DT as a writer's tool

DEVONthink Scenarios
81

Hello,

I have been using Hog Bay Notebook for several months now very successfully as DevonTHINK substitute. Photoshop runs so much better and my computer (2 GB RAM) spends a lot less time paging.

Especially nice is the favorites drawer which gives you immediate access to either folders or documents. You can drag favorites in and out and up and down as need be. Keep free flowing address books in here (somebody has to become a regular part of my life for promotion to Address Book as it keeps the database manageable), among other things.

Still plan to use DEVONthink as a massive PDF graveyard at some point as I am in no hurry to upgrade to the compatibility nightmares of OS 10.4. In the meantime, I haven’t opened it for two months.

CP Notebook is my project outliner. Neither Hog Bay Notebook (much better but not good enough) nor DEVONthink are good enough at this to be considered seriously.

Straight HTML still gets written in BBEdit for the text highlighting, macro and quick preview functions. Everything else in Hog Bay Notebook. Ecto for blogging.

All of these programs are comparative lightweights. Cumulatively it feels like with all of them open, they use less resources than DEVONthink alone - which was why DT was finally banished more or less from my computer.

Cheers, Ronsard

PS. Please no flames from hardcore evangelists. I am an independent software user and have no ties to any of these companies other than my own needs as a writer and image maker and business person. Genteel discussion from non-scientific and neutral users most welcome.

82

Hi, Ronsard:

I’m glad you’ve put together a comfortable working environment. No flames from me about that. :slight_smile:

83

Hmm, I haven’t noticed any delays or pageouts, but then I use DevonNote – maybe its demands on the system are smaller than DT? And I work almost entirely with rtf and text docs, not image files.
Is it possible to confirm your suspicions by using Activity Monitor to see how much memory each app is pulling?

84

brett:

Yes, it is.

Another important indicator is total memory usage, including both RAM and Virtual Memory. I monitor the amount of free memory available on my computer. With heavy activity and a number of open applications, OS X may begin to use Virtual Memory a lot, which tends to slow down operations. When I use my old TiBook, the Virtual Memory swap files can climb to 1 GB, resulting in more disk access and slower operation. When Virtual Memory swap files approach the amount of RAM in your computer, a lot of disk access will be required. A restart speeds everything up again. But on my iMac G5 with a 2 GHz processor and 2 GB RAM, I rarely see much use of swap files. I’ve been working in DT Pro all day, and there’s only 1 64 MB swap file, which dates from startup this morning. Right now, I’ve got 1,331 MB of free memory, so all is well. Everything runs fast.

By the way, Virtual Memory swap files can really bog things down if you have limited free space on your boot disk. The Apple folk like to see 15% or more free space in order to accommodate VM files and other temporary files needed by the operating system. Too little free space not only results in slowdown, but drastically increases the chances of file corruption. Right now, I’ve got 211.44 GB free space on my boot partition, so no worries.

85

Well, now, I do feel sorry for both Bill and Brett that R&K can “do it” for you. Perhaps next time I’m in Baton Rouge, Bill, I’ll be sure to drop off some of my own gumbo, or at least get you a stuffed bread from the Creole Lunch House – see, BR just doesn’t have the whole lunch house scene that Lafayette does. That’s just, just, not just. That’s all.

Brett … I can’t assure you that the way I currently use OO and DT does not overlap, either a little or a great deal. I’ve been using OO for a while now and I have only recently begun to load up DT. Some of that loading up I was able to do from some large OO outlines that the forum here helped me figure out how to do.

I use OO as a writing tool. For me. DT is a tool for gathering and analyzing. I use it for typing in quotes that I will probably use and for gathering html/rtf/pdf’s that I plan to reference.

But if I’m in a library taking notes quickly, or if I’m trying to sketch out some ideas quickly, then what I want is an outliner, something that will let me see chunks of text in relationship to each other and will let me manipulate them quickly – and with OO, one can do that from the keyboard.

OO also exports directly to Word format, where the headings and notes are recognized as such. (Unfortunately, Mellel’s auto-numbering does not pick up on these headings.) OO also has better style control than DT.

It’s just a great writer’s environment, I find. I was using it as a place to gather information, and a lot of people do use it that way, but it was becoming unwieldy for me.

I hope that helps. I feel like I said a lot but didn’t get to the core of what you asked. Sorry. I’m just back from a fish fry – fresh white trout, straight from Dulac, dipped in mustard and a corn mean and flour batter – and I’m feeling a little sleepy.

86

A quick question for ronsard: you didn’t mention the machien you’re using and its config. I’m using DT on a 12"PB (1.33 with 1.25 GB of RAM), and I run PS and iMovie and a few other memory hogs on it and I’ve never encountered a moment when running DT interfered with PS, as your post seems to suggest. And I’ve never really seen DT be a memory hog. Is this something that happens with very large databases?

