User Profile for Bill D

DEVONthink Pro 1.5 (Mac OS X)

DT Pro 1.5 includes Spotlight integration  

Note that DT Pro 1.5 integrates with Spotlight. If a Spotlight search result item exists in a DT Pro database, double-clicking it will open it in the database. Also note that OCR is not a component of DT Pro, but is a component of DT Pro Office. Disclosure: I'm the Evangelist for DEVONtechnologies, developers of the DEVONthink applications. [alert admin]

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Thursday, January 03 2008 @ 10:30 AM PST

Papyrus 12.19 (Mac OS X)

Fully editable PDFs make Papyrus a wonder  

Papyrus gets 5 stars from me because it does two things no other word processor does for me, and both things meet my needs. [1] It's the first powerful word processor that produces editable output fully compatible with my DEVONthink Pro databases. Not only is the text of those Papyrus documents fully searchable and analyzable, the layout including footnotes, endnotes, images, spreadsheet tables, etc. is viewed in my databases exactly as in Papyrus. And that includes working hyperlinks for URLs, mail addresses and internal 'bookmark' hyperlinks. From my DEVONthink Pro database I can select such a document, click a button to open it under Papyrus, then edit and save it. The changes are then visible in my database next time I look at the document. And I'm looking at the actual document including images, footnotes, full layout, everything. I can't do that with Word, Mellel, Pages or any other word processor above the level of TextEdit. That's because Papyrus 12 for Mac OS X can produce editable PDFs. Fully, absolutely, completely editable PDFs saved with the "pap.pdf" suffix. That's a WOW! feature, and the reason I bought Papyrus 12. [2] I'm doing a project that results in lots of PDFs. Those files are reviewed by several people who often request changes. In the past, I've had to do the dreaded two-step. I've had to find and open the original document created under another application, edit and save it, then create a PDF version of the changed file. No more. Now I just open the PDF generated by Papyrus, make changes and save the file. That's it. No second step required, no duplication of material on the drive. Perhaps you won't understand why I appreciate that one-step edit/save process until you are faced with managing dozens of PDFs that have a number of requests for changes. Summary: For my needs Papyrus 12 is wonderful. For those who need to include powerful spreadsheet table elements within a document (which can read data from other files as well), it's very good. For those who need very large documents, with the capability of generating a linked table of contents, it works well. For those who might need complete compatibility with MS Word documents, it's not that great, but can capture the text of Word documents. For those who need fully editable PDFs produced by a capable word processor, there's nothing like Papyrus. The developers note that Papyrus may be able to open "normal" PDFs in the future. As I work with a lot of OCR'd PDFs, I hope that would let me correct OCR errors. [alert admin]

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Tuesday, September 19 2006 @ 03:07 PM PDT

DEVONthink Pro 1.1.1 (Mac OS X)

In response to SWriter's multiple postings  

Disclaimer: I'm the Evangelist and do support for DEVONtechnologies applications, including DEVONthink Professional and DEVONagent. I think it's only very rarely appropriate for a developer representative to reply on this forum, which is intended for user comments and ratings. In this case SWriter has posted multiple low ratings separated in time; that doesn't appear accidental and seems intended to lower the overal user rating. In previous communications with SWriter we requested that he send in crash reports for DEVONthink Pro, as he was reporting problems. Yes, there were crashes, but they were caused by already corrupted files on his disk. We responded to SWriter, noting his significant problem with corrupted files. SWriter has apparently chosen to blame DEVONthink Professional rather than address preexisting file problems on his computer. We do not feel that's appropriate. I will only note in passing that DEVONthink Pro and DEVONagent are often commended for their design interfaces in OS X, and that DEVONagent, properly used, is very effective for Web researchers. [alert admin]

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Saturday, June 10 2006 @ 03:09 PM PDT

NoteTaker 1.9 (Mac OS X)

NoteTaker 1.9 is a great update.  

There's much better control of the cover page (contrary to Wouters' complaint), including easy modification of the cover title text and positioning. And cover pages can now be printed. There's a page on this in "What's New" for version 1.9. Highlight and summarize is much more powerful and useful. Tables copied to the clipboard from Word or Excel can now be pasted in as HTML, retaining the appearance and formatting of the tables. And there's a set of sample plugins that, among other things, allows one to create tables in a notebook. The contextual menu options perform well, and are really handy for designating the target of a clipping, including repetitive clippings to the same section of a notebook. I've been a happy user of NoteTaker since version 1.6. Version 1.9 is the best yet, and adds major features such as "dynamic linking." The user manual is exceptionally well done. [alert admin]

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Friday, January 07 2005 @ 08:48 PM PST

DEVONthink PE 1.9 (Mac OS X)

