(Archived) Tag Tree in the Android App

[borets 2]

Dear Evernote

Instead of viewing our tags in a collage of bulky icons, please give us the option to view our tags in the nice tree that we built on our desktop version in the Android app. What would be even more awesome is the ability to move the child tags around (to different parents or to the parent-less realm altogether) in the Android app as well.

The tag hierarchy is an awesome feature in Evernote, but the Android app is completely blind to it, which makes the feature significantly handicapped.

Thank you in advance for listening and adding this feature in the next release of Evernote for Android!

-Mike

[varpness 0]

People on this forum keep saying a hierarchy is completely unnecessary and tags are superior. Of course, this is contradicted by the fact that the developers have implemented it in the desktop client. If it servers no purpose, then why is it implemented? It needs to be in the Android client, or perhaps someone could explain how to do the same thing with tags.

I've looked around and have yet to find someone able to backup the argument of tags over trees, and I even dedicated a thread to asking for help with understanding how to use tags to do everything a hierarchy can do, but I don't have my fingers crossed.

Meanwhile Springpad allows this with Android client, but it doesn't have an offline desktop client, which is the only reason I'm hanging around Evernote at this point. Actually, I'm really never offline so maybe Springpad is the answer.

Or maybe a good tutorial on how to use tags effectively with VERY large collection of structured notes.

[lockiedownunder 1]

I have all my 520 tags sorted into a tree view/hierachy on my desktop.

Branch for work, broken up into Safes, Automotive, Electric access control etc (I'm a locksmith)

Branch for personal, broken up into Recipes, finances, bookmarks etc etc

This make finding them quite simple. Although I do wish applying a lower tag would auto add the tree structure but I can live without it.

For the Android a tree view would make much more sense. I would not be forced to look through sooo many tags to find the one I want as the tree view would be mostly closed.

Please consider this

Tony

[KentChes 0]

Evernote is one terrific app!

I would like to voice my opinion in support of a Tag Tree in the Android app. Finding a specific tag in the overall list is rather hard - even when sorted by name. I suppose I could cleverly name the tags to denote their hierarchical structure (i.e. Next Action @Home) - but this would make their names more complex.

Please consider it.

Have a great day!

[danrochman 1]

+1

I love the nested tag functionality in the desktop app & web, but need it most of all in the Android app, where drilling down into a tree would be much faster than any other way of finding my tagged notes. But while a treeview control in a left-hand pane would be consistent with the desktop and web apps, it's probably unwieldy on most non-tablet Android devices, even in portrait mode.

As an alternative UI, I'd be pretty happy with tags acting like (nested) folders, rather than a split-pane treeview control UI. I picture it as follows:

1. Have a setting in the Android app to "Show all tags" (the current model) or "Show only root tags" (or some such - yes, that wording is bad), which would hide all nested tags from the initial "Tags" view. This setting could default to the current model, so that some users (like me) could opt in by changing just one setting, while everyone else wouldn't have to notice or deal with any change.

2. In the current Tags view, when showing only root tags (at the outset), modify the Note Count values for each tag so that they include the notes tagged with that tag AND ALSO any/all notes tagged with any tags that are nested below/within that tag. Relatively simple grouping/recursion, I hope.

3. When I tap on a tag, show me the "Notes tagged " section just as you do now, BUT ALSO have a "Child Tags of " section right below (or above?) it, listing each of the child tags immediately below the current tag, with each of those tags showing their own note counts, using the same code as was used at the root. Tapping on any of those tags takes me down one level, and so on indefinitely. This lets me quickly and intuitively drill down to any note/tag I want. Throw in a couple of small buttons at the top of each screen (below the root) for navigation: a "Home" button (back to the tag root), and an Up/Back button. Breadcrumb navigation would be nice, but not essential, and with deeply nested tags (and/or tags with long names), it probably wouldn't be that workable anyway...

So, just my $0.02. I'm not much an Android/Java developer, but I've got the SDK installed, and know enough to be dangerous. If you give me access to the sources, I'd be happy to contribute.

ps: I'm going premium the minute nested tags arrive on Android.

[borets 2]

As an alternative UI, I'd be pretty happy with tags acting like (nested) folders, rather than a split-pane treeview control UI.

Great input! This will make the android app totally awesome!

Dear Evernote,

I will be a happy camper if you listen to danrochman.

-Mike

[Philip Constantinou 11]

Thanks for the feedback. We're looking into ways of incorporating a tag tree design into upcoming version of the Android client.

We'd thought the visual nature of the tag thumbnail grid was more useful than the tag tree since it provides a preview, label and count with higher information density. Also there's a bit of ambiguity when browsing a tree -- does tap mean view the note list or the sub tags? I'd been concerned that the number of elements per page on the Notebooks screen had decreased with the new Notebook view that incorporated Stacks. We'd have the same shortcoming with a tag view and users generally have more tags than notebooks.