With a bit more information, perhaps the DT developers could keep their eye out for possible optimizations down the road. With DT catching on as much as it seems to be, more users are going to be having larger databases in the future and they’ll want to stay ahead of that.

So, nice to know your alternate setup is working for you, but report back on the details of what wasn’t working, if you have the time.

87

You just had to mention the fish fry, didn’t you? I shouldn’t read these posts before dinner.
Thanks to this discussion and others, I have been giving OmniOutliner a whirl in drafting a new play. I have OO2, bundled with my Powerbook, which lacks features of the current version. And I agree that it is admirably simple and intuitive. I made a 3 level outline of scenes, notes, characters, etc. But once again, the environment I ended up with wound up looking a lot like what I make in DevonNote: a topic (in OO) or folder (in DN) containing other topics, with the text of any item visible in a notes pane, and which I can rearrange at will. Again, it just comes down to re-envisioning the metaphor: whether you call them folders or topics, they’re all just containers.

But I just can’t get over the feeling that I’m missing something important here, because structure is very important to me in everything I write, and I’m still too dense to see what OO gives me that DN doesn’t. If anyone can nail that down for me, I’d appreciate it. Maybe if I’d discovered OO before figuring out how to use DN as, essentially, an outliner, I’d stay with it because it is so simple and clear.

On the other end, I’m wondering what OO provides that Mellel’s powerful but cryptic outlining feature doesn’t. Took me awhile to figure it out (I still think it’s unnecessarily complicated), but now that I do know how to use it, it seems to let me do anything OO does. Moreover, Mellel allowed me to import previously drafted documents (one in Word, one in TextEdit) and restructure them, which I don’t think my version of OO can do.

So, yes, if I’m starting from scratch, I can see where OO’s quick simple interface, ability to add columns etc. could come in handy in various uses, and thanks to this discussion, I think I will probably use it for some note taking, maybe even try to draft my next column in it, although I’ll continue to store the research notes that I draw on in DN. Will report progress.
But I won’t be surprised if I still wind up using DN for everything after I try OO out.

It sounds like all of us here agree that Devon is the app for storing and managing research notes. Many others use it for organizing their writing, and maybe a few use it for actual writing. Others use OO for that organizational step and a WP for writing.

Now I have to decide whether to buy Mellel or use OO and TextEdit or NeoOffice (all of which I already have) to accomplish essentially the same thing – writing short articles and long book chapters from scratch. I realize we’re in a Devon forum, but judging by how many folks here use all these apps, I’d sure appreciate any advice on that one! I’ve been using Mellel’s demo to work on previously drafted chapters and make a chapter outline out of them, and I’m impressed by everything about it so far. But I always prefer to use tools I have rather than acquire new ones if possible.

88

Mellel 2.0 (due “soon”) should be the bees knees in terms of writing.

I use OO, NeoOfficeJ, text edit, Nisus, only when necessary Word X and also Mellel.

89

Like so many of the posts in this forum, this struck a chord with me. After using DT Personal intensively in its early days, even writing an article singing its praises, I also as good as abandoned it for a few months because it always took 5 minutes or more to start up. Eschewing DT meant I could have VoodooPad, StickyBrain, Webstractor, Bookends, OmniWeb, etc., all open without any strain on the system.

It seems unfair to blame DT (and I know you weren’t blaming anyone). After all, no other software we own can suck in PDFs and show us similar ones, so we don’t overload those other programs like DT. But since DT is so capable, it’s so tempting to shove everything in there. Pro seems far more robust than the Personal edition. In addition, when switching to Pro, I imported only a small subset of what had originally weighed things down. And that’s not to mention that I’m now using an iMac G5 with far more free disk space than my previous computer. Even so, after a couple of weeks of adding documents as I come across them the database takes appreciably longer to load than before, so it’s not impossible to imagine a similar situation arising again.

I guess periodic database-splitting and the other measures Bill suggests become more important with DT, since we’re not just dealing with text. Or maybe we should give up some of the convenience and Take Notes in preference to Printing to DevonThink. And of course your way is another alternative, using DT as a PDF graveyard (presumably of the living dead variety) and using VoodooPad, Hog Bay Notebook, CP Notebook, OmniOutliner, or whatever, to play around with ongoing projects and texts of immediate relevance.

90

I think this thread is sort of funny from my perspective because I’ve done the opposite of most of the discussion here. I’ve gone from using a hodge-podge assemblage of other programs (e.g., NoteTaker…which is a great program btw for a notebook metaphor, Ulysses, CopyWrite, MacJournal, Stickybrain, AbiWord, Word, etc…ad infinitum) and came to the realization that I was sick of switching to one program to do this and then to another to do that and oh, btw, what program was it where I put that text on which I was working? Why didn’t I put that graphic with it…where did that go now? I’ve narrowed my list down to pretty much DEVONthink and Word. Oh, I’ll occasionally slap together a little text in CopyWrite (that will end up in DT anyway) or do something in NoteTaker but when the rubber has to hit the road, it’s time to focus and get the job done, it’s DT feeding sections to Word (or recently PowerPoint for a presentation I’m building). It just seemed as though it was getting too aggravating dealing with so many tools, having to bring them one after the other to the foreground to work, and reducing the number of them allows me to focus more on the creative process.

