DEVONthink Professional 1.2 Keeps Track Of “What’s On Your ‘Book”
by Charles W. Moore
“What’s on your PowerBook? was one of my all-time favorite Apple advertising campaigns. Various celebrities would pose for the magazine advertisements holding their PowerBooks, with an inventory of what was on their hard drives listed below. Of course, in the early and mid-’90s, it was quaintly easy to describe the contents of most people’s hard drives in a few lines. The average PowerBook user then had only a handful of programs and relatively few documents. The concept really wouldn’t work today very well.
Indeed, one of the challenges of contemporary computing is simply finding stuff on your hard drive even if you know it’s there somewhere, and generally keeping your archived data organized. Once I got used to its idiosyncrasies and angularities, I’ve found that Spotlight in OS 10.4 Tiger helps a lot. There are some maddeningly annoying things about Spotlight, two particularly notable ones being its inability to search for phrases, and the complexity of doing simple filename searches. I would also like more versatility for searching within results. Nevertheless, those complaints registered, even a lame and clunky Spotlight is better than no Spotlight.
However, if you have a lot of archive data to organize, store, and search through frequently, there are better solutions then just depending on the Finder and Spotlight.
I’ve been using DEVONthink Personal Edition, and more recently DEVONthink Professional, as my main information storage and retrieval managers for research data and suchlike for several years now. It’s been for the most part an impressive piece of software, and has only gotten better with continued development. DEVONthink Professional version 1.2, which was released last week, is the best yet by a significant margin, particularly in the speed department.
If you’ve never checked out DEVONthink, it’s a “document and information manager” — a notepad, outliner, scrapbook manager, information manager, freeform database, archive, bookmark manager and image database, and also includes a built-in Safari-based Web browser and RSS newsreader. DEVONthink intelligently stores your text files, PDFs, images, bookmarks, even QuickTime movies and MP3 files, and helps you organize them in one database, regardless of where the data is physically located, and integrates both local documents and live content from the Internet to keep, e.g., all project-related information together. A hierarchical filing structure and AI functions for sorting in and finding documents makes it ideal for both, keeping a simple notebook and organizing large information collections. DEVONthink Pro is particularly useful if you have a large quantity of information that needs to be cross-referenced, indexed, searched and retrieved — providing powerful database functions without a lot of database geekiness.
DEVONthink Professional Edition 1.2 includes several new features, such as support for bookmarklets, which are JavaScript commands added to the bookmarks of a bookmarklet-enabled Web browser, e.g., Safari or DEVONagent 2.0.2, that perform a function instead of loading a stored Web address. DEVONthink Professional supports two bookmarklets that add a displayed Web page either as link or as Web archive to the currently open database. Basically, they “misuse” bookmarks as handy shortcuts for application functions.
DEVONthink Professional supports the following two bookmarklets:
¥ Add bookmark to DEVONthink Professional ¥ Add page as Web archive to DEVONthink ProfessionalTo use a bookmarklet, load any page that you want to archive - then select the bookmarklet of choice in your bookmarks bar. Instead of jumping to another page, as with other bookmarks, the bookmarklet will create either a link document or a Web archive for the displayed page in your DEVONthink Professional database.
Bookmarks or Web archives created using these bookmarklets will be created in the group defined in the preferences, “Import” tab, for “New notes.” This works extremely slickly for saving entire Web pages as Web archives, which can of course be displayed in DEVONthink Pro’s built-in Web browser.
DEVONthink Pro 1.2 is also significantly faster than the previous version 1.1, which is great news, because while I love DEVONthink Pro, it has up to now been a tad sluggish, even on my 1.33 GHz PowerBook with 1.5 GB of RAM. With version 1.2, it’s still not the most instantly-responsive program, but the speed optimization that has been done is very noticeable and welcome.
I haven’t tested DEVONthink Pro, which has been a Universal Binary since version 1.1, on an Intel Mac, but if you’re fortunate enough to have one, it the performance boost with this application should be very gratifying.
