it to meet their needs. Some of the user cases seemed extreme and may not have made much sense to me but I always appreciated how others used the tool.  V10 was built from scratch and is not yet at the same level of flexibility and efficiency it once was.

The key expression here, I think, is "it provides." Evernote once provided the ability to edit the updated date manually. I presume this never prevented that edit from being overwritten when the note was actually updated? (I could be wrong.) "Date updated" metadata is something Evernote provides, like a lot of other programs. Ability to edit that metadata is not common, I think. If Evernote doesn't provide that ability anymore, that's a programming choice, and IMHO a reasonable one.

18 hours ago, s2sailor said:

Personally, I would like to be able to manually change the updated date and also be able to select which metadata changes trigger the update date to automatically change.  Recently, for a while there, just viewing a note was changing the updated date which wasn’t helpful at all.  User ability to control what affects the updated date field would be must welcome, at least by me.

This one is a bit of a jaw-dropper for me. Are there other programs that let users customize when updating a note updates the date updated field? I'm with @PinkElephant at this point: such a deep remodeling of the purpose of a portion of the (meta)data suggests that some different solution altogether is needed. Again, I suggest adding a metadata field for date tracking (call it whatever). Couldn't possibly cost more than 7 cents.

[Boot17 1,452]

Being able to sort by the updated date is a helpful tool for me to see which notes I’ve worked on across all my tags and notebooks in the most recent days.

Sometimes I might fix just a typo in a note from 2 years ago and I want to pretend like it was that way all along so in Legacy I’d manually adjust the Update date. (Now I just live with it)

Operating systems allow for the file creation date and modify date of files to be manually set. 

I can also see though that Evernote might want to start using that date for internal programming reasons (syncing or other) and allowing users to manually change that date could be problematic. 
 

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,963]

3 hours ago, Boot17 said:

Being able to sort by the updated date is a helpful tool for me to see which notes I’ve worked on across all my tags and notebooks in the most recent days.

Sometimes I might fix just a typo in a note from 2 years ago and I want to pretend like it was that way all along so in Legacy I’d manually adjust the Update date. (Now I just live with it)

Operating systems allow for the file creation date and modify date of files to be manually set. 

I can also see though that Evernote might want to start using that date for internal programming reasons (syncing or other) and allowing users to manually change that date could be problematic. 
 

Good considerations. Yes, I've occasionally done that kind of typo fix in a local file and manually reverted the file update date through the OS (actually using Directory Opus). And I almost always sort in Evernote by updated date, and deal with having notes show up at the top after some minor fix. (The alternative, of course, is to live with the typo until you want to make a substantive change in the note. But what neurotic compulsive perfectionistic decent human being could do that?)

[s2sailor 2,205]

16 hours ago, Dave-in-Decatur said:

This one is a bit of a jaw-dropper for me. Are there other programs that let users customize when updating a note updates the date updated field? I'm with @PinkElephant at this point: such a deep remodeling of the purpose of a portion of the (meta)data suggests that some different solution altogether is needed. Again, I suggest adding a metadata field for date tracking (call it whatever). Couldn't possibly cost more than 7 cents.

This isn’t really an extreme idea, but if this field is used in the new sync structure, then I can see allowing users access to change this field would cause havoc and not be practical.  I would be fine with a new user defined field as long as we are allowed to sort on this field.  I usually sort by updated date and am always surprised at the notes that will float to the top along with expected ones.

This certainly isn’t a big problem and is not on the top of my list of suggested improvements, but having a sortable field that sorts only on changes that are meaningful to me would be useful. 

[AlbertR 532]

18 hours ago, Dave-in-Decatur said:

I suggest adding a metadata field for date tracking (call it whatever)

and 

1 hour ago, s2sailor said:

... but having a sortable field that sorts only on changes that are meaningful to me would be useful.

"Properties" would be a good name - see https://discussion.evernote.com/forums/topic/111798-evernote-research-tags/?do=findComment&comment=494811

18 hours ago, Dave-in-Decatur said:

Couldn't possibly cost more than 7 cents.

Agree 😉 - but it's worth.

[s2sailor 2,205]

2 hours ago, AlbertR said:

Properties" would be a good name

While we are dreaming, let’s make the field title user definable 😀.

[AlbertR 532]

29 minutes ago, s2sailor said:

let’s make the field title user definable

Of course - but my idea is to have more than one user definable property columns. Each of the them will get an own title. 🙂
Every property should get a property type like "date", "integer", "floating" or "string" to allow defined value ranges. During input the UI might help to enter only valid values. Sorting such types columns would be very easy...

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,963]

3 hours ago, AlbertR said:

"Properties" would be a good name - see https://discussion.evernote.com/forums/topic/111798-evernote-research-tags/?do=findComment&comment=494811

I voted it up -- now it has 2!