Some of us rather appreciate the rock solid stability of the product given the data we have entrusted to it. Speaking personally I’d rather rock solid stability than a mad ride chasing the latest and greatest in AI. I do appreciate that others may have different views, of course—but felt it important to balance that stated.
Stephen
And since it’s so much fun to watch these things in real life:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/07/08/gizmodo-ai-errors-star-wars/
One would have thought that it’s one of the easiest tasks for this kind of software to gather wildly available facts from the internet. Apparently not so.
My thinking is the same as @chrillek’s. Firstly: DT is already scriptable - this forum alone has a wealth of shared community scripts - so I don’t see what “plugins” themselves would magically offer that isn’t already available. An OpenAI script has already been shared for those that want to test it.
Secondly, and more importantly, several of you are making assumptions that the majority of users want, or even care about, AI. You have no evidence to back that up. Given that every time to date it’s come up in the forum there’s a clear divide between those that want it in DT and those that don’t, and given that the forum itself only represents a small subset of users - probably the ones most embedded in the app and/or generally the most techy - it seems very unlikely it actually is the case that most users want it. (There’s a whole separate philosophical discussion about whether developers should provide what their customers want or stay true to their own vision, but it’s somewhat irrelevant here since there’s no evidence the majority of customers want this.)
Thirdly, some are operating under the assumption that apps should have a continual cycle of (apparently fast?) “improvement”. I doubt all DevonThink users agree with that, but in any case I certainly don’t. I obviously have no objection to improvements and the DT team does great work, but equally DT is a great app as it is and I do not believe generally that all apps must be on a continual cycle of improvement. Plenty of apps have been ruined by developers unnecessarily “improving” their product.
Obsidian caught my eye with the canvas feature. Having whiteboards where instances of notes could appear in each context needed, like tagging a note with multiple tags, is really powerful.
I wish I could view any group or tag as a whiteboard/corkboard, with persistent layout.
What I found was Obsidian offered some nice features but at a cost of reliability. Plugins are not always as well debugged as they should be. Even the grandest of them, like Dataview, have quirks.
Right now, I’m playing around with using MindNode files inside Devonthink as my “canvas” displays. Where I would have built a body of notes by tagging them, now I’m linking them to mind maps.
It’s not quite as nice, but it’s not bad. A Keyboard Maestro macro copies an item link to a MindNode node. It’s not quite the same as Obsidian’s canvas. In my use, it’s a lot less quirky although it probably reduces DT’s smart searching.
DT’s sync is completely reliable here. I use a thumbdrive (bad user, bad!) and have had zero issues. Every so often, I retire the thumb drive. I recently got a portable SSD that I may move my sync to.
I do weekly backup to a series of zip archives and I have three Time Machine devices. Well, three on my desktop. The laptop I sync to, being less critical, only has two.
If you’re going to cheat data death with a USB sync, you should have backups.
I’d sleep a little easier if you moved the database(s) too 
Ah, being the befogged kind of customer who uses thumbdrives for sync, I didn’t communicate very clearly.
See above, befogged.
I have one database that I use on my laptop from the USB portable SSD. I’ve just started doing that.
Otherwise, USB thumb drive for sync only - databases are all on internal storage. I may reign supreme on Dunning-Kruger’s majestic upper left promontory, but I restrain myself from heavy I/O on USB sticks.
I’m unconvinced portable SSD’s are more reliable than USB thumb drives, but now I’m feeling guilty. I think I’m move my syncing to the SSD.
LOL - no worries (and less for me now )
There are some pretty bulletproof (not literally - haha!) thumb drives out there. However, (1) they’re still not made for sustained I/O required by apps like ours, and (2) they’re devilishly expensive.
So nice rugged enclosures – and optional analog/digital interface – but I still wouldn’t put my databases on it except as a travel convenience.
