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karatedog

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Posts posted by karatedog

  1. I think that enhancing search to allow for hierarchical functionality would be the way to go: i.e., the ability to search for notes labelled by a tag and any of its subtags would give users the ability to treat their tag trees as semantic hierarchies, which seems to be what some of them want.

    If I understand properly, this would result in multiple levels of notebooks represented by tag hierarchy.

    Which leads back to my original question (which popped in my mind, reading a lot about the tagging system): If the tagging system is to be enhanced (and not the notebook hierarchy), why there is a one level depth at all?

  2. Agreed. I ended up using prefixed tags to get around this problem.

    This is the proper sign of an underlying architectural problem. These "tags" are tied together on the wrong level, which results in tags like "project_documents" and "project_info" and you'll have "project" duplicated. Although the Search functionality is smart enough to find text fragments, that way searching for "projec" will work.

  3. Funny, I keep getting the sense that people who want a more defined hierarchy seem to think that their way is the only valid way. If how EN has chosen to do things doesn't work for you AND they've said they don't really intend to change, why are you continuing to frustrate yourself by trying to use the wrong tool?

    You need to get to now Set theory deeper :D . If you want exactly 1 level of stacks and I want unlimited level of it, my "valid" way contains your "valid" way. If the software knew unlimited levels of stacks you could still use only 1 and we could both have our "valid" ways without clashing. Those "valid" ways would collide only if we wanted the same thing but with a different predefined property (you want 1 level, I want 2).

    And you are generalizing that the whole tool is wrong just because one of its - smaller - functionality is wrong. Evernote has problem, but for this one there are no workarounds. Take "Paste as Text" as an example. A very simple function, yet it is a *****. I don't know what it does wrong, because it is irreproducible. Every time I try it, the text looks good in Evernote, but if I copy/paste it into another software, it becomes garbage. So I paste text first into Notepad++, then copy it from there, then paste it into Evernote. Then it will be good everywhere. But I'm lazy to file a ticket, because this workaround solution is fine for me.

  4. which end up being restrictive when you have thousands of notes.

    How can "having more depth in hierarchy" be more restictive than having 1? :D

    I understand your point and it works well for people who have so much information that they have to use search functionality all the time. They really need to categorize the data (tagging), that data can be anywhere, because its location just doesn't matter. These people wouldn't be harassed by even a totally flat note structure.

    However project managers like me (and around me) are cursed with some data organizing habit. So I keep my projects in folders (named by the project's name), and when I want to work with something I can usually pinpont it, I don't need to search. This makes tags completely useless to me.

    Then I tried to think outside the box, as you suggested :D , because the file-system example is wrong if we look at the fact that file-systems don't support tagging functionality at all and that's why we are used to use folders. But I immediately missed features which would ease the pain on tags:

    Introducing tags in the note creation process very early: There are a lot of people arguing about the missing stacked notebook feature, and the answer is usually 'use tags'. So these people need to be taught to use tags. But - for example - if I select a tag (or more tags), the right-click menu does not contain a "Create note with tags" entry. I don't know how much of the documents are automatically imported into Evernote instead of creating it in Evernote, but I usually do the second (and not scan, send a document into Evernote, or whatever).

    The illusion of usefulness of nested tags: adding the deepest entry of nested tags won't add its parents. Which makes tag nesting useless and confusing. A simple tag grouping would have been better to understand, although useless as well. Even if there were some "auto-adding nested tag's parents" feature, it would be still useless, as when tags are added to a note, they immediately loose their child/parent hierarchy (so why create them in the first place?).

    I hope I wasn't nitpicking too hard, I might have done lot of UX and UI projects this year :)

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  5. Interestingly, I'm currently working on some software for a multi-national, multi-billion dollar enterprise customer that is completely tag driven.

    You forgot to mention what you are working on. A CRM system? Maybe on the LHR? So even it is "enterprise" and "multi-billion dollar" it is not necessarily justifies not having a tree structure in information organizing.

    Facts: people usually use computers, and those computer organize information in file-systems, and it is logical. Therefore it is no wonder these people would like to use the same information organizing method they have been used to for ages.

    Why these people don't accept the logic behind the "we have only tags instead of notebook hierarchy"? Because Evernote has hierarchy, although it is 1 level deep.

    A flat level tag system will never be able to organize information like a file-system or a tree hieararchy would do, because the tags currently used in Evernote have no hierarchy, so you can't reproduce this in Evernote: foo/bar/foo/bar.

    Not to mention that small work I have to do when I want to move a bunch of my notes form one place to another. Currently it has to be done by renaming tags (for the missing depth in hieararchy) and moving those notes (because Evernote has that 1 level deep hierarchy).

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