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Mac OS X  |  Business / Productivity  |  Database  |  DEVONthink Pro  |  Still has problems

DEVONthink Pro

DEVONthink Pro

Intelligent info manager.

Version:  2.0pb7

   [ Views: 899 ]

Still has problems

Feedback Type:  Review

Contributed by: blizzaster Tuesday, February 27 2007 @ 01:21 PM PST

Product Platform: MacOSX

Used Product For: Less than a month

Recommend Product: NO

This program may be considered the state-of-the-art, but I'm not convinced that is saying all that much. It still has some problems.
for instance:
    • A system which is supposed to help you manage data, under OSX, that doesn't offer spotlight support is just a disconnected database.
and worse:
    • The program is buggy.
The second one must be qualified I suppose. It is all too easy to get the program into a mode where clicking things in the list on the left, does not display or update the document area, or selecting links only highlights the item in "unselected gray" in the list rather than actually displaying it. From that point, about the only thing you can do is close and relaunch the application. Additionally, from a usability standpoint it suffers serious flaws. As an example – the various modes of the program are nice, but it has a tendency to "hide" things which you think should be displayed in the lists, and reveal others which you wouldn't think would be there depending on what mode you are viewing in. I think it needs some list handling conventions which it sticks to no matter what display mode the program is in. In general, it the program acts as if it takes one mess of data, and makes a different mess out of it with its own set of rules. On the plus side – it has powerful and fast search. That's about it though.   
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2 of 4 users found this helpful.

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Comments

2 comments |

Still has problems - Bill D

The current version of DT Pro is still compatible with OS X 10.3.9 and has a database structure that isn't compatible with Spotlight indexing of text-based file types, although Index-imported Finder items are visible to Spotlight. A future upgrade will be Spotlight-compatible. Personally, I rarely use Spotlight as I prefer the search environment inside DT Pro, but there will be advantages to integration in the future.

I'm puzzled about the comment that DT Pro 1.3 is buggy. DT Pro makes a great many calls to OS X and so depends on a clean OS. Depending on the state of the OS (some applications introduce modifications that can produce OS errors, including haxies, and rarely memory errors can creep into the OS, which sometimes requires maintenance) a call to display another document in a view might not work. If that happens, it's not necessary to restart DT Pro. Simply close that view window using Command-W and reopen it, which will clear the memory error. Such memory errors are not created by DT Pro itself.

Disclosure: I'm the Evangelist for DEVONtechnologies.

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Tuesday, March 27 2007 @ 10:09 AM PDT


Still has problems - comradedata

Dude, Devonthink is the best of its class, it helps me with my research papper. Yes the reason it doesn't have spotlight becuase it has a better find feature than spotlight. There is no need for spotlight, if you want to use spotlight, then use other program. I don't know about your system, i use this program forever, it never crash, the feature is unmatch.

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Friday, May 25 2007 @ 07:06 PM PDT