SuperNotecard 2 is not very stable. It crashed when I launched it—or should I say tried to launch it 
I started using it for a little project I’m working on. I jotted down a few ideas and an embryonic structure. I’ll tell you what I think when I’m used to it.
Edit.—The text formatting options are somewhat disappointing 
I’m a bit disappointed
Not very stable, no drag and drop between decks/cards, poor formatting options, no hyperlinks within a note…
I tried to assign the same category to several decks with a discontinuous selction but ALL the decks have received this category.
Good but not great IMHO.
Actually there’s a piece of software which can do what I’d like to do: Tinderbox. But I don’t like Tinderbox and it’s way too pricey.
Anyone here owes themselves a good look at the new Scrivener Beta. Bloody Brilliant. I’m in the proceess of integrating it with DT and finding them to be a very good match. And I must admit, Devonthink could learn a thing or two from it.
E
Ditto. Several of us Devonauts (Devontees?) are beta testing Scrivener, whose developer has been remarkably responsive to writers’ requests – including some for features we’ve asked for in Devon. It’s terrifically intuitive and easily the best writing app I’ve ever used, and I’ve had no problems with any of the betas. It’s really intended as a kind of bridge between info / notetaking apps like Devon and layout/formatting apps like (gag) Word and Pages. For some users, it could handle all those tasks, but I agree that it works great with DevonNote, which I’ll probably continue to use for info organizing. Any writer, fiction or non, should check it out.
Hi Eiron and brett. If either of you has time, I’d love to hear about how you are integrating DT (or DN) with Scrivener, which is quite a delicious program indeed! I’ve been snowed under with finishing my dissertation (in Mellel–just had my last chapter approved and am working on revisions!!) plus a pile of family visits and other challenges, and haven’t had time to play with the new beta at all. Very sad.
I too plan to continue to use DT to organize and maintain my information ‘warehouse,’ and will be looking for ways to get Dt and Scr. to work together.
So, if you have a moment to spare, I’d definitely appreciate hearing how you are evolving your DT/Scrivener system!
Alexandria
PS Yes, Scrivener is the best writing program I’ve ever tried. My search has definitely ended. I still pinch myself to make sure I’m not dreaming when I use it! Keith is a bloody genius! And I love the forum too.
Thanks guys, I hadn’t realized a new beta was out – my writing time has taken a nose-dive these past few months.
Beta3 is quite good, really everything I could ask for. Well, everything except open document support, which Keith admits is a low priority.
I haven’t found a good way to do this myself. Scrivener imports documents rather than linking them, and DT is a document/information repository. I end up with duplicate data.
The ideal solution would be to have Scrivener link to (instead of copy) documents in the DT database, and have some sort of “sync to DT” utility that recreates the Scrivener binder in a DT group, since you are likely to be doing your editing in Scrivener and your research in DT.
Unfortunately Scrivener is not scriptable, so there’s not too many options here.
Perhaps the Scrivener project could be imported into DT using links to the on-disk Scrivener files? The BinderStrings.xml file provides some useful info, and the .scrivproj file is just a property list (meaning the “defaults” program can read it, so the import could be handled by a script).
To me, Scrivener has the same flaws as every other writing program I’ve ever tried (and I’ve tried organizing with everything from a directory full of MS Write files in Windows 3.11 to a MediaWiki)…
I’d assume it’s excellent for managing a short story, but I don’t understand how it could reasonably accomodate a novel of any appreciable complexity. It’s just missing too many capabilities. Admittedly, I only wrestled with it for a few minutes, so I might be wrong, but it seems insufficient for my needs.
In my opinion, any serious writing app on the market today should be ready, willing, and capable of handling a mythopoeic series.
I’ll bet that Homer would have given his right arm for a Mac with Scrivener – or for that matter, a Mac with TextEdit (especially with DT Pro!).
Those old guys (Homer, Dante, Joyce et al) managed the complexity in their heads very well, but had to depend on pretty simple tools to get things down on “paper” or its equivalent.
I remain in awe of a late 19th-early 20th-century English historian of chemistry, who held an encyclopedic grasp of everything he had read in his head. He could footnote copiously (and accurately) from memory. It wasn’t just rote memory; he understood his subject matter wonderfully.
Most of us simply are not in the same league as those guys and can only hope that computers can help. 
