An Unsubmittable Review of the Chrome Extension: Notebook Web Clipper
As someone who discovered this extension by chance and noticed it would help reduce the clutter of my bookmarks (as of August 2020 I have 2839 bookmarks as shown by my Google Sync data) I thought I had finally found the answer to reducing my bookmarks and allowing me to organize the pages I wanted to keep and reference without having to bookmark it no more; but no, I was mistaken.
It’s been frustrating to learn how to use it and even after giving it a chance (and learning it somewhat quickly by comparison to other users, for what I’d presume, since I’ve been known to be a quick learner but this took some time to click, test what this [button] does, if I can do this, and then determine how it all works together — meaning, a normal productivity extension, such as ToDois for example, took all but maybe 2 minutes to learn and enjoy using while this took almost 10–15 minutes to figure out completely.
For instance, trial and error taught me that notes in a notecard cannot contain notes from a different website because it requires a separately made notecard to be place in and “categorized” by its parent Notebook. But, I digress as I’ve only come closer to realizing it’s not useful for anything I had hoped for.
My problem is simple: sometimes I research a topic of interest and I will find news articles, websites, and/or tidbits that I want to later organize into a research paper, for example. With the extension, I can take notes and clip from a single page several items into a single “Notecard,” but if I navigate away from the page, I have to start a whole new Notecard instead of being able to add it to the same Notecard from earlier. One might argue, well, that’s what “Notebooks” are for. But, within the extension I can’t make new Notebooks. And initially, I am restrained to using “Default,” the only Notebook I have available from the provided drop-down menu.
After clicking to view a new notecard which opens a web page of all my notecards may I then create a new “Notebook” (or change the name of my “Default” notebook), to keep any applicable notecards. But I don’t want separate notecards for each web page because then I’d have to create a new Notebook for every new idea, concept, or topic I’d have and/or find subject matter on.
Therefore, in principle, I now have X amount of notecards sitting in Y amount of notebooks. To illustrate my point: Sometimes my subject matter is related to my trading/stock market activity. I will research a particular company, let’s just say “Zoho Holdings,” for example. Then on another occasion, I may be researching a method of creating a cartoon effect in Photoshop, to which I might find other useful Photoshop tutorials. In this regard, I would have to create a Notebook for Zoho Holdings filled with notecards of each website/news article/research report I came across, and then the Notebook is the top level of my organization (for now at least, as I’ll later discuss “tags”). Transversely, If I have a notebook for Photoshop tutorials which has notecards including various tutorial pages/videos I found, then “Photoshop Tutorials” and “Zoho Holdings” are my 2 notebooks appearing in myZoho Notebooks web page (because to view your notecards and notebooks the extension opens a webpage and not a separate app-like window such as with Google Keep).
Now let’s say, for investing I will on average research 4–5 different companies a day and beyond Photoshop I might also seek out After Effects tutorials, Premiere Pro tutorials, and Lightroom Tutorials. The number of notebooks per company plus the number of notebooks for each program tutorial would grow very quickly. And these are just 2 examples of the number of items I or someone else on the internet might come across or use the extension to do.
So then, what am I left with? No way to categorize notebooks other than by the use of “tags.” But alas, with tags I would now have to first visit my collection of numerous notebooks (which again means going to a web page and not within this extension), select the tags I want to filter by, then have it present to me all the notebooks with that I’ve managed to include having that tag. Problem solved? Sure, but not quite, considering my goal was to reduce clutter.
For me, the organizational use of tags can seem cumbersome if not properly done or thought of in advance and from the beginning. This can be difficult if one is trying to organize and categorize things from the future (*sarcasm*). To illustrate: Let’s say I am discussing companies of interest with a fellow investor and they bring up a bankruptcy. I might vaguely recall reading about a company that went bankrupt or something of the matter this past year. So I go looking through my Notebook/notecards to review.
If the only tag that I included at the time was something like “Investment Research,” then I would then have to rely on using the “search” function to find the term “bankrupt” which would show me all the notecards I have inclusive of the word “bankrupt.” But, let’s say I didn’t describe a company as going bankrupt but one that filed bankruptcy so my search did not turn up any results, and won’t until I try the other form of the word, “bankruptcy”.
But wait! That still returns no results, because my poor memory doesn’t recall that instead of mentioning bankruptcy, I wrote in my notes, “may file chapter 11”.
Okay, search that!
