While there are lots and lots of handy ways to make notes (Scratch Pad, Document Notes, Project Notes, Synnopsis Notes, Comments, etc), there are not a lot of options for viewing the notes en masse, tagging the notes, or compiling the notes into groups. I feel like I have an embarrassment of riches in my ability to take notes but am a bit starved in terms of the flexibility of how to view, group and arrange notes. Each note taking widget (is that the right word?) is limited to a particular viewing method. I can see document notes in the document note pane, but I can’t include them in an outline view. I can create a note very easily in the scratch pad, but I can only send it to a project as a scrivening (not as a document/project/synopsis note, etc.)
Maybe you guys are thinking about the note taking thing backwards. Maybe, instead of having many different ways to create notes, you have just one note taking interface (probably scratch pad). And then, from that one interface, the user has the opportunity to tag and attach that note to the project in multiple ways. The note exists in one location, but by tagging and attaching, you can link that note to a specific block of text (as a comment), and/or to a document (as a document note) and/or to the general project (as a project note). You could tag individual notes and then pull up all list of all the notes with a specific tag. (I’d like to see a list of all the notes regarding my main character, for example). You could view all the notes attached to a selected set of scrivenings. You could search the notes and compile them into smart lists (similar to the binder).
When I make notes, I find that they don’t fit into discrete categories. A note about a particular character moment might also be relevant to the project as a whole. A comment about a plot point might be relevant to multiple scenes. While working in outline view, I might want to see document notes as well as a synopsis. Rather than duplicating the note in different places, I’d rather make one note and then have the option of viewing it in different contexts.
I think you’ve missed the best notes of all (in my opinion) - Scrivener Links, Cmd-L. They can do much of what you want, including being capable of being scrivened together into a list or collection. Worth investigating.
Just to say - it’s slightly better than that implies. Cmd-L will automatically create a new document in a folder of your choosing, ready for you to fill and complete with all the potential for meta-data, labels etc of a normal Scrivener document.
Just wanted to follow up and say that this is a great suggestion. I’m now doing this for all of my notes (which kind of makes the comments, synopsis, project and document note areas a bit moot for me). I do miss the ability to click on a comment and have the document jump to the exact location of that note. But I’ve hacked around this by hand entering reverse links into the linked scrivenings. It’s not ideal, but it works.
If you want the link in the document text, you’ll need to do something like that, but you can have the link to the original document automatically added to the new note document’s doc references by turning on the “Create back-link references when created Scrivener links and references” option in the Navigation panel of Preferences. The references are viewable directly in the QuickReference window if you want and use the same keyboard shortcuts as the regular inspector, so while you’re in the QR window you can hit Ctrl-Opt-Cmd-N and the references will pop up (or you can select from the pop-up menu at the bottom of the window).
Sorry if this got mentioned, but also note that inspector comments can be easily viewed en masse simply by forming a Scrivenings session of all the items in the draft. The inspector stacks all footnotes and comments into the sidebar. You can quickly scan through them and click on them to jump to that spot in the text. That’s almost exactly what you describe as a sort of unified interface that links back to spots in the project. The main limitation in it is forming a huge session, which can be a bit slow the first time around in a mature project.
If you have “Create back-link references when creating Scrivener Links and references” turned on in the Navigation preferences, you should be getting an automatic back-link in the Reference pane for the note. I love this feature, it makes the system very agile. If 40 documents link to a research document, then the References pane will show me all sections of the draft that refer to that research, so it works well when you are doing reverse-discovery too. Of course, there is also history (Cmd-[).