Devonthink? a dying dino?

DEVONthink
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Precisely!

I gave up trying to make things look prettier. Not even the browsers themselves (“Reader” etc.) can do it reliably nowadays. Sometimes, not at all. I am at least comforted by DT’s webkit allowing me to skip a lot of gook, and treat lazyloading images ok. Single-page pdfs. Done. Jim would sigh with me - he has a serious design / printing background. The days of Bodoni & Garamond are over. Long time ago. Nowadays, I even don’t cringe anymore at the horribly spaced “1” (that we would kern manually in QuarkXPress). But I am founding solace in thinking that plain text lives forever, and discovered markdown. But maybe AI will solve this? :wink:

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42

The medium IS the message

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43

I’m very happy to trust you :slightly_smiling_face: because I don’t have the slightest desire to leave DT. For that to happen, something new would have to be really, really, really better.

I’m interested in your opinion: What will DT 4 be like? Will it be an evolution or a revolution? Can DT be taken into a new era? Is that even necessary? What do you think DT is still missing?

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Veering waaay off-topic, but…

Sad but true. I remember the furor when Quark released QuarkXPress 4 :flushed_face: 3 was my workhorse.

PS: While i love both faces, I’ve always had a thing for Goudy and Frutiger for sans-serif :heart::slightly_smiling_face:

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45

And, they are still with us and flourishing as birds!

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Frank, thank you :blush:
I think DT (the ecosystem) was built as a sort of general infrastructure for finding, ingesting, grouping, tagging, classifying all kinds of bits of information. Because devil is in the details, it is the many little smart ways DT does this that is the secret sauce. For example, importing vs indexing; the flexibility of arranging your viewing/exploring space; the ability to work with all kinds of metadata (check also Tinderbox…); the use of Applescript for those who want it (and JS for others); smart rules; replicants; in-built richtext, markdown, etc preview/edit panels; and so much more I am certainly not doing it any justice.

On top of that, the amazing iPhone/iPad port, and the brilliant sync capabilities (I use webdav, bonjour). For such a small team, I can’t quite get it how they did it so well. And I have massive databases, very messy (all kinds of file types). I worked for database companies in the past (Oracle), ETL ones (informatica), Hadoop, you name it - always with products that dealt with massive amounts of data. But they had thousands of engineers. But maybe it’s because the team is small ?

I may be wrong, but I expect DT to evolve, I don’t think it’s going to be a revolution. And, IMO, it shouldn’t be, I suspect (and they won’t confirm or deny ha ha) it’s not their philosophy. These guys are not disruptors, they are magnificent craftsmen, like the Zeiss, the Leica, the Mercedes or the Range Rover of yesteryear. I believe they are focussed on fit and finish more than anything else. And they should be. There’s a great book by James Stewart, “How Buildings Learn” that explains why the old MIT buildings were so amazing. DT is the MIT buildings.

I don’t think DT is missing anything - I think it gets better and better, WITHOUT losing its readability as an ecosystem. My mental model of what DT is is clear. I basically GET IT what I can do with it - yet I am constantly getting surprised that I can do things a little better, or I can do stuff I didn’t know I could - and when I do it, I gasp at how they’ve already ANTICIPATED that I might want to do it.

So these guys know a whole lot about PATTERNS, architecture patterns and use patterns. And that is a MAJOR KEY - their users (us) use DT in many different ways and for many different purposes - but if you tried to listen to much to what your users_said_ they wanted (hat tip to Steve Jobs), you would get lost fast. I’ve seen that in most companies I worked with.

Patterns, especially MICRO-PATTERNS, is the key. Put together a platform that has a large set of very coherent micropatterns, that can be built in different workflows, and that’s it.

So, I just said, A PLATFORM.

I don’t like molecular food that much. Give me my Steak au Poivre, superbly executed, with fresh black pepper, fresh cream, grass-fed beef. Old-world like ingredient quality. DOP. DOP Micropatterns. That’s where I think it will continue going.

But, I could be wrong. I’ve been in the past. Many times.

Happy 2025!!

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47

Veering even further: My very fave font for use with DT is Morandi (Jovica Veljovic, who did Esprit, etc). Delicious for those RTFs and MDs. It renders very very well on both my M1 MBP, and my NEC photo-editing screen.

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48

Frutiger. My thesis advisor studied design in Switzerland, and knew him well. But Erik Spiekermann, also had some awesome system typefaces, and I am talking about Meta and Officina.

