(Archived) Feature Request - Nested Notebooks

[tcww 0]

Couldn't find this with a search.....how about "nested notebooks"? In other words, a personal notebook that might contain other notebooks including a journal, receipts, etc.

This would make the interface much more useable.

[engberg 89]

Notebooks may not be nested, but you can nest Tags by dragging one Tag under another one to create a hierarchy. You may just want to use Tags for this purpose.

[tcww 0]

I'm comparing this to all of the other information capturing applications that I've tried or currently use on the Mac. The nested tags work pretty well for a lot of my items, but for others it's not very convenient or esthetic (at least in my opinion). For instance, I keep a daily journal, by month/date (i.e., 080620), and I currently have each month as a separate notebook. In the long run, those notebooks will take up a lot of space in my left side, and it would be very convenient to group them into something like "2008 Journal".

I guess I don't understand why this could not be done. After all, we can group tags........why not notebooks?

[engberg 89]

Could you clarify why a tree of tags under "2008 Journal" would not be aesthetic, but a tree of notebooks under "2008 Journal" would be?

As usual, this isn't an issue of what could or couldn't be done, it's just a question of balancing usability (especially for new users) against complexity. You're using a Mac ... Apple constantly balances these two things, frequently in favor of usability. iTunes doesn't let you nest playlists under other playlists, even though there's no technical reason why they shouldn't be nestable.

People like me complain to Apple about the lack of complicated controls that we've used elsewhere (e.g. I can only resize a window on the Mac from the lower-right corner, not from every edge like on Windows), but we still end up buying MacBooks because of the overall usability.

Nothing is set in stone, but nesting notebooks has a lot of implications for other parts of the system: what does a public notebook look like if there are nested notebooks? what happens if i drag a local notebook under a synchronized notebook? etc. Those are the considerations we're trying to balance.

[tcww 0]

Dave:

I understand what you're saying, and I've now set up Evernote with nested monthly tags. It seems to work pretty well. You gotta understand that tags are a paradigm shift, at least for me; whereas using nested folders is what I've done in the past, and is, in fact the way my whole file system is set up. I realize that, for some, tags is a way to file/access things, and if I were starting out on a new machine, that would probably be the way I'd go. Unfortunately, I have decades of files and I need to take baby steps first (I guess).

The ultimate goal is to use Yep and Leap, both by IronicSoftware, to tag everything and use them as my alternate Finder; but for now, I gotta go with what I have.

I love Evernote, and I really appreciate the time and effort you guys have put into the app. It will ultimately replace all of my other note-taking applications.

Thanks for your input and suggestions.....I'm always willing to try something new.

Ted

[crane 40]

I would like to point out that with notebooks, you can at least indicate which notebook you want something in, before you create the note. With tags, you have to create the note *first* and then tag it. I much prefer the former method (or at least the ability, like we had in 2.2.)

[tcww 0]

In the best of worlds, I guess I'd like to have the option for both nested tags and notebooks.