http://evernote.com/evernote/whats_new/windows/?utm_source=silverpop&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=100413_windows_webinar_en_usca

haven't really examined the new features yet but I know our intrepid outliner afficianados will quickly dissect it.

Evernote 5 has been around for Mac for a while (currently on v5.4). The Windows version is very similar, but some Mac features are not yet present. The most obvious of these is the full-screen "Presentation" mode that came along in the most recent Mac release.

There is lots of change to the chrome in Evernote 5 on Windows -- most of which is welcome, and I feel this makes the interface more pleasant to work in. I thought the "Reminders" feature would be useful. One can ask Evernote to nudge you to read an entry in a day, a week, or some future date. In my experience, as it turns out this is just one more todo list and I don't need more todo lists ;-)

The new similar-note suggestions are helpful. The most powerful change is that search is much smarter -- for example, search results dynamically narrowing down or expanding as words (even partial words) are typed in the search box.

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?

22111 wrote:

- But let's say you have 10,000 items, then EN must be a nightmare?

Yes, I'd think it would be. Evernote is not the tool for that kind of volume, or for the other features you mention.

- It has been said here (I think) that EN offers a tag TREE - in their
video, I just can see flat lists of tags?

Tags can be nested, thus

Tag A
.....Tag B
..........Tag C

but there's not much point to it since there is no tag inheritance (notes with Tag C do not also inherit Tag A and Tag B)

- 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?

Notebooks can be gathered into "Stacks" -- stacks have one level:

Stack A
......Notebook 1
......Notebook 2

There is no indentation within notebooks.

I'm in the midst of writing a book with all of my notes in Evernote. I of course use tags and careful note-naming practices, but I am falling back mainly on "outline notes" in which I create rather primitive outlines of chapters filled with links to other notes.

It's not a terribly sophisticated form of outlining -- it certainly wouldn't satisfy many of the really intense outline-enthusiasts on this forum -- but I have to admit that I have been a slovenly outliner all my life. When I first encountered formal outlining in high school, I asked my teacher, "How can I know what I am going to write before I write it?" That still seems like a reasonable question to me. Of course when I used to do a long piece of writing (before computers, that is), I sketched out on paper the main sections and subsections and then organized my note cards in a sequence that more or less approximated my rough sketches. But I was always convinced that the really important organizational stuff went on in my head as I was gathering material and as I was writing.

In other words, Evernote is not terribly good at organizing material, but it more or less works for someone like me who harbors suspicions of over-elaborate organizing anyway. I hope I won't be branded a heretic on this forum for expressing such an unorthodox view.

Bill

Paul Korm wrote:

22111 wrote:
>- But let's say you have 10,000 items, then EN must be a nightmare?

Yes, I'd think it would be. Evernote is not the tool for that kind of
volume, or for the other features you mention.

I have 9,000 notes, about a third of which contain PDF, Word, or image attachments. If you talk to people on the EN forums you will find lots of people with far more notes than that.

I think this type of volume is *exactly* what EN is built for. I've never used another piece of software, other than Gmail, that can quickly and easily retrieve content out of such a large database -- especially considering that unlike Gmail, EN searches the *content* of PDFs, Word files and images. So in my experience, it's far from a nightmare - I don't know what other tool I could use for this if EN did not exist.

The fact is, hierarchical organization is terrific for creating outlines of books or papers or other specific topics: when you are dealing with one specific topic that will have a couple hundred sub-items, all of which logically fit in a hierarchical structure.

