Anyone know what's going on with these guys? - Bill D

Yes, Spotlight has become useful under Leopard and the Leopard Finder is improved.

But please let me suggest that you actually try using a DT Pro database, instead of just looking at it. A database with tens of thousands of documents runs faster than ever under Leopard, using the current version of the application. Searches of the database are not only faster than Spotlight searches but provide a richer working environment for the indexed text. And the database has artificial intelligence features not available in Spotlight or the Finder, such as See Also and See Selected text. If you need to find and analyze information, especially for research and writing, DT Pro's working environment provides assistance and tools that are orders of magnitude better than a working environment composed of Leopard's Finder and Spotlight.

DT Pro Office makes it easy to digitize paper files into the database, with OCR support. Or to 'broadcast' access to a document database over a network, useful e.g. in an office or classroom environment.

The DEVONtechnologies developers are busy. New products will come along, including a major upgrade to the DT applications that will take new advantages of Leopard, including Spotlight integration. And allow multiple concurrently open databases. And provide far more powerful query operators and syntax than Spotlight.

But if you have work to do right now, the current versions of DT Pro and DT Pro Office allow you to leverage the information content of your data in ways that are still unmatched on the Mac.

Disclaimer: I'm the Evangelist for DEVONtechnologies. But I'm also a heavy user of DT Pro Office for research and writing.

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Monday, December 03 2007 @ 09:05 AM PST

Anyone know what's going on with these guys? - pvonk46

One star, huh??

This means DTPro is on a par with some app that constantly crashes, corrupts data, has very limited format support, etc. etc. I guess you'd have no choice but to give such an app one star as well! I don't think so!

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Wednesday, December 19 2007 @ 08:39 AM PST

Anyone know what's going on with these guys? - donlevy323-225-2228

I think the writer of this comment, above, perhaps has not fully caught onto the many DEVONthink advantages. I find it indispensable to cataloging and almost instant retrieval of an incredible array of information that's not cluttered and commingled with everything else on my hard drive(s).

Sometimes I'm annoyed by not understanding some of the options in DEVONthink (I think that's perhaps often related to the problems of translation between the developers' native German and my native English, so that some of the finer subtleties aren't carried clearly from one language to the other, rather than a failing of the software itself), but I cannot imagine effectively working without it.

I tried a number of different programs before adopting this software, but its speed of retrieval and ability to quickly and usefully organize my saved information has kept me well satisfied. I'm currently using the Pro version, but probably will upgrade to this Office version, particularly for some of the email features.

For me, one of the most delightful features is its ability to save "Web Archives": it preserves the page EXACTLY as the original - live links, images, movies, sound, etc. AND I'm also able to ANNOTATE it with my own notes and comments; and should the "real," original online web page be removed or modified by the owner of the site, it STILL resides in my DEVONthink database exactly as I found it, frozen in time, as it were! How is this useful? I often save web archive's of pages that, themselves, have links to other sites and pages that are highly relevant to the page's subject, but which I haven't the time to explore the day I find and archive it.. I know that even two years later, I can enter a search, bring up the page, and then, when I need to, use those links to dig still deeper into the subject matter.

There's a moderately steep learning curve to some of the features of DEVONthink, and I haven't, I'm sure. explored and mastered it as fully as I might like, but it's brilliantly helping me to do my own work every single day. I think the primary distinction for me, is that Spotlight can be useful in finding files and folders, and routine documents I create (and receive from others, but are unrelated to my main research and informational retrieval), and it catalogs way too much, so that when I do a search, it feels like I'm drowning in irrelevant information. Since everything I save to DEVONthink is stuff that I INTENDED to catalog, it is my personal Wikipedia, without all the distractions, irrelevancies and overkill of a Spotlight search.

One final observation: I've found the developer to be highly responsive to user inquiries on the two or three instances that I've made contact.

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Monday, October 13 2008 @ 11:54 AM PDT