In early versions of the program, while available import options were extremely flexible, they could also be confusing. However, beginning with DEVONthink Professional 1.1 they have been cut down to importing and indexing, with the various import preferences for different file types cleaned up. “Alone this simplification helps making importing files into the database less error-prone and flattens the learning curve for new users,” says Eric Boehnisch-Volkmann, President of DEVONtechnologies.
DEVONthink Professional 1.2 can import complete Apple Mail or Microsoft Entourage mailboxes including all sub-mailboxes while recreating the original mailbox structure within the database, making the program a versatile email archiving tool for major email applications: Apple Mail, Microsoft Entourage, BareBones Mailsmith, Eudora and Powermail.
Appearance and user interface functions-wise, DEVONthink Professional is pretty similar to the DEVONthink Personal Edition. Upon first startup after installation DEVONthink Professional automatically imported and assimilated my existing DEVONthink archive files, making this switch to the more powerful program no hassle at all.
The interface window supports a variety of views.
Backups are simplicity itself. All data is contained in a file called “DEVONthink.dtBase” stored in the Documents Folder of your Home Folder. To back up, just drag this file to your backup media.
One of the slickest features of DEVONthink (either edition) as well as the companion “light” DEVONnote application, is that you can create a new document in your database simply by selecting a block of text in another Services-savvy program, such as a browser or word processor, and exporting it into any of the DEVON applications via the Services menu command, which gives you the option of RTF or plain text. You can also append a subsequent selection to the last created document. I use this feature a lot. My only major criticism is that it would be nice to be able to have the option of naming the new document rather than just having the first few words rendered as the title. In that context, a naming dialog when you create new document in DEVONthink itself would be a big convenience, perhaps as a contextual menu option. Not a big deal, but one of the few niggles I have with the way this program works.
Actually, DEVONthink Personal Edition is capable of a lot more than I really require of it for my needs, and in that sense the Professional Edition is sort of gilding the lily, as it were.
DEVONthink Professional has Automator support offering 14 actions and ten sample workflows that demonstrate their possibilities and using Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger’s automation tool for creating workflows and to integrate DEVONthink Professional with other applications, the Internet or the iPod. An AppleScript droplet converts AppleWorks 6 documents for DEVONthink Professional, three new scripts import complete mailboxes from Apple Mail and Microsoft Entourage and copy emails from PowerMail to the database. The Microsoft Entourage scripts also import only short headers now, and all scripts have been overhauled for compatibility and performance. Compiled scripts and Automator workflows can be added to the script menu making it even easier to extend DEVONthink Professional’s functionality.
DEVONthink Professional can handle multiple databases instead of everything necessarily being stored in just one as with Personal Edition, allowing users to split up their information collection into several smaller databases for specific projects. Databases are simply packages and can be copied, emailed and backed up like any other file or folder. However, only one database can be open at a time, and in order to switch databases, you have to quit the one that you are in, and then find and start up the other one using a menu selection and dialog box. IMHO, at least for my purposes, this adds unnecessary complication, and defeats the paradigm of having all of your archived stuff available at any time. However, you can still simply operate that way with a single database if you wish, so the multiple database capability is no hardship.
A data type area called sheets and records can hold table-like data like reference lists, information collections or any other type of structured data. Unlike spreadsheets, sheets and records combine the database-oriented approach of records with a comfortable table-like view for easy entering and managing structured data.
Data management and structuring is one of DEVONthink’s strong suits. As well as data stored originally in DEVONthink, you can import documents archived on your hard drive (which remain untouched in their original location, but are indexed or copied into the DEVONthink database). This can be done manually, or just drag a folder (say, your Documents Folder) into the DEVONthink window and let the program do its stuff.
DEVONthink classifies data into “groups” of documents sharing a common focus or theme. You can create groups yourself, and manually drag or transfer documents into them. Groups appear in the DEVONthink interface as folders, and function pretty much similarly to the Mac OS Finder’s folders.