But hierarchy does not scale.
How do you search the internet? With a hierarchical tree navigation structure? Remember, Yahoo! tried that in the 90s and it became unusable very quickly. No, you search the internet using Google. You search content and metadata using search terms. That's the way you deal with large volumes of information -- so far, it's the only way that works.
Same thing with big content databases: big data doesn't use hierarchical databases, because it doesn't scale. It uses relational databases which, again, you search using search fields.
Of course it's useful to be able to group search results into convenient buckets for future reference. Big content databases always allow some type of "binder" or "tags" so you can tag data or drop it into a "binder" or "folder" and then later find this discrete group of documents. Google doesn't facilitate that type of structure. But EN does: both with tags and with saved searches. For instance, I have an EN notebook called "people" for people I don't need in my permanent contact list. And then I have project-based tags. Then I have a saved search for "people in ." Click on that and I have a nice, project-based contact list. And any new people I can just drag their contact information into EN and tag it with the project name and they automatically show up in that saved list.

Just for the record, I have 18,753 notes in Evernote, many of them created back when it was a Windows-only program (i.e. pre-2008). I have only begun using EN again on a serious scale within the last year. I should also point out that many of these notes are just short bibliographic entries; I find that EN is really first-rate for creating, organizing, and managing bibliographies.

Bill

My experience is very similar to Dan's and WSP/Bill's. I have more than 12,000 notes in my Evernote database. The vast majority are news articles collected from the internet, most of which I haven't read in depth. EN saves me immeasurable time by allowing me to collect any news I consider interesting--whether on my browser, my email , an RSS feed, or even on the street--without bothering to file it properly.

Every once in a while, usually during a discussion, I will remember that I read about the subject somewhere. I can quickly search EN on my mobile and mail the item to my colleagues from the app itself, right there and then. In this context I may have used 1-2% of my notes, but I think it is unlikely I would have used more had I spent the innumerate hours needed to classify the inputs.

There is other information, like project documentation, for which I don't find EN particularly convenient. I have much more in depth knowledge of such information, and I interact much more frequently with it, so a hierarchical organisation is both easier to do and more useful. But for the masses of marginally relevant information I am exposed to on a daily basis, I have found nothing better than Evernote.

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?

On the Mac, EN can be paired with DevonThink Pro Office (not sure about the capability of DT's other flavours to import EN exports without the use of Applescripts - of which there are one or two around): EN for collection, short-term storage and dissemination, DevonThink for longer-term storage, organisation and use in tandem with Scrivener.

Thank you all very much for this info, this gave me a rather good overall picture of EN today. (I "own" - no, not really own, since I downloaded it from a site that said they made available the unauthorized, last copy of - the desktop version, but it was really ugly, so from looks, it's another world now. And I never used it, except for playing around with it a little bit.)

NO indentation level, not even one, within the notebooks, OMG! That's what I call a nightmare, but I understand that's my problem: I need grouped items since most of the time I cannot remember the proper search terms, and the same with tagging: cannot remember by which tag I tagged something, afterwards - but I understand the tag tree is there to solve this latter problem.

If I had 10,000 items from the web in EN, those would be lost for me, for not proper searching; I understand the situation is quite different if your memory for search terms is better than mine!

So it's as I had presumed, in order to organize info with EN, you rely on searching and tagging (and on notebooks grouping, as I would have grouped 10, 20 or 30 "sibling" items within a "sub-tree") - but it seems that for many people, this is far from being so bad as it would be for me - accepted.

dan7000, this is a little bit off-topic, but since you brought it up.

Outlining not scaling well? This is not that exact, since in the end, file plans of big corporations, with million of documents, are outlines, but I know why you bring up the relation with web outlines. We have to distinguish: In the web, everybody wants to be, at good position, within such an outline. Yahoo paid people to do the selection; it was the beginnings of the web; Yahoo's outline was extremely helpful then, but extremely cost-intensive for Yahoo, too, and prone to manipulation: the risk of rather badly-paid stuff, but paid well by people wanting to assure a good position for their product/service (the risk I say).

Now for a corporate outline structure, or for a corporate one, the criteria to position the thing is totally different from a public one: It's the interest of the unique user, or of the corporation, that decides upon choice of entering, and then choice of level of prominence - in a public outline, those who want to be at some position within that outline, do NOT have the public's interest in their mind, but their own, and solely their own, and this is even valid for people who don't have anything to sell for a price, but even different universities crave for more prominent positioning there.

