A Theory of Outliner Software Market Development

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Oct 11, 2011 at 05:41 PM

Vincek wrote:
>Evernote is great for capturing
>information, but its lousy for manipulating that information into a hierarchical

I’m not sure I would agree. As I’ve written elsewhere in this forum, IMHO Evernote’s tagging capability more than makes up for the lack of structure in the notebooks themselves.

Tags can be organised in a hierarchy of, apparently, limitless depth; ergo, a tag outline can be created. One can drag and drop information items to tags on the tree, as if they were folders. Having more than one tag per item is equivalent to cloning items within separate folders (even though the paradigm is turned on its head).

What Evernote is surely not good at, within the process of writing a book, is the kind of text editing provided by a classic one pane outliner, or a modern solution like Infoqube or Sense, i.e. being able to see the forest and the trees at the same time. But I have serious doubts that Evernote’s API is so flexible as to allow an external application to provide this kind of view/edit pane.