Indeed. I seem to recall hearing that Joyce had twenty-seven notebooks for one chapter of Finnegans Wake.
I don’t really see it as us being lucky to have these tools, though. No software program out there can compare to the versatility of massive amounts of butcher paper and permanent markers.
(Not to knock DEVONthink, because I definitely think it’s the leader of the pack… and I’m trying to learn Applescript to incorporate the few features I can’t live without)
I am one of those who converted to Scrivener for writing.
In the beginning I thought only of non-academic writing in Scrivener, but in fact it works with academic writing as well.
Still, there are differences in working processes according to the task, and for me the following setup seems to become standard:
**** Data / material is collected, commented, sorted in DevonThink Pro
**** Translations do not work well in Scrivener, but excellently in DevonThink Pro, they will be the only writing projects that I would do/write in DevonThink
**** non fiction writing, lectures, larger academic projects are designed and written in Scrivener
**** Letters, short academic articles will be written in Mellel or Nisus Express
**** Draft exports from Scrivener will be imported into Mellel (or Nisus, if they eventually implement an outliner) for final polishing and presentation.
**** finished projects will be imported into DevonThink Pro 
It is unbelievable how the Mac community survived these years without a mature word processor, but now we have some software which is far beyond a simple word processor, and I am happy that things seem to settle now in such an elegant manner.
Best,
Maria
Alexandria: congrats on nearing the finish line on your diss; after they hood you, the Portlanders on this and the Scriv list should go buy you a microbrew.
In answer to your question: I probably fail to use most of the capabilities of DevonNote and Scrivener, so I may not be a good example. But FWIW:
I do it this way because Scriv offers wonderful ease at organizing material; if I thought about it long enough, I could probably do all this in Devon, if a bit awkwardly, and I used to use the excellent OmniOutliner as my main writing app. But Scriv. just makes it all easier, for lots of little reasons I won’t go into here as this is a Devon forum. I dunno-- sometimes I think I could do everything I need using just the Finder (including Spotlight), OmniOutliner and TextEdit.
Yes, this gives me 3 versions of the source material. I’ve been dumping the finder copy when i’m done; could probably dump the Scriv imports too.
The real question is whether I could just do everything in Scrivener and dump DN. Scriv also allows clipping via Services. But I trust Devon’s ability to track down related material across large numbers of projects; sometimes I need to quickly find supporting material from a project I wrote a couple years ago and I’m not sure yet whether Scriv would let me do that as easily as DN. I dunno – I’d like to hear from others what DevonNote offers for this kind of short article info organizing that Scriv. doesn’t.
The next test will come when I go back to my book project, which has thousands of items of info that I’ve imported into Devon but haven’t worked with yet. I imagine I’ll use Scriv for it also, but it has footnotes, which Scriv can handle, in a rudimentary way. But I have to exchange drafts back and forth with my coauthor, and he’s using Word…
I use DevonNote for assembling articles, talks, and review-essays, but the positive comments on Scrivener above have me intrigued, and I’m going to try it with a small project that’s currently in progress. For something larger, like a critical book or a novel, I prefer DT Pro because it handles so many file types. I think Scrivener might also be useful for mapping out a film or play script, or just brainstorming a set of ideas, because of the outline and index card panes.
In several notes above, and elsewhere in the forum, folks have complained about the limitations of Spotlight. An excellent alternative is NotLight, freeware by Matt Neuberger, which you may download from VersionTracker. It’s fast because it uses the Spotlight index, and accurate because you may focus your searches. It will look for file names, content, comments, extensions, type code, and modified date. A terrific tool for writers who have tons of research files!
That would be quite nice! 
And you have to call me Dr. Alex. Ha!
Thanks to you and Maria and all others for sharing their Scrivener/DT system. Maria, yours is close to mine, except I’d reverse it for short and long academic/non-fiction projects. I plan to write everything possible in Scr. and only use Mellel for very large, complex projects involving multiple footnote streams and the like.
My major glitch in my own system is that I tend to forget or get lazy when doing research on a project and I put things into Scr. and not DT. There’s no question that Scr. is my writing program. After using it, I could never go back to struggling with other programs to make them work the way I need to. Scr. does it all for me for researching, writing, and developing projects.
