DTPO 2.0 requests

DEVONthink Feedback
1

First of all, congratulations on the launch of long-awaited version 2 beta. I waited for it for long enough to feel I wasn’t sure it was actually going to happen this soon. My experience with it is positive so far. At least, there was no fatal glitch that lead to a massive data loss on my side.

There are many small issues like strange behavior, unexpected behavior, etc., and I don’t know if you use bugzilla-like bug tracking system, but here are some things that I like changed, definitely.

Keep track of more recent databases. One sales point of DT2 is that it allows multiple databases be open simultaneously. This leads to a user decision to make a larger number of smaller databases, whenever this is the logical organizational choice. As a result of it, recently opened databases should have a lonter memory than it does now.

I think there should be a meta-database like “project” for TextMate. This meta-database can have a list of databases, some preferences, and whatever else that logically fits. For example, I can have a project file for my business (client tracking database, financial database, advertising database, tax and government report database, etc.), another project file for my research (experiment design database, experiment data/analysis database, report/writeup database, etc.), a project for private matters (friends/fun database, apartment-related database, etc.). When a database file is opened, DT may open all the related databases, or it can just list the related database, to be opened upon first access.

Another thing is the behavior of ctrl+s in the editor. It strokes text, which is very rarely used. But ctrl+s has been a common key binding for text search, as in emacs and TextMate. Perhaps, you might want to implement incremental text search like in emacs and TextMate and use ctrl+s for it. Stroke function really annoys me.

In the left sidebar, databases that are currently open are indicated without .dtBase2, but recently opened databases do show with the .dtBase2. I’d prefer they both not show .dtBase2, since this is a waste of space. This is becase DT2 doesn’t open anything other than this format. For that matter, I don’t even like the icon to the left of the database filenames, as they are waste of the space. They are fine on 24" wide screen on my Mac Pro but they are useless trimmings and a bit irritating when I use MacBook with significantly smaller screen real estate.

Thanks, and happy new year.

Ryuji

2

I heartily second the motion. :wink: This is especially true as shrinking the sidebar space gives priority to the EXTENSION not the database name!

As for your suggestion RE: project databases and all the related subordinate ones, I can understand the appeal. Question: Isn’t that substituting a hierarchy \ outliner approach to file management, thus minimizing the strength of DT?

Cheers!

Don

3

Not when your database is 30GB each. Or 500MB for that matter. Carrying one big database is worse since database operations, search, classification, etc. become slower and less accurate. Say you want to auto-classify an OCR’ed document to one folder in a 30GB database and 3GB databse. WHich will lead to a better accuracy? Which will be faster? Plus, it often makes more organizational sense to divide a bigger database that contains multiple things. Deeper hierarchy in DT database is not very good in that situation. It’s too easy to move things to wrong places accidentally, takes more effort to navigate through and wastes more space in the screen real estate.