GrumpyMonkey

The reality is that the more data you have, the less efficient a strict hierarchical system becomes. I learned this before even using Evernote b/c I have so much data spread across so many hard drives. I was often having to look through a few Windows folders in order to find a file. I finally started using Locate32 which allows me to quickly find a file, regardless which drive & folder it's in. A simple example is images/photos. If I'm looking for a photo of Uncle Joe in San Diego, is it in the "family" folder? Or the "San Diego vacation 1999" folder? Or the "San Diego vacation 1997" folder? Or the "San Diego marathon" folder? What a pain it would be to locate an ebook if it was only in one category? Is it filed under "fiction"? "Best sellers?" By title? By author? You mixed several hierarchical system. In fact, you can find them if you put them right there. Your problem is on classification, not on the system. Besides, I use hierarchical system but I don't use it alone. I use search box to find what I need, then I use hierarchical system to see what's relative. I'm not terribly invested in this argument, and even though I left the "Yahoo! Portal" (hierarchical / categorized model of information management) for the "Google Search" (flat model of information management) camp a long time ago, I do recognize the value of having multiple ways to structure data. Evernote (in my opinion) works better for the Google one. Personally, I'd like to see both made stronger in order to pull in more users, but there may be design decisions involved behind the scenes.

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. Before EN's note linking feature was out, I had a very hard time to arrange all my notes. I wanted to make all my notes be my Wikipedia, but it turned out to be my Google. I could help me find things but I couldn't see the whole picture of them. Maybe hierarchical system is cubersome for some people. But it's not cumbersome for all people. This is a great analogy, and I have to agree that the note link feature has been crucial for me as well. It has its issues and limitations, most notably the feature missing from mobile devices, but it is an improvement. Surely, she is a household word! Just kidding, after cutting the cord a few years ago (no more cable tv) it seems that my time on this earth has included a lot less inane blather, though I am surely suffering in some way without being jacked into the Jersey Shore. I only really know about her through word of mouth, clicking on articles I come across in Google News, and my general interest in the phenomenon of monetizing your public persona.

Oh, I know that. Look at my figure, and I am still not famous! I was just trying to help explain Kim. Actually, I think she has a colorful history, connections, marketing acumen, and lots of other attributes as well. Who knows what the formula for success is, though? Heck, in this day and age cute animals outperform political and business leaders in terms of popularity. It seems a little easier to wrap my head around tags and notebooks than the mysteries of fame and notoriety.

A pun? You know, she is famous for her figure, among other things. Anyhow, my brain seems to work pretty well without a hierarchical organizational system, but I think it is true that stuff outside of my brain don't tend to do as well. Evernote's tags, especially if they become "smarter" by getting applied automatically (with an option not to do it, of course) might help us make the leap to an external brain that works more like our internal one.

EN reads all the posts on the board but does not comment on them all. Nor do they publish their roadmap or ETAs. The most you usually get is a "thank you for the suggestion". Yep. And, they have already commented on it. See Evernote Podcast #28 (40:25-43:28). It is "inevitable." However, we don't know the timeline, so it could be anywhere from tomorrow to a hundred years from now

Good question. My guess (this is only a guess) is that Evernote would probably be more interested in mobile clients, because that is where a lot of customers first encounter the platform. Also, there is already a third-party Linux client, and its user base is probably relatively small and unlikely to grow much (sorry, but that is just how it looks to me, as much as I like Linux). I don't have any numbers for any of this, of course, and I am not an employee, so I have no idea if what I am saying is accurate or not. I suppose, if Linux users want to see the client, they'd have to (as you suggest in your post) justify the expense.

It does break your workflow if you move to mobile. I'm hoping that note links will come sometime soon to mobile, because (like the complaints about missing stacks on the iPad) if an organizational tool is missing in one place, it might as well be missing in them all.

Hi. Welcome to the forums! In an ideal world, I bet the Evernote developers would agree: let's have an app that does anything you want, totally customizable for your needs, and available that way on any operating system / device. However, that isn't how things work with cars, software, or any other product. Designers have to make decisions about what to put into a product based on available resources (capabilities of devices and operating systems, time, money, manpower, expertise, etc.). From the early days, Evernote decided tags would be a better way of organizing notes than notebooks. Personally, I think they ought to have both systems in place, but that would mean we'd have nothing to grouse about in the forums, and this place would get shut down Seriously, though, I don't know why they made this decision. My guess would have to be that they saw folder hierarchies and complicated organizational systems as antithetical to an "external brain." Our meat brains don't organize things into yellow manilla folders, so why should our silicon ones? Instead, we associate items with other ones similar to tags -- a memory of our mom could link to delicious home cooking just as easily as it could to a family trip, so why would we try and force things into this folder or that one? That is just a guess, but it makes sense to me, and is certainly an approach that resonates with me. I've written a bit about my Evernote use case on my website (http://www.princeton.edu/~cmayo/notebook.html). My use case might be too minimalistic for most people, but the general principle of associating things with one another instead of organizing them into categories is the same. More broadly speaking, I think Phil and his team are a little more ambitous than just giving customers what they want. Like Apple under Jobs, I think they see their mission as one of creating a new way of living that will appeal to people, rather than giving people the supercharged TO DO list and task manager that everyone says they want. Evernote Hello (in my opinion) is something along these lines, because it challenges us to totally rethink how we do a fundamental ritual that we have all performed at one time or another; namely, meeting people. Because it is so radical in some ways, it probably hasn't been adopted as widely as something like Food or (soon) Penultimate. However, in the end, it may take us to a better place than a more conventional contact manager would have. I think that is pretty cool, and along the lines of the company's less well-known goal to make people smarter. They say they want to help you remember stuff, but I think that is only the first step. Yellow manilla folders don't seem to fit very well into my vision of a smarter me