But I ‘do’ want to use DT for storage (don’t use DN, but DT Pro). I love DT and it’s one central place for everything. Nothing else touches it regarding capabilities for handling vast amounts of information, and I collect information constantly for many different projects. What I don’t want is things scattered among different programs when I’m trying to find something. I want to store everything first in DT and then transfer things as needed into other programs, particularly Scr. That’s not smooth yet and I’m still trying to figure out how to do this easily.
I’m also changing the way I handle pdfs and media files. I used to store them all in DT (importing, not indexing). Now I’ve moved them out and store them on the finder in folders, then index them into DT so I can search them, etc., but this way I can also attach them as references in Scr. as needed. So my system is changing and evolving. I can’t wait to get this dissertation completed so I can really work with this as I develop other projects.
Brett, I’ll be interested to see what develops in your work flow when you start your new project. I too have thousands of items stored in DT that I’ll need to pull up as needed. For me, this is ongoing–not a one-time shot. So using these two programs together will be critical for me as well.
That is interesting, Maria, about translations. I do work in other languages, though not nearly as extensively as you do. Primarily they are languages like Attic Greek, Latin and Sanskrit, so they vary in how easily I can work with them in different programs. Also French, but that’s pretty easily accomodated whatever I’m using. I haven’t really tried working with these languages in Scr. Is it in exporting material that you run into problems? I seem to recall this from the Scr. forum.
Yes, the Mac surely has no shortage of software any longer. My first Mac was a 512K machine I used back in 1985. I loved it. But all through the years, it was hard to see Windows users getting all the juicy software while we had to make due with what we could get! Not an issue any more!!!
Back to work! The dissertation calls and seeing the end in sight makes it even more compelling!! I’ll look forward to that brew!!!
Alexandria
Hi Alexandria,
the problems in the Scr forum were on footnotes in Non-Western writing systems. This night I received a new inbetween beta, and the footnote problem is solved. That is not what I am talking about when I say Scrivener is not so useful for working with translation (it handles several languages in one project very well).
I am not a translater, but colleagues frequently ask me to translate something from a European language into Japanese or English (a joke orignally not intended, but I will leave it like that because there seems something true in it 
).
Archaeology is concerned with almost every field of humanities and science, vocabulary covers wide ranges, which often cannot be found in dictionaries, but only in standard introductions and handbooks or now – thanks internet – in databases for land mollusks in Northeast Asia e.g., or in the Wikipedia . So I set up a database with all documents that I have found using these terms or which I have created during the years I lived in Japan: vocabulary lists, original texts, mixed stages with original and translation. DTs find features allow me to find not only which term I translated how in earlier works – in order to keep a series consistent – or to check in which context a certain word is used or better not used, or how it is built into the sentence in these languages that are foreign to me.
It is a dictionary for many academic fields and a good guidebook for their correct usage, evolving and getting better the more I work on translations.
The limitation I experienced with Scrivener is mainly that it is limited to one window, for this workflow several windows have to be open (text I am working on, find window, vocabulary list for the actual translation, sample texts etc.). In Scrivener I had to navigate back an forth, that was a terrible mess. It works fine with DT.
Someone who still believes that he is working on an OS called Word and thought that this is enough to know about computers, realized just yesterday that Scrivener would be great for his research papers. (He liked DT too, but that was a bit too complex for his purposes, may be he will change once he possesses an iMac?)
Best,
Maria
Howarth: thanks for the NotLight recommendation. I’ve pretty much consigned Spotlight to 2nd choice after Devon’s EasyFind; how does NotLight compare to it?
NotLight is faster than EasyFind. It uses the Spotlight index but lets you get at those contents more readily. It also does not start a search until you click the Search button. No more annoying searches on mistyped terms.
Notlight also finds text strings in an Entourage database, faster than Entourage. I don’t use Apple Mail so can’t vouch for that.
Here’s the download URL: tidbits.com/matt/default2.html
Ha. That is funny. I think….
Thanks for explaining the problems with Scr. and translating. Makes sense. I don’t do translating in this way very often and wouldn’t need the same set up, so I don’t think I’ll run into problems with Scr. Still, DT does things other programs don’t do, or do as well, so it will always be a primary component in my work flow. I think I covered that already, though, so I’ll stop there!
An OS called Word. That does sound funny. But it’s easy to forget that most folks use computers for what they need them for and not as a big toy, like some people. Ha!
Take care,
Alexandria
Hi!
Nisus Writer Pro is now final. Have you given it a try? I’d like to know what Devonians think