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Zotero anyone?

I've been looking at Zotero as a means of information management recently. It seems to have a much more intuitive and seamless integration with the Web than DevonThink. And it has tag-support built in!

Anyone have any experience with this Firefox plugin? It looks pretty powerful. Easy to gather clippings, citations, and notes -- organize them into smart folders -- mark up and annotate -- etc.

The only think it's missing is DevonThink's AI search tool.

But I tell you what... Yes, I know that Zotero is available on all platforms. But as a matter of principle, this may be the final straw in tipping me over to the Linux, open source world. Last year, I invested in all the fancy Mac apps (OmniOutliner, DevonThink, etc.) only to discover that several open source tools fit my workflow much better. I'm constantly amazed by the sheer volume and variety of free tools out there. (I mean: I had to rig up the most god-awfully awkward solution to get tags in DevonThink.) And while most of these are available to Mac OS X users, it is making me wonder why I would pay $2000+ for a new MacBook when I can get rig up a Linux laptop for well under half the price. (And Firefox for the Mac is still so slow and clunky.) Quicksilver is great and all - but now I do so much from the command line that I rarely use Quicksilver. I have enough other beautiful things in my life - so having an ugly computer isn't the biggest loss.

Anyway, that's my rant of the day. But about Zotero... Anyone?

TOPICS: Mac OS X
Tjowens's picture

Hi, I work on the...

Hi, I work on the Zotero project at the Center for History and New Media.

As I understand it, IdeaMason does not allow you to automatically capture reference information from the web. It looks like you still manually enter the information and beyond Zotero being free it is also completely open source, we constantly have people expanding and extending the tools capabilities.

Thanks, and feel free to email me with any questions you have about Zotero.

yours,
Trevor@Zotero.org

 
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