Less obvious are the little interface touches (or their absence) that impact on the experience while working within DEVONthink. Opening up the database to make it accessible in other ways apart from DEVONthink itself would go a long way toward easing these concerns and would no doubt win the software some new converts. I count myself among those users who are apprehensive, although that hasn’t stopped me from using either DEVONthink or a few other software packages which also rely on such databases (Microsoft Entourage comes to mind). While DEVONthink does a decent job of exporting (not least by simply dragging and dropping to the desktop), many users will be apprehensive about trusting any large chunk of information to a proprietary monolithic database. This touches on one issue which may be a deal breaker for some users: the use of a proprietary database scheme at all. Try Online Counseling: Get Personally Matched (Responsibility here of course lies with the DEVONthink developers: this is not in any way a weakness of Spotlight.) I don’t always know whether I have something tucked away in a folder somewhere, or whether I’ve stored it in DEVONthink, and although I don’t actually use Spotlight very often, it would be a big plus if it could at least let me know when something is stored in a DEVONthink database on those occasions that I do use it. Perhaps the most obvious is the complete lack of transparency for the Mac’s built-in search facility, Spotlight: information which is easy to find once it is within DEVONthink’s database becomes impossible to find using Spotlight. Having said that, there are still a few rough spots and omissions. All of these translate into real, tangible value for me in my business. If you’ve read this review so far, you might have noticed that I’m pretty amazed at what this software can do in terms of saving me organizing time, revealing relationships between sets of information, and helping me get more real benefit from the things I take the time to store away. DEVONthink Still Has Room for Improvement Note that some of the above capabilities are not available in the basic (and less expensive) versions of the package. Of course, stand-alone OCR software has been available for a couple of decades, but DEVONthink integrates it well enough to make it actually usable on a routine basis: just scan the document, and there it is, in your database. Scanning Mentioned only in passing above, DEVONthink’s integrated optical character recognition (OCR) engine enables you to scan paper documents and immediately have them indexed and incorporated into the database: in other words, when you scan the document, you have not only an image, but the actual text of the document to work with. Unfortunately, most of the more advanced capabilities are not available through this interface. Database Sharing I can’t quite imagine myself wanting to use it, but if you’re on a LAN and want to share your database with colleagues, DEVONthink provides a front end to enable them to search it via a local web front end. Mail Archiving DEVONthink seamlessly imports email from all major email applications, including Apple’s Mail and Microsoft’s Entourage. Bookmarks, Web Browsing and RSS Although it would be a shame to use it only for organizing bookmarks or reading news, DEVONthink makes a very capable bookmark manager, web browser (using the same underlying rendering engine as Safari) and RSS reader. ‘Site Sucker’ DEVONthink can be set to download and archive arbitrary sets of pages - even whole web sites - with just a few clicks. I can’t cover all that such a sophisticated piece of software has to offer in this brief review, but I’d just like to nod in the direction of a few more little morsels in addition to what I’ve covered so far: AppleScript, Automator and Bookmarklets Great integration with the Mac’s built-in automation technologies makes it easy to grab text or images from other applications and drop them into the database I use the Safari bookmarklets for archiving and bookmarking all the time, and DEVONthink’s AppleScripts fairly often. DEVONthink Still Has Room for Improvement.
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