I've been a big fan of <a class="zem_slink" title="Evernote" rel="homepage" href="http://www.evernote.com">Evernote</a> ever since it appeared. It's clever software that lets you sync notes, ideas and photos between Macs, PCs, phones and tablets such as the iPad. But there's always been one big bug bear that's stopped me using it over Microsoft's OneNote: it's never been easy to organise information in hierarchical folders.

People have been complaining about this for years. The Evernote people always told us we were wrong to want it. Finally it seems they are seeing the light.

I only just noticed this but, on the Mac only, they have snuck out a new version of their client software that finally brings hierarchical information to the platform. You <a href="http://blog.evernote.com/2010/12/01/evernote-beta-for-mac-gets-sharing-and-notebook-stacks/" target="_blank">can read about it here.</a> A screenshot is below.

<img class="size-full wp-image-6536 alignnone" title="stacks" src="http://vir.liquidweb.com/~davidhe4/davidhewson.com//wp-content/uploads/2010/12/stacks1.jpeg" alt="" width="490" height="287" />

They call the feature 'stacks' and it's not a full-blown hierarchical system. Basically that top level 'folder' is just a label beneath which you can drop actual notebooks. The hierarchy as far as I can see goes one level deep. But actually that's enough for me. So call me happy.

The post from Evernote says this will be introduced into other versions in future releases, and the stacks won't show up in anything other than a Mac until new software is rolled out. But the stacks do appear for me on Windows in version 4, even if I can't create them there. No sign of them on my Android phone or in the rather gimmicky iPad app though - you just see the folders without the stack, and they mustn't have common titles -- research for example -- or they'll get confused with others of the same name.

Still this seems quite an advance, and one that will be very popular indeed once it's more widely available. It doesn't turn Evernote into OneNote. But you do have to balance the fact Evernote is available in so many places -- on phones, tablets, computers and directly through the web -- with OneNote's sophistication.

Where does this leave the Mac and Windows in the writing stakes? For me it runs like this...

Windows leads the field with the much superior general word processor in Word 2010 and has the most capable information manager in OneNote.

The Mac lacks a word processor that comes close to Word 2010 -- sorry -- but is miles ahead in the specialist writing app market with the amazing Scrivener 2. Mac users were also lacking something as fluent and logical as OneNote on the information manager front. But these new features for Evernote do close the gap on OneNote quite a lot though it seems to me. I could see myself running a project's research and management functions through this now -- I could have a top folder for the project then notebooks beneath it for characters, location, research and diary functions.

Interesting times ahead.