I am sure I have seen a post on this topic here more than a year before (and I can’t find it today anymore), but the question still persists for me: Is there any plan to develop a modern sync solution into DevonThink? When I started using Devon products they used to offer a simple way organizing my work. Now with all the distributed work I do (three Macs, an iPad and an iPhone), and all the great advances in cloud storage and seamless remote syncing it increasingly looks like a liability to have to deal with periodic sync, sync conflicts, sync corruption, database corruption, etc…
And believe me, these happen more than it should happen with Devon products. Not that they are not carefully designed, but just that we have got past this point in syncing technologies…
Also the ubiquitous access to my documents offered by dropbox / iCloud / SkyDrive / GDrive, etc… at anytime and anyplace, makes it feel increasingly like an anachronic decision to rely on a solution that puts the information in arbitrarily named folders and then it doesn’t provide the proper device-based or cloud-based interfaces to seamlessly access the files whenever I need.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not a dissatisfied customer bashing the hard-working team at work in Devon Technologies, but rather a loyal customer that wants to see Devon keep up with the new trends and provide working solutions for the foreseeable future. Personally, I don’t know of any other solution that can replace Devon for me, and I don’t like the fact that I am becoming more and more hesitant to drop files into my Devonthink database, telling myself that maybe I need to access these right away on the go, before I get the time to do a manual resync, or on that other Mac at work that has developed a corrupt database and I haven’t had the time to sit down and fix its sync issues (and even if I do, I have to wait for a good hour before it rsyncs everything). I have been using EverNote and OneNote increasingly in cases that I used to uniquely rely on Devonthink, and this is dispersing my information over different platforms.
I simply want to continue to be a happy customer, and I think Devon has strong assets to expand into online content management services given the unique expertise it has, that we see implemented in its desktop apps. Personally I believe that a cloud-based Devon-like content management solution will be able to create tremendous value for many customers way beyond what it offers today, and will be able to support many new usecases adapted to new classes of customers.
So, I try to formulate my question: Are there any plans on Devonthink’s roadmap pointing to a seamless and realtime and working sync solution? Are there any plans to offer more sophisticated cloud services? And moreover (I know this is not a new question), when will we be able to keep up with our paperless workflows on our iPads?
I (and there seem to be a good number of people like me) am planning to completely drop my laptop from my workflow, keeping only my iPad, as it seems much more adapted to the kind of activity I do on the go… Again, one of my major concerns is that I can’t rely on a half-baked bonjour-based wifi sync for that. Everybody has moved to the cloud (including the ultra-conservative Things app, and the super-finicky papers app). When will the time come for Devon? Can we at least have a roadmap we can put some hope in (the way CulturedCode does)?
Sorry for the way-too-long letter, and thanks for reading.