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Evernote 5 is here
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Posted by dan7000
Oct 9, 2013 at 04:20 PM
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.
Posted by WSP
Oct 9, 2013 at 09:04 PM
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
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Oct 9, 2013 at 10:48 PM
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.
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?
>
Posted by Hugh
Oct 10, 2013 at 09:59 AM
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.