(Archived) 'Special' notebooks

[andreab 0]

I suppose that most of the feedback that you receive and eventually decide to incorporate in new Evernote releases consists of minor improvements on the interface. For this reason I am not sure how far proposing complex new features would go, but I'm going to give it a shot anyway.

Evernote is an eclectic note-taking program. It can digest different kind of data and therefore notebooks and notes have been designed with content-agnostic attributes.

Notes and notebooks designed to be content-agnostic, however, lack in efficiency when only content-specific notes are entered. A notebook that is entirely composed of, say, audio recordings should possess specific characteristics to make the experience more consistent. For instance, each audio file should appear in the notebook as an individual list of "miniplayers" with brief descriptions of the file, and not as attachment embedded in a text file. More audio files are in the same 'note'? Let's give an option to group them in a collapsable/expandable list. Some users want to attach text to the audio files? Let's build an option to append text to the audio, rather than append audio to a text file as it is now. Some users would still want to have more freedom to add other media to their audio notes? Well, in that case they could just use a 'normal', content-agnostic notebook. A similar case could be made for notebooks that contain only photos, screenshots, pdf documents or whatever else. I hope I have been clear enough in the description, interfaces are difficult to describe as concepts.

One might say that Evernote is a note-taking application which handles various types of media rather than a proper media archive. However, as Evernote expands its functionalities and its ambitions – which has already happened to a significant extent – the overlap between note-taking and data-archiving increases. A one-size-fits-all approach for notebooks only goes that far to catalogue one's digital life.

Thanks for the attention

A.

PS

Is a function to convert images/pdfs into pure text, as opposed to simply making them readable already in the pipelines? Perhaps I just didn't look well enough.

[jbenson2 2,147]

Interesting concept.

However, my gut feel is that Evernote has other items that are in a higher priority status right now. The sheer size of Audio and Video files create conflicts with the maximum note size. Based on some of the comments during the last podcast, it sounds like PowerPoint type files have the inside track.