DEVONthink Personal - 2.0pb7

Here is what I think when a company continually puts out one beta after another. The company has no confidence in its product and is trying to pawn it off to the public while being able to fall back on "Hey! We said it was beta!" DEVON: If its any good, release it. If it is junk, stop using the public to do your testing for you.

Thanks to the Folks of Devon Technologies for powerful, intuitive software.

I research, collect and organize data for a variety of purposes and for several volunteer organizations.

In this process I have tried a number of data search, collection and organization programs. Each have their features, some work better than others but DEVONthink & agent are superior.

Circus Ponies Notebook is one notable competitor and does a nice job of organizing and looking like a good old notebook. It is a comfortable program in that sense. However DEVONthink does it much better without the comfortable format.

The kindness of the Devon Folks in providing licenses for certified non-profit and educational use is deeply appreciated also.

Support and responsiveness is excellent.

Well done!

I'd tried OmniOutliner, which is a great app, but not _quite_ what I was looking for (although I'll continue to use it for a few limited purposes). I'd also tried Notetaker (which is a tad flaky on my system) and Circus Ponies Notebook (which has a gorgeous GUI, but can be a little less than easy to navigate around if you have a LARGE amount of data saved in a single notebook).

DEVONthink (especially coupled with DEVONagent) seems to be about the right compromise. A clean, easy-to-navigate GUI which doesn't get in the way of your data and a series of simple mechanisms to incorporate media from a wide variety of applications.

I'll continue to use OmniOutliner for simple outlining, but for managing large amounts of disparate info, I'll be using DEVONthink. It's one of those rare apps that just felt 'right' from the moment I installed it.

The ugliest??? But are we talking about the same application, about DEVONThink? You must be kidding!

for another info manager that, after almost 3000 entries, was bogging down - slow to the point of impracticality. So I bought DEVONthink (about a year ago), played with it, but just couldn't get comfortable with how it worked. Then an email upgrade notice from the developers suggested that some of my previous concerns about ease of use had been addressed and so I decided to give the new version a whirl. What a difference! I'm finding it far more versatile in storing many more kinds of data, and far more efficient and easy than the older version, and thus much more practical for storing my data, and phenomenal for organizing it, heirarchically and especially on the fly. I am getting the hang of using its ability to automatically classify my data and move it to folders (groups) I've created. In exchange for a bit more input of learning time initially, I've been rewarded with really, really fast retreival. In short, it now does what I needed. One of my original complaints had been the documentation; the current manual is far more helpful in both getting started and learning the fine points, as well as a good reference (still needs page numbers and an index to be rated tops, but head and shoulders over what was available before).

That would be the end of the story, except we had a split second power failure last week - so short that although most of our several computers went completely down, my own stayed up. But when I went to use DEVONthink, it had locked itself up tighter than a drum. The data was still visible and readable, but nothing could be added and nothing deleted (I later learned this is an automatic DEVONthink security feature that insures not making a corrupted database worse). And after a complete reboot, it was still locked. A rebuild failed. Suspecting a disk problem, I ran DiskWarrior and there was definitely a problem with my hard drive which DiskWarrior was unable to handle (rare, in my experience). Worse, it affected not only the current DEVONthink database, but all my backups. That's when I panicked and contacted the developers. And they came through like champs. Sent me clear, concise step-by-step support and patiently handled my several emails with courtesy, obvious empathy and real-hands on help. Not only did the database get repaired, but so did the backups. I'd definitely rate their after-sales support six stars on a scale of five...

I'm still looking for improvement in this program as it matures. My wish is for some way to more easily name entries on the fly and for more scripts for moving data from other programs (like the one that now exists for moving data from Entourage to DEVONthink), but after my recent experience with the latest upgrade and the developers support, I'm confident such improvements will be forthcoming.

Don Levy
The Mac Therapist
Los Angeles