[Feature Request] Visualization of Notebook Contents

[Mark Levison 15]

Today I have a notebook that is ~200 notes in size and growing fast. In the next few months it will hit 400-500 items. I need a better tool to visualize what I have. In the pre-electronic days I would have written an index card for each item and group them in the floor. Instead today I'm using Stromboard (picture attached), but its slow and time consuming because I have to reference each note manually. In a perfect world Evernote would display the title, tags and first few words from a each note in its own postit. I would then organize according to my current thing.

 

I would like to be able to organize them manually and add comments or pictures.

 

I would very happily pay for this service.

 

Cheers

Mark

[Adjusting 276]

Not exactly what you're looking for, but have you tried BubbleBrowser or Mohiomap?

[Mark Levison 15]

Thanks - I had tried MohioMap but not BubbleBrowser neither really fits the bill. Imagine you're trying to build a course or write a book. You want to visualize what you have, what you can do right now and where you're weak.

 

That's my goal. Mohiomap lets me see where I have lots of articles but not the content itself.

 

Cheers

Mark

[anjoschu 67]

Your use case sounds quite specific. Am I understanding this correctly: You want to be able to manually arrange or group notes on a 2D canvas, supporting different types (colors) of notes? Would the note types and "boxes" on the canvas represent tags in Evernote? This also sounds like a kind of activity where most people wouldn't want to have their complete Evernote content involved (think of scanned receipts, etc.).

 

I think most solutions for spatial representation of Evernote contents are meant for structure discovery and go the inverse route: Analyzing whatever structure there is within your Evernote account and generating a spatial representation. They don't seem to offer any kind of manipulation facility (where dragging stuff to a different group/branch actually changes the metadata).

 

A quick web search on "Evernote task board" / "~ plan board" / "~ card board" didn't turn up any solutions (just a whole lot of shared Evernote notebooks about Scrum and such).

 

So, anyhow, here's a kludgy workaround I hacked together for you. I used a structure of notebooks (which I called "Group 1" etc.), grouped into a stack called "Card Board" (no pun intended). I resized the Evernote window and changed the view options to get it to look like you see in the screenshot. Then, I opened 3 more Evernote windows and arranged them so each of them represents a different notebook ("box"). You can drag notes around between boxes now, as indicated on the screenshot. Because it's still "full" Evernote, editing and adding notes etc. still works. Obviously, for this to work properly, you need more screen space than I have.

 

 

Because Evernote remembers window positions, you can keep this arrangement as well as a "normal" Evernote window (which would obviously be in the background when you use this arrangement). If you're like me and keep Evernote running all the time, you could minimize the "box/group" windows when not needed, and maximize them again when needed for the next arrangement session.

 

Please let me know if this helps.

 

P.S.: Somehow, I couldn't get the picture to upload as an attachment. Sorry for the giant image.

P.P.S.: Did I mention this workaround was kludgy?

[noduslabs 10]

Hello,

 

I don't know if it's still relevant, but if you want to make sense of your notes, I invite you to try http://infranodus.com

 

It uses text network analysis to find the most relevant terms in your notes (words + hashtags) and visualizes them as a graph. 

 

You can then see how they all connect and find some gaps in the graph to generate new ideas.

 

I made a post about it also on our blog, so you can look through and see if it's something you'd like: http://noduslabs.com/cases/evernote-iphone-notes-text-network-graph/
 

The app is free and open source (so you can install it on your computer), but to use our server version you need to contact me for an invite code. 

[Mark Levison 15]

Noduslabs - (sorry for not using your name), I would like to try your tool. I can't see how to contact you. My email is mark @ agilepainrelief com I would appreciate an invite to the online forum.

 

anjoschu - your notification never came though. Thanks for the idea - its a start, I still wish a builtin view existed.

 

Cheers

Mark