When you open a document in the DEVONthink window, a “Classify” button will appear, which, when clicked on, opens a drawer offering suggestions of likely likely groups into which you might want to move the document. A bar graph icon appears next to each group suggestion; with longer lines denoting higher thematic relevance.
To move a document into a group, choose one of the suggestions from the list in the drawer ( find that DEVONthink’s judgment is amazingly good, and most often it will be the top suggestion that is appropriate) and click the Move button. The document will disappear from where it was and show up in the target group’s directory
There is also an Auto Group command under the Data menu, which uses the same sort of logic to put a random batch of files into some kind of order. A particular document can belong to more than one group. Right or Control-click a document, and one of the selections that appears in the contextual menu is: “Replicate to...” which when clicked creates an identical copy of your document and deposits it in the group you specify. The replicant document will henceforth mirror the original if the original is edited or changed, and vice versa. In other words, replicants are synchronized copies of their originals.
Another of DEVONthink’s major virtues is its fast and powerful search engine, now with an improved interface, which can be configured in a variety of search options. In my estimation, it works the way Spotlight should, and is integrated with Spotlight searches.
There is a download manager for downloading complete Websites and storing them for offline editing and browsing in the database as well as the possibility to save single Web pages as Mac OS X standard “webarchives”. Webarchives can be edited in WYSIWYG directly in DEVONthink Professional. The built-in Safari-based web browser handles RSS, RDF, RSD and Atom newsfeeds, effectively making DEVONthink Professional a news reader and aggregator.
DEVONthink Professional supports more file formats than the Personal edition and comes with new import/export plug-ins. In addition to text files, rich texts, Microsoft Word documents, HTML/XML, webarchives, PDFs and PostScript files, images, movies and MP3s, DEVONthink Professional exchanges data with OmniOutliner, all OPML compliant applications, BibTeX, iData 2 and the Mac OS X address book. AppleScripts further integrate it with email applications such as Apple Mail, Microsoft Entourage, Barebones Mailsmith Qualcomm Eudora or PowerMail. The new web site export plug-in lets users publish information from DEVONthink readily prepared for their homepage, and an iPod export plug-in converts selected documents for viewing on-the-go. No other application on the Mac has ever been so open for all kind of standard file formats.
The convenience of DEVONthink’s ability to quickly open both MS Word and PDF documents with formatting intact simply by dragging them to the DEVONthink icon the Dock can’t be overemphasized for users who don’t have Word itself on their hard drives or find Preview’s lack of cut/paste support inconvenient. Or for that matter, even if you do have Word and/or Adobe Reader, you get to see your document faster by opening it in DEVONthink ( if the latter is already open, which it almost always is on my Mac), than waiting for the aforementioned behemoths to lumber into action.
Other features include full screen mode, which allows the user to write and browse without any interface clutter, the Mail-like three panes view for easy navigation and two Dashboard widgets for searching the database and for quickly jotting down notes in DEVONthink Professional.
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The DEVONjot Pro widget allows you to take notes and export them to DEVONthink Professional. It can be configured to send the note to a particular database and group.
On the front side of the widget is a field where you can type your message. Devon notes that because of a peculiarity of the current WebKit from Apple, you can only start typing after you click in the upper left corner of the widget (if there is no insertion caret visible.
The area with the “Warning” or “Error” icon will indicate if you can take your note. Or if something went wrong when you clicked the “Take Note” button it will show an “Error” icon. If you hover your mouse over these icons, you can see the exact message on the screen. If your note was stored successfully in the application, it would have been erased from the widget to make space for a new one. All the information on screen is preserved even if you leave Dashboard, as long as you don’t close the widget.
You can flip the widget by clicking the “i” button that appears when you move the mouse into the lower right corner of the widget. The back side contains some preferences that you can use to customize DEVONjot Pro to your needs.
The DEVONsearch widget allows you to search your DEVONthink Professional database directly from Dashboard. The widget lists all results and shows a preview in a drawer.
