A while back in one of their free software bundles, MacHeist gave away a personal license to a program called DEVONthink. It sat in my Applications folder for a long, long time. Until the other day when I had some time and I got started on a research project concerning William Lane Craig's handling of transfinite cardinalities in the Kalam Cosmological Argument. I had emails, PDFs, URLs, and documents that were all interrelated in complex ways, and my needs began to exceed what Finder is able to offer. I began exploring the uses of DEVONthink.
Quite frankly I am now about as overwhelmed as I am impressed. I plan on upgrading to DEVONthink Pro 2 as soon as I understand DEVONthink Personal a little better (and can afford it), and I am looking into DEVONagent (which is essentially a very specialized personal search engine that runs as a native application in OS X).
What exactly can one do with DEVONthink? What are its benefits? Well it seems to be something of a cross between Finder, a web browser, a text editor, wiki software, and a data analysis engine, which is highly flexible, customizable, and extensible. It's arguably impossible to concisely summarize the theme of its unified benefit or function. One can organize information (folders, smart folders, tags, and on beyond Zebra). One can create information. One can interlink information. One can view documents of almost any type, RSS feeds, websites, and sheets. One can create multiple replicants of one's files (like glorified aliases that all access and change a central file). DEVONthink can simply reference these files in Finder, or import them entirely into its database. One can even create multiple databases. It's just simply incredible.
DEVON's website is choc-full of tutorials, examples, videos, forums, downloads, and even contact information for local consultants who each appear to function as something of a cross between a business consultant and a DEVONthink trainer. Some even write custom plugins to extend the functionality of the program to meet the specific needs of one's business.
DEVONthink makes use of systemwide shortcuts, the service menu, folder actions, AppleScripts, widgets, bookmarklets, Automator workflows, menu items, and more (including Growl notifications and something of an iPhone app). And these functions don't feel contrived - I can imagine a power user saving hours and hours every day if he knew how to make efficient use of all of DEVONthinks goodies.
The feature set is so bountiful and the interface so flexible that it is, once again, overwhelming! I can imagine its utility for manifold projects and such strength is also its weakness, as it greatly increases the learning curve and makes it difficult to imagine how one might best make use of it.
But powerful things take time to learn. I personally will enjoy getting to know this program and the company who makes it more over time, and I couldn't resist telling you about it.
The most recent betas for DEVONthink Pro and Personal, and DEVONagent, appear to be extremely stable and currently look like their functionalities aren't restricted at all. You can download them here if you're interested in checking them out.
If you have 20 min. to spare, check out the DEVONthink introductory video to get a cursory understanding of DEVONthink and to get your creative juices flowing.
I wonder if DEVONthink would give you a discount for giving them this sweet review. Shouldn't you be linking to them?
ReplyDeleteThat would be rad. Maybe I'll email them.
ReplyDeleteI linked to them twice - the download and the video...