jefito

Here are some pretty well understood facts: Notebooks are not the same as tags: A note belongs to exactly one notebook; a note can have multiple tags. Evernote tags == Outlook Categories == GMail Labels. However Outlook's Categories and GMail's Labels are not folder systems. Both Outlook and GMail have separate folder systems, so you can mix'n'match, just like with Evernote (though Evernote's notebooks have the also-well-known properties of being one level deep, albeit organizable in stacks). Tags, Labels and Categories all function like adjectives. Folders are more familiar, it's true, but not necessarily simpler, particularly when you try to scale them to larger systems of disparate items. My old example of classifying a red ball is a case in point; do I put it in the 'Red' folder or the 'Spherical' folder or the 'Toy' folder? It's not something that has a single easy answer, whereas it's pretty simple to describe it using tags. And tags are also quite familiar, if you understand them as simple adjectives or labels. I'd guess that most people learn adjectives before they learn strict hierarchies. The sharing bit is not as familiar to me, but as I understand it, a person who has a notebook shared to them can use existing tags in the sharer to apply to a note in the folder. As far as I can tell, that would make those tags 'shared', in some sense. They don't share in the same way as folders do; they just come along for the ride. I would gladly be corrected in this case if I'm wrong, though -- I don't use notebook sharing to any serious extent. That might have been a little ambiguous: the 'you' merely refers to the general Evernote user. It's been my experience in dealing with Evernote users of all stripes, some have difficulty conceptualizing tags, some just will not use them, for reasons of their own. First thing: Evernote doesn't typically reveal their plans in advance of release, save for beta clients. There are no secret tricks, no super-premier levels, only 250 notebooks, and we can only deal with Evernote as it is, not as we wish it would be. Second, nobody's really saying that you're using Evernote incorrectly; there's a limitation that you've bumped up against. It's not clear to me whether mixing in tags would help you alleviate the problem, or not (I reiterate that I am not a sharing expert). I only know what you yourself said: that you and your team preferred notebooks over tags. If they won't help you solve your problem and you really, really, really need 250 notebooks, then there really is no other conclusion at this time: Evernote is not the product for you. That's not the same thing as saying that you're using it incorrectly, but you are attempting to use it in excess of its limitations, which you now know.

@rgp: While tagging is indeed an important part of the Evernote organizational toolset (I couldn't/wouldn't use Evernote without them), notebooks (there are no folders in Evernote) are also, as noted earlier in the thread. Good use of Evernote requires a user to find a balance. If you cannot or will not use tags, and you need more notebooks than Evernote allows, then unfortunately it may not be the product for you, at least at this time.

Ahem. Favorites Bar in the Windows client.

Well, yes, a developer can always play the game of: "Evernote has 40 million or more customers, so if I can sell a product that captures 1% of them, then that's like 400K. WooHoo!! Porsche-ville, here I come!!" (this is of course the same line of reasoning that launched 1,000 *****, ahem, flatulence apps in the Apple store, well, for awhile anyways). Anyhow, the sort of needing to fumble with note links by hand that you describe seems the antithesis of what Evernote is about, which is capturing -- and categorizing -- lots of stuff you're interested in, simply and easily (that plus X-Marks munged up my bookmarks enough times that I have a hard time trusting them anymore). Frankly, there are no third-party add-ons for Evernote that I use at all these days -- plain old Evernote works pretty well for me, straight up. But then again, I'm not in dire need of even more nested folder structures in my life, however visual they may be. Nevertheless, that's an interesting tip, and I hope that some other folks find it useful. BTW, I think that the metaphor you're reaching for is "800 pound gorilla". A 100 pound gorilla would be pretty puny (http://en.wikipedia....characteristics).

The clip is particularly meaningful to me, as I spent a significant part of my professional career writing software for computer mapping, including different projections. In fact, I spent a fair amount of time last year working on fixing problems with map rotations of raster imagery.