Now google does it with "weighting value", the weighting process being very complicated, the the value biased by dollars going to google, partly (but not so much that the google system is invalidated by it, meaning the value for the "customer", for the pc user searching, is always high enough so that some dollar-biasing can be accepted.

And google has/is the best search machine on earth; no compare with what you've got on your pc, which means if I say I never remember all the relevant search terms, my google searches are (mostly) successful notwithstanding, when my desktop search results are quite poor, at the same time; of course, this could be greatly enhanced by better desktop search tools.

But even then, we accept the google flat list of 100 or 300 search results, because it's that or nothing; there are some tools out there that try to better GROUP those google results, and if I need some info, in context, from my info stuff, I get to just SOME of the relevant info there, and all the context is grouped around it, more or less well, which means whenever I need such context again and again, my efforts to group it in the most senseful way is justified, and I will have concise info there; whenever I just "import" something, in order to "read it again some later day" (which often never occurs, we all share this experience I think), all those entries are just put together as "siblings" in some sub-category, without really thinking about order or even "which ones should be the children of others, instead of their siblings": So, my "level of ordering" is in fact a function of the utility of this ordering, which means in my system, putting something into some category or sub-category is not any more effort that your assigning something with 1 or 2 tags, so this is rather similar.

I have to say that I don't do this "assignment to a category" by macros, so it's really sped up - if you do it entirely manually, the often-heard argument that the effort/time to "categorize it" is not justified by its later use (which possibly never comes).

So, let's not mix up outlines that serve an internal purpose, and outlines to which third-party interests assign things: the latter would be loaded with crap, when in fact the former are very uneven in "information quality", but, as said, in direct consequence to the potential utility of things in one sub-category or in another : Here, the same people (or their staff) who then use the content, put the (relative) categorization effort into that same things.

In theory, you are not wrong: AI could perhaps do lots of this categorization work. Tagging is about cataloging, outlining ditto: In such a big, categorization outlining, it's not so much the outline that is of interest, but then, the grouping of items within adjacent sub-categories within that big outline, and here, on this micro-level, tagging and outlining are quite similar, are quasi-brethren. That's why hoisting, 3-pane design or other strategies for breaking up that "whole thing" are so important.

As for public outlines, I've said it here some weeks ago, the wikipedia.org organization is thinking about overlaying / about how to overlay a tree structure upon its wiki design, as an alternative for better "holding things together that belong together", and it goes without saying that in such a structure, both individual items and headings/subheadings have to be amply cloned, in order to realize multiple contexts, and not just one principle one.

Interesting discussion.

I think there are at least 2 different objectives that people are discussing here:
1. storing and organizing documents including web pages for future reference
2. organizing notes, original content and source materials while working on a project using those materials (e.g. authoring a book or paper, working on a campaign or product)

For 1, I don't think it's true that hierarchy has ever worked for large collections of documents. While it's true that corporations have traditionally used file folders for documents, that is only because legacy operating systems, originally built for personal computers with floppy discs, used folders. Corporations have largely realized this doesn't work for large collections of documents in the enterprise, which is why we now have "Enterprise Document Management" or "Enterprise Content Management," which use relational databases, not hierarchies. I've used a number of these EDM-type systems in my work, involving collections of hundreds of thousands or millions of documents. These systems usually have lots of different views on your data, some of which involve very shallow hierarchies - like a tree of saved searches, a tree of tags, and a single-level tree of "binders" or "folders". EN is probably the most convenient version of this for personal use, but there will be a lot better tools in the future, based on these EDM systems.

