Problem in Evernote for Mac creating a tag hierarchy in the Tag View

[IncrediMetaBeta 22]

In Evernote for Mac, I'm finding that creating a tag hierarchy in the Tag View, by dragging and dropping tags onto one another, seems to work perhaps 50% of the time.  When it does not work, the 'dropped tag' "returns" to its original place.  (When it does work, the tag onto which I wish to drop, highlights when the mouse is over it and, upon releasing the mouse button, the drop occurs as expected.)

 

Could I be violating some rule baked into EN, the times when the drop does not occur?   Since no error message appears, I don't know why I am getting this unexpected behavior.  Could it be a bug?  Or am I failing to comply with some undocumented rule?

 

Please note: I'm not dragging onto the tag list in the sidebar; rather onto the oval tag icon in the center of the screen.

[gazumped 11,637]

Hi.  The only rule of which I'm aware is "new tags don't d&d" - which is to say that if you create a tag,  sync your account first,  so the tag has been sent to the server;  then you can move it around.  If that's not the situation here,  can you see any other similarities with your tags - size / unusual character content / language / spaces ?

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

@IncrediMetaBeta:

 

I've seen this same behavior myself.  The EN Tag view seems to be very sensitive (or maybe very erratic) when drag/drop Tags.

I'm not sure if this is a bug or a design flaw, but in either case it is a significant hindrance to productivity.

 

If you want to report it as a bug, see Submit a BUG report via an EN Support Ticket. In the Support Form, select "Report a bug", and start the Ticket Title with "BUG:  " to make it clear.  Reporting a bug should be available to all users, including Free Account owners.  Other Ticket types available to Free users are "Data Loss", "Crash", & "Sync Issue".

[IncrediMetaBeta 22]

Thank you both for your speedy responses to the problem.  I have reported this as a Bug.

 

BTW, I was careful to first sync the EN database with the Mother Ship.  I don't know whether there is something unusual about the text contained in the particular tags that might explain why they would not "drop" onto another tag.  I will follow up and report back.  

 

I concur, Explorer, with your comment about productivity.  "But wait!  It's worse!  Lack of predictability also makes EN ineffective."  Surely, creating a Tag Hierarchy is about as central to EN's value proposition as any functional feature I can imagine.  Indeed, the lack of a reliable mechanism and procedure for creating a Tag Hierarchy, or lack of predictability in its behavior, is a significant hindrance to productivity.  I need to CONTINUALLY curate my notes (at last count: 14k+).  Without predictability in creating and refining a multi-level Tag Hierarchy, I don't know how to shape my notes into knowledge, nor how to leverage tags to access specific elements, to which I need to refer, to write.  

 

Clearly, tags are the "agile" way to curate content, whereas, Notebooks, with their numeric limitation, preclude organizing notes and collating them, when note content is highly diverse.  Absent the ability reliably to drag and drop to refine my  tag hierarchy, I'm unsure how to derive conclusions by curation "from the ground up," that is, by revisiting, reviewing and collating notes from the ground up, annotating them, so that, together, they form up into emerging, superordinate concepts, theses, topics.  I'll check further on the tags I tried to drag and drop, to examine their text contents and see whether there is something anomalous about them, and try to vary them, to see whether there is some tricky factor that might explain why particular tags that would not "drop" onto another tag.   

 

More generally, beyond the particulars of this issue, lies a larger concern I have had for some time about the use of EN.   How to put it?  Not every note saved to EN is saved at the time of 'capture' with the requisite metadata, ie., pertinent, topical notebook and tags.  Without metadata, one's original frame of mind, motivations and nuances thereof, when saving a page to EN, may easily be forgotten.  When subsequently re-accessing the saved page, an absence of descriptive metadata makes it hard to recapture the original mental associations that made one want to save the page in the first place.  These emergent thoughts need to be captured to, but sometimes my mind moves faster than my fingers can.  This difficulty underscores why post-capture Tag and Note Curation  are so vital to EN's fundamental customer value proposition.

 

Here's a tentative construct of the problem symptom:  It's as though EN is relatively static, whereas the mental process one experiences with the content are more dynamic, more complex and, certainly, subject to the limits of human memory.  Other than tags and their curation, EN does not seem to support one's thinking as well as I suspect it might be designed to do.  A symptom of the way that EN supports EN technicalities but not the thinking process is the paucity and disorganization of posts and help pages pertaining how to use EN in the writing process.  How people actually use EN to write appears to be 'fugitive' information.

 

Agree?  Disagree?  Please advise...  I'd love to hear other perspectives and learn from them.  I may be a curmudgeon but I'm relatively docile, ie., educable.  

 

You guys are stalwart, intrepid respondents.  I appreciate it.  

 

While I think of it: Will there be an EN 'Conference' in 2015?

[IncrediMetaBeta 22]

Here is the solution to this dark and bloody mystery, of why creating a tag hierarchy in Evernote for Mac's Tag View, by dragging and dropping tags onto one another, seems to work so erratically.

 

It seems that drag and drop properly refuses to work when there is any text in the EN search field.   Duh....

 

Problem solved, I believe.

 

Does it seem appropriate to have an error message pop up, to avoid needless inquiries, such as my original one above?  I vote, "yes".