Jump to content

crispinb

Level 3
  • Posts

    224
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Posts posted by crispinb

  1. Evernote guys: please, please consider this. Removal of the classic note links as default was a bad enough regression for power users (albeit an understandable choice for others), but making the classic links so hard to get to is a total pain.

     

    The best, most mac-like choice would be to make the 'classic note link' available as a 'Note' menu option when the opt key is held (cf Finder Go->Library). That way a user can add their own App Shortcut in System Prefs.

  2. that's why I politely ask you for your answer since this question has been raised more times than I care to remember - are subnotebooks going to be supported, are they a priority feature, is it being worked on?

    And Dave has already politely answered. He was quoted above, but here's a link to the original: viewtopic.php?f=42&t=7385#p28325. EN are not working on subnotebooks (or any other hierarchical means of organisation), and are not currently planning to do so.

  3. For my purposes that would be cumbersome (if I'm correctly following the suggestion). In Zotero (or plain filesystem directories, or anything with hierarchical structures available), all I have to do to work on Chapter 1 of Project X is click on that Chapter 1. That's it. And I easily stay in that context whilst working on chapter 1. Then it's just 1 click to work on the Intro of that project, etc. The ergonomics are good because a truly hierarchical means of organisation fits a hierarchical project.

  4. It's one thing to express disappointment, criticism, etc. Quite another to imply a company's product is vaporware. Not cool.

    Ah well, its understandable enough. We invest an awful lot of time in software we use a lot, and it can be frustrating not to have an influence over its direction. In an ideal world I'd dictate my desired feature set, which would change about every 2nd week, to my own personal team of developers. They'd hate me, but be sufficiently well paid to stay with the job.

  5. First off, I want to thank you for responding so patiently. I was concerned I came across snarkier than I intended.

    No snarkiness detected (or offense taken).

    All the (as you say) semantics aside, I think we know from Dave's posts here, along with recent announcements of priorities, that EN's organisational facilities are just not going to change fundamentally in the foreseeable future. So there's little point in more petitioning. Those of us who find a tag-only approach less than adequate either have to use something else, or work around the limitations. I use a combination of both (zotero for projects, EN for misc capture and storage).

    Suggestions for workarounds and enhancements using tags (like stuartibee's) are welcome and useful, even if like me you need or prefer containers for some purposes.

  6. It seems to me that tagging does already offer the functionality of sub-notebooks. It sjust a matter of interface and presentation IMHO.

    Here is my idea to provide sub-notebook functionality without altering the basic existing architecture of Evernote.

    One serious problem with flat tags is that they exist in one namespace. An example: it's a trivial issue with any hierarchical organisational system to have multiple instances of 'Chapter 1' or 'Introduction'. That's also the most natural way to express collections for the Chapter 1 or Introduction of several different projects. But it's impossible with flat tags.

    Tags are useful. Hierarchical containers are useful. Each can to some extent be used in place of the other in some situations. But they are fundamentally and formally distinct.

    I suspect I'm not the only person here who knows perfectly well that some of my projects need container hierarchies and am getting a bit bored of being told that they don't.

    Edit: btw stuartibee, I do think your suggested enhancements are good ideas. They'd bring tags nearer to being a practical substitute for hierarchical collections.

  7. Well, I find Dave's comment's clear unless someone insists on a 'never' rather than just a 'no' (and I can't think where you'd get that). If you look back at the context I had asked him to clarify so that people could either decide to use alternative tools where necessary, or just adapt to tags. I found his statement enough to convince me on a pragmatic level that it wasn't worth waiting for any hierarchical means of organisation, so I use a different tool now for projects, restricting EN for miscellaneous capture and search.

    In general, I don't agree that software companies have any particular duty to inform customers/competitors of their plans, but EN has maybe invited the demand by adopting a subscription model. Buying a product with features fixed at the time of purchase is quite different to signing up for a period of time not knowing what you're going to get a few months down the line. So I agree there.

    I'd also like real hierarchical tags (the current system is really a bit of a fake), so agree there also.

    But the pragmatic upshot is unambiguous: if you need forms of organisation beyond EN's flat tag system, don't waste time waiting for it from EN, but find a more appropriate tool now.

  8. But now, thanks to you, my problem has gotten worse because I have to check out Zotero now...

    Well I might be able to save you some time: zotero doesn't have hyperlinks, so mightn't be any use to you if you need those. It's primarily geared towards academics and researchers, and makes it easy to create a database of references with associated notes. As a standalone note-taker it does have a bit going for it, in that it has both a folder hierarchy and tags, but being a firefox add-on is slower and has a rougher feel as a note editor than does EN. It does have a web sync facility, though the web side of it is as yet very rudimentary.

    In an ideal world, I'd use Zotero for references and EN for everything else, but I can't do that until EN has some form of true hierarchical organisation.

  9. I had exactly the same reaction. Letting you structure the tags so they display in a hierarchical manner when they don't actually behave in anyway other than flat was very confusing - and disappointing. I hardly bother with tagging in evernote as a result. When I have notes that need to be structured, I move them out of evernote.

    Can I ask what you move them to? I haven't found a perfect solution yet for my own notes (as opposed to captured odds and ends, for which EN is perfect), though Zotero comes the closest of anything I've found so far.

  10. crane: yours is a very similar tale to mine, actually. I've been through a couple of iterations of trying to use Evernote for my project-related stuff, and always found it just too hard to keep a consistent form of organisation. Like you, I for a while even had notes reminding me of the tagging scheme to use within my projects. But that was a pain to keep maintained, and, in the end, a silly way to have to use a tool.

    My solution is structurally similar to yours: I use Evernote as my immediate dump for everything, and as a permanent store for lots of disconnected stuff; but I use a different app for my highly structured, project-related info (Zotero, in my case).

    It's worth commenting though on why I persisted in *trying* to find a way to use Evernote for projects, which is that in most ways it's so damned good. The local client is beautifully responsive and friction-free, the Firefox clipper is just the best, it's great to have everything mirrored on a decent web app, its development is moving forward at a really impressive rate, both Mac and Win clients, bugs are fixed quickly etc etc.

  11. ... but then I don't make much distinction between the idea of tags and folders anyway, to me they are just different metaphors for categorising things. In "real life" I'm forced to use physical location (folders, notebooks, shelves etc) as the main means of categorising things, which is rather restrictive since an item can only be in one place at a time, whereas in Evernote something can be in many places at once (using tags).

    Well, the really crucial difference is that real-world containers can have hierarchy. The lack of this in Evernote could be fixed either by having subnotebooks or hierarchical tags, but certainly not (as Dave seems to have suggested a couple of times in the forums) by simulation via the current flat tag system (notwithstanding the fake hierarchical GUI fig-leaf). A good example of what you can't do with Evernote: have a series of Projects, each with a 'refs' section. Yes, you could have 'ProjectX' and 'refs' tags, but then to assign something to ProjectA's refs, you have to tag twice. You don't have to go far along this road before realising how quickly such a system becomes too error-prone and cumbersome to be viable for *organising* (a different problem from *searching*).

    I feel some impatience with both sides of this debatelet. Dave's answers sometimes seem uncharacteristically evasive (as if he's telling people that Evernote's facilities are adequate to their needs, when are plainly saying they're not); and the subnotebook proponents seem intent on thcweaming and thcweaming and thcweaming until they get what they want (when the EN guys are plainly entitled to take their app in any direction they please).

    • Thanks 1
×
×
  • Create New...