Any Reason to Upgrade (today)

DEVONthink
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My use of DT pre-dates DT3 and I bought DT4 when it announced, but before it released. I share some of Stephen’s thinking about the DT developers. Over the years, my use of DT has changed considerably. In the early days I used it for almost everything to do with my work - including indexing my pdf law library - but not any more.

My main use then as now is the sorter. Whenever I get or make a phone call, I make notes in the sorter. But calls in are few and far between nowadays. Mostly, the outside world communicates with me by email and text. So nowadays I reach for a sheet of paper and scribble notes. Years of keyboarding has made my handwriting illegible and difficult to do. Sometimes I forget which scrap of paper I’ve put the note on, so the efficiency that I enjoyed using the sorter has gone by the board.

June this year marks 50 years since I established my business (50 years self-employed) and about 58 years since I left school and started work. I have no plans to retire, and never had any desire to. Demand for my services has become overwhelming in recent years and I work 6-7 days a week, 12 hours or so a day, My physical gait is not what it was, I had the computer monitor at the wrong height for too long so my neck droops, I hurt my left hand the gym earlier this year and have a soft tissue injury which is gradually healing, but I still cannot grip anything or use my left hand for lifting anything heavy. And a lymph pool issue in my legs means wearing compression socks. So all in all, at the tender age of almost 76 I’m nothing like as fit as when I got DT3 .

I’m not interested in A! except in passing, although I must say that a Google search has improved immeasurable. Type a question, get an answer - no. more wading through numerous websites in the hope of finding. I write a lot in my work and am a guest editor for a law magazine, so I do a lot of research and used to keep it all in DT. But last year, I decided to have a private access website, so have embarked upon transferring my 11,000 item law library, some of which is on DT, much on Scrivener, and the rest on AirTable, one record at a time. I daresay I shall get around to exploring what DT4 has to offer and, although happy to be supportive, whether I shall want to make it my No.1 ap for almost everything as it was once, I doubt.

(Try as I do, I have never managed to use DT To Go. Synchronising takes ages - even having high-speed broadband wifi - and somehow despite reading the Take Control book and the help instructions, it has never worked for me as it should. DevonAgentPro I use when i remember. And the WordService i use every. day.)

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22

Thanks for sharing your experience and thoughts on this!
Congrats on 50 years in business! That’s an accomplishment not many get to celebrate. :slight_smile:

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Thank you. A few of my contemporaries have been at it longer. But we are in a minority. I prefer to keep testimonials to myself, but this one I am sharing: It’s from a trustee of a charity owning a substantial portfolio of commercial properties. I’d sent him a copy of an advertisement which the law magazine I write for had kindly given me a full page space for. I wrote the ad as a potted history of my practice. (For anyone on the forum I’m in the UK)

" Having worked with you for over two decades, I wanted to take a moment to put in writing something I have said many times privately: there is no one in this country quite like you when it comes to rent reviews and the wider commercial property field.

Your recent press release was a moving reminder of just how much you have contributed—not just to clients like myself, but to the very profession itself. Your story, from the foundations laid by your father, through your early days in central London, to the launch of your own pioneering practice in 1975, is nothing short of remarkable. You have carved out a niche that did not even exist before you created it.

What stands out most to me is the sheer uniqueness of your service. In truth, you are far more than a surveyor. You often operate at a level that outpaces even some of the most seasoned solicitors and, at times, challenges the sharpness of barristers and QCs. Your analytical ability, clarity of thought, and instinct for spotting both the opportunities and the pitfalls within lease structures are unparalleled.

You are, quite frankly, too modest in pricing. Your work consistently delivers results that would justify multiples of your fee, yet you have remained committed to making your expertise accessible. That alone speaks volumes about your character and values.

There is no one else in the UK commercial property market with your combination of historical insight, technical mastery, and razor-sharp reasoning when it comes to rent review negotiations. I have no doubt that your writings, newsletters, and the digital legacy of your law library will become essential reference material for years to come.

xxxx, I just wanted to say thank you. Thank you for your advice, your insights, your unmatched service, and above all, for being a genuine one-of-a-kind figure in this industry.

With sincere respect and warm regards,"

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Praise is all too rare, which makes that even more priceless :heart: This morning, I received a wonderful message from a customer about my documentation and such encouragement does wonders, mentally and emotionally. Thanks for sharing that :slight_smile:

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The most important UI change of all: You can now set the colour of duplicates and replicants yourself using the Mac colour palette. Love it :joy:

(I’m joking, I’m sure there are far more important UI settings to explore, but I saw that option in the menus and thought “how fun” - immediately changes the colours to something terrible which I will hate within hours)

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26

question: can this A.I. act by command like similar to scripts? can I give orders what to do? Like: delete doubles or combine them…connect useful tags…create backlinks for x type of doc to y…etc.. ?

