Perhaps this actually could start saving me some time. No navigating required: just a single keyboard shortcut, and DEVONthink did its best to fit new items into my existing organizational structure. Soon I tried out the ‘auto-classify’ feature and discovered that if I already had a good number of items filed in one ‘group’ (a folder, in terms of the visual interface elements), DEVONthink was pretty good at spotting new items that were similar, and zooming them straight into that same group. Try Online Counseling: Get Personally Matched I had little motivation to try out new capabilities, because with such a small database, few of them would prove useful. So at first, nothing much was different, I wasn’t getting any significant benefit, and learning a new software environment demanded that I invest some time rather than saving it. Usage Tip: If you’d just like to have a quick look at the software’s capabilities, try importing an existing collection of folders full of documents, or grab a sample data set from the developer’s web site. (I wasn’t prepared to jump in headlong just yet: my old archives were staying just where they were!) And at first, this was little different than what I’d always been doing: just grabbing web data and, using the 2-pane or 3-pane DEVONthink view of my collection, stuffing it into hierarchically organized folders that I created along the way. One day I just decided to start with web pages I wanted to save for later use: as I encountered them, I began dropping them into DEVONthink rather than into the various locations across my hard drive where I’d been accumulating bits of information for years. I’ve heard many people comment that DEVONthink has a steep learning curve, but in my experience it’s more appropriate to say it has a steep appreciation curve - i.e., it took awhile before I really began to appreciate what I could do with it. Here’s how I got on with DEVONthink Pro Office version 1.3.2, interspersed with a few usage tips that may be of some help if you decide to try out the free demo of the software. If I could get up to speed with it quickly enough, DEVONthink promised to do some of my jobs for me. When I came back after 3 months off, I had a fair bit of catching up to do, but I also had a renewed determination to spend less time on organizational tasks. I’ve personally been using DEVONthink Pro Office (this is one of several versions see ‘System Requirements and Pricing’) in research and business every week since shortly after I returned from paternity leave in late March 2007. Long-time readers will know that before reviewing any piece of information technology at - whether hardware or software - we make a point of actually using it, and putting it through its paces in the real live business environment of a small mental health practice and web publishing venture. So if you have a mass of information, and you want to organize it and retrieve it easily - or if you want to explore or make use of the interrelationships within it - then the answer to the question ‘who needs a personal database?’ is you do. But the fact is, you’re not alone: with capacious hard drives, zippy processors, and always-on broadband connections to the internet, today’s computers invite everyone to accumulate files ranging from fairly useless digital detritus through to irreplaceable gems of wisdom and important business documents. If you’re an academic or a researcher - say, working in a mental health field - you already know what it’s like to amass mountains of data…and then have to manage it and make intelligent use of it. And the data needn’t come just from files you already have sitting on your hard drive: you can also grab them live from web pages or RSS feeds (browsing: built-in), scan them in from paper documents (optical character recognition: built-in), or create them on-the-fly (text editing environment: built-in). Need to search for all the files that include something roughly like a particular phrase, but which are also focused only on a specific topic? It’s a piece of cake.ĭEVONthink handles everything from emails to PDFs, from music files to photos, from movies to browser bookmarks. How about finding all your other files that are related to a given paragraph of that article? It’s easy. Want to see a list of the main topics in an article? No problem. DEVONthink does just a bit more than a box, however: built-in artificial intelligence technology automatically analyses the content of what you throw in, classifies it, groups it, interlinks it, summarizes it, and serves it all up back up to you in the blink of an eye. DEVONthink Still Has Room for ImprovementĭEVONthink, from DEVON technologies, is a pack rat’s dream: as a free form database, it’s a digital analogue of a box into which you can throw pretty much any type of file.
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