Android UI guidelines discourages line widths that are narrow because they are hard to tap -- so there's a limit to the number of useful rows that you can put on the screen. There's about 25% fewer items (9 instead of 12) per screen in a list view than the tag grid.

But, the forum feedback seems to indicate that a list view that represents hierarchy is more useful than a tag grid with no hierarchy.

Have any of you seen a tree browser on Android that you like? Astro File Manager is the highest rated app that incorporates a tree browser.

[borets 2]

Preamble:

Before (or after) you think, "Holy *****!! This is a LOOOOONG post!!"

This feature is very important to me, and I'd like to give Evernote as much feedback and as many ideas about it as I can.

Thanks for the feedback. We're looking into ways of incorporating a tag tree design into upcoming version of the Android client.

Thank you sooo much!

We'd thought the visual nature of the tag thumbnail grid was more useful than the tag tree since it provides a preview, label and count with higher information density. Also there's a bit of ambiguity when browsing a tree -- does tap mean view the note list or the sub tags? I'd been concerned that the number of elements per page on the Notebooks screen had decreased with the new Notebook view that incorporated Stacks. We'd have the same shortcoming with a tag view and users generally have more tags than notebooks.

Android UI guidelines discourages line widths that are narrow because they are hard to tap -- so there's a limit to the number of useful rows that you can put on the screen. There's about 25% fewer items (9 instead of 12) per screen in a list view than the tag grid.

Regardless of the view, it's very useful to know the following things for each tag:

1. 
   [*:9kc4rt19]How many notes are tagged with it.
   [*:9kc4rt19]How many child-tags it has.

I can definitely see your reasoning in the value of the thumbnail view. You may want to give the users a choice of the two views (thumbnail vs. list view), kind of like you did in the notes view. Here are my ideas for both views to incorporate the tag hierarchy:

Wait. Before I go on, following assumes that we only see the "top level" tags (i.e. the initial Tags view will not show any child-tags, and viewing a parent-tag's child-tags will not show any grand-children-tags). I will go into adding more versatility to the views later. Please, bear with me.

Thumbnail View:

We already have green little bubbles indicating the note count for each tag. If tag has no notes, no green bubble. This is nice, no clutter. You may want to consider adding a grey little bubble under the green one to indicate the number of child-tags for each parent-tag. If no sub-tags, no grey bubble. If a parent-tag has no notes, only show grey bubble. No clutter, this is nice.

We already have a context menu popping up when we touch-and-hold on a tag thumbnail. It only has one menu item: View Notes. You may want to consider adding a second menu item: View Child Tags. By default, touching a tag would bring us to the tag's notes. To view the tag's sub-tags, we would simply touch-and-hold it, and select "View Child Tags."

List View:

You're making the rows tall enough to make sure their clickable, so you have enough room to say: "# Notes" and "# Child Tags" somewhere in that row.

I have a suggestion for navigating the list view of the tags, but I'm not sure about how comfortable you would be to implement it. As in the Thumbnail View, we would touch the tag to view its notes. To view a parent-tag's child-tags, we would slide or "fling" our finger horizontally across the tag-row in either direction. An android file explorer called eFile has implemented something like this in their list-view of files/folders.

Whether or not you implement the sliding-finger navigation, we would still have the context menu that the Thumbnail View has to view the child-tags of a parent-tag.

Another alternative is double-tap on a tag to view its child-tags. This will work for the Thumbnail View as well!

What about showing all of them??

To add more flexibility, the grey bar at the top (the one that shows the total number of tags) may have an on-off switch to "Show All" tags. You may actually turn the tag-count into a button to conserve space (just make it look more "clickable" with a nice border, or something like that). To demonstrate more clearly the value of this, I'll draw you a scenario:

1. 
   [*:9kc4rt19] I open Evernote.
   [*:9kc4rt19] I touch the Tags thumbnail (which has the TOTAL number of tags in parentheses).
   
   1. 
      [*:9kc4rt19] I see only the parent-less tags. This is a list view. Evernote remembers my preference of viewing my tags in a list, but I can always switch into Thumbnail View
      [*:9kc4rt19] The grey bar at the top says "Tags" and displays the count of only the parent-less tags.
      [*:9kc4rt19] I slide across/double-click the "Areas of Focus" tag
      
      1. 
         [*:9kc4rt19] Evernote opens a list view of only the direct child-tags under "Areas of Focus"
         [*:9kc4rt19] The grey bar at the top says "Tags under Areas of Focus" and displays the count of only the direct children of the tag "Areas of Focus"

[*:9kc4rt19] I slide across/double-click the "College" tag.

1. 
   [*:9kc4rt19] Evernote opens a list view of only the direct child-tags under "College"
   [*:9kc4rt19] The grey bar at the top says "Tags under College" and displays the count of only the direct children of the tag "College"

[*:9kc4rt19] I touch the count number on the gray bar at the top.