For 2, I am in complete agreement that it would be very hard to use EN successfully. I used ADM for a long time and still have not found its match. I assume this is the type of work Daly is referring to where he has to export stuff from EN to WhizFolders in order to use it. I totally agree - I wish there was a good tool for organizing a subset of EN notes into a highly structured outline. TreeLiner was supposed to do this but never came out of beta. I'm using Workflowy right now, primarily for its portability and easy export to Word, but it's far from ideal.

One further data point on large document collections: Another place people have a lot of information stored is Outlook. I have a couple hundred thousand emails stored in Exchange. Windows Search / Outlook Search is totally useless for this because it simply cannot index that much information (it always says index is incomplete when I search). While I do have a folder structure, some folders have 10,000 emails so the folders don't help organize except at a very high level. I've been using Copernic Desktop Search lately and it does a fantastic job of indexing and finding emails in this collection remarkably quickly. It also searches the content of attachments, and shows the attachments in search results, which is amazing. I mention this because Copernic ignores my folder structure, and I have found that as I rely more on Copernic's interface and rarely go to Outlook to find an email, I am ignoring the folders too, and relying on search fields instead.

That view is supported when you learn that computer-held, apparently hierarchical organising systems such as DevonThink, which I mentioned above, are only that - apparent. Devonthink for example, creates its folder-equivalents in exactly the same way it creates its tags.

Nonetheless, I think there are reasons beyond mere custom and practice that many of us set up hierarchical systems on our hard-disks, and they have to do with the fear, justified or not, that at some point we may not for whatever reason be able to use tags or pure searching to find what we want. The only course of action remaining, eyeballing, is probably most easily accomplished if you're not staring at 'a pile of leaves', but an ordered, hierarchical structure.

It's interesting that several of you are protesting that what I am proposing to do can't be done: assemble a large body of material in Evernote and transform it into a book. I'll let you know eventually whether I succeed or collapse in mental confusion.

But the procedure I'm using seems simple and effective. As I've said here before, I just create a series of special notes -- one for each chapter -- that serve as outlines. It's extremely easy to drag and drop the links to other notes into these outlines, and then I can create any hierarchical structure I want within each outline note. When I am ready to write a draft, I double click on the outline note name (in file view), which opens that note in a separate frame, and then I control-shift-click on the various links to open them; I can have as many notes on the screen as my screen size will accommodate. With these various notes open on the screen, I can then write the actual draft in another EN note (if I wish) or a word-processor or a text editor or whatever.

I did something approximately like this for my last book with MyInfo, and I thought it worked very well.

Bill

dan7000 wrote:

I wish there was a good tool for organizing a subset of EN notes into a highly structured outline.

WSP wrote:

I just create a series of special notes -- one for each
chapter -- that serve as outlines. It's extremely easy to drag and drop
the links to other notes into these outlines, and then I can create any
hierarchical structure I want within each outline note.

Bill, the way I see it, you created the kind of tool that Dan suggests (and many of us have wished for), and it works for you. You've effectively turned EN into a personal wiki a la Connected Text, with master documents and sub notes. Since you model your content hierarchically, you use your contraption as an outliner, though others could use it as multidimensional hypertext. I am quite certain that neither Phil Libin, the Evernote CEO, nor any of his top bras have thought about this use--at least not seriously considered it.

I personally think it is a brilliantly simple solution for what you want to do, and I seriously don't see any reason for it not working, particularly as you clearly have the academic diligence to adjust the tools to your modus operandi rather than vice versa.

Sidenote: until fairly recently in the history of the web-aware Evernote it was impossible to create a copy of a note, believe it or not. Now this works, which means that one can safely keep their original material intact as reference, while manipulating 'clones' whichever way they see best to fit into the document under development.

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:

I am quite certain that
neither Phil Libin, the Evernote CEO, nor any of his top bras have
thought about this use--at least not seriously considered it.

