SteveJazz

..and, then I discovered Craft. A beautiful app. Completely rethinks note taking with a block paradigm, the ability to create nested pages and cards, and the concept of links and back links. Oh, and a folder system that easily allows for nested folders. Evernote feels like an attempt to polish an old paradigm. Evernote will do a great job at that, but I’ll take the new paradigm...and nested folders. Ironically, the ability to create sub-pages is so powerful, it enables me to flatten my hierarchy and I need fewer folder levels. Genius. No tagging yet, but I bet tags come before Evernote adds nested folders. Bought the Craft subscription; cancelled the Evernote subscription.

Can someone tell me what they mean or represent? They look like some sort of progress bar, but it isn’t obvious to me what information is being provided to me.

Split screen support for the iPad would significantly improve the functionality of Evernote. Currently, I’m using Apple Notes (but waiting patiently for nested folders support, at which point I will convert to EN). I frequently split my screen with an instance of Apple Notes on each side. Great use case. Great productivity.

Yes, but that is the key point for those in the folders camp: we want a few more layers. Evernote is a beautiful app, and I like the new version (although it definitely is buggy). I hope to some day convert back to it.

Two quick things: First, I’ve heard an interview with Evernote’s CEO where he states that their are two camps of people: those that like to put things in folders and those that like to tag things. He’s a folder person, so - perhaps - he can finally influence the roadmap. I think tags are wonderful, but feel like notes should be in folders and then the tags can cut across the folders. That’s exactly how the CEO described. Second, I keep looking at Bear (as an alternative App). It actually has “tags”, but I put that in quotes, because they work more like folders. And tags can be nested. Now, their implementation isn’t exactly what I want, but it certainly is a lot closer than Evernote. Net, Evernote needs to raise its game and add simply, nested folder support.

Yes...when using the Magic Keyboard (and with the iPad connected to it) I often can’t see the hamburger icon to open up the sidebar and I don’t see the “new note” pill. These elements are obscured, it seems, by an element associated with the keyboard itself.

Evernote does not play well with the Magic Keyboard. In particular, when my iPad is attached to the keyboard, the “new note” pill and the “hamburger” icon that opens the left panel are obscured. This makes it very difficult to use Evernote when connected to my Magic Keyboard. This is my normal workflow, so it effectively renders Evernote unusable to me.

I’m wondering why I get notifications to upgrade the iOS version on my phone and my iPad when a) the notifications are out of date (e.g., I received one today, although the last upgrade version was two weeks ago) and 2) I have already upgraded and am on the current version. These notifications are irrelevant. Although not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, it does make me wonder what is going on at Evernote.

Yes, some idea of what was fixed would be tremendously helpful.

Thanks.

They don’t actually, not after the second step I described. For notebooks, when you navigate to a notebook, all the notes in that notebook are in the left sidebar. I can click into a note, and the all the other notes in that notebook remain in the sidebar. It is easy for me to move between those notes and interact with them. For tags, when I select a tag, I get what I’d term a search view. The selected tag is active in the top left and all the notes that have that tag are displayed. So far, the behavior is the same as with notebooks. However, I can’t interact with this group of similarly tagged notes. As soon as I click on one note, the view changes. I still am in that note, but the display now shows the notebook in which that tagged note lives, along with all the other notes in that notebook, whether they have that selected tag or not. This highlights again that there is a difference in how notebooks and tags are implemented, displayed, etc in EN. If you want to simply say that notebooks and tags are simply attributes of a note and are the same...then, fine, at that level, they are the same. The problem that I’m describing is that EN approaches notebooks and tags differently. Living in a tag structure for organization forces me into that dimension, and to me it is inferior to the notebook dimension (as in the above example). ‘The same is true in the parent/child example. I want to interact with all of my notes that are part of a group and a subgroup, or sometimes I want to interact with the notes that are just in the subgroup. (I’m using group and subgroup to be generic and avoid stack/notebook and parent tag/child tag terminology). I can do what I want in the stack/notebook dimension. Click on a stack and you get all the notes of all the notebooks in that stack. Click on a notebook in that stack, and you get only the notes in that notebook. This works different in tags. Click on the parent tag (which is equivalent to a stack in this example), and you won’t see the notes that have the child tag (even though they are in that parent’s hierarchy) unless they contain both the child and the parent tag. Again, I’m not saying either dimension is inherently right or wrong. I’m saying they are different, and they are different. Unfortunately, my preference is for the notebook dimension and EN has decided to not create a hierarchy for that dimension. As a side note, even Stacks is a poor form of hierarchy, since no notes can live in the stack and outside of the stack’s notebooks. In any computer filing system, that limitation doesn’t exist...I can have files (notes) or folders (notebooks) live side by side in a parent folder. Stacks is really just a wrapper without any functionality except for visual organization. I can use that, but it isn’t ideal.