1. 
   [*:9kc4rt19] Evernote shows every tag under the tag "College" (i.e. its children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, etc.)
   [*:9kc4rt19] The grey bat at the top says "All tags under College" and displays the count of all "offspring-tags" under the tag "College"

[*:9kc4rt19] I touch the "Biology Exam" tag (a grandchild of the "College" tag, and a child of the "BIO 212" tag), and Evernote opens the list of all notes tagged with "Biology Exam"

[*:9kc4rt19] I press the back button on the android phone, and I'm back in the "All Tags under College" list.

1. 
   [*:9kc4rt19] If I touch the count number again, Evernote will filter out all of the grandchild-tags under "College".

[*:9kc4rt19] I press the back button on the android phone, and I'm back in the "Areas of Focus" tag, showing only its direct children.

[*:9kc4rt19] I press the back button on the android phone, and I'm back in the "Tags" list.

[*:9kc4rt19] I touch tag count number

1. 
   [*:9kc4rt19] Evernote shows ALL of my tags.
   [*:9kc4rt19] The grey bar at the top says "All Tags" an displays the count of every tag I have in Evernote.

[*:9kc4rt19] I press the back button on the android phone, and I'm back at the start-up screen of Evernote.

[*:9kc4rt19] I press the back button on the android phone, and I've exited Evernote, very happy with the new tag interface of Evernote on Android.

So, by default, Evernote only shows the direct children tags. It remembers to show the grandchildren tags only when I go back the the list in the breadcrumb-way demonstrated.

What about moving the tags?

It would be simply amazing if Evernote Implements this feature as well. It already has the interface for it! When we touch-and-hold a tag, we can have a THIRD menu item called "Move Tag." When we select it, Evernote can display a dialog similar to the tag dialog for a note. If the tag has a parent, then the parent will appear in the tag list, and the controls at the top of the dialog will be disabled, as a tag can only have one parent. To make the tag an orphan, we would touch the "X" to the right of the parent, and touch done. To change the parent of a tag, we would first make the tag an orphan, thus enabling the controls at the top, and then, select a tag to set as the new parent of the current tag. We can keep the option to create a new tag when selecting a parent, which will simply create the new parent-tag in the "root" tag directory (as it does when we tag notes with a new tag).

To wrap it up.

I really tried to be clear on what I mean in my suggestions. Please forgive me for the wordiness, as I tried to elaborate enough to be clear.

And dear Evernote, I'm certainly not dictating how you should implement this feature. If you come up with a better, smoother, and more intuitive way to implement the hierarchy, then I would be more than glad!

Thank you again for listening to your users!

-Mike

[mickeyjuice 7]

I have all my 520 tags sorted into a tree view/hierachy on my desktop.

It's an apparent- or pseudo-hierarchy, not an actual one, unfortunately.

[varpness 0]

Thanks for the feedback. We're looking into ways of incorporating a tag tree design into upcoming version of the Android client.

We'd thought the visual nature of the tag thumbnail grid was more useful than the tag tree since it provides a preview, label and count with higher information density. Also there's a bit of ambiguity when browsing a tree -- does tap mean view the note list or the sub tags? I'd been concerned that the number of elements per page on the Notebooks screen had decreased with the new Notebook view that incorporated Stacks. We'd have the same shortcoming with a tag view and users generally have more tags than notebooks.

Android UI guidelines discourages line widths that are narrow because they are hard to tap -- so there's a limit to the number of useful rows that you can put on the screen. There's about 25% fewer items (9 instead of 12) per screen in a list view than the tag grid.

But, the forum feedback seems to indicate that a list view that represents hierarchy is more useful than a tag grid with no hierarchy.

Have any of you seen a tree browser on Android that you like? Astro File Manager is the highest rated app that incorporates a tree browser.

I removed my posts and decided to avoid interacting with users on this forum due to extremely childish behavior and mistreatment of those with differing opinions. However, I heard about this post through the grapevine and decided to log in once in order to give my thanks for working to implement a tag tree. I'm sure not to be the only one who orders a premium membership once this feature is implemented. Thank you again.

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

I removed my posts and decided to avoid interacting with users on this forum due to extremely childish behavior and mistreatment of those with differing opinions.

No one was rude or unkind to you. OTOH, you came into the forum with attitude. Other users posted opinions that differed from yours and asked you to backup statements you made & claimed to be "facts."

The only childish behaviour was when you went back & deleted your posts.

If you can't handle people posting opinions that differ from yours or ask you to backup something you claim is a fact rather than your opinion, then an internet message board is probably not a good medium for you.

[mickeyjuice 7]

If you can't handle people posting opinions that differ from yours or ask you to backup something you claim is a fact rather than your opinion, then an internet message board is probably not a good medium for you.

Irony alert...