jefito

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

Thanks for the update, baumgarr, and rock on!

@2dvsio: You claimed that it's easy, but evidently it's not worth it for you to make one yourself. That's exactly the sort of calculation that Evernote goes through as well. They appear to welcome any contribution to the Evernote ecosystem, but they don't necessarily feel impelled to devote their resources towards providing support for all platforms, including Linux. Apparently they don't feel that it's worth it either. Meanwhile, baumgarr has created a client, but how much support from the Linux community has he gotten? (That's a real question -- I don't know whether he's gotten any, or solicited it.) Seems to me that that's an existing code base that does a lot of what a true Evernote client should do; why not start there, since Evernote doesn't seem interested in producing one themselves?

Well, since you're a programmer, and since it's so easy, maybe you should do a Linux client yourself.

Doesn't exist, except for one of the iOS client versions, I think. It has been discussed/requested a fair amount already. Feel free to search the forums for some of that, if you want.

Just out of curiosity, what percentage of students *actually* need LaTex, particularly for notetaking pusposes (which is actually only a part of what Evernote is designed for), and what do you base your figure on?

Realistically, Evernote hasn't seemed inclined to devote any of its funding towards Linux client development. So why not run a Kickstarter for NixNote, whose developer has shown an interest in Evernote for Linux?

I'm sure a little melodramatic flourish will work...

Yeah, and wait until the 36 million existing Evernote users stumble over the review, decide that it matters to them, and switch to OneNote or whatever. Sure, so very simple. As I said -- valid request, maybe they'll do it, maybe not, but there are certainly ways to do without, in many cases.

Valid request (and not unique), but no signs that it's going to happen any time soon (not that Evernote gives out its feature roadmaps that often). As it stands, your college notebooks are already separate (they're different notebooks already). You can search notebooks separately (using the notebook: scope modifier) or search an entire stack (using the stack: scope modifier). I'm not sure that I see the problem. You might also investigate using tags for distinguishing your college notes: you can use the same subjects, but use different tags for each college.

@shawnholt: It's up to you to start the discussion that you want to have (though participants may not always keep to a narrowly defined focus; witness this current thread, which indeed started out with a call for nested folders). Whether or not such discussion will actually solve any problems -- however collaboratively people join in -- is another matter altogether. Typically, user problems here tend to be lack of knowledge of how Evernote works, in general or with respect to a particular client -- that's what I prefer to the focus on here, regardless of how you think my energy ought to be spent. Meanwhile, you seem to persist in missing my point, and that of other commenters : it's not Evernote's responsibility to cater to every user's desires. It's a good trait for them to listen (they do) and engage (they do, though I'd prefer more), but ultimately it's their own business that lives or dies according to their choices.

Products do not "need" to be built for any and all markets that exist, just for some identifiable market segments. This is demonstrably true. There is a "LARGE" segment of users whose needs are met by the structure that Evernote provides today. People don't understand adjectives? Really? Because that's all that tags are, when it comes right down to it. Maybe that's why both GMail and Outlook provide similar facilities (labels and categories, respectively). Though to be fair, both of those products also provide for nested structure as well. Sheer guesswork on your part ("I have no idea" is the telling quote). No real relevance to the discussion. BTW, I used Outlook for a lot of years, and found nested folder structures more trouble than they were worth -- by the time that I stumbled across Evernote, I had already settled on what is essentially a one-level deep folder structure in Outlook, using categories for sorting. Evernote just made sense I think that the discussions are more generally along the lines of: "I need arbitrarily nested folders" (sometimes followed by "it's unbeliieeevable that Evernote doesn't have them; how could they have missed that?"). "OK, that's a fair request, but Evernote doesn't provide them and doesn't seemed particularly interested in providing them, so tell us what you are trying to do, and we'll try to see how we can make Evernote work for you". And if pressed, we can go 'round the barn (again) on why tags are generally more flexible than folders and how tags might be improved to make them have folder-like behaviors. As far as I am concerned, there is no 'ANSWER' required, except for "it works for me". There is no real problem here, just a difference of opinion that Evernote needs to include a facility for arbitrarily nested folders, which I would call a perceived problem. It's is a design issue, really (what Evernote chooses to provide), not an issue of bugs (flaws in the execution of a design). They've talked about it some in the past; folders are not part of their public roadmap, plain and simple. You can call it arrogance if it pleases you to; I just think it's making a reasonable choice and sticking to it. Their results seem to be pretty good so far. This is akin to saying: I really want to be able to use this hammer to cut this tree down, i.e., not very pragmatic at all. The pragmatist in me says "hey, Evernote has tag things, maybe I don't really need folders to make Evernote be useful to me". Sounds like you don't actually want to use Evernote as it is, you want to use some Evernote-like tool doesn't exist, and may never be made by Evernote. Obviously, you are welcome to discuss this stuff all you like -- it's a user forum, after all -- and you'll likely get some response that agrees with you, and even people who disagree with you but think that your asking the question is valid (like me), but you may not get Evernote folks too deeply into the discussion, if at all. I'm pretty sure that the notion of how folders might interact with tags in Evernote is not unfamiliar to them.

Metrodon, do not post that picture again, I beg you. You know which one. @shawnholt: it's not arrogant for Evernote to make choices about the software and services that they make and sell. Yes, it's true that some people who have tried Evernote want true hierarchies. But Evernote doesn't need to cater to every user's desires in order to be a success. Doesn't mean that they're not listening; it just means that they are choosing: every day in fact, the choices that they make are tantamount to making a bet that their software is good enough to be useful to enough people so that Evernote can continue to stay in business. You, the consumer, are faced with a choice of many different services; if you don't like Evernote, there are others competing for your dollars. Again, this is not arrogance, it's just a fact of business. In the meantime, tags are what are on offer, and they work fine for many users.

Scott's right -- tags are it, for now and the foreseeable future. There is no function "Create notebook in tag" because tags are only applied to notes, and not notebooks (or stacks); not sure what the use case for this would be. If you feel that tags are too much to handle in addition to notebooks and stacks, I'd suggest that you consider using fewer notebooks and use tags to do your main organizing. There are any number of people who use mainly tags to organize their 1000s of notes.

NixNote is a third-party program. The work that Evernote does for third-party programmers is to provide its API, and support for the API. If they wanted to do UI on Linux they would just do it, and have it be an actual Evernote product.