Everyone can speak their mind in here (provided they never become personal attacks) and you’re more than welcome to feel disappointed and express it.
I am not sure what’s complicated, slow, or unconfigurable, if you could clearly state these things.
(And yes, I work for DEVONtechnologies.)
Complicated - The visual complications are quite obvious, but the chief one that annoys me is that it displays the entire hierarchy of all of my databases. You cannot simply drop on the open tab, now you must precisely target the drop or it gets ignored with no feedback.
“Unconfigurable” - In addition to the inability to choose which databases are visible in the Sorter, you can no longer position it freely onscreen. It also, as noted, no longer runs independently (at the expense of adding features that I do not use).
Slow - it’s a usability problem that it now requires precise targeting, resizes itself (without rese) when exposing hierarchy, requires DT3 to be running, and visually intrudes over other windows. All of which slows me down and makes it less usable for me.
Sounds as if what you may want is to simply add the Global Inbox as a Finder location so you can drag things in there whether or not DT3 is open. Then create smart rules to tag or move or otherwise process those files as you see fit.
You don’t have to show open databases in the Sorter as there is an option to Hide them.
Items added to the Favorites in DEVONthink’s Navigate sidebar are available to drop to in the Sorter, no differently than DEVONthink 2.x’s Sorter (other than visually).
What I am missing too is that you cannot define your own drop folders like before.
Since DT3 I find myself just moving everything to the inbox to sort it later.
But even though I process them later within DT it is more time intensive to sort them until you not really add everything to you favorites.
My understanding of favorites is not to add unimportant folders just because I often need them to move daily paperwork in there. I use the favorites when I am working (on projects) and need lots of navigation.
My favorites are already overloaded due to other workarounds that have been discussed in this forum.
It would have been nice to have a separate drop folder definition for the sorter and not to mix everything with the favorites.
Well, the new Sorter should have it’s own configuration, not rely on the side effect of having to remove a db from Favorites in order to suppress it somewhere else. (Which introduces just another set of inconveniences.)
This isn’t the equivalent of DT2 because the DT2 Sorter window could be resized to “hide” the other Favorites, and it would remember its size so they never got in your way.
Rkaplan’s suggestion is a work around, thank you, but underlines my mourning of the loss of simplicity and usability. (Putting the Global Inbox folder in the Dock is also a good hack, as someone expressed in this thread some time ago.)
Just want to mention, that the free floating is really missing
The dock mode is not practicable when you (like me) have the mac dock on the leftern side of the screen. At least a prepositioning for the left, center and right bottom is missing.
My understanding of favorites is not to add unimportant folders just because I often need them to move daily paperwork in there. I use the favorites when I am working (on projects) and need lots of navigation.
My favorites are already overloaded due to other workarounds that have been discussed in this forum.
That’s your own perception and use of the Favorites, but that doesn’t change the function it has with the Sorter. Part of the reason the Favorites are shown in the Sorter is exactly for the purpose of quick filing, just as it was with the previous Sorter.
The new Sorter is incomparably better. Saves me hours of work when I can put things where I want, even adding new groups if needed, when I decide I want to keep something. I spent much less time sorting manually within the app, what was two steps is now one.
I still have the Inbox in the Finder window sidebar, I still have the Inbox in my Dock, and I use them when I’ve no time to think, but if I know where something should end up, no contest.
TommyWeir - Out of curiosity, how many databases do you have marked as Favorites so they appear in Sorter?
Okay, sorry Gordon, I must be more attentive in future.
I have five groups marked as favorites. But they don’t appear in the Sorter unless their relevant database is actually open.
Then I can navigate where I want. I typically have my Photography and Teaching databases loaded at all times. 90% of my work is within them.
I don’t get on here too often (obviously) and just now got around to seeing your comment. I wasn’t trying to show any kind of superiority, it’s not my thing, so I’m sorry if you took it the wrong way, was just trying to help. Reading it again it does sound a bit patronizing but it wasn’t my goal. I’m not a perpetual commenter anywhere and in fact barely use social media. Maybe there was a better way to put it, but I still stand my my intent, that many people really don’t have a clue what goes on under the hood in a multitasking OS, nor should they need to, and I was trying to calm fears along those lines.
Your last point is correct and with a vengence. It can be a time suck to get too far under the hood. I have done it and regretted it. The apps, like DEVONthink 3 are now good enough, in my view, that really you can do any academic work I am familiar with ‘out of the box’ with no need to learn scripting or anything. I am sure there are STEM folk who have stronger requirements but then they would know the other stuff anyway? Frankly I have no IT bottlenecks at present and my own progress or lack of it in my field is pretty much down to yours truly! Be well.
i’m very happy with new sorter, i’m use it mainly as note entry point.
one thing seems nobody ask for it’s metadata support.
i understand that maybe would not be at all coherent with HIG, but what about to show at least the first medatada?
or may be an option in sorter preference pane to go directly to new note in DT after you have added it?
about sorter search pane, i’d like to navigate directly to favorite by keyboard, no “Enter” nor key combination with “Enter” seems to reveal it…to me seems logic if i select a group inside search list and i press “Enter” to open it in database, eventually reveal with say Command-Enter.
you can of course double click on it but…well you need mouse and moreover you open the group in a new window, and no option to reveal, not what i’d like to.
Thanks
The functionality of the 2.0 sorter was that the Mac desktop gets cluttered with documents that you need to file, and this could be cleared by dragging into the Sorter Inbox for the relevant database.
Now to get the same effect you first have to Open DT3.0 and then Open the database itself.
I have read here that the standalone function is unlikely to return - but could the capacity to have an inbox to drag and drop into without the need to have the database open be reintroduced? Our team of 10 are synched across about 20 databases. Some databases are huge and so having them always open would slow us down.
Thanks very much indeed and as always, thanks for a sublime product.
You could set up inbox folders for each database working like the Global Inbox folder in the Finder.
You could access these inbox folders in the Finder, you could add them to the Finder sidebar, your desktop, or dock. You might want to put them into an enclosing folder and put that one into the Dock to get a grid or a stack of your databases’ inboxes, whatever you prefer.
You could add Dropzone (or something similar) to the mix to get a user interface rather similar to the old DT 2 sorter.
You can accomplish that now in various ways - including using an indexed folder(s) and smart rule(s).
That’s what I meant with setting up inbox folders but stupidly omitted.
Just in case my above postings contributed to confusion instead of help as intended:
And of course this does work not only for database inboxes but you could set up an indexed “inbox” folder for any group or database (top level).