It's my staff of intelligent research assistants  

I've been using DEVONthink for two years. My database has grown to over 12,500,000 words, in many thousands of documents. The primary focus of my collection is on environmental issues, with extensions into such related fields as biotechnology, geology, health sciences, information sciences, economics, public administration, etc. DEVONthink easily captures into the database a wide variety of file types. Most of my references are PDF, RTF, RTFD, HTML and Word file types. DEVONthink captures the text of these files so that it can provide very quick search and retrieval of information. Collecting and retrieving information is nice enough. But DEVONthink lets me look at a document and, if desired, quickly show me related information via the "See Also" button. Through contextual recognition (artificial intelligence) features, DEVONthink can help me see relationships between bits of information scattered throughout my database, that I might never have found on my own. DEVONthink 1.9 is simply awesome. The program is user-friendly, yet so deep and rich that I continue to find new ways to use it. The developers continue to add new features that make sense, and there's a great user forum for users to share tips and suggestions. Yes, I use other programs for printing or Web output of projects, but I spend much more time in DEVONthink than in any other application. It's time well spent. [alert admin]

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Tuesday, November 30 2004 @ 07:13 PM PST

pdf-Recover 1.2.7 (Mac OS X)

Solved a problem for me  

Indexing PDF files into DEVONthink makes them searchable within DT, and therefore makes them much more useful to me. One sourcer of PDF files covering topics that I follow has no problem with me indexing their files. But the contractor who created their PDFs put copy protection on the files, so they could not be indexed by DT. Of course, there are several ways that I could still get the text from the files, but those approaches take time and effort. pdf-Recover takes only seconds to make these files available to DEVONthink. I bought it immediately. [alert admin]

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Monday, October 04 2004 @ 12:16 AM PDT

()

iListen is MUCH better than iGreg believes  

I do most of my writing with a keyboard. But iListen is useful when I'm transcribing handwritten notes, such as meeting notes. Reading my notes into iListen is faster and more convenient than putting my notebook down and typing, then picking up the notebook, flipping pages, putting the notebook down and gong back to the keyboard.... The accuracy of such dictated material (assuming no unfamiliar vocabulary) can easily be in the mid- to high-90% range. Quite often, I find it almost perfect and easily edited later. I don't get 100% accuracy while typing, either :>) [alert admin]

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Sunday, January 04 2004 @ 10:36 PM PST

Circus Ponies NoteBook 1.2v170 (Mac OS X)

Rock solid, fast and even better  

CP NoteBook 1.2 runs well under Panther, has fast and versatile search features for text, keywords and other attributes, and can export HTML that's compatible with a broad range of browsers and platforms. It is feature-rich, yet easy to use. It's a powerful outliner and much, much more. CP NoteBook is becoming an indispensable tool for writing, note-taking and juggling digital information from text to graphics and audio clips. NoteBook is a showpiece for what can be done with Cocoa and Mac OS X, and it's development path promises even more for the future. I use NoteBook in tandem with my huge DEVONthink reference database. Makes me feel sorry for some of my friends in the Windows world, who have no tools approaching the power and flexibility of my suite of Mac OS X applications. Small programming shops like Circus Ponies and DEVONtechnologies that write for Mac OS X are producing wonderfully powerful, consumer-friendly products. As Tom Clancy has said, if you want to write, get a Mac. [alert admin]

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Wednesday, November 05 2003 @ 10:25 PM PST

Apple Mac OS X 10.2.8 (Mac OS X)

Looking good  

Smooth install on 500 MHz TiBook with 1 GB RAM, 60 GB HD Everything works....cable modem, ethernet, MS Office, OS X Services. Immediately after installation I ran DiskWarrior 3 (no problems) and then permissions repair(several problems corrected). [alert admin]

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Monday, September 22 2003 @ 08:11 PM PDT

Circus Ponies Notebook 1.0 (Mac OS X)

NoteBook and DEVONthink complement each other well  

I've got thousands of reference files on environmental science and policy topics on my TiBook. File types include Word, PDF, HTML, XML, RTF, RTFD, text and others. The collection grows daily, mostly through Web searches of online journals. I use this material for my articles and projects. How to manage this information? I think I've tried every organizer, outliner and document database application for Macs. The winners are NoteBook and DEVONthink, which complement each other beautifully. NoteBook holds my daily journals, notes and article drafts. Everything is indexed for fast searches -- not only words, but keywords, highlighted items and creation or edit date. For example, if I think an item might be a good topic for an article, I label it with a custom keyword -- a great memory aid. Later, I can come back to the labeled cell and start writing the article within NoteBook. (NoteBook has a neat View option, focus on selected cell, that let's me display just the outline I'm working on.) DEVONthink is my big, smart document database. It holds many thousands of pages of reference material. Not only are searches amazingly fast and flexible, but DEVONthink can suggest similar items, alternative terms and lots of other knowledge mining assistance features. I wouldn't drop a 252-page PDF document into NoteBook, but my DEVONthink database contains items that big or bigger (I use TextLightning, so that I can see the RTF text search results). I often use NoteBook as my 'front end' to DEVONthink. I can initiate DEVONthink searches from within NoteBook via OS Services. Likewise, from within DEVONthink, I can send text clippings (for example, quotes or bibliographic material) directly to NoteBook. And NoteBook holds my notes and comments arising from looking at material in DEVONthink. Through OS X Services, there's a wonderful synergy. Jayson Adams, the programmer of NoteBook, is extremely responsive and helpful. I wanted to be able to reference external files without including them in NoteBook. Jayson suggested using path URLs, which works great not only in NoteBook, but also in DEVONthink. Mac OS X has grown up big-time. These are tools I've been looking for all my life. Now, they are here. [alert admin]

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Sunday, May 11 2003 @ 08:11 PM PDT

Anyone know what's going on with these guys?  

