I've been a DEVONthink customer for a couple of years now, and I must say the honeymood was great. Unfortunately as time marched on my Mac technology evolved and in turn so did I—DEVONthink did not. I'd imagine if I were still utilizing Mac OS X version 10.2 that DEVONthink Pro Office would be of quality help. Anyone who is still using Jaguar should definitely give this application a test drive. Not only does this application look and feel like a rusty old Jaguar bundle, the overall experience has made things worse as I've witnessed two years of sad attempts to pass off lateral improvements as "updates" and "upgrades". Frankly I'm tired of the whole folder hierarchy thing, which DEVONthink basically adds another entire layer of on top of existing structures.

Most everything in DEVONthink is to redundant to warrant any claims of sophisticated and/or optimized info management. It doesn't tap into the OS X Spotlight functionality at all, so there is no saving a search after constructing it once. Nope, zilch on the Smart Folders. You have to run the same search again and again every time you need similar results.

Wanna save your place in a PDF file so next time you fire open your database you can pick up ready where you left off? Sorry, can't help you there.

OCR capabilities are limited, hence requiring extra applications and steps to break apart longer files into smaller ones for full doc recognition.

The worst wax job is pawning off the searchable/shared database proclamation as an actual "feature". Wrapping a static web server experience into the execution is a glorified hack at best. So I can't actually read the contents of a pdf file in another database from the acual imported or indexed pdf itself, instead I have to download the damned thing in a browser window which is such a clumsy clutter-glut that takes up more hard drive space every time it's done.

When an application is as stuck in the folder hierarchy paradigm (as DEVONthink definitely is), one feature that can assist in blowing the dust off said antiques is powerful search functionality. While DEVONthink's main search tool is borderline sad, it can hardly compare to the pitiful document specific search. I won't even go into specifics about the scrawny one at a time snailfest search involved with document specific queries.


I can't even imagine this thing running on top of Leopard, it'll look and feel like a horse & buggy runnin' NASCAR.

DEVONthink is a digital toad.