(Archived) "Invisible" Tag! Wouldn't it be cool?

[James M. 15]

I'd love if EN would either hardwire an "Invisible" tag completely hiding any notes which were tagged with it, until the show/hide feature were turned off. Of course if I were really dreaming I might choose to add this feature to custom tags or indivitual notes, but I think hard-wiring it would be the easiest way. I'd definitely kickstart it with a few shekels if given the opportunity! How much could this cost to develop?

[Candid 167]

Can I add that I'd like a password to be added to switch on the invisible notes? That would protect notes with sensitive information that are only kept on one device (local) if that device was lost.

Although I guess you could just do the encrypt thing.

[James M. 15]

Can I add that I'd like a password to be added to switch on the invisible notes? That would protect notes with sensitive information that are only kept on one device (local) if that device was lost.

Although I guess you could just do the encrypt thing.

Capital idea!

[jefito 5,589]

Let's ballpark this, without knowing a heck of a lot:

OK, so assume that an Evernote employee makes on average $80K/yearly, just for the sake of argument. That's about $40/hour. The real cost of an employee is typically double that to their employer (equipment, office space, benefits, etc.), so you're looking at $80/hr rate, per employee. I don't know how it would be implemented, and neither do you (I'd actually use some different mechanism than tags, like a special separate piece of metadata, but that's just me). So let's go along with the special tag idea. First things first: you need to do some design and planning. How does this new feature affect the Evernote infrastructure? Would adding a new special tag break anyone's existing use of a tag with this name? Would there need to be a change to the Evernote schema? So, OK, that takes a bit of time (it's almost always more time than you think). Let's say it this takes 3 people a week: 120 hours @$80 = ~$10,000, before you even write a line of code.

So OK, this magical new tag would probably need to be supported across all of Evernote's platforms, as it's somehow special (even if all of them don't support the actual functionality, they would need to be aware if its specialness). So that's, what, 6? 8? 10? platforms? Let's say 8. Coding wise, suppose we allow 3 weeks of coding/platform (internals and UI). So 24 weeks = 960 hours = ~$76,000. It's probably more, since devs typically make more money than other personnel.

So are we done? Uh, nope. Gotta test that sucker. $$$ Gotta document it. $$$ Gotta train your techs how to understand it. $$$ And so on.

Ballpark, I'd guess that this seemingly small little project costs somewhere north of $100K. Now the question is, is it all worth it to Evernote?

On the other hand, you can do this yourself, fairly easily, for most situations. Make a new tag, called, say "Visible". Tag some notes with it. Do a search "-tag:Visible". Hey, where'd those notes go?

[James M. 15]

Nah, just let somebody bang it out in a night and leave it as an undocumented feature for us cool kids!

[Candid 167]

Nah, just let somebody bang it out in a night and leave it as an undocumented feature for us cool kids!

I'm with James, that sounds a lot more fun than doing accounting this early in the morning.

[jefito 5,589]

Sure does, but things tend to look a little different when you have more than 36 million users.

Of course, there is an Evernote API...