I have long since resigned myself, more or less cheerfully, to the fact that I am really not Libin's target demographic. (Nor, I suspect, is anyone else on this forum.) When Libin and his top brass in 2008 began to blather on about taking pictures of wine labels and expressed open contempt for power-users, I became very upset and abandoned the program for a number of years; and I notice more recently that he now routinely denies that Evernote is even a note-taking program. Oh well. It's a fine program, and it obviously can be used for information-gathering (in other words, note-taking) on a large scale. Nowadays I don't particularly mind if Libin seems to be obsessed with the lifestyle crowd -- as long as he doesn't remove any of EN's functionality while he tries to gather in a zillion more users. Meanwhile, some of us will find ways to use Evernote that he has never thought about. I confess I'm rather pleased to be doing that. It's my subtle form of revenge against the wine-label obsessives.

Bill

WSP wrote:

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:

I am quite certain that
>neither Phil Libin, the Evernote CEO, nor any of his top bras have
>thought about this use--at least not seriously considered it.

I have long since resigned myself, more or less cheerfully, to the fact
that I am really not Libin's target demographic. (Nor, I suspect, is
anyone else on this forum.) When Libin and his top brass in 2008 began
to blather on about taking pictures of wine labels and expressed open
contempt for power-users, I became very upset and abandoned the program
for a number of years; and I notice more recently that he now routinely
denies that Evernote is even a note-taking program. Oh well. It's a fine
program, and it obviously can be used for information-gathering (in
other words, note-taking) on a large scale. Nowadays I don't
particularly mind if Libin seems to be obsessed with the lifestyle crowd
-- as long as he doesn't remove any of EN's functionality while he tries
to gather in a zillion more users. Meanwhile, some of us will find ways
to use Evernote that he has never thought about. I confess I'm rather
pleased to be doing that. It's my subtle form of revenge against the
wine-label obsessives.

Bill

I must admit I too have had vengeful thoughts - against those who transformed the original 'tear-off-and-use' Evernote, which I found pretty useful, into something that I find less useful. But the fact that the market hasn't replaced the original like-for-like is perhaps an indication that I'm in a very small minority. And I suppose one must admire the boldness of those who conceived the current Evernote, its platform independence and its free/premium business model - I think they were amongst the first on a large scale - and who went out and raised a relatively large sum of money for a small-ish developer - $6m initially? - to bring their conception to reality.

I agree. I admire the cleverness and resourcefulness of the Evernote folks. I'm just grateful that in producing software with mass appeal, they have also slowly modified and improved EN so that it is now capable of serious data manipulation. For me, the (re-)introduction of cross-note links was the feature that made EN usable again.

Bill

dan7000, I don't have any knowledge about such big systems but I know there is a tendency towards management information systems in that scale, hence those "views", and "big data" and its "aggregation" and half-automatted analysis. I know some not-so-big dms, and they all function by virtual folders (which often are not named this way) and clones, and some try to facilitate inter-personal workflow, from one staff to another/"the next" staff member, beyond shifting the item/object manually into the "ToDo" folder of that "next" man or woman; of course, access rights management is an integral part of those systems, which means of those I know, several try elaborate functionality in this respect, to the detriment of other aspects. There are big differences in clarity of functionality there; in Germany, there is ELO Office, originally by Leitz (the lever folders inventor (?)), very often installed, but from what I have seen, one of the worst programs when it comes to intuitivenesss and all.

All those database-based outliners are based on relational databases, so the technical storage of data is not that important, and "views", if they are not augmented by some form of AI, are nothing more than virtual sub-headings in a tree, or clones to a virtual folder, perhaps half-automatted, by kinds of tag inheritance (thanks to wsp for telling me that in EN, this would have to be done manually) and similar procedures, as in Zoot.

As I said, in the end, almost no one in a big corporation looks at the "big tree" if there is any, and technically, in most such systems, it could be created, similar to AS, from the content of some record fields, and then ordered by the content of some other record field (for example record number); this would not even suppose similar record fields in all of the records, since the automatism could build up this "tree" by some alternative fields. So again, it's not that different after all.

