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DevonTHINK, how has it helped you?
caseykoons | Jul 12 2006
I've asked y'all on this board for buying advice in the past, and I'm very happy I followed it. (OOP is awesome, I use it everyday). My current quandary is DevonTHINK Pro. I wondering if I should acquire this as I become a graduate student in the Fall. It's very pricey though, so I was hoping that you folks could throw in your two cents about this program and it's alternatives. I looking at Mori in particular as a potential middle-ground. What I'm particularly curious about is smart folders. Does DevonTHINK Pro have a smart-folder like ability? I find that strictly grouping data with one label limits the amount of connectivity, and I confused by the way DevonTHINK uses folders. I, for example, use Mail.app in the following way and love it. All archived mail goes into a folder called "archive" Mail is tagged with MailTags and Smart Folders help to parse them all out. It's fast, easy, and highly adaptive. Messages can exist in multiple contexts. I'm curious if I could get DevonTHINK to work in a similar fashion. Thanks! -Casey 2 Comments
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 DTP: a good investmentSubmitted by terceiro on July 12, 2006 - 10:27pm.
I am a graduate student myself and own and use DEVONthink Pro (and Mori and OOP and VoodooPad and Mellel and Bookends and TextMate and CopyWrite and ScrivenerGold). I have the toolbox approach: no single app can do everything I want, so I use the best tool for the job. Honestly, Mori is no replacement for DEVONthink. Not even close. I love Mori, but it has a couple of features (eg. being able to nest notes) that DTP doesn?t, and that makes Mori worth the money. DTP excels--indeed has no peer--in it?s semantic AI. I love the fact that I can open up a drawer and the computer finds related information. It?s so much more than just a filing system: it finds relationships between items that I might not have considered myself. In my case, I have sucked a couple hundred articles into it, plus notes from dozens more books and articles. Working on my thesis, I find a quote I?m looking for, and then see if DTP can point me to any other quote I might not have remembered. And honestly, I?m not likely to remember everything I?ve dumped in: many of the articles in there I?ve only skimmed. More than once, one of those articles has something really useful that I found using the ?See Also? button. But to be honest, I was operating on faith for about a year before DEVONthink really showed its worth to me. Now I have a system which, honestly, takes a bit of effort to keep up. It requires some time and thinking. But it pays off for me, big time. The whole idea of switching to Linux for me seems absurd almost entirely because I would hate to lose DTP. I should mention that I?m in the humanities. A close relative in engineering found it interesting but eventually dropped DTP. Maybe it was the subject matter and his style of research or maybe he didn?t give it enough time (or enough material) to make it more than a fancy scrapbook. Never having been an engineer myself, I can?t say. I will mention that a very significant percentage of those who hang out in the company forums are academics. There are plenty of weaknesses in DTP. The interface sucks. As a word processor, it?s just TextEdit. It is an embarrassment to outliners everywhere. But that?s why I have other excellent tools like OOP and Mori and Mellel. Each is swell in their own place, and for their own purpose. As far as I?m concerned, however, DEVONthink has no peer and no competition. Oh, and I?m just a happy user (no company affiliation). » POSTED IN:
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