And, one other example that shows the differences. If I have a stack with 5 nested notebooks, I can click on the stack and see all the notes in these 5 notebooks. If I have a tag with 5 nested sub-tags, I can click on the parent tag, but I only get the notes tagged with the parent tag. I don’t see any of the notes that are tagged with a child tag. Frankly, I don’t understand that behavior at all. It feels like there is no relationship between child and parent tags (other than I can set them up visually that way, but I don’t see any enhanced functionality by doing it). What does EN expect me to do? Tag notes with both the parent and the child tag? Frankly, I conclude that EN spent a lot of time creating a hierarchical tag structure that doesn’t work the way I would expect. It created a notebook structure that does work like I expect (but lacking in level depth). Both are fails (to me). I’m not busting on EN. It has a lot of great functionality that is superior to most other products. Nested notebooks are important to me, I don’t see tags as a viable alternative. Net, I need to either compromise with EN or look at another app. I may be the odd man out, and that’s perfectly fine.

I’m not sure I really want to wade into what seems like a touchy subject in this forum, but I can provide some examples. Most importantly, it feels to me that Notebooks have more primacy and functionality in EN than do tags. EN is still fundamentally structured around the stacks/notebooks. Tags feel like a secondary dimension (although important and capable). If I have to use tags to create my hierarchy, then I’m working a lot in this secondary dimension. I’d prefer not to do that. Second, I actually want to file my notes and feel that they are part of a virtual hierarchical structure. I want to be able to click on a notebook or sub-notebook and see all the notes that I know are related (because I put them in that notebook). I agree that I can structure the tag list to mimic my desired notebook structure. However, the functionality really isn’t the same. If I click into a notebook, I see all the notes that live in that notebook. I can click on a note, and still see all the other notes in the notebook (in the left sidebar). I can move between those notes and interact with them as a group. Now, if I click on a tag, I end up with a search result of all the notes that have that tag. If I click on a note, do I still get to see all the other notes with that tag? Nope! I end up in the notebook that houses that tagged note (and I’m looking at a lot of other notes that aren’t relevant). I find that ironic, because it really is an admission that the note “lives” in a notebook. Maybe that is less about notebooks vs. tags (I agree they are both just attributes), but EN provides functionality and a visual metaphor for notebooks that are different than it provides for tags. I want to be able to use that functionality with sub-notebooks with a reasonable number of notes, aggregated into larger logical notebooks, aggregated into stacks. Finally, philosophically, if tags are a substitute, then why does EN have Notebooks? I think somewhere EN realizes that notes should be filed/structured and tags should be used to find notes that share some attribute across the structure. And, that’s what I believe, I just want the filing structure to have more depth. Frankly, for me, if forced to use EN, then I’d simply create a long flat list of notebooks. I’d name them in some way to imply a hierarchy (1, 1.1, 1.2, 2.1). That would give me the structure I want, but would not be visually pleasing and it would not be as functional (as I’d be doing a lot of scrolling). Why not simply let us open or close a nested hierarchy? Honestly, the ratio of applications that use a nested file/notebook structure as the primary organizing dimension to applications that offer tags as the primary organizing mechanism must by 1000:1. It does feel to me that someone at EN just wants to be contrarian.

It seems like this has been a passionate debate on these forums for a long time. I think it is fair to say that for those of us that like a hierarchical structure and the concept of actual filing notes, tags are not a substitute for nested notebooks (or folders). Tags are helpful in other ways, and they can approximate the functionality of nested notebooks, but they aren’t the same. I’m not sure it really is a debate...Tags won’t work for me (if they do for others, that’s wonderful). Unfortunately, having that functionality is critical to me. I got excited when I learned that Evernote was doing a major revamp and had hopes that nested notebooks would be enabled. Frankly, even one more level would be enough to enable my workflow. Sadly, this major revamp doesn’t have that functionality. That’s fine...Evernote has a philosophy and it is sticking to it. I have a need, and I will fulfill it by using Apple Notes (which, although lacking in other features, has enable nested notebooks/folders) or OneNote.

The Dev team should test the new software with an iPad leveraging the Magic Keyboard. I see a few unusual behaviors. The main one is that using the trackpad to highlight text doesn’t work well. If you click the pointer in front of a line of text, then hold your finger on the keyboard to grab the full line (left to write), this causes the entire window to move to the previous window (as if the user had selected the back arrow in the upper left hand corner). For me, this is not helpful behavior. I want to use the keyboard and mouse, and have them work as they do through out the entire system.