The forum link seems to be wrong here

Fixed, thanks

Is it about assigning specific color to a tag and painting note frame with it?

If no, a) what is "category"? b) "Assigning colors to tags" proposal should be posted.

Assigning colors to tags won't work, because a note can only be of one color and can have many tags. I'm thinking about introducing note categories, which will determine "what" a note really is and what can you do with it. Each category will have a set of flags assigned to it. Flags will be displayed directly in the note title as icons with checkmarks or dropdown lists. For example, for notes of "Task" category, the "Urgency(Normal/High/Low)" flag and "Completion Status(New/Started/On Hold/Completed/Cancelled)" flags can be defined. (Most probably flags will be implemented as special tags).

Bloatware! Just get creative with tags and colors, maybe symbols for them. Why can't one note have many colors? Gradients. Stripes. This is the creative part :-)

1. On categories: that sounds complex.. I'm afraid we loose CN's key simplicity here. I see these categories with their flags (states/statuses/values/whatever) just as another set of tags. I mean they serve similar purpose, but bring a new entity in.

Could this feature be covered by "tag hierarchy" feature? Just make your "task" lvl1 tag and some lvl2 aggregated tags (Urgency, Progress). And further we have 2 variants:

1.1. 3rd tag level. "Urgency" has 3 aggregated lvl3 tags: low/normal/high. "Status" (or "Progress") has 5 aggregated lvl3 tags: New/Started/On Hold/Completed/Cancelled. I'd choose this one.

1.2. Implement parametrized tags, so "Urgency" and "Progress" will have their values. Though.. Where we have values, there we need types, and that's another problem..

2. On colors: for notes with many colored tags we could go color mixing :)
Joke.
Actually got 2 more ideas here:

2.1. Still make possible assigning colors to tags, but use these colors as a background for tags displayed in notes. Just like in customizable GMail labels. Human eye reacts on color faster than on the text. Here's a sketch:
http://img692.imageshack.us/img692/6056/cintanotescolortags.png

It would be nice to also color their backgrounds in the tag panel (didn't reflect it on sketch).
And I didn't make the tag font contrast enough, so we could enable the user to select tag font color too, OR prepare some ready (and well defined) background-foreground pairs, like GMail does for labels.

2.2. Do we want to color notes? Let's color notes! Just add color selection control in the note creation/editing window. Simple, ha? No extra entities.

2.2.1. Little detail here (one of many variants ofc). Color may be picked from one of the N (configurable) boxes with configurable colors. I've made a little sketch:
http://img831.imageshack.us/img831/580/cintanotescolornotes.png

An example of colored note:
http://img833.imageshack.us/img833/9587/cintanotescolortitle.png

Or you could just color notes red if they are tagged "red", green if "green" etc :)

But what is really difference between "color" and "category"? It is just name and that's all.
Calling it "category" would be more fair since this is what it is.

I understand that it's tempting to do everything using tags as universal mechanism. But I think there is a point where one should think about introducing a new entity just because it will be more convenient for the user. Just imagine 100's of tags with 100's of subtags, some of them colored... this doesn't look very usable to me.

Normal/High/Low - too complex!!! I suggest only “high priority” with red color. In the most of cases you really need to see what is urgent or important at the moment.
CN is cool and easy to use note organizer. Project (or time, life) organizer is another stuff. It is better not to mix them.

Or I suggest choosing color for any single note. Let the user decide if red is “urgent”, green “done”, yellow “to think about” or “dream” or whatever. Everybody can work out a unique system. It is more flexible.
It is like a sort of parallel (color) tagging (hopefuly with the search opportunity). It is important that the user can assign any meaning to any color by oneself. But the quantity of colors to choose should be restricted (to keep it easy).

This is what tags are for. Just implement colored tags (maybe even with symbols?).

Just wanted to start a similar request and saw this one ;-)
As this feature is already planned I want to share my thoughts about how to implement this...

I love the gmail approach with it's colored lables > it is simple, approved, familiar and flexible!
Maybe we could - in addition - color the whole note if only one colored tag is assigned to it.

On the other hand I really would NOT like to have 'special tags' for the color feature:
The reason: special tags like 'priority' or 'status' imply that people use notes in the special way they are intended (e.g. as tasks) and prohibits using colors for other uses.
fictitious example: if I want to color all my notes related to 'trees' green than priority won't help.

Of course many of us (including me) use CintaNotes also as taskmanager. So an additional feature for priorities is also welcome.
But I strongly vote for an approach that is more generic and harmonizes with the great flexibility of the current tags.

As it is already planned: Alex, could you give us a hint which implementation your have in mind?

Hi Alex:

This is a feature where I have a love-haterelationship depending on how it will be implemented (I have already posted my opinionhere).

Is the 'how' already settled?

Is there still an opportunity to vote for one or the other?

Just to show how Google solved this:
(each label (in CN this would be a tag) can have it's own foreground and background color)


Implementing it this way should also reduce the complexity (it would just be a visual thing).

Hy Andrew - just a short question:
Is this the same request like: http://roadmap.cintanotes.com/topic/3368-different-colors-for-different-note-categories/  ?

Yes. While searching I have missed this topic...

No problem, I'll merge this idea with that one.