DevonThink

There's a lot to be said about DevonThink, it's an amazing software, not just on the Mac but on all platforms.

DevonThink is not an average document manager, although it is marketed as such. It competes with softwares like Yojimbo, Together, Eaglefiler and Soho Notes, but it is not really meant to be a shoebox application. The new 2.0 version attempts to add features to compete with those document managers but seriously, people who really use DevonThink rely on it's AI engine not the superficial functions like tagging or smart folders. Most of the document managers use Spotlight and smart folders (which are built-in functions of Leopard) in a container for managing the files, DevonThink is unique in the sense that it learns and adapt to the user.

Regardless, most users will still upgrade to 2.0 because of it's ability to open more than 1 database at the same time. Also the improved importing speed and new functions to split files are worth the upgrade.

File-splitting is important in DevonThink, you can't just throw an ebook into the database and hope that it will learn and helps you in your research. An ebook needs to be split into pages to exploit the potential of this software. Not only will it helps returning better searches, it will also find similarities between pages in a book for you.

DevonThink is a killer application that can persuade Windows user to switch their OS to Mac. It's sibling software: DevonAgent is a powerful sidekick to compliment this app. I just wish that they had implemented the "mind-map" features of DevonAgent into DevonThink, it will make the app even more remarkable. DevonThink Pro Office has a built-in server to create a search engine, it's a very useful feature to share your database with others. However, for some strange reason DevonAgent is not able to search into DevonThink's search engine. Users have complaint about it for years, the developer seems to crippled this function intentionally.

DevonThink comes with a lot of "extras": scripts, widgets, droplets, automators, etc. The widgets are not good enough for practical use but the scripts are very useful. Some people think of the scripts as an act of a lazy developer unable to implement functions directly into the app, but when you start using them you will understand why they did it this way. I can use the automator scripts to do a batch convert of PDFs using OSX Quartz filter, or to convert PDFs to text. The scripts make better use of OSX's native functions than most Mac apps.