[MlMt] Devonthink

[Jan Erik Moström]

On 25 Aug 2016, at 16:38, Howard Wettstein wrote:

> I’m intrigued by comments about Devonthink. Could someone give me a 
> brief description of the program and how it works? I don’t mean a 
> technical account, just a short message about how to use it, what it 
> does, etc. Or a link to where I can find such a descriptions. I’ver 
> used Evernote for years, love it, and it seems there is overlap.

Devonthink is similar to Evernote in that you can store notes, pdfs, etc 
in a database. But Devonthink takes a different approach than Evernote.

Evernote is an online service (at least if you want to take full 
advantage of the available features) that has clients on a large number 
of platforms. EN stores notes etc in HTML format but it can also "embed" 
files, photos, etc in those pages. The OCR is pretty, organization and 
searching is average, there is good support from various other 
apps/services to use EN. From my point of view I think it works best as 
a capture device for web pages - I don't like it very much from a note 
taking view (the formatting is also troublesome when working on 
different platforms). Biggest problem for me is that it modifies plain 
text files when they are stored as notes (tabs etc are removed since the 
text is stored as HTML), also no Markdown support.

Devonthink on the other hand is a "local app", i.e. there is no cloud 
where you store the data instead everything lives on your Mac (more 
about this later). You can create any number of databases, you can 
organize each database as you like - for example in a hierarchical 
fashion (folders within folders). You can store almost any kind of data 
in its original form - so a text file stays a text file, a word file is 
a word file. Actually, you can tell Devonthink to index files *outside* 
the database which means that you can leave your Word files as normal 
files in a folder somewhere on your harddisk but DT will index them and 
make them searchable from within DT. DT also contains a web browser, a 
very powerful search engine, some "AI" to help you categorize and find 
material, etc. It also supports templates and is highly 
scriptable/extensible.

Evernote have had the convenience advantage because of the syncing and 
the availability on many platforms while DT has pretty much won 
everything else except OCR (EN is more convenient).

They both have user interfaces that be considered ... "rough". EN has an 
almost flat "learning curve" while DT will surprise you for years you 
with functionality that you didn't know existed.

I've used both on-and-off for a long time. And until this summer 
Evernote has won because of the convenience aspect, but this summer 
Devon Technologies released a new syncing engine together with a new iOS 
client ... which makes a huge difference. The convenience advantage is 
now gone for Evernote (I'm all macOS/iOS) so I'm now moving my important 
stuff to DT - will probably continue to use EN for sharing documents etc 
within the family but otherwise I'm going to DT.

= jem
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