I have been using DTP for almost 2 years now… and I have no idea what it’s good for.
I was hoping that it would find things within the many huge files that I have to deal with but it will not, it will tell me that certain things are in them but will not show me them, as in, I enter a phrase, it finds it, and then allows me to move from page to page to view repeated instances of it, no, it will only tell me that it’s in a 2.5 M PDF… somewhere, and maybe more than once, who can say?! That is the database version of a cocktease!
Now, you might say, I have to learn how to use it. Well there’s 3 things about that:
- Spotlight is free and finds the files faster than DT.
- I don’t need to learn how to use Spotlight, because it just searches for things in a straightforward manner!
- There’s only so many hours in the day and I don’t have time to massage DT into the right mood, when I can get 90% of what I want done using stuff that I already need to use anyway!
And:
I was hoping that I could throw things into a folder and have it index them, so that I could just open DT and be able to start working with them… oh no! No, that is only possible if I attach a script, one that is not included in the menu of scripts that come with DT. I just had about 2 G of data blown away while trying to solve that one!
It is odd to me that scripts that, for instance, change all of the dates in your files (What?) are front and centre in your product’s menu but synchronizing data is not, as if getting data on a regular basis, and wanting a no maintenance way of indexing it was some strange need!
I can clip webpages to DT of course. Thing is, I have this thing called a web browser that has been doing that for me since the mid 90s, again more quickly, and for free!
Oh but I can get