I think the basic problem with DEVONthink is that it does a LOT. I wound up using and sticking with it, because at the end of the day it IS an engineering-driven application and Christian is a remarkably gifted engineer/programmer, who has managed to maintain and evolve an extremely complex application which winds up intersecting with the OS in myriad places, and does an incredible job of dancing through the minefield and dealing with all the broken crap and problematic frameworks which are under Apple’s control, and cannot be changed/revised, until Apple gets around to dealing with it.
My databases MUST be reliable and they need to work. I have never found anything within the same class as DEVONthink which is not a client to some very large SQL back-end running Oracle (or occasionally MySQL). I have databases with tens of thousands of groups, and hundreds of thousands of documents, and DEVONthink continues to work… rapidly, and reliably. Which is a miracle in and of itself.
Try loading all that crap up, into anything else that’s out there. You’re going to discover that once you pass a few thousand documents, the application slows to a crawl and starts falling apart at the seams. They don’t scale, period.
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Some of the complexity can be compared to the neverending religious war between the dual, classic *nix editors: vi and emacs. I’m not going to wander off on endless tangents, but to sum it all up: vi is very fast, small and simple, whereas emacs is everything and the kitchen sink, LISP, and some cast-off UFO parts that happened to be laying around. Doing simple things requires insane levels of finger-dexterity, hitting 7 function keys at the same time, and works better when you have a mouse with at least 9 buttons, 3 scrollwheels, a gear-shift, and foot-pedals.
B’okay, I exaggerate slightly, but not much.
The problem with all of DEVONthink Pro’s different views and options and features is: they’re in there, because somebody – usually a collection of somebodies – finds that particular feature extremely useful/possibly critical, to their continued use of the product. By simplifying the interface, you are inevitably going to wind up stepping all over something, that I (and a few thousand other people), are presently using, and find very handy. What I like, and use, depends on the database and what I’m working with; and that reflects my personal needs, which may not be the same as yours.
None of this is an excuse for poor UI design, and DEVONthink is gradually and consistently getting better. It is, however, not exactly the ideal Apple app, and probably not going to be winning any Apple Design Awards anytime in the near future.
On the flipside of all that: how d’ya feel about iTunes? This is probably the ultimate instance of an Apple application which began as one thing, and has gradually grown to encompass everything and the kitchen sink, doesn’t really use any Cocoa frameworks at all; it fakes everything and lives off in an alternate universe coded in C++ so it can be cross-compiled across multiple operating systems, and act as a hub for all the shiny Apple gear, you plug into piece of s–t Windoze boxes.
It’s very large, it has to do a lot, and it’s probably the one Apple application people complain about the most.
The question is: how do you evolve all the power and complexity that’s present in DEVONthink, into a better user-experience, without taking some of the power away from people who want/need it.
Possible answers are: something along the lines of what Adobe has done with implementing “Workspaces” and further refining them in CS4, so you have the basic “Image Editing” workspace, the “Video” workspace, the “Pre-press” workspace, etc, etc, etc. While that’s a step in the right direction, and perhaps DEVONthink could offer a “Creative Writing” workspace, a “Scientific Monographs” workspace, a “Whatever Else” workspace, and allow people to create their own default workspaces, it’s still not going to simplify the program down to a level that’s really intuitive.
Preview is a really nice, handy, constantly-evolving Apple app. It’s great for reading PDFs, viewing and editing simple stuff within images, etc. But there is a lot it cannot do. Fire up Adobe Acrobat Pro 9, or Photoshop CS4, and … you have a gigantic, incredibly confusing – to the novice – array of tools presented to you. And Adobe has, for all intent and purposes, limitless money, to keep throwing a small army of UI designers at their product, in an attempt to simplify things.
Still, when the average person who has never used it, launches Photoshop, well… it’s not exactly Pixelmator or Acorn or whatever, but on the flipside, it does roughly 2000% more, if you know how to use it.
And we’re back to: figure out Final Cut Pro vs. iMovie. Different products, different audiences. Most people can intuitively grasp iMovie, without reading the help file, best of luck doing that with Final Cut.
So far as the Apple HIG goes: it’s just a lot of “blah blah blah,” the actual HIG amounts to: whatever Steve thinks looks cool that day. Which is why the Apple interface is pretty schizophrenic and has spent nearly a decade with a mis-matched collection of random themes – chrome, no chrome, dark brushed metal, blue scroll bars, no blue scroll bars, capsule-shaped buttons, no capsule shaped buttons, light background, dark background, the Pro apps which all use yet another interface altogether and are always in grey, etc – which is gradually moving towards some sort of cohesion and unity, but as of Snow Leopard, STILL isn’t there.
Having said all that, these are just thoughts and things to contemplate. I enjoy enriched environments, I like big colorful icons, I am sitting in front of an OS/X box, not running X + Enlightenment or Compiz Fusion, on Linux or BSD. DEVONthink does need to evolve the UI and address some issues, it’s just not as simple as it may appear to be.
One instance of an application that is comparable to DEVONthink Pro’s complexity would be Omnigraffle Pro. It’s nowhere near as simple as it used to be when it was the Lighthouse app Diagram! under NeXTSTEP (which Visio copied and ported to Windoze, and Microsoft eventually purchased), but it’s current incarnation has been constantly re-arranged, and the UI has evolved to still be relatively friendly and intuitive while offering a lot of power to people who need access to it.
Anywaze, just my thoughts.
Patrick