I think it is a fair question you had about why there is no Linux support from Evernote. But, I guess we have answered you the best we can. Evernote has decided at this time not to create a Linux client. Instead, they have decided to offer a well-documented API, and support for anyone who wants to develop an integration. A third-party developer has stepped in with an integration, and from what I have seen, he has done a great job with it. Of course, there is the Web interface as well. So, you have a couple of options. Maybe someday Evernote will change their mind. I don't know. All we can do is comment on what has happened in the past, and what is available now.

For those of you who don't know, baumgarr has a publicly shared Evernote notebook (https://www.evernote...mgarr/nevernote), a website (http://nevernote.sourceforge.net), and some information about how you can help support his project (http://nevernote.sou...information.htm), which amounts mainly to donations of your time to the project and/or donations to charities in lieu of direct support. Pretty cool, if you ask me, and definitely something worth supporting.

To tease apart Metrodon's message a little bit more: Evernote offers access to the same API that they use to build their client, so developers are welcome, and even encouraged to build integrations, including anyone who wants to create a Linux client. Evernote has chosen so far not to invest their resources (time, money, and manpower) into development of this client. I don't know why. It is too bad for Linux folks, of course, but I think a lot of companies have followed a similar path of focusing their limited resources on areas where they can have the biggest impact. If I had to guess, I would say it is simply a matter of priorities. One thing to note, I think, is that a significant number of users come to Evernote from the mobile platform, and so Evernote has poured a lot of its resources into this. If Evernote is aiming to bring the service to 1 billion people (this is what the CEO has said), then I doubt putting their money into Linux development (as opposed to servers and infrastructure) will advance them very far in this direction. To reiterate what Metrodon said, it isn't that Evernote is opposed to a Linux client, in the way that some proprietary software developers might be, but rather that they have left it up to developers. This is just my take on it, though. Feel free to request the client! After four years, though, and great success with their current clients, I am thinking Evernote will probably not change course...

Personally, I don't think your numbers argument is very persuasive. I am familiar with LaTeX, and some of my colleagues at university use it, but I think it is restricted almost entirely to the sciences, and even there, only a small subset of students/researchers/faculty use it. I have never encountered anyone in K-12 using it, but I wouldn't be surprised to find pockets of enthusiasts here and there. If you accept that we are mainly talking about university students, then the percentage of the US population (last I checked) was under 6%. That is less than 15 million students. If you accept that LaTeX is restricted primarily to the hard sciences, I think we are talking about less than 200,000 students (last I checked) graduating with BAs each year. And, less than 10,000 with PhDs. I am not saying that LaTeX support would be "bad" or "good", but if you are basing your argument on numbers of students, then I think you are on rather weak ground. In addition, using the numbers argument, I think we could make a far more persuasive case for including some basic word processing features like highlighters, margin support, etc. Personally, I need neither LaTeX nor Word Processing support. I just want plain text (we do not have that with Evernote). But, just like you, I am on weak ground with the numbers argument, because there are probably not very many students passionate about plain text In the end, Evernote needs (in my opinion) to go where the numbers are, and they have to develop features that will impact millions of users, not just a few thousand. What to do? Encourage third party developers to make integrations (the Evernote API is open, easily understood, and well-supported by staff dedicated to helping out developers). If you are right about your numbers, and totally disagree with me on mine, then you will have an idea worth lots of money. In addition, I bet it will support plain text, so both of us benefit

Hi. Evernote only has stacks and notebooks available (a two level hierarchy). I think the service is designed to rely more on tags than notebooks for organization, so I think that even if it is not necessarily comfortable at first, you'll be better off in the long run using tags. With a few exceptions, I use neither notebooks nor tags myself (http://www.princeton.edu/~cmayo/evernote-organization.html) for organizational purposes.

Update: I ran out of space again on my Mac today, so I did some digging around to see what was happening. Somehow, Evernote has grown much larger since I last checked, and it now occupies about 1/4 of the available space (26.98 GB of 120GB) in my local drive. I underestimated its size in the previous post, but I have to admit that I have no idea how it could have grown so large -- a month or two ago it was about half this size. I have already deleted almost all of the notebooks people were sharing with me, and removed things like iTunes and all but a handful of my files. I am sure I will be able to scrounge around and find enough space for the application, but I don't see how I am going to continue through the year at this pace (Macbook Air 128 GB). I do hope selective sync is coming sooner rather than later.

