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Some Reflections on Evernote and MyInfo
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Posted by WSP
Aug 17, 2011 at 08:14 AM
Just a few more thoughts about the troubling non-hierarchical aspect of Evernote. EN (the Windows version, at least) has recently introduced internote linking, and lately I’ve been doing some experiments to see whether that feature can be made to replace, at least in part, a hierarchical tree.
Let me give an example. I have an EN notebook devoted to notes about family history. (I also use family-tree-generating software, but these are more miscellaneous notes that don’t fit well into a family-tree program.) At the moment, in EN, if I want to search for the major notes dealing with one particular person, it’s tricky. I can of course search for both first and last names, but in some notes the name may be rendered differently (an initial instead of a first name, for instance), and unless I use some very convoluted note-naming procedures, EN, after a search, will not display the notes in any coherent order. Furthermore, I can’t create a tag for each of my ancestors, because that would make the tag list too long.
In a hierarchical program like MyInfo, it’s easy to organize this sort of material. In the tree I set up a node for “John Doe” and then create a series of sub-notes in any order that I want.
What I am trying to do at the moment is to replicate that procedure in Evernote.
So I create a new note in EN called something like “John Doe: Summary” in which I place links to all the major notes about Doe, in an order of my choice. (I can also add an explanatory phrase about each linked note if its title is too cryptic.) It’s slightly more time-consuming to do this in EN than in MyInfo, but it does seem to work reasonably well, and it then gives me all the additional benefits of Evernote (cross-platform syncing, excellent tagging system, etc.). The example above is a deliberately simple one; I can imagine creating a more elaborate note of cross-links that would constitute an outline for an article or a chapter in a book.
Has anyone else done any experiments along these lines?
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Aug 20, 2011 at 04:38 PM
FWIW, Evernote does have a hierarchical tree, for organising tags. For me this is a direct equivalent of a ‘classic’ hierarchical tree allowing clones (i.e. an item being included in more than one branches of the tree) given that an Evernote item can have multiple tags.
With tags, the tree paradigm is turned on its head in a way, but I find that I can do any kind of hierachical organising that I would with, say, UltraRecall or Surfulater. Well, with a couple of caveats:
- All tag names have to be unique; e.g. you can’t have a Software tag under a PC category and a Mac category too. Solution: PC (parent tag) \ PC Software (child tag), Mac (parent tag) \ Mac Software (child tag)
- You can’t see the actual items on the tree, only in the separate list pane. However, I find this an advantage rather than a handicap, since you can have large numbers of items without operpopulating the tree. It is the same approach used by Zoot, Sycon IDEA! and mail clients.
WSP wrote:
>Just a few more thoughts about the troubling non-hierarchical aspect of Evernote. EN
>(the Windows version, at least) has recently introduced internote linking, and
>lately I’ve been doing some experiments to see whether that feature can be made to
>replace, at least in part, a hierarchical tree.
Posted by WSP
Aug 20, 2011 at 07:10 PM
Yes, I’m aware that it’s possible to arrange tags hierarchically in the Evernote tag list, but that doesn’t solve all of my problems. Here’s an example (from the same family tree notes I described above):
It’s easy in EN to create a tag for the “Doe” family. But under Doe I want to be able to create subcategories for “John Doe” and “Jane Doe.” That is where the difficulties start. In theory I could do that, but in a large body of notes on anyone’s family history, creating a tag for each individual would produce an intolerably long list of tags, especially since EN forces us to put all notebooks into a single file. In MyInfo I can separate my family notes from other kinds of notes very easily (and then search across more than one file if I wish), but in EN the tags of all those combined notebooks can quickly get out of control. I have thousands of notes in EN (mainly a legacy from using earlier versions of it), and my tag list is already stupefying large.
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Aug 20, 2011 at 08:55 PM
WSP wrote:
>creating a tag for each individual would
>produce an intolerably long list of tags, especially since EN forces us to put all
>notebooks into a single file. In MyInfo I can separate my family notes from other kinds
>of notes very easily (and then search across more than one file if I wish), but in EN the
>tags of all those combined notebooks can quickly get out of control. I have thousands
>of notes in EN (mainly a legacy from using earlier versions of it), and my tag list is
>already stupefying large.
Our situation is actually not very different: I use Evernote for both professional and private items. I have copied as tags all the folder hierarchies I have used in other systems (file system and PIMs) for compatibility, so I too have a very large number of tags. My solution is the following:
- Tags: organised hierarchically within separate ‘superfolders’ representing major areas e.g. work, personal, family etc. The superfolder names, as well as those of the tags themselves, begin with a special character depending on the area; ‘!’ for personal, ‘$’ for work, ‘^’ for family… These characters are quite intuitive for me, and also sort nicely.
- Notebooks: separate notebooks (actually notebook ‘stacks’) for each area, with the same naming conventions as above.
I don’t mind that EN keeps all notebooks in one file; I just expand only the stacks that I am using. I can then select to search/filter only within those.
Posted by WSP
Aug 21, 2011 at 01:37 PM
Thanks for the suggestions. I will do some experiments along these lines.
I feel that I ought to like and use Evernote more than I do, but I confess that I still feel some lingering uneasiness about the way the company abandoned its most loyal users a few years ago. It’s a brilliant piece of software, but the company itself has always struck me as unpredictable and unreliable. I notice that the latest manifestation of this is that they are going on a wild buying binge. (Apparently now, with Skitch, I will be able to add comic remarks to my photographs. Right—just what I need.) Any firm that claims it is creating a universal permanent memory for the human race (or whatever their current phrase is) probably ought to be viewed with some suspicion. I don’t want software with cosmic powers; I just need a decent, functional note-taking program, for heaven’s sake.