Some Reflections on Evernote and MyInfo

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?