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49

The answer is of course in the headline. To any newspaper article that has a headline which terminates with a question mark, the answer is ‘no’. The accepted advice is just to move on…

Here is the back story

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I am one of those DT users who depends on the solid bedrock (Devonian) to have a relatively unchanging basis on which to hang other apps which link to my data store and display it and work with information. This does mean being aware of changes as to how other apps work, and break workflows from time to time

I like the concept of ‘ignorability’. Coming back to a manual workflow after some months can leave me confused - how did I do that, and what apps did I use, and in what order. Even carefully crafted instruction lists can be cryptic and gnomic…

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And here you hit on a major difference between user types :grinning:
Some users value stability very deeply (I am one). Others, and I venture to say with more than a little sarcasm, didn’t explore, and don’t use the app enough to matter, and may be chasing the latest and greatest. This is common. And no different than, say, buying a new digital camera, or a new tool in the hardware store.

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I don’t post often, but I’ve been an active lurker here for quite some time. :smile:

I’ve been using DEVONthink (DT) for years, and I see it as a vital companion to the application I use for project management, note-taking, and writing. (Notice how I avoid the PKM word.) For these requirements, I rely on NotePlan, where everything is in markdown, as you’d expect.

That said, none of my writing ends its life as a markdown document—something I’d imagine is true for many users. Instead, it’s typically transformed into a blog post, an online article, or a fully formatted PDF. My clients need these deliverables, not their markdown equivalents, and DEVONthink is indispensable for quickly locating and sharing them.

While tools like NotePlan—and I know others—do support attachments, I’ve found their search capabilities within those attachments to be less effective. Also, the presentation of attached files often leaves much to be desired, usually limited to a generic icon or thumbnail. In contrast, DEVONthink acts as a comprehensive vault for all the content I create, storing it in a way that’s highly searchable and easy to retrieve. It might not be perfect, but its unique strengths make it irreplaceable in my workflow.

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Welcome @georgeacrump (officially)
Thanks for coming out of the shadows to share your thoughts :slight_smile:

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Having used DT for over a decade, I still see it as a work of art realized as software. Thanks to Jim for his diligent support and to all the software artists working on development. You bring benefit and joy to my daily work. I also really like the community of intelligent people around DT.

My twenty-year-old son also uses DT successfully in his medical studies. One day he will be a doctor with a good repository :grinning:.

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18 years for me, almost to the day and pretty much daily usage. Wouldn’t/couldn’t be without DTPO.

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@georgeacrump describes why I bailed out of Obsidian, after going all in on it for a couple of years.

tbh I have sometimes wondered whether it makes sense for me to use DT, given that I don’t use advanced features. Would the Finder work just as well?

But I like DT because everything is nicely integrated — the documents directory integrated with the writing environment.

And lately I’ve been rediscovering the value of a well-structured groups hierarchy. PKM enthusiasts talk about a Map of Content, which is, basically, a personalized topic page, like Wikipedia. A well-structured groups hierarchy can serve that function, helping you find documents as needed. And replicants — an advanced DT feature — are a valuable part of that structure.

Here’s an example of a Wikipedia topic page:

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I doubt that. With Finder, you’d have to do a lot more work to keep things organized. DT doesn’t do it all, but it helps to quickly file things away and (more importantly) find them again. Using advanced spotlight methods is much more difficult.

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No to Finder “work just as well” on the Mac (Files on the iPad)
I use tags for organization; supported better in Devonthink
Devonthink also syncs the data between my devices

Note; with indexed folders, we can use both Finder and Devonthink at the same time

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I did the same working with Obsidian & Logseq. Now, 100% all in with DEVONthink. Support by Jim and everyone else in the forum is incredible and greatly appreciated. :grin:

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It might, but only if you don’t use any of the powers and abilities of Devonthink, outrunning speeding trains, leaping tall buildings in a single bound, that sort of thing.

Seriously, DT’s replicants are far nicer than symbolic links in the OS, and it is really nice to have a companion document in the form of an annotation file.

Tagging is very strong, custom metadata is an outstanding feature, smart rules and smart groups are powerful and linking between documents makes DT a worthy Zettelkasten/PKM.

As a place to throw files, probably little of that matters and the Finder does fine. Once you have files with common context, like a research project or (my favorite) exposing government coverups, Devonthink far exceeds the Finder.

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