Comments on: How to effectively use DEVONthink?

Question: How to effectively use DEVONthink?

Señor Pantalones — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 14:08:27 -0800

DEVONthink: how can i learn to love it?

I've been using DEVONthink Pro for two months. I had the one month trial and thought it seemed interesting, so I bought it. Two months into it it's feeling like a bit of a chore. I can't really explain it but I feel like I'm time-warping back to some less effective mode of organization where cavemen bookmark things locally and store files in one place right after they take down a mammoth.

The developers have told me they're implementing tags and UI changes into the next version, so I know I don't need to bother with Yojimbo.

But what's the big deal overall? How do you use it?

I'm in a directorial role in a user experience & development team. I've primarily been a programmer + designer (read: at the production end of things) all my life and picked up DTPro as a hopeful solution to tracking the materials, urls, and conversations around 8-10 simultaneous projects. I'm not sure it's really fulfilling any sort of magic bullet role but I keep hearing people swear by it. So...can you tell me why?

Thanks!

By: bonaldi

bonaldi — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 14:25:40 -0800

I have this problem in such a bad way. DevonThink really doesn't "feel" right, does it? There's no really good organiser on the Mac, despite it being an incredibly crowded market. The closest I've found is Together, which is nearly there in everything except its QuickNote function, which is rubbish.

Still, Parallels and OneNote FTW.

By: Happy Dave

Happy Dave — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 01:21:19 -0800

You may find this essay about using DevonTHINK by Stephen Berlin Johnson useful (the chap that wrote the Ghost Map - here he is talking about that at TED).