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Evernote 5 is here
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Posted by 22111
Oct 10, 2013 at 02:59 PM
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.
Posted by 22111
Oct 10, 2013 at 03:34 PM
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.
Posted by dan7000
Oct 10, 2013 at 05:08 PM
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.
Posted by Hugh
Oct 10, 2013 at 05:49 PM
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.
Posted by WSP
Oct 10, 2013 at 07:13 PM
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