Part 2 on DEVONthink Pro Office

DEVONthink Has More Treats in Store

I can't cover all that such a sophisticated piece of software has to offer in this brief review, but I'd just like to nod in the direction of a few more little morsels in addition to what I've covered in the previous section:

AppleScript, Automator and Bookmarklets

Great integration with the Mac's built-in automation technologies makes it easy to grab text or images from other applications and drop them into the database; I use the Safari bookmarklets for archiving and bookmarking all the time, and DEVONthink's AppleScripts fairly often.

'Site Sucker'

DEVONthink can be set to download and archive arbitrary sets of pages -- even whole web sites -- with just a few clicks.

Bookmarks, Web Browsing and RSS

Although it would be a shame to use it only for organizing bookmarks or reading news, DEVONthink makes a very capable bookmark manager, web browser (using the same underlying rendering engine as Safari) and RSS reader.

Mail Archiving

DEVONthink seamlessly imports email from all major email applications, including Apple's Mail and Microsoft's Entourage.

Database Sharing

I can't quite imagine myself wanting to use it, but if you're on a LAN and want to share your database with colleagues, DEVONthink provides a front end to enable them to search it via a local web front end. Unfortunately, most of the more advanced capabilities are not available through this interface.

Scanning

Mentioned only in passing above, DEVONthink's integrated optical character recognition (OCR) engine enables you to scan paper documents and immediately have them indexed and incorporated into the database: in other words, when you scan the document, you have not only an image, but the actual text of the document to work with. Of course, stand-alone OCR software has been available for a couple of decades, but DEVONthink integrates it well enough to make it actually usable on a routine basis: just scan the document, and there it is, in your database.

Note that some of the above capabilities are not available in the basic (and less expensive) versions of the package.

DEVONthink Still Has Room for Improvement

If you've read this review so far, you might have noticed that I'm pretty amazed at what this software can do in terms of saving me organizing time, revealing relationships between sets of information, and helping me get more real benefit from the things I take the time to store away. All of these translate into real, tangible value for me in my business. Having said that, there are still a few rough spots and omissions.

Perhaps the most obvious is the complete lack of transparency for the Mac's built-in search facility, Spotlight: information which is easy to find once it is within DEVONthink's database becomes impossible to find using Spotlight. I don't always know whether I have something tucked away in a folder somewhere, or whether I've stored it in DEVONthink, and although I don't actually use Spotlight very often, it would be a big plus if it could at least let me know when something is stored in a DEVONthink database on those occasions that I do use it. (Responsibility here of course lies with the DEVONthink developers: this is not in any way a weakness of Spotlight.)

This touches on one issue which may be a deal breaker for some users: the use of a proprietary database scheme at all. While DEVONthink does a decent job of exporting (not least by simply dragging and dropping to the desktop), many users will be apprehensive about trusting any large chunk of information to a proprietary monolithic database. I count myself among those users who are apprehensive, although that hasn't stopped me from using either DEVONthink or a few other software packages which also rely on such databases (Microsoft Entourage comes to mind). Opening up the database to make it accessible in other ways apart from DEVONthink itself would go a long way toward easing these concerns and would no doubt win the software some new converts.

Less obvious are the little interface touches (or their absence) that impact on the experience while working within DEVONthink. For example, while the auto-classify feature is reasonably competent, it doesn't actually show where it's decided to put things: they're just whisked away to their new home without any indication of where they've gone. Perhaps that's fine if auto-classify guesses correctly, but what about those occasions where I'd have preferred it to go to a different place? (And I usually have a clear idea where that place is: I almost never use auto-classify unless I already know where something should go, and I just want the speed of DEVONthink to do it for me rather than taking the time to do it myself.) Just as irksome is the floating palette-style window which pops up to inform you when DEVONthink has been unable to auto-classify something: it can't be dismissed with a keyboard shortcut and requires a mouse trip over to click it away.

DEVONthink is actually chock full of non-obvious interface elements which unnecessarily obscure functionality for new users. For example, earlier I mentioned the pop-up list of terms used within a document, where selecting a term will generate a list of related documents. It's a great capability. So why is it hidden behind a tiny little icon that looks like a 'fast forward' symbol? Give me a nice big mouse target to hit, give me a contextual pop-up menu, or -- better yet -- give me a quick keyboard shortcut to the same list, so I don't have to waste time mousing around.

This problem isn't limited to the obscure terms pop-up: the whole DEVONthink interface is starting to look a little long in the tooth. If it were merely cosmetic, it would be less of an issue, but some of these things impact actual usage pretty significantly.

In terms of functionality improvements, I'd really like to see thumbnail images for web archives; although DEVONthink already provides thumbnails for PDFs and image files, you get only a generic icon for web archives. Scanning visually when I already know what something looks like is, for me, a very powerful and fast way of finding something -- that's one reason why, for example, scanning through photos in iPhoto can be so handy. But unless you're looking for a PDF or an image, visually scanning is essentially useless in DEVONthink.

And when it comes to metadata, DEVONthink oddly enough offers very little; it would be handy, for example, to be able to enter comments or other information about a given item without having to generate a completely separate item. If I save a web page, I'd like to be able to store my own notes or annotations about that page in a way that is automatically linked directly to that page -- not by writing a whole new note document and putting a link in it to that page, but rather by permanently attaching the annotations to the saved page in a way that allows them to be accessed directly and immediately whenever I'm viewing the page.

Conclusions

I was going to call this section 'Conclusions for Private Practitioners', since I think of the software mainly as a time saver in my business and research work -- but in fact, I think my main conclusion applies to a much broader set of people than mental health professionals (or academics or journalists, for that matter). My main conclusion is just this: if you find yourself spending significant amounts of time managing or using a large body of information, and you need a tool to reduce the time spent managing it while also enhancing the experience of actually using that information, then I believe DEVONthink is worth a serious look.

You can download a fully-functional, time-limited demo at the developer's site, along with sample data files and a whole host of tutorial material.

System Requirements and Pricing

DEVONthink requires Mac OS X version 10.3.9 or higher and comes in the following flavours:

• DEVONthink Pro Office: US$149.95
• DEVONthink Professional: US$79.95
• DEVONthink Personal: US$39.95

Please see the DEVONtechnologies site for full details of the different features available in each version.