Can you explain to me what this phrase means?
Same for me. I appreciate how easy it is to create custom (and often expendable) automations in DEVONthink. To accomplish the same in Logseq or Obsidian is possible, but requires a lot more code and dependencies. That scares off the novice of me.
See the Inspectors > Annotations & Reminders section in the built-in Help and manual.
And here comes the next notetaking fad… ✱ Forever Notes Method 
I think people spend more time implementing their notetaking systems than actually taking notes and getting work done.
11 Likes
You are absolutely right. The “preparation” of the actual work gives many people the good feeling of having done something “meaningful” and at the same time allows them to postpone the more important but stressful part: the work itself.
I recognize myself very well here 
7 Likes
Well, for someone who recognizes himself here as well, I would put, not entirely perversely, that the 'preparation" is a very delightful way to fill our horror vacui 
Particularly in retirement.
3 Likes
Let’s do it this way, to keep you busy, you keep me up to date on new and better apps than DT… ah, no, correction. Don’t do that! If you find one, I’d have to leave DT, even though I’ve just arrived. Mm, we’ll have to find something else to keep you active. 
Seriously, congrats on the retirement. I wish I was already there too. Unfortunately, I need 2 more years. 
Edit: Maybe you could bribe someone on the DT team to tell you (and then me) what DT 4 will be able to do.
Hey Frank, it’s close!
Bribing: I tried convincing Jim to come to Portugal drink some Porto, but he’s incorruptible. As for Christian & rest of the team, if I understand correctly, they all live in a monastery very high up the Mountain of R… I would have to go there barefoot, and spend 6 months fasting before I could ask.
Now that my gainful life on this earth seems to have ended, I am working on big personal projects, 2 of them involving DT heavily, and one involving DT and Tinderbox, with postage stamps. In a few months I may mention it here (when I am begging for help)
Cheers!
5 Likes
While I don’t mind imbibing the occasional aperitif (or digestif 
), if you had offered coffee I couldn’t have resisted 
4 Likes
OK, it’s offered now! And coffee in Portugal is VERY good.
3 Likes
Good, you’ve found his weak point!
The better the coffee, the more information he has to give us. 
Sadly, this may be very true
2 Likes
The application that can be used is not the eternal application … Tao Te Ching – Verse 1. I hadn’t expected this, but Andreas’s foundational post sent me back to my undergrad paperback bookshelf - The Prince, The Tao, Flatland, The Phaedrus - as design patterns for software. Or maybe it’s nostalgia. Wait, there’s a copy of Bacon - some notes on commonplace books.
3 Likes
There are two kinds of annotations in Devonthink. You can annotate PDFs with inline annotations, plus any file can have either an RTF or Markdown annotation file, loosely tied to the document you’re annotating.
In the inspector, click the second icon, Annotations and Reminders.
Use the drop-down triangle beside Annotations, just above the box that starts out saying “No Annotation.”
Choose a template or just type in the Annotations box - but use a template.
An annotation template should begin with a link back to the parent document. That’s done with a placeholder in the annotation template.
That’s the only way to navigate back from a template to the file it pertains to, which is why I said annotations were loosely tied to their parent documents. You can always navigate from a document to its annotation file, but if the annotation doesn’t have a link back to the parent it is less obvious how to get there.
Not a big deal. Just use templates with parent links in them.
Annotation files are a way to make notes about a document without modifying the document itself or requiring the creation of new groups or tags.
I like them because I was once a minor player in the FORTH programming language market. The FORTH embedded in Motorola’s 68F11 processor, at least version 1, was 100% my work. I was the only developer in those early days.
FORTH’s native editor had a feature called shadow screens, a screen being a page of code. The idea was each page of code had a shadow screen where you could explain what you were doing. Meta comments, so to speak.
DT annotations remind me of those shadow screens.
7 Likes
A huge boost for me has been selecting text and adding quotes via the annotation document. It provides a link back to the source in document types that support it. Then seeing annotations in one folder in a database draws all the themes together in one place. So good.
1 Like
That sounds awesome - how do you do that?
I purchased DT Pro back in 2016 but have been a frequent/constant (maybe even heavy?) user only since maybe 2019 or 2020, so I haven’t been there since the beginning. But I can’t understand or relate to your experience much.
Yes, the web clipper has issues, but I find I can usually (and I mean like 80% - 90% of the time) get a good rendering of the article into DT with a try or two. I sometimes have to use a different browser (I find Safari to be a great fallback) and sometimes a trick or two (like Safari’s reading view), but I can reliably capture an article a large majority of the time.
I don’t know what you mean about extensions not working. My installed DT extensions seem to be puttering along just fine. I would assume by ‘pkm’ you mean Personal Knowledge Management, but that makes your next sentence entirely inscrutable as that’s exactly what DT does best.
And I’m completely baffled by the claim that DT doesn’t listen to users. I could point you at multiple super-long threads in which their support have corresponded with me to address issues. They’ve improved the web server component in particular by leaps and bounds since I started relying on it and running into issues.
In short, I hear you saying it’s not the tool for you, but from where I sit I wonder if it isn’t more that you aren’t the user for DT. Because it does a great job.
7 Likes
I have been using Devonthink Pro and DevonAgent for the past 14 years. Devonthink is the best application I have EVER used thus far.
Devonthink is used for documentation, academic research & repositories, business, repositories, notes, and what not. The databases sync from one Mac machine to another and the iPhone (via WebDAV or MobileSync if necessary). It is simply the BEST application used on a computer all day, without which managing information is much more complex.
I can hardly overstate Devonthink’s impact on efficiency and utility, without which you can revert to a useless Windows or Linux machine.
8 Likes
Been following this thread. I’ve been using DT for 15+ years, off and on. But after a 4 month try to get more immersed in Obsidian, I’ve just decided (as part of my New Years cleanup of workflow) to re-fully commit to DT. Though I am also a long time Evernote user, and will also take advantage of the few places where EN does shine, and will use it probably mainly as a pre-processor (web capture, quick notes) to either DT (using the capability to export as HTML in Evernote) or my file system.
Looking forward with bated breath to DT 4.
2 Likes
Just curious: why not use them both? That’s what I do. DT is a storage and indexing monster, even though I’m only scratching the surface with it, while I’m using Obsidian for more focused projects. When such projects are no longer are part of my daily work, then I archive the contents in DT and add to its ever expanding repository of my stuff. And in the meantime, I can use the wonderful Obsidian plugins and such as well as its ability to integrate so nicely with Neovim (my programming editor).
1 Like