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No. DT talks to the AI, not the other way around. Apple will introduce some stuff to ease AIs talking to apps. It remains to be seen if that will be implemented as badly as their translation tools (tied into their UI frameworks) and if it will be usable at all. And of course if DT will tie itself into it.

However, you can use the result of AI chats in smart rules right now. Perhaps to do some things that you asked for. I’m not willing to shell out any money for the AI stuff right now, and my local Ollama models are so slow that they’re unusable (running on a NAS). So I haven’t tried any of these things out myself.

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OCR question - does DT4 update the OCR engine, or is it the same as for DT3 (DTOCRHelper v1.1.26)?

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It is 1.1.26.

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Thanks!

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31

I have a widescreen monitor and it’s great with DT because I use a four column view (Sidebar, view group as list, main window, inspector) and I can still read all the columns without having to have anything except long filenames truncated.

However, personally I can’t really recommend such a widescreen for uses outside this (and big spreadsheets, where it shines!). You can’t hold all of the screen in reading focus if you are 0.5m ish away like I am, and the far edges of the screen feel “far away” when I’m working. There’s therefore a level of neck and eye movement which may not be comfortable for some people. Because of this, I’ve actually shifted my positioning relative to the monitor and am now positioned in front of the left half of the screen. All my window tiling options (I use an app) keeps windows away from the far right fourth of the screen and I leave that for windows I’m leaving open but not needing much (e.g. my to-do list). Or I just leave it “empty” so I can see my desktop and any files I’ve temporarily placed there.

If I’d had time to trial the monitor before buying it, I think I would’ve either gone a step up and got a curved widescreen, or accepted that there actually is an optimal size for screens for me and gone for a normal ratio of width to height!

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This helped a bit. I’ve been looking at what changed that I care about. I have a lot that I really like and use a lot in DT3. I have been a user since DT1 and have a rather large database where I’m approaching around 100k objects (updating my MBP and adding RAM with 48GB to ease searching and using the incredibly helpful “See Also and Classify” to find related objects and papers in my collection).

The Generative AI is not of interest, but other AI uses and improvements would be helpful. Optimizing efficiency in search and other relevant documents is what I’ve been hoping for. Until this list, there really wasn’t anything in the marketing that drew me to DT4 and it included things that I’ve learned to stay away from in many cases (GenAI most often tilts toward mediocrity, but falls short and decreases speed and accuracy - I do use it separately from apps and it helps with some use cases, but most often when included in apps it really is far from an improvement).

My concern has been the efficiency would degrade with GenAI and the functionality I rely on would be impacted or removed.

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Thanks for sharing your thoughts. We’re glad to have been a part of your computing life for so long!
As I’ve noted in several places, access to external AI is not a replacement; it’s a complement to DEVONthink’s own AI, made to work with it’s core functions.

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Thanks Logica, what you are saying makes complete sense to me. The curved screen is interesting, I wish I could see one in action here in Portugal.

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So don’t upgrade? You don’t need to.

DEVONthink still will work for a few more years for you.

I fact your use case scenario you can comfortably use DEVONthink 2 even DEVONthink 2 is too much for you as you practically only store and search for stuff

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DEVONthink 2.x has been out of development for many years now so we would not recommend this.

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DEVONthink is one of the few tools that truly transforms information into assets. It not only organizes scattered materials with precision but also acts as a reliable digital assistant, helping me extract value from overwhelming data and build a structured knowledge system. In knowledge-intensive work, it’s a force multiplier for productivity and a powerful accelerator for deeper thinking.

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Don’t want to start a debate here, but are the folks who say they don’t care about DT’s newest AI features sure about that? I’m a laggard in this area myself, but am glad they’re adding generative AI. Like a lot of DT’s features, it’s good to have ready for when I finally realize I need it!! :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

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well said.

Just want to add that it has been instrumental in organizing my work, my personal life and my leisure activities. From moving countries to cooking to working on my photography and other stuff. It is the PIM - personal information management - I wanted years ago when I realized Finder was very, very insufficient, Excel was limited, databases were rigid, and pure note-taking apps insufficient. With DT I finally managed to learn how to use tags, labels, smart groups in a consistent way. And I have tried, seriously, dozens of apps in the past. Invest in learning the new stuff, you will not regret it. I’ve said this several times in the forum - the reason I’m still on a Mac is DEVONthink.

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40

We definitely have people who don’t want AI in DEVONthink at all. In fact, some have asked for AI-related functions to be hidden, and in some cases, removed entirely from their copy. Whether the impetus is distrust or disinterest, not everyone is a fan of AI, and there’s no right or wrong on the topic.

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