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…

Original feedback item : Read More(1 words)

Monday, December 03 2007 @ 09:05 AM PST

Ist Goot  

The previous poster was a bit snide. Yes, Mellel is a good application. There are elements of Mellel that I prefer to Papyrus 12, although overall I would rate Papyrus as somewhat more powerful, especially for its spreadsheet capabilities. The trouble with Mellel, as with most word processors, is that it uses just another one of those proprietary file types. Want to share your Mellel document with a friend? Oops, he can't read your email attachment…

Original feedback item : Read More(1 words)

Friday, October 12 2007 @ 11:00 AM PDT

Still has problems  

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…

Original feedback item : Read More(1 words)

Tuesday, March 27 2007 @ 10:09 AM PDT

Replicants vs. Tags  

Does grouping of documents imply a hierarchical database structure? No. I prefer thinking of the documents in my groups as clusters of related data. DT Pro's features allow me to break the rules of hierarchical organization. Many of my documents are located into more than one group, through replication. But my databases have never been fully, neatly organized -- certainly not into some rigid hierarchical structure. They are a working environment to help me work with…

Original feedback item : Read More(1 words)

Friday, March 02 2007 @ 10:55 AM PST

Another winner from Michael Tsai  

DEVONnote, DEVONthink Personal, DEVONthink Pro and DEVONthink Pro Office allow the user to export all of the files contained in a database to the Finder. So there's no need for concern about being 'trapped' into a database format from which the files can't be recovered. But I agree with the poster that the ability to retrieve files easily from a database should be a consideration. I've seen some notable exceptions, especially in the Windows world.

Original feedback item : Read More

Saturday, January 27 2007 @ 01:05 AM PST

Another winner from Michael Tsai  

DEVONnote, DEVONthink Personal, DEVONthink Pro and DEVONthink Pro Office allow the user to export all of the files contained in a database to the Finder. So there's no need for concern about being 'trapped' into a database format from which the files can't be recovered. But I agree with the poster that the ability to retrieve files easily from a database should be a consideration. I've seen some notable exceptions, especially in the Windows world.

Original feedback item : Read More

Saturday, January 27 2007 @ 01:04 AM PST

Another winner from Michael Tsai  

DEVONnote, DEVONthink Personal, DEVONthink Pro and DEVONthink Pro Office allow the user to export all of the files contained in a database to the Finder. So there's no need for concern about being 'trapped' into a database format from which the files can't be recovered. But I agree with the poster that the ability to retrieve files easily from a database should be a consideration. I've seen some notable exceptions, especially in the Windows world.

Original feedback item : Read More

Saturday, January 27 2007 @ 01:00 AM PST

Another winner from Michael Tsai  

DEVONnote, DEVONthink Personal, DEVONthink Pro and DEVONthink Pro Office allow the user to export all of the files contained in a database to the Finder. So there's no need for concern about being 'trapped' into a database format from which the files can't be recovered. But I agree with the poster that the ability to retrieve files easily from a database should be a consideration. I've seen some notable exceptions, especially in the Windows world.

Original feedback item : Read More

Saturday, January 27 2007 @ 12:59 AM PST

Boo! Hiss!  

Hi, MS5STAR. I don't normally post here, as I'm the Evangelist for DEVONtechnologies. I'm breaking my rule twice this evening. :-) DT Pro and DT Pro Office are different products and both will continue. Why DT Pro Office? Unlike your imaginary auditorium, we've had a great many requests for those three enhancements in DTPO: [1] control of scanner to OCR to saving in a database, [2] rich text archiving of email including images and attachments and [3]…

Original feedback item : Read More(1 words)

Friday, December 01 2006 @ 01:06 AM PST

STAY AWAY FROM THIS  

Hi, fioretralefoglie. As this is basically a forum for user comments I don't often post in it, as I'm the Evangelist for DEVONtechnologies. But I think you are confusing cause and effect. You installed the DTPO beta and when you had Mail keychain problems blamed the problems on DTPO. I've been running pre-public-release for months, and we've had a number of external beta testers prior to release of the public beta. No one else has reported…

Original feedback item : Read More(1 words)

Thursday, November 30 2006 @ 11:45 PM PST