3PV workarounds

DEVONthink
1

My 3PV work arounds so far:

These are not easy decisions to make nor to implement since I have 287 gb in various DT databases, but the 3PV impact has been severe.

  • I have moved all my business files to OneDrive. I am no fan of OneDrive, but Dropbox decided to start erasing my stuff one day. Oh well…

MS Office is happier there anyway. Given that my industry in general is joined at the hip to MS Office and all the test gear software is windows based, I am having a hard think about if I will be sticking with macs at all.

  • I am slowly weaning myself off Devon Technologies products as a whole. Currently I am using DevonSphere to retain some of the search functionality while I identify alternate advanced search tools for macs and windows.

  • I have not decided yet on information capture in toto, but copy and past to *.txt files, printing web pages as PDF etc are proving less disrupting to my work flow than trying to stay with DT3.

  • If I move to windows as my primary OS I will likely move back to OneNote. I used it extensively before I discovered DT and it is a good enough note taker that is part of the MS ecosystem.

  • I am no longer evangelizing DT with friends and colleagues and I have dumped any plans and interest in keeping things like our technical library on a DT3 server.

Last but not least, I remain very curious why the developers would sacrifice such a well loved feature. I doubt we will ever know, as serious loss of face seems to be involved, but I hope they are happy with the sacrifice of customer happiness on the alter of conceptual purity. Not the hill I would die on in the business world we live in today, but so it goes.

1 Like
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Read this?

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Yes I did. My understanding of it is that yet another workaround is being planned but still not a real 3PV like in DT2.

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Thanks for posting @RCK. My current workaround has been to move all note-taking to Scrivener, and I am experimenting with replacing Devonthink with either Alfons Schmid’s Notebooks or OneNote for capturing data, PDFs, etc. OneNote is a strong possibility as I have to work cross-platform these days.

I continue to use DTPO2, but am slowly extricating myself from that as support for it will be limited going forward.

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Thanks to the pointer to Notebook. I will take a look at it. I like Scrivener, but efforts to wean my colleagues off of Word went nowhere unfortunately.

Note taking is currently with textedit and I have been working with print to pdf for capture, anticipating dumping all my databases to pdf or txt unless they are things like docx or xlsx. I have quite honestly been procrastinating given the amount of work involved what with the cross platform aspect of things.

I have also been doing a lot more of my MS Office type stuff on the Dell in the lab. It works and the office/onedrive combo is a LOT happier on a windows box. I have fought the virtual machine wars and worked to get one going again, (don’t ask) but in all honesty there is a strong possibility that when I replace this butterfly MacBook I will get a Surface or Dell instead for work and/or get a NUC for home to plug into the MS ecosystem.

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I use ON a fair bit, but its sync reliability can be sketchy. It really does seem to be the platform’s major weakness.

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Thanks for the warning re OneNote @Packrat , will bear that in mind.

I’m continuing to experiment with DT3 by consolidating databases in order to reduce the endless click/scroll that the lack of 3PV has brought on. In doing so I continue to run up against some of the regressive behaviours introduced in the new navigation pane, particularly DT3’s failure to remember my place in the previously used database, and the inability to select more than one folder at a time. These are both incredibly frustrating drawbacks. It drastically reduces the utility of having two (or more) discrete databases open in the sidebar if I can’t leave one and then resume in the exact spot I left when I return to the first database.

As ever, I would be grateful for DTech’s support/developers to reply here and let me know if there is something obvious I am overlooking (given the speed with which replies/suggestions are posted on other threads on the forum, I have high hopes!). The Go > To Group command seemed promising, but in my experience it doesn’t eliminate the need to click and scroll. Favourites doesn’t seem to offer a viable alternative, unless I dump hundreds/thousands of records into one folder. My experience here is partly a consequence of having ‘Show Only Documents’ enabled as part of my workaround to mitigate the impact of the loss of 3PV. It means nested folders are pointless in Favourites, unless I switch view. I constantly have to fiddle with view options, which takes me out of my work and forces me to focus on the software.

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Sorry if this doesn’t address your needs, but have you tried the Workspaces feature?

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Thanks for the suggestion. I have indeed, and can see how they would be useful if I know that I will work with a static set of databases and folders open, or spend a lot of time re-organising information into specific folders. They don’t seem to me to allow for organic use of multiple databases or information management, whereby I can happily navigate to a database/folder not already open in my workspace, and then easily return to what I was doing.

But I may be using them improperly, and would welcome any workflow suggestions or tips on best practice

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I would love to know the rational behind the deletion of the 3PV view but the silence is deafening. If there was a solid reason, clearly explained to include the tradeoffs or future wonderfulness its removal enables it would be one thing, but swinging in the breeze with 240 gb of active databases I have depended on 3PV to work with effectively…???

I have the impression from elsewhere in the discussion that we are all supposed to be stampeding off into labels and tags and just dump all our stuff into a data soup, but??? Obviously there is something about all of this the devs are willing to fall on their sword over, but come on, I would love to not have to find other tool sets as DT has been the cat’s meow for me for a loooonnnggg time, but the silence is not helping.

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Thanks again for the reminder about work spaces @R_Barre, they are much more powerful than I remembered. Unfortunately they don’t alleviate the two problems highlighted above.

I can understand that, though I’m not really interested in the why – it’s their product after all. I’d just like to get some responses (even just one) to my queries for best practises moving forward.