As said, the advantage of "trees" - in fact, to be precise, of just ordered LISTS, instead of simple tagging - lies in the fact that if I really need those 20 or 30 "siblings", in tagging this list is unordered, whilst in a "tree" or the like, I can order those siblings and look at or work on them in that order; if you try to get so something similar by search and/or tagging alone, you must do it by entering order number in an additional "record number" record field, but of course, this is done by the outliner for you, behind the scenes, and a no-outliner system could of course display, upon request, a field in which you would order the entries/finds (from searching/tagging) manually, by drag-n-drop, or by alt-arrow keys, and then assign/reassign the respective order numbers for this "view" or this "stored search" or such.

So, again, it's about finds being automatically listed in some order, and an outliner assures this: You put your stuff into some category, and if your effort is justified, you do some manual sorting there; if it is not, you leave your material there in the original = chronologic gathering order, as it would be for a tagging system.

This easily possible ordering of siblings - as Hugh correctly stated in other words - is the thing outliner preferrers are after, it's not the big tree that quickly becomes so convoluted in most outliners, since their developers don't see the necessity to display various sub-trees, most of the time, of if they see it and offer hoisting, they do it in such a way, example Ultra Recall, that your overall view is always mixed up with your detailed view.

Outliner preferrers are NOT into hierarchy, we just need the big tree in order to quickly get access to our detailed "views" - and it goes without saying that for "views", current cloning implementation, be it of items or of sub-headings = grouped items, is not fast, and not smart enough, I developed this in another thread some days ago: For every "view", this gathering follows other rules, often very similar, but slightly different, though, and for such minor dissimilarities, it's manual work and rework - again, I don't know the details of the real big players in this field.

But it's not "outliner people vs. tagging and search people" - it's just that if (you think) you need ordered siblings at the micro level, today's outliners available for individuals make this easy, whilst today's tagging/search tools are not of too much help in this respect - not speaking of professional software that perhaps is much better, without even presenting one stable outline; as said, from any relational database, you can create multiple outlines on the fly.

Btw, that's another missing point in today's outliners: Technically, they would be able to present other views of the tree, AND the tree as you see it, so they would be able to revert to it, after your sorting by different attributes, but then, those sortings remain stable: You cannot switch views, you just could destroy your outline in its previous form. "Different views" are very rare, for example Bonsai does it.

This is not to be mixed up with flat views by tagging or searching, as in MyInfo. Technically, the "outline" you see in your "outliner" should not be but ONE "view" of multiple possible views, but then, developers do not offer this, except for in AS, which in its current version, you could use as a traditional outliner (if you have a macro automatically fill up some fields for any new item), and for alternative views, too.

It's a pity in modern outliners there is one structure, by parentage, as "THE outline", and then, perhaps, "stored searches", but them giving flat lists of hits only, and no "stored outline by attribute x, then, y, then z", for example. Except for being immensely practical, this would also finish with the misconception that an "outline" is some very special kind of organizing things: it's just one view, by "parenting", among many possible views. Currently, the unnecessary limitations of developers' efforts too much define the presumed, very special "kind" of organizing things.

Phil Libin's story is interesting. He was losing his shirt on EN, and only an 11th hour investor saved the day, keeping the product alive.

I have a lot of respect for what has been accomplished in terms of software engineering and marketing. No doubt it is a profitable result. And still, the premium version is relatively inexpensive for what is on offer, compared with many new productivity related subscription type programs which charge much for relatively less.

The Trunk may be EN's way of recognizing its limitations as an information manager. It's ingenious and some of The Trunk programs are nifty.

If I was Libin, I'd begin to take seriously what all of us info and outliner wonks have been saying for years. An infocentric version of EN could be offered for say, a dollar more per month than the regular premium. I suspect the additional revenue would make it worthwhile.