I have no idea where the center of the surface of a sphere is. I have some ideas about where I think the political/economic "center" of the world is, especially if we consider the accumulation of capital. Oh dear, GM... time for a bit of education (courtesy of The West Wing): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8zBC2dvERM

Let C be the set of Evernote customers Let F the set of requested Evernote features Given: f1 and f2 are members of F Let c1 and c2 be sets of members of C such that each member of c1 really really seriously needs f1 and each member of c2 really really seriously needs f2. Is it in general possible to say that f1 is more important than f2? If it is possible (and I don't believe it is) then that's just a baseline on prioritization. Even so, there's the question of whether feature popularity has much pull relative to Evernote's own vision for what they are trying to accomplish (I think there's some, but there doesn't seem to be any kind of popularity counter, i.e., +1's don't really seem to matter all that much). Beyond that is p(f), the price of implementing feature f. If it's high, then that would probably tend to lower f's priority. What other ways are there? Are there any that are more popular or widely used?

"Wast" is a word -- archaic, but a word nonetheless. http://www.thefreedictionary.com/wast It is true that MS Word makes better suggestions, according to my extensive research.

Shows red squiggles in Chrome/Win 7. Classic.

There is no way to do this in any Evernote client except, I think, one of the iOS clients. And the third-party Linux client, as well.

Understood. Sorry that you had a bad experience, but good luck anyways.

This is a user forum, and discussion is up to the users to direct -- so participate, or not, as you choose. But just so you know: Evernote staffers do read everything posted in these forums, as best I can tell. They sometimes comment, but not always. It's clear that they know about the desire for adding arbitrary notebook nesting, semantic tag trees, and the like, and have thought about it, but haven't done it yet, if they ever will.

Who are these users speaking on behalf of Evernote?

I knew it!

Right. I understand that, and I believe that Evernote understands that. The difficulty is that you may never find a perfect solution, and may need to compromise on one or more of your requirements, as you imply in what I snipped. It's not for everyone, I agree. That was, as I said, something to think about, not a definitive argument. However: let's face it, I use hierarchies all the time, every day. I've probably traipsed up and down more file directory folders than you've had breakfasts (meaning a lot). I'm not unaware of their utility. However, with Evernote, I am almost completely free of them, and blissfully so. And I understand that the internet is built on hierarchies, too (though it is, as its name implies, actually a network, aka a graph). But most of the time, I am happy to let associative search find things for me. I'm not sure where you're going with the bit about how I learned my lessons in school; it seems clear to me that we actually do learn associatively, on some level at least. So I'm not sure what your point was. On the other hand, you *can* compare apples and oranges: http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/science/2010/11/comparing-apples-and-oranges/ Two different statements. Evernote works the way it works, and that's as it was designed and implemented by Evernote. That it works in a way that makes sense for me is great, but I consider that to be a happy coincidence, and if they changed for some reason that doesn't work for me (not that I think they will), I'd just go and find something else. In that, I'm no different than anyone else: I'm just looking for a solution that works the way I want it to, to within some tolerance, as most software requires some compromise. That's independent of the idea that tags (or labels a la GMail, or categories a la Outlook, or other similar constructs) are somehow conceptually difficult for human beings to understand. I don't believe that. Because they do it all the time -- we refer to items by listing their properties rather than their location in some hierarchy (or some collection of hierarchies). To me, it's as easy as understanding that tags are like language, the noun and adjective part, anyways: you come up with a vocabulary that describes the sorts of things that you store in Evernote, and you apply some subset of it to each note. And to find notes, you do the reverse: describe, in terms of your vocabulary (and possibly some search text) what you are looking for. And this will work whether you store notes hierarchically or in separate non-hierarchical notebooks or even all in one big notebook. Now, there's one interesting part of the above that isn't strictly relevant to this topic (which is about hierarchical note storage, and which I don't particularly need), but rather about hierarchical tag storage, which already exists in Evernote. The interesting thing to me is that we could really could have more useful search by taking advantage of the existing tag tree structure. Right now, tags are independent of each other with regards to search. For example, if you ave a tag A with a subtags A1, then a tag search on A will not return could return a note tagged with A1 unless it was also explicitly tagged with A. But suppose the Evernote extended the search capability to return such notes -- would that be useful? I think so. Something to think about...