Oh, no wait, I remember reading they filed bankruptcy but my research was before that and I only took notes on how they would be in danger of losing all its funding. I could go on about my attention span and mental disadvantages but just as my point is made no more clear than before, so much so does the answer remain no less the same, it’s arguably a personal problem.
To this regard, for me to prevent this, at the time of my note-taking, I would’ve had to think how I might search this later on, and maybe include a tag of “possible bankruptcy” but whoops! I can’t, as soon as I hit the space, it’s a new tag, so now I have a tag of “possible” and “bankruptcy,” just what I wanted! (*more sarcasm*)
To spare whoever has the patience to read through this, here is my case and point:
If I have to search through my notes using terms for tags which weren’t all presented to me at the time they’re made (for reference and in comparison, of the 2839 bookmarks I have somewhere around 120 folders that starts with 3 main ones each respectively opening up to 11, 9, and 3 subfolders, and each one either with their bookmarks or opening to another set of sub-sub folders, and so on, up to maybe 5 or 6 levels deep) then it seems no more a reduction in clutter than is the expansion of my bookmarks. The only difference, which I can still value among my surmounting frustration, is that I can add notes to the sites or reference I choose (which I currently can do anyway by adding my reason for bookmarking a page to the name of the bookmark itself).
To me, I would see this as a “bookmarking features addition” extension with the extra features being things like adding notes to bookmarks, clipping text from parts of the page, and extracting applicable photos. But at the same time, I am stifled by the fact that if I wanted to take a photo from a page (and not a bookmark) and what to remember or be able to reference the URL of the page I had taken the photo/screenshot from, I would have to manually add the URL to the notecard itself, on my own. Even viewing the info of the photo within the extension (or techincally at the webpage) doesn’t include where it came from if I wanted to rely on the extension taking note for me.
Extra features with extra work, woooweeeee!
Same amount of clutter with fancy bells and whistles that do not seem intuitive, hooooooraaayyyy!
Uh oh, I just reminded myself of another one…so let’s explain it too.
Here is the experience that was it for me. The one that set me off in submitting this (or tried to and failed to*) and the part that did not seem to be very intuitive as follows:
When I am in a notebook and are looking at notecards, if I want to view the action options for a notecard or take any “quick actions” (or what I would say this example equates to), I would have to look to the top right of the Notecard for the 3 dots in a circle and hover over it to access the dropdown menu of options. BUT, if I click on the 3 dots, I will inadvetently open the notecard instead of just accessing or bringing down the menu.
Now, when I open a notecard and am viewing a notecard, at the bottom I have a similar looking button from earlier with the 3 dots, found at the bottom next to some other buttons, and on the far right at the end. But, now instead of just hovering over it, I have to click it to access its menu. So, I now have 2 associations with a 3 dot, horizontal line in a circle (AKA the menu button) which is: within a notecard, I must left-click. But, outside a notecard (and in a notebook), I don’t click, I’m supposed to wait for the menu to appear when hovering over it otherwise trying to click it will open the notecard.
The inconsistency is like a subconscious frustration for lack of aesthetics in functionality. And to add insult to injury, the hover menu for a notecard has a total of 9 functions, 8 if you don’t count the first one that is for “Open,” (and no, I’m sure I didn’t accidently hit the first option, click anywhere in the box will open the notecard) while the menu after opening a notecard contains 10–11 action buttons, depending on if there are different versions of that notecard available (like different draft versions from previous saves).
Honestly, I could go on about my frustrations, but unless something happens, what’s the point other than seeming like a whiny ungrateful end user who’s going to be told, “if you don’t like the extension, just uninstall it.”
And to that, I will.
Due to my inability to publish this review on the Chrome Web Store for this extension, I am including what I could fit so that someone who had an interest in finding it, would be able to find it by doing a Google search of the entire following paragraph:
I wrote a 1613 word review of this app that covers my frustration in the un-intuitive design, the confinement of some of the features, the restrictions that limit my personal use of it, the learning curve it presents, and the overall experience I had with this extension. But, without an explanation as to why I keep getting an error, I can only assume it’s a character limit issue or a copy & paste issue. So, because it couldn’t fit and because I had already spent so much time writing it, I’ve published my review on Medium. I would link it, but I’m worried what copy and paste might do or being marked as spam, so copying the first sentence of this review and putting it in quotations for a Google search should bring it up.