Ariadne had a lot of potential to develop into a heavier duty info manager. Unfortunately, the latest version shows that the ingenuity of its earlier incarnations has been lost. 4.0 versions of Ariadne may be among the best note taking apps on the market for those who want something more than bare bones.

Yesterday I spent several hours working with WhizFolders, relieved at having resolved my anxiety around EN and always having to set it up to do what it should have in the first place. I accomplished a fair bit, and for the first time in months felt like I might be a real writer if I wasn't careful. :-)

Daly

But I doubt that will happen. Other programs will fill the void.

Daly

Hugh wrote:

WSP wrote:

>
>Alexander Deliyannis wrote:
>
>I am quite certain that
>>neither Phil Libin, the Evernote CEO, nor any of his top bras have
>>thought about this use--at least not seriously considered it.
>
>I have long since resigned myself, more or less cheerfully, to the fact
>that I am really not Libin's target demographic. (Nor, I suspect, is
>anyone else on this forum.) When Libin and his top brass in 2008 began
>to blather on about taking pictures of wine labels and expressed open
>contempt for power-users, I became very upset and abandoned the program
>for a number of years; and I notice more recently that he now routinely
>denies that Evernote is even a note-taking program. Oh well. It's a
fine
>program, and it obviously can be used for information-gathering (in
>other words, note-taking) on a large scale. Nowadays I don't
>particularly mind if Libin seems to be obsessed with the lifestyle
crowd
>-- as long as he doesn't remove any of EN's functionality while he
tries
>to gather in a zillion more users. Meanwhile, some of us will find ways
>to use Evernote that he has never thought about. I confess I'm rather
>pleased to be doing that. It's my subtle form of revenge against the
>wine-label obsessives.
>
>Bill
>

I must admit I too have had vengeful thoughts - against those who
transformed the original 'tear-off-and-use' Evernote, which I found
pretty useful, into something that I find less useful. But the fact that
the market hasn't replaced the original like-for-like is perhaps an
indication that I'm in a very small minority. And I suppose one must
admire the boldness of those who conceived the current Evernote, its
platform independence and its free/premium business model - I think they
were amongst the first on a large scale - and who went out and raised a
relatively large sum of money for a small-ish developer - $6m initially?
- to bring their conception to reality.

I am a lover of outline software and a very happy user of Evernote but Evernote is NOT an outliner. There is no hierarchical structure and Evernote actively discourages organizing this way. Even people that try to use tags in a hierarchical way are just doing work arounds - the tags aren't really in hierarchies.

Instead, all the data is dumped into various notebooks and then retrieved via tag search. Some people even use only ONE notebook to hold everything.

At first, I resisted this and kept thinking I needed more structure, but I have become a believer over time. I can now find things faster with smart use of tags than I can by drilling down through a hierarchical structure. And, best of all, with tagging a note can be found with every possible use for it instead of only being in one place in a rigid structure.

For what I use Evernote for, it is fantastic and I don't miss the lack of structure. But there are some things that an outliner works better for and then I use other products.

Garland Coulson wrote:

At first, I resisted this and kept thinking I needed more structure, but
I have become a believer over time.

Yes, at the end of the day, everything might be miscellaneous http://www.everythingismiscellaneous.com/

To summarise my own attitude in respect to the above view of things, I will quote from the story of an (apparently) unrelated discipline: "I know it's true, but I just don't believe it".

dan7000 wrote:

While it's true that corporations have
traditionally used file folders for documents, that is only because
legacy operating systems, originally built for personal computers with
floppy discs, used folders. Corporations have largely realized this
doesn't work for large collections of documents in the enterprise, which
is why we now have "Enterprise Document Management" or "Enterprise
Content Management," which use relational databases, not hierarchies.
I've used a number of these EDM-type systems in my work, involving
collections of hundreds of thousands or millions of documents. These
systems usually have lots of different views on your data, some of which
involve very shallow hierarchies - like a tree of saved searches, a tree
of tags, and a single-level tree of "binders" or "folders". EN is
probably the most convenient version of this for personal use, but there
will be a lot better tools in the future, based on these EDM systems.

