Anyone using Devonthink Pro?
September 18, 2011 9:31 AM Subscribe
I'm considering using Devonthink Pro for research and article writing. Looks very interesting. And MeFites out there already using it with great success? Would love some tips and pointers about what your process is like. Thanks!
I guess I'm thinking of using it as a notebooking app, a way of gathering notes and articles and whatnot. Seems to be one of the major selling points.
Is it worth it?
(The last Devonthink Pro question was asked almost four years ago... That might be a touch out-of-date.)
I guess I'm thinking of using it as a notebooking app, a way of gathering notes and articles and whatnot. Seems to be one of the major selling points.
Is it worth it?
(The last Devonthink Pro question was asked almost four years ago... That might be a touch out-of-date.)
Response by poster: It's more the researching side of writing, I suppose. I already use Scrivener and quite like it for some kinds of writing. (For more personal writing, I prefer WriteRoom.)
posted by chasing at 9:56 AM on September 18, 2011
posted by chasing at 9:56 AM on September 18, 2011
The Notebook app from Circus Ponies is a great, simple app to use. I use it for my journaling and research purposes. I tried using Devon a while back, and found it a bit complicated....
posted by theKik at 10:10 AM on September 18, 2011
posted by theKik at 10:10 AM on September 18, 2011
I write in TextMate (using LaTeX) but do all my research in DevonThink Pro Office. I also keep all important documents scanned in there and do a bunch of other things. There's numerous case studies on the DT website, I can't really offer you much aside from I web archive HTML pages and save PDFs in native format while organizing them into a rough folder structure. I don't use tags since I started using DT well before they did tagging and never felt the need to.
posted by Brian Puccio at 11:15 AM on September 18, 2011
posted by Brian Puccio at 11:15 AM on September 18, 2011
Best answer: I use DT for organizing articles and my dissertation, and I love it. Some articles I've found helpful for thinking about how to set up and use Devonthink are parts 1, 2, and 3 of a series on using DT for historical research, as well as this article walking through another DT setup for project-based research.
posted by philosophygeek at 11:21 AM on September 18, 2011 [8 favorites]
posted by philosophygeek at 11:21 AM on September 18, 2011 [8 favorites]
Long-time DTPO user here and love it. I would suggest that you spend a couple of evenings browsing the user forums at the DT website. I've found them much more interesting and helpful than the usual user forum, probably because DT users tend to the academic/research/writer side and because the software itself costs a fair nickel. It's very stable, well-maintained software. I don't do a lot of writing in it because that's not really what it's meant for (that's Scrivener for longer pieces and your favorite plain-text editor for shorter ones).
To me, it's the one note/snippet/idea/webpage/thought/PDF-collector to rule them all because it is so incredibly smart in its indexing and retrieval capabilities, especially when you pair it with a scanner and start creating OCR'd PDFs of everything you dump into it.
posted by webhund at 12:49 PM on September 18, 2011
To me, it's the one note/snippet/idea/webpage/thought/PDF-collector to rule them all because it is so incredibly smart in its indexing and retrieval capabilities, especially when you pair it with a scanner and start creating OCR'd PDFs of everything you dump into it.
posted by webhund at 12:49 PM on September 18, 2011
Never used Devonthink, but it seems to share a similar structure to Zotero, which is fantastic, and free.
posted by Mundungus at 9:00 AM on September 19, 2011
posted by Mundungus at 9:00 AM on September 19, 2011
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by dfriedman at 9:49 AM on September 18, 2011