Files Organizer, Information Manager
Developer: DEVONtechnologies
Commercial: Personal $39.95, Pro $79.95, 25% educational discount
Version: 1.3b3 (Professional)
Release Date: 2007-01-30
Last Updated: 2007-02-04
Pros: Great to store, retrieve, link, organize, view texts, pdfs, notes, websites etc...; AI helps to make contextual connections between information files; Fast and very stable.
Cons: Does not cooperate with Spotlight.
Description
DEVONthink is commonly described as an information manager. Hm, sounds interesting, you might think, but what is it actually doing? Well, think about it as a database, where you can dump any file (texts, PDFs, audio, images, websites, etc.) and retrieve information using the software's intelligent search engine. Sounds like the Finder and Spotlight? Well, yes and no. You can use the Finder to achieve similar results, but DEVONthink is quicker and more accurate - let's see why...
First of all collecting information is a breeze with
DEVONthink. When you are surfing the internet and you see
something, for example about alligators, which you might
want to look at later - just mark what interests you and
hit a keyboard shortcut and the snippet is stored in your
database. Do basically the same thing with texts, images,
PDFs,... without having to save the file at a specific
place. Next time you are in DEVONthink search for
"alligator" and the website from above will be shown
directly in DEVONthink's main window together with all the
PDFs, images, emails, text files and other websites related
to "alligators". Select a specific file and hit another
button and DEVONthink's excellent AI (artifcial
intelligence) is looking for all files which might be
contextually relevant to you. By the way, this works better
the bigger your database becomes. Especially academics who
prefer to have their articles digitalised will appreciate
this feature. So then the advantage of DEVONthink over the
Finder is that you do not have to save your information in
a pre-defined hierarchical folder structure, but that the
information is automatically organized and presented to you
depending on its content. For a better overview DEVONthink
still lets you group any number of objects, but this
usually happens as a result of a certain contextual search.
One word about PDF files, since this the format probably
most commonly used by academics. While the new (and more
expensive) deluxe version DEVONthink Professional Office
has OCR capabilities (converting images, e.g. scans, into
real text files), the two smaller versions only support
full-text searches of PDFs as long as these actually
contain text. Unfortunately some academic journal portals
(e.g. standard JSTOR, with searchable PDFs available in
their "sandbox") save the contents of a journal article as
images within a PDF. Not only are these files larger and
their "text" quality worse, but it also restricts any
search engine from actually looking at the content of the
PDF. Therefore, in order to make better use of DEVONthink's
or any other search engine's capabilities, it is well worth
it to download an article through a service offering true
text PDFs whenever you have the choice, or to spend some
extra-cash on DEVONthink's office version.
But DEVONthink does not only let you search for
information - no matter what file format (apart from some
crucial exceptions such as Mellel), it lets you look at the
contents of a file directly in DEVONthink, and even lets
you edit the content if it is a text file in the broader
sense. Or you can store your images with relevant project
files and look at them in DEVONthink's gallery view. Or you
can save your interviews as audiofiles together with the
transcrips and listen to them also directly in DEVONthink.
Or you can even create new documents, e.g. memos, directly
in DEVONthink. Or, or, or...
The possible usage scenarios for this software are
possibly endless. For academics working with large amounts
and different types of files and doing a lot of research on
their computer and in the internet, DEVONthink's store and
search capabilities can be a great help; in any case they
are worth downloading the software's trial version for 30
days.
Other Reviews
Macworld
Useful Links
Wikipedia Entry