Dan, can you mention some EDM systems that you believe eventually might be scaled-down and re-packaged for small business or even personal use? Are you talking about the likes of Alfresco and Liferay, or something like Sharepoint?

My view does not necessarily contradict yours, but I personally see ICT developments in recent decades having been led by the consumer market, even if the original technologies were developed for the high-end markets--including the military in the case of communications. In this context, I expect that the next widespread knowledge- or content-management system is more likely to be launched first as a personal / small team solution and then scaled up. It could be Evernote or Onenote for all I know--not to mention some cloud product currently being developed at a college dormitory.

Without having followed TheBrain story closely, I seem to recall that after version 1.5 they had withdrawn the Development Kit and the ability to publish brains in the personal versions, focusing on their EKP--Enterprise Knowledge Platform--offering instead. More recently, publishing has been brought back in the personal version, a Team version is being developed based on the personal, and Harlan Hugh--inventor of TheBrain and former CTO--is now CEO. It seems to me that they have shifted from a top-down to a bottom-up strategy.

Another example is Microsoft's evolution of Office to the 365 version, as a full solution for businesses. Again, I see a bottom-up approach: take the products that most knowledge workers are already familiar with and scale them up / interconnect them to cover the needs of the business.

I'm the co-owner of a 7-person service oriented business. On the average working day, I receive more than 50 business related email messages. Not counting the replies, we are talking about more than 10,000 interrelated 'documents' a year, and I know that some of my collaborators receive a lot more. Add to these the attachments which take on a life of their own and you can realise that the needs of even an individual knowledge worker nowadays are (un)reasonably close to those of a corporation in the not-so-distant past. The market is here, now.

As I said here recently, I've read that several big players currently follow a top-down strategy, and this is because they have the development money, but all the big corporations have got their stuff, when for little corporations, really sophisticated offerings are mostly lackings, and "there's a market, here, now", which up to now wasn't of enough commercial interest to the big players.

Nobody should touch TheBrain, people loose data with it, and doing "strategy" without delivering the basics is a most ridiculous thing, and no serious buyer will get his data into such an unreliable data structure - of course, I'm speaking of the versions we get access, too, but their "corporate things" should be a myth: You need real data storage, and definitely, the personal version does not deliver that, so why should their corp version do?

Also, I cannot imagine any serious corporation to store their data (even if is was safe there) within such a "web" representation, where the user always looks at beautiful graphics, and then has to work with his mouse all the time - I know corporate people who work with a keyboard, and with multiple lists: They would like to know where the "location" of their respective data is, TB's "flow" of things might apply to some marketing/advertizing people, on a mac.

Show me one serious corporation that uses TB (any version) in a general way, and my mouth will not shut up anymore for the rest of my life, but this will not happen - as you know, even formerly serious corporations are sometimes brought to pieces, by very special managers; in war, you call this acts of sabotage.

No, big players don't need to be afraid of TB acting bottom-up: Read their "we are in so many big corps" as a "for 3 installations within the strategy department where it's used as one tool among many others for the same purpose".

As Daly says it (if I understood him well): With a sophisticated 2-pane outliner, he can do real work, he's getting creative and productive, when in the flat EN world, he just gathers things (which is not so bad if you (can) do both.

Of course, with MS, it's a little bit different, they try some things, with what they've got, and they are rather successful with it, for the opacity of the dms market, and also because they can offer better integration with the low-level things, at least in theory (and because the anti-youknow authorities don't do their work: hidden interfaces, and so on). But as I see it, this hampers the sophistication of their offering, or in other wording: If you have a really integrated workflow, Word becomes less important for you.

And yes, I know excellent 7-, 70-, 700-people (not 7,000-people) dms, but its real value would not become evident to prospects who then try to compare with TB.