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Without These 5 Features, Evernote May Be Over (with competitors like Notion hitting the scene)


Rufus M

Idea

I love Evernote, but after several years as a user (primarily for academic research), I am acutely aware of several areas in dire need of development (which would probably be quite easy to do).

Evernote is lagging several years behind the competition in terms of features, having made only minor incremental changes since I started using it. With apps like Notion currently stealing the spotlight, Evernote needs to develop quickly indeed if it wants to maintain its user base.

Despite the power of Notion, I haven't quite been willing to make the jump, primarily because of Evernote's magnificent search, web clipper, and offline functionality. However, in order for Evernote to survive going forward, I believe these five features are absolutely vital (and wouldn't take long to implement). If any of the developers are reading, I hope you find these suggestions helpful:

  • Custom note order (i.e. drag-and-drop), as in OneNote, Scrivener, and virtually every other notetaking app. The only way to manually arrange the order of notes is to put an alphabetical/numerical code at the start of the note title, but the moment you want to rearrange those notes, you have to go through and re-title everything by hand. When creating databases, there is usually a logical order for information to be presented in, so this feature is vital for researchers.

  • Hierarchy. Whether the Evernote Team like it or not, hierarchical organisation is vital to keeping notes organised and easily accessible (insert Jordan Peterson joke here). Tags do offer a limited hierarchy, but it isn't very convenient in terms of how most people actually use the app. I can think of two solutions under this subheading:

    • Stackable folders. People have been asking for this feature for years, and it blows my mind that we can still only create two-tiered folders (stacks with notebooks inside). The inevitable result is either (a) notebooks with far too many notes, (b) stacks holding an insane list of notebooks, or (c) both. If you've been using Evernote for a while, you probably know what I'm talking about here.

    • Sub-notes. In some cases, there is information that I'll probably only ever want to view as a sub-document of another note. Rather than burying it inside the main note itself (which can make it hard to find the information), sub-notes allow information to be stored as a separate document, but within another note. This works incredibly well in OneNote and Scrivener, helping to reduce clutter and make it easy to navigate between subsections of a given topic.

  • Custom metadata. This is one area where Notion absolutely hits it out of the park, bringing it the closest any app has come to matching the power of Scrivener. As great as Evernote's search function is, there is no way to categorise your tags and then search by those categories. Custom metadata allows users to create additional columns, and place tags, text, checkboxes, etc in those columns, for extra sorting power.

    • e.g. In Notion/Scrivener, I can create fields for "Screenwriter" and "Director", and enter the relevant name into each field for my note on a film. Then, if need be, I can search only for films directed by a given artist, while excluding films where they were screenwriter instead. In spreadsheet/table view, there is a separate column for each category, which lets me see a lot of information about my research materials. In Evernote, I can search for notes tagged with the artist's name, but there is no differentiation by role. This is a crucial feature for any serious research app, and vital if Evernote is to compete with Notion and other newcomers.

  • Note descriptions. Scrivener users will be familiar with this one. When viewing the note list, there is a text field below the title that lets you add a more detailed description of what the note is about. Incredibly useful if you want to know the key ideas of your notes without clicking on each one individually and waiting for it to load.

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On 11/25/2019 at 10:43 PM, Rufus M said:

Without These 5 Features, Evernote May Be Over

You're not the first to submit a  post like this (Evernote May Be Over)
Of course the missing feature list varies;
you missed Markdown, OCR with access to text files, Highlight Colours, Recurring Reminders, ...

And yet, Evernote continues to store and organize my data 

You might post your items as separate feature requests; and drop the  "May Be Over" dramatics

>>Custom note order (i.e. drag-and-drop)

Currently implemented in Evernote, but only for the Reminder and Shortcuts sections

>>Stackable folders

Evernote has no support for a folder filing methodology    
Instead, Evernote provides two fields in the note metadata; Notebooks and Tags   
imho This is a superior organization method

Tags are Evernote's primary tool for organization    
A hierarchy is supported with unlimited levels (Windows/Mac)

Some users emulate folders with the notebook/tag trees in the sidebar

>>(a) notebooks with far too many notes

I use minimal notebooks; basically a single FilingCabinet notebook for my 13,000+ notes   
Is that "far too many notes"?

>>Sub-notes

Evernote provides a note link feature   
It's possible to link sub-notes to a master note

>>there is no way to categorise your tags and then search by those categories.

I prefix tagnames; for example Budget-Utilities, Budget-Rent, Budget-Food    
and search for tag:Budget*

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Is the sky falling? Again?

"Dire"? Really?

A couple of points:

7 hours ago, Rufus M said:

Custom note order (i.e. drag-and-drop), as in OneNote, Scrivener, and virtually every other notetaking app. The only way to manually arrange the order of notes is to put an alphabetical/numerical code at the start of the note title, but the moment you want to rearrange those notes, you have to go through and re-title everything by hand. When creating databases, there is usually a logical order for information to be presented in, so this feature is vital for researchers.

Reminder notes can be arbitrarily ordered via drag/drop, at least in Evernote for Window and Android. I don't need all of my notes to be reminders, only the ones I'm most interested in at the present time, and reminders allow me to focus on just those notes.

