With thanks to @richnewman and his demo on The Readers' Republic earlier this week, I find myself looking at DevonTHINK again.
The price mentioned on the day was a couple of hundred bucks - but it looks like there is a version at $100 - will I be disappointed?
@JohnPhilpin In December I bought a pro license plus DevonAgent when it was on offer, for 152 Euro. Had tried it out a few times over the years. The idea of duplicating my filesystem into a database never appealed to me, but am trying it out again nevertheless. I find it clunky, and feel unsure as before about what DevonThink is actually for.
@ton with you on duping the files but @richnewman was talking about pointing at tiles not just importing … and search seems to be highly thought of
@johnphilpin If I remember our conversation correctly, you were, in addition to DT’s indexing capabilities, you were intrigued by the possibility of managing Blot from within the app. For those kinds of functions, I don’t think you need the Pro version. I scan a lot of material into DT and some of the other Pro features, like Bookends integration, are useful to me in my work, so I never actually used only the Standard Edition.
There is one thing to know about managing Blot in DT: Images need to be managed and named outside the app. If you name an image inside DT, as per Blot’s convention, beginning with an underscore so it doesn’t post, once that image indexes to your Blot folder, the underscore is for some reason stripped away—someone at DT explained it to me, but I don’t remember. In other words, you need to use Finder to name and copy the images into whatever folder you’re using.
If you decide to use DT to index files on your hard drive, you do need to learn about how DT creates and manages the relationship between the indexed version of the file and the file on your hard drive. Otherwise, you could end up causing yourself unnecessary hassle. Like anything else, you’ll either find the benefits of using the app are worth adjusting your workflow or adjusting your workflow will turn out not to be worth it.
One thing I do like about DT is that, with the exception of the images in Blot noted above, I can do the work almost entirely within DT, without having to open another app.
@richnewman many thanks for this considered thought - and you are right - managing blot was one thought - also
1) searching my world of fragmented docs
2) a place for all pdfs
are two others (though we didn’t speak of either on the day).
@JohnPhilpin By fragmented docs, do you mean unorganized—eg, lots of things that might otherwise “go together” saved in different places or some such thing—or something else? Either way, you might find DT search could actually help you organize them if you dig a little into indexing. (I vaguely remember them doing a blog post about this.)
About PDFs: if you already have an OCR workflow you’re happy with, you might just want DT to store and work with them. But, if you’re looking for change, you might give the DT Pro trial a try. The app has really good OCR, at least for my purposes, and pretty robust ways of working with those files from start to finish.
@JohnPhilpin Also, this is the DT blog post about indexing that I was remembering, not exactly what you are talking about, but it gives a good sense of how DT's developers think and about how helpul they can be. (This particular post was a lifesaver for me.)
@richnewman really good thoughts / Thankyou. Definitely going to take a closer look via a trial / but need to choose a time when I can focus on it.