Why no love for TagNotate?

Posted by Mirce
Oct 9, 2018 at 12:28 PM

I was suprised to find very few references to TagNotate here on outlinersoftware.com (to be precise, only two short references, in a thread discussing octopusnotes). Given the fact that a great deal of discussions here focus on MacOS software (and to a lesser degree to iOS), this is quite strange.
For those who did not hear about this app, it is a pdf-reader and annotator, but it has some unique functionality that I didn’t find in any other app, either on Windows or Android. The most useful features are:
- you can underline (highlight) and annotate parts of pdf files and tag every annotation INDIVIDUALLY. So, tags are not based on the pdf file, but on its contents.
- you can search inside the pdfs in your library with full text search but also with tags; you can “drill down” to your search by selecting multiple tags from the tag-cloud (using AND / OR operators). TN shows the pdf files which contain the selected tags and also a preview of the annotation.
- after you have drilled down enough, you can export the results to the clippboard and use it for further study. To be clear: the export contains only the annotated portions of the pdf’s, not the whole pdf’s.
- the library of TN allows “virtual folders”, meaning one pdf can be in several virtual folders (or collections). When you select the virtual folder / collection, the tag-cloud only shows tags which are contained in the pdf’s in this specific locations.

Why is that important (at least for my workflows)?
When I read non-fiction books, they tend to be from various fields - Physics, Psychology, History, Politics, Pop Science, Economics etc. Things which I find interesting are highlighted and tagged according to my pre-defined tag-list. When I want to focus on one area of my interests, I dril down with the tag-search, and copy all the info associated with those tags for further studying. This way, I often see connections between areas which are at first look not related.

As I said, TN is unfortunately available only on apple OS’s. I use it primarily on my iPad, as I have no Mac (I have MacOS virtualized through VirtualBox on Windows, however it is no joy working in this because of the lag).

I really wish there would be a Windows (or Android) app like this, ideally with some note-taking addition (or is there?)

On a related note: Why are tag-implementations on note taking / outliner applications so weak? For example MyInfo, which is my main note taker. You can assign multiple tags to a document (but not on a specific part of the document), but you can filter / search only according to ONE TAG. This is the same with every other note taker which I tried (MyNotes Keeper, RightNote, MyBase, CherryNotes…). Am I the only one who would find such a thing useful or is it so difficult to implement?

What is your take on Tagnotate? Do you find the concept useful or are the use-cases in your cases too exotic?
Are there any other apps which are similar regarding this functionality? (and I mean really similar, not “similar.to” like similar).

(BTW, I am in no way affiliated with the authors of TN except that I bought the app on my iPad. The app has its shortcomings: no updates in a long time, you cannot rename a tag and deleting the tag involves deleting are instances it is assigned to….)