If your work includes any explicit information collection, DEVONthink deserves your attention. The amount of information that needs managing grows on a daily basis, and DEVONthink’s latest update makes great strides in its ability to collect and search data. The core philosophy behind all three flavors of the app--Regular, Professional, and Pro Office versions are available--is the same: accumulate lots of information and then provide ways of making that information useful.
Simply mousing over a stored webpage shows you a wealth of metadata.
For starters, DEVONthink 2.0 uses all the Spotlight plug-ins that you already have on your Mac, rendering most files’ contents indexable by the app. If you have collections of paper documents you’d like to make electronically searchable, you’re in luck: DEVONthink Pro Office 2.0 includes Optical Character Recognition (OCR), saving you from having to buy a separate app to digitize text. DEVONthink 2.0 also keeps any files you add in their original form, allowing you to export them later, preventing lock-in to any proprietary data format.
So what do you actually do with DEVONthink 2.0? That depends on what your task is. Authors use it to collect digital research materials before sitting down to write books. Lawyers use it to collect case research. You can even use it for searchable email archives. Common tasks like note-taking, storing information and URLs from the internet, and aggregating data on your Mac are made easy by DEVONthink’s unified Inbox, the first collection point for added files. From there, DEVONthink helps you tag and organize disparate bits of information, whether into categories or into separate databases. And it’s this ability to collect projects into databases that makes DEVONthink a valuable addition over just relying on the Finder and Spotlight.
What also sets DEVONthink apart is its abilities to make inferences about related information, creating linkages and relationships across your data. At its simplest, the app uses word frequency to figure out which documents are related. As you continue adding data, DEVONthink builds more and better associations between your files, allowing you to use the See Also feature in its search window to have the app suggest similar documents. More often than not, DEVONthink’s suggestions are quite useful. This capability alone is a huge timesaver for focusing research through a large number of documents collected over a long period of time.
DEVONthink 2.0 is a great tool for collecting and making sense of a lot of information. It’s hard to imagine any knowledge worker not benefitting from the app’s organizational tools.
DEVONthink Pro Office 2.0
COMPANY: DEVONtechnologies
CONTACT: www.devon-technologies.com
PRICE: $149.95 (upgrades $20-$120, depending on prior version)
REQUIREMENTS: Mac OS 10.5 or later
Broad options for information input. No data-format lock-in. Cheaper versions available if you don’t need all the features of the Pro Office version.
Its depth and breadth can be overwhelming. Sometimes value only becomes apparent after collecting enough data.