On the front side of the widget you can enter your search term into the search field and click the DEVONthink Professional icon to start the search run. If DEVONthink Professional isn’t running, it will be opened. The result list include the name of the found documents and the score.
Scroll through the results and select them to open a preview drawer. Click the yellow up arrow to close the drawer.
You can flip the widget by clicking the “i” button that appears when you move the mouse into the upper right corner of the widget. The back side contains some preferences that you can use to customize DEVONsearch to your needs.
To view a web page in DEVONthink , you have first to create a URL document (“Data > New > Link”). Then name the new document with the URL (with or without http://). The naming is dome in the left window column list, which is less than intuitive, and not terribly convenient. Alternatively, drag any Internet location file from the Finder or bookmark from Safari into the DEVONthink browser or onto the DEVONthink icon in the Dock.
As soon as you select a link document, DEVONthink will start to load the website in the preview pane (in horizontal or vertical split view). A progress indicator will appear in the status bar. You can also double-click it to open the page in a separate window or use the contextual menu to open it in an external browser.
Like in Safari, you can navigate back and forth all visited web pages using the back and forward arrow buttons in the status bar, stop loading with the “X” button and reload the page with the round arrow button. Selecting the URL in the status bar or option/command-clicking a link opens the current or linked page in your default browser, e.g. Safari.
However, to make this feature really appropriate for routine use, there should be a one-click command to create a Web page document with a conventional URL field and preferably tabs. There is also no Bookmarks function, although it is possible to create one manually by making a folder full of URL links.
If you enter a URL as the name for a new link, DEVONnote automatically sets the URL of the item too. E.g. create a link, enter “www.apple.com” - that’s it.
Via the contextual menu you can grab complete web pages or frames and store them as separate RTF or HTML contents in the DEVONthink database. Depending on where you’re opening the contextual menu or if you have text selected, various options appear: “Capture Note”, “Capture Page”, “Capture Frame”, “Capture Image” or “Capture Link”. They are all context-sensitive, i.e. they appear only when applicable.
You can also just grab the page’s location. Control-click the page background and select “Copy page location to clipboard” to copy the URL of the page you are viewing to the clipboard. This also works for images, frames and links. You can then rename the generated link document or use the contextual menu or “Action” menu command “Set Title As” to rename the document to any piece of selected text.
DEVONthink Professional has no restriction on the number of PDFs and images in the database, and it comes with both a comprehensive tutorial written completely in DEVONthink Professional itself and a complete documentation as online help and downloadable PDF.
DEVONthink Pro is a wonderful tool, although I would prefer to have a more comprehensive set of text editing tools, and an Applescript menu dedicated exclusively to text editing with configurable keyboard shortcuts, similar to the one in Tex Edit Plus. Also, one annoyance is that some standard Mac OS keyboard shortcuts such as F4 for Paste or F3 for Copy are not supported in DEVONthink’s word processor.
DEVONthink is a Mac-only application, and is tightly integrated with the operating system and its frameworks. It provides a Dock menu, and the aforementioned Services menu commands and makes heavy use of the Safari Web browser engine and advanced PDF library of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger.
If you work with a large amounts of information that you need to frequently search and reference, you will probably find DEVONthink Pro worth the cost of admission. For users with less stringent information management needs, DEVONthink personal edition or DEVONnote, which is amazingly powerful for twenty dollar shareware, could well do the job for you. However neither of the lower-priced applications include the widget support, and they’re pretty cool.
System requirements:
DEVONthink Professional 1.2 requires Mac OS X 10.3.9 or Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger”. It is immediately available as a free demo download from:
http://www.devon-technologies.com
DEVONthink Professional must be purchased for $79.95 after the evaluation period of 150 hours of non-continuous runtime. DEVONthink Professional is also available together with DEVONagent as the “Infoworker’s Pro Bundle” for $99.95. Owners of DEVONthink Personal can upgrade to DEVONthink Professional for $45.00.
For more information, visit:
http://www.devon-technologies.com