8 hours ago, Rufus M said:

Stackable folders. People have been asking for this feature for years, and it blows my mind that we can still only create two-tiered folders (stacks with notebooks inside). The inevitable result is either (a) notebooks with far too many notes, (b) stacks holding an insane list of notebooks, or (c) both. If you've been using Evernote for a while, you probably know what I'm talking about here.

Um, I know what you're talking about here, but frankly, over 10 years of Evernote use, I haven't found much need for more than 10 or so notebooks and a couple of stacks in each of the two accounts I operate, several of which are necessitated by the need to share some groups of notes between the two accounts. If you're creating an "insane" number of notebooks, then "insane" is the operative term for this type of approach.

7 hours ago, Rufus M said:

Sub-notes. In some cases, there is information that I'll probably only ever want to view as a sub-document of another note. Rather than burying it inside the main note itself (which can make it hard to find the information), sub-notes allow information to be stored as a separate document, but within another note. This works incredibly well in OneNote and Scrivener, helping to reduce clutter and make it easy to navigate between subsections of a given topic.

As mentioned by @DTLow above, note links can be used to express a note hierarchy. I use this a lot, mainly to capture subsidiary notes and other information about a current bug ticket, while only needing to keep the note links in my weekly journal and other repositories of this sort of administrivia. You can even extend this to full networks (which are more expressive than simple hierarchies) if you want. That, mixed with the nice history mechanism that's present in the Windows application makes it easy for me to navigate my projects and their subprojects.

7 hours ago, Rufus M said:

Custom metadata. This is one area where Notion absolutely hits it out of the park, bringing it the closest any app has come to matching the power of Scrivener. As great as Evernote's search function is, there is no way to categorise your tags and then search by those categories. Custom metadata allows users to create additional columns, and place tags, text, checkboxes, etc in those columns, for extra sorting power.

??? I use tags to categorize my notes; I don't need to categorize my tags: tags are the categories in my Evernote world. Sure, I see a case for custom metadata -- heck, I might even use it if it were present, if the search language supported it (and don't get me started on the search language), but geez, the last thing I want to do is to build a complex system to organize things down to a fare-thee-well, when what I actually need is a simple system that allows me to find things easily -- and when I say easily, I mean a search that narrows things down to a small list ("7 plus or minus 2" anyone?) where I can easily pick out what I want by eye. Evernote gives me that. Sorting is largely irrelevant to that use case.

8 hours ago, Rufus M said:

Note descriptions. Scrivener users will be familiar with this one. When viewing the note list, there is a text field below the title that lets you add a more detailed description of what the note is about. Incredibly useful if you want to know the key ideas of your notes without clicking on each one individually and waiting for it to load.

Not a big issue for me, since I use snippet view in the Windows application, where I get the first couple of lines from each note by default, after the tags. Android does this too, minus the tags.Of course, I generally use tags to express the key concepts in a note, much like keywords in a research paper. I suppose that Evernote could add a list view metadata item that's auto-populated by the first few lines of a note, but it itself edtable, a la the title field.

Note that I'm not saying that Evernote can't be improved (I've made my share or suggestions over the years), but what I like about it is that it's relatively simple conceptually and has a mapping to the physical world that makes it readily understandable (the notebook/note/tag metaphor; reminders being sort of corkboard for notes, if you want to extend the metaphor).  I found Notion to be difficult to get into (what is a "block", anyways?), almost unapproachable when trying to figure out where to begin. Power user weenies will love it, I suppose, and it will surely siphon off users from Evernote, but for my money, Evernote's simplicity is pretty much all I need. Would it be worth it for Evernote make non-trivial architectural changes in order to chase those types of users? Not my call. Would adding such features make Evernote harder to use for minimalists like me? It's possible, but adding more stuff almost inevitably implies adding more UI stuff, so I'm somewhat skeptical on that point.

Regardless, I'm pretty certain that Evernote will survive, even continue to prosper, without adding the 5 features named above.

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10 hours ago, Rufus M said:

The inevitable result is either (a) notebooks with far too many notes, (b) stacks holding an insane list of notebooks, or (c) both

Out of interest, what difference does it make how many notes are in a notebook?  Search is a great neutralizer. 

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On 11/25/2019 at 10:43 PM, Rufus M said:

Custom metadata ... spreadsheet/table view ...

As a work-around, 
- I store custom metadata using keywords in the title/contents   
- all note titles begin with the subject date, note type    
Example, a receipt note    
2019/11/27 Receipt !Vendor-Walmart !Budget-Furniture [Mirror] $30.98  
This is easily parsed

>>In spreadsheet/table view, there is a separate column for each category

Evernote has a List view feature, but it's limited in functionality

For a spreadsheet view, I use an actual spreadsheet (Apple Numbers)
- exporting the Evernote data to a spreadsheet using a script on my Mac;    
  copy/paste also works
- using separate columns for custom metadata  and selected tags       
- hyperlinking back to the Evernote note   
- stored in Evernote as a note attachment
Example, my spreadsheet view for receipts
837845579_ScreenShot2019-11-28at7_23_45AM.png.e18d251e370c51bf7a6250cb2cf3e234.png

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