Ditto. Am on an Air with 250Gb, and still contend with space management problems. I've been relying more and more on Dropbox for that very reason. Selective sync gives me the ability to store only what's necessary on the Air while keeping all files on the Mini in the office. If I'm missing something on the Air, I just go to Dropbox online and download the specific item. Tight, clean, controllable. The MBAir only has just-so-much space, then :::poof!::: Dead in the water with a maxed out hard drive. Please, please, please...selective sync, soon. I dearly love Evernote, but can't afford the risk of having it crash my drive. Yeah. I crashed a lot over the last few days. I think what happened is that I was doing something with PDFs that seems to have temporarily eaten up all available extra space (that was a surprise), and I had a bunch of shared notebooks with thousands of notes in them (many gigabytes). Crashing was not much fun, but running out of storage during a sync caused Evernote to have to re-index all of my notes (10,000+) as well. That took a long time. Deleting the shared notebooks freed up space, and now I am more careful with the program that I am using. None of this crashing is Evernote's fault. However, ideally I wouldn't have to delete shared notebooks at all, and I could certainly use the 13GB + my account is taking up (it will likely be 25GB or more by this time next year). Selective sync would be a welcome feature indeed.

Yes, and no. It only saves a note history every 8 hours or so. This can result in a note not existing yet or changes falling in-between the times. If you are on a desktop, I recommend regular Time Machine backups. It doesn't hurt to copy/paste into a new note when making changes to something important. This produces versions of a note that can be useful or deleted later.

Hi. Welcome to the forums! I am in the same boat, but I am afraid that removing the OSX app from my computer is inconceviable at this time (I get way too much done with it), and the Web app (while useful) is woefully inadequate for my needs, so I have shifted a lot of my files to the Web. This is quite unwieldy, and I lose important functionality like Spotlight searches and easy browsing of research. Hopefully, selective sync can be implemented sooner than later!

hi. welcome to the forums! no. there is not. a search on these forums for linux will get you up to speed on options available.

I suppose it depends on where you look. If you read my post, I think you'll see that I didn't say you were "wrong" about notebook hierarchies (that is the topic of this thread), but I do think you are wrong in your accusations about Evernote. Perhaps we need to agree to disagree on this one. As for a dialogue about entirely redesigning the app and presenting information in an outline form (however that is achieved), that sounds interesting to me, but may be beyond the scope of this particular thread (a more modest request for deeper hierarchies) and I think it may need to be fleshed out more so we have something specific to discuss. Feel free to start a thread on it! Personally, I think it is unlikely that Evernote will go that direction (I have no idea what this would mean for third-party integrations, server loads, re-training of employees, or possible defection by current members who are satisfied with the current structure), but I guess that you never know.

More notebook hierarchies is a reasonable suggestion. I think it is great that people take time to offer their opinions. Evernote staff are listening. They comment in these threads. And, they have responded (here is one from the CTO http://discussion.evernote.com/topic/14214-can-stacks-contain-stacks/#entry68438). By definition, I think they cannot be said to be ignoring the request, and just because they disagree about the vision for how the app should be structured doesn't mean they are arrogant. You never know. They may change their minds. It's worth a try! But, if they don't, I doubt accusing them of arrogance is going to help your case

If you use iOS (iPad or iPhone), you can change the accessibility settings so that pressing the Home button three times will reverse colors. This is great for reading at night. It is a global setting that works for all apps.

Actually, this is a problem, isn't it. I have deleted things on accident and wondered how they got there. I know this might be way beyond the pale, but I think it would be cool if we could have a note generated each day (optional, of course) detailing our activity. I'd like to know all sorts of diagnostic stuff and have it in an easily digestible form. Report for August 13, 2012 12 notes changed 20 notes created 3 notes deleted 2 notebooks shared 1 shared notebook deleted Changed notes blah blah details Created notes blah blah blah details Deleted notes blah blah blah details

Welcome to the forums. Shared notebooks are neither posted by Evernote nor indexed by search engines, so unless you share directly with people on a website or something like that, then it is unlikely anyone will stumble across it. I have gathered together a bunch of shared notebooks and posted them on my website. I'd be happy to add yours into the mix http://www.princeton.edu/~cmayo/sharednotebooks.html

You are not being shunned. There is an API. Anyone is welcome to develop for the platform. Give a listen to Podcast #8 (18:03-18:59) see what they think, and if possible, please offer an argument that might persuade them to change their minds I have links to the podcasts at the bottom of this page http://www.princeton...multimedia.html

You could do that if you want, but I think if you search around on the forums, you'll find that this request comes up every once in a while, so they probably already know that some users want it. I suppose it is probably more a question of whether they want to do it, priorities, resources, and technical obstacles. Personally, I would recommend relying more on tags than notebooks. Share a notebook with a broad category (see http://www.princeton.edu/~cmayo/evernote-notebook.html) and use jbenson2's suggestion for creating a tag hierarchy within it (see http://www.princeton.edu/~cmayo/evernote-tag.html).