I didn't notice that you added any details about why you think that DropBox's business solution would make it into a big competitor to Evernote For Business. Is it solely because they have a hierarchical storage system, and Evernote has a very shallow one? Kindly read *my* comments a little more carefully. I think no such thing, though you're welcome to go ahead and point out where I say anything like it. My baseline opinion has been and continues to be that Evernote is the entity that determines how Evernote should work, not me (and that doesn't mean that they shouldn't take suggestions, they should and do; the trouble is that there are a lot of suggestions, and finite development resources). As it happens, it works pretty well for my usage, and although I can think of several features that I think would make it better for me, and have written about them in the forums, I maintain no expectations that Evernote will ever fulfill them. To wit: So, yes, dream on (and I'm not being flippant about that). Keep advocating for hierarchical notebooks, you're not alone, and I do not, nor have I ever actually said that they'd be a bad thing. But I find it hard to believe that people are not sophisticated enough to learn how to use tags as organizational tools. Most people I know can already use multiple adjectives to describe an object, and that's really not too far from what tags are. Hey, in the battle of organizing the Internet, Yahoo (hierarchical search) lost, and Google won (associative search). Something to think about. Never disagreed with that. But you can't use it as if it has arbitrarily nested notebooks, because it just doesn't. At least at this time...

Now I am dying to know what Metrodon's three favorite notes really are... is one of them the one with the encrypted Swiss bank account code? The secret formula for Coca-Cola? Aimee Mann's phone number? The location of the last city of Atlantis? The secret of the Thirty-Nine Steps? Evernote, give over. The world is dying to know.... what's in Metrodon's Evernote???

Once again, Dropbox and Evernote solve different problems. I use them both, every day.

If you're referring to specific people, please quote them directly, rather than paraphrasing them anonymously, and incorrectly. The plain and simple truth of it is that the for some of of use who have been participating in the discussion, the stance is this: 1) Suggestions are welcome, however... 2) ...while Evernote may change in the future, right now all we have is the Evernote that exists, not the Evernote of your dreams, so therefore... 3) ,,,advice is usually given for solving problems based on Evernote's current capabilities, but... 4) ...if all workarounds suggested are not sufficient, then advice to seek out another product is reasonable. Note: everyone's voice is as loud as any others here.

For once, there was no pun intended. And there's plenty of people with nice figures who ain't famous, I reckon. I've advocated -- in my way -- for smart tagging since, well, basically since not long after I started on the forums...

A hierarchical foundation is not necessary to present a file system to the user. There's no theoretical or mathematical reason why hierarchies are the sole best organizing scheme for content, or that their use is required. That being said, hierarchy is a useful tool in the organizing toolbox, and it's all the more important because it's familiar (then again, Kim Kardashian seems to be famous because she's famous -- go figure). Bottom line for me is that tags theoretically have the power to express hierarchies, but not the converse. It's one of the reasons that I prefer tagged organization. The flip side in this instance is that Evernote has not really provided support for more fully realizing tag expressiveness, so we can't quite do all of the hierarchical operations as we might like -- for example, the ability to organize tags hierarchically is useful, but the inability of search to understand that hierarchy is an impediment. Suck to live in an imperfect world, right? I certainly accept that this is unfortunate. I think it will be remedied, sooner rather than later, or at least should be.

It's apparently a little known fact that tags do form an organized structure, albeit not necessarily hierarchical. Of course, if you want to organize your notes into a hierarchy using tags, there are techniques that allow you to do so (see jbenson's system, for one), and they can actually convey some benefits in note filtering: by reflecting hierarchy position in a tag name, you can use wildcards to locate notes in a specific branch of your hierarchy. And tags do this today, which obviates the need to try to bet whether Evernote will ever provide arbitrarily nested notebooks any time in the future.

@megsaint: Pretty much where I'm at. Well put.

It's fine to make suggestions, I wouldn't expect (after having been here for awhile) Evernote staff to comment on all of them, particularly those that have prior discussion, and those that they've already commented on. As far as I know, they do read all posts here. Typically though, because it's Evernote policy not to disclose their roadmap (much less delivery timeframes), for feature requests their comments are likely to be of the "Thanks for the suggestion" type, or maybe a clarifying question (but I'm guessing that this particular issue needs no further clarification; the justifications and parameters are pretty well-known). Forum search can help you find other discussions in the issue, some of which have Evernote staff commentary.

* Maybe because this is actually a user forum, and while Evernote staff do appreciate suggestions, they don't necessarily respond to all of them * Maybe because this issue has been discussed elsewhere in these forums, and they have commented on it in those other discussions