ChemBob

91

Me too! On all of it. For me it’s mostly DT to Mellel, and to be honest, even that much switching back and forth is sometimes too much. Aggravating is the right word for me too. It was driving me nuts, all that switching around!! I was spending as much, or more, time experimenting with new programs than I was writing! And trying to figure out how to make them all work together.

Once I decided there was no ‘holy grail,’ I did what I’ve always done (with Hypercard and other earlier Mac programs) and got to work with what I had! Speaking of which, that thesis calls… :slight_smile:

Alexandria

92

For my part, after a infidelity with DEVONthink (wearied to await the version Pro), I returned mainly in DEVONthink Pro.
But not entirely, I use a little MacJournal for my blogs and OmniOutliner for writing notes and as software’s projects (mine are small).
And especially Mellel to write.
Lastly, I wait impatiently until DEVONthink Pro makes it possible to keep two to three bases opened simultaneously.

93

Alexandria:

Glad you remembered. :slight_smile:

94

Hear hear!!!

Rollo

95

“Still plan to use DEVONthink as a massive PDF graveyard at some point as I am in no hurry to upgrade to the compatibility nightmares of OS 10.4. In the meantime, I haven’t opened it for two months.”

What are the “compatibility nightmares of OS 10.4” to which you allude? I had some Airport trouble at first, but 10.4.2 has cleaned that up. Otherwise, no worries at all. I would find it hard to go back to the pre-Spotlight, pre-Dashboard era now.

96

Agreed. The only Tiger problem I had was having to reload one printer driver. It works better, faster, and with more features than did Panther.

BTW, I don’t really like to think of DT as a ‘graveyard.’ I feel like it accomplishes more for me with every upgrade and as I learn more and more of its features. Does it occasionally aggravate me? Sure! But I usually find out it’s my fault for not fully understanding some feature but using it anyway. I really think there would be far less usage controversy and a much more adept user base if there were lots of concrete usage examples/shortcuts/tips and tricks on the website (or somewhere) geared to a variety of specific types of tasks (a gaggle of which could be gleaned from these forums). I admit, developing such would be a lot of work simply because of the near-infinite permutations that can result from the vast number of features in DTPro.

ChemBob

97

I couldn’t agree more (with both your main point and the recognition that it’s a mammoth task). I’m thinking that something like a Visual QuickProject-type thing would be nice (or rather several of them). The tutorial that is or was available for OmniGraffle was also really nice, and I worked through it step by step at least twice when it became available.

Perhaps a simpler thing in the short term would be to browse through the forums and copy and paste all the bits where Bill or anyone else has explained in some detail how to do some specific and useful task, and then think about which of these are crucial and what kind of order they should be presented in (assuming people don’t mind their words being repurposed). It seems to be customary at times like these to suggest that the developers set up a wiki in addition to user forums (though it’s not something we would necessarily have to rely on the developers to do). Is anybody very familiar with, say, the Tinderbox or OmniWeb wikis? Do people think they are valuable?

Lest I be misunderstood, let me also say I don’t want to belittle the achievement that is the official DT Pro tutorial, which I quite often browse around in.

98

Had zero problems upgrading from 10.3.9 to 10.4, then 10.4.1, then 10.4.2. Of course I did the usual maintenance stuff. It’s been a total pleasure to use 10.4. And Dt Pro runs very well on it.

I agree with ChemBob–any program I use can be aggravating when it doesn’t do exactly what I want it to, or, as he points out, when I am doing something wrong or not understanding a feature because I didn’t take the time to learn how to use it. Happens a lot with DT, since it’s such a robust, complex program, yet at the same time (sometimes deceptively) easy to use.

Ditto as well on the usage tips. I suppose that is what this user forum is, though not nearly as organized as we’d like it to be. It can sometimes be a challenge to know how to word a proper search for something I’m having problems with. So it would be extremely helpful to have this all organized somewhere.

But, despite my occasional ‘plaints,’ I really appreciate DT and my fellow users on this forum. It’s the best thing going, from what I can see, on all counts.

Alexandria

99

Alexandria:

Do you suppose you could get your thesis advisor to let you switch to the project of organizing and consolidating all the useful information on this forum?

Surely that would be worth an advanced degree. :slight_smile:

100

Hmmmm…sounds like much more fun than what I’m doing! But I think anything would sound like more fun. And what I’m doing seemed so exciting and interesting when I started–over a year ago!! :smiley:

Alexandria