Evernote 5 is here

Posted by Daly de Gagne
Oct 10, 2013 at 12:04 AM

I have about 8,000 items in Evernote. Essentially it is a tag tree, with a superficial approach to using notebooks to create some of the relevant structure you might otherwise have with folders.

As I have said repeatedly, Evernote is not a good information manager.

Even something so simple as a highlighting feature was only introduced in version 5. When I tweeted the company CEO about it a couple of years ago I think he was surprised it wasn’t there. He immediately tweeted back to me it would be in the next new version.

EN’s engineers have developed the cross platform, capture anything, anywhere capability with a passionate obsession which has kept them from asking critical questions about what people to do with information.

The one thing I have found useful is that EN allows multiple open windows.

The abundance of YouTube videos and books documenting how you can use Evernote for anything when it comes to information management and your life and business is, to me, a sign of a need - and indeed, I find much of the advice given, is in fact sets of workarounds for a product which puts more emphasis on collection than it does on managing what you collect.

EN’s lack of a folder structure, or at least a way of nesting tags more effectively is why people like me end up with hundreds of tags. If you are working with widely varying topics, it’s amazing how often you end up face to face with this crazily long list. I have used workarounds to make it all more manageable - for example, I put prefixes in front of some tags so they are all grouped logically and at the top of the tag list. But I ought not to have to play this game.

EN places limitations on how individual items can be listed. If you have a lot of items it all becomes a pain.

This week I realized that to use some of the information I need quickly to get an important project done I will have to pull a lot of items out of EN, and put into another piece of software. I am using WhizFolders. Second choices were MyInfo and Surfulater. MyInfo does allow me to have more than window open, but I can only work in the main window open as the second pane, not in the floating windows (Petko said this would change in the next new version. I like Surfulater a lot, especially its ability to attach notes and other information to an item, but alas, I can only have one window open at a time.

Neither My Info nor WhizFolders are really heavy duty collectors of information. But that’s ok, now that I realized I can’t rely on EN, and I’m damned if I am going to go through the work-arounds to get it to do what I need.

WhizFolders offers me a good system of tags, linking, templates, hoisting, etc.

Essentially all I need to take a bunch of info, break it into manageable bites, and write my book. I do like the fact that Sanjay, the developer of WhizFolders, has kept writers’ needs in mind, and that this is reflected on the WF website and in the demos.

EN does function as the best web data collector I have ever used. It is nice to have all my items synched and downloaded on my table. On an average bus ride I can read 20 to 30 news stories, or one or two long form articles. But it’s not friendly when it comes to taking information through the steps necessary for a writing projects.

Daly

22111 wrote:
So I looked to their preposterous video. So…
> >- I understand its facilities of data entry are outstanding (ocr out of
>pictures, etc., many such functions have been mentioned here, and I’m
>impressed)
> >- I see its layout is very pleasant (and that’s important, too)
> >- I see it has got some similitude to OneNote (from the above, and from
>the lacking “depth” of indentation levels)
> >- Now I perfectly understand that people with some “leisure tasks” will
>be very pleased by this program, that’s obvious
> >- But let’s say you have 10,000 items, then EN must be a nightmare?
> >- It has been said here (I think) that EN offers a tag TREE - in their
>video, I just can see flat lists of tags?
> >- Let’s put my question this way: How do you switch around between
>multiple “notebooks”, how many indentation levels do you have within
>such a “notebook” (not counting the unique “source” item if there is
>one)? How do you navigate fast and in a reliable way? Do you rely on
>tagging, search? Or did I not grasp any feature making all this much
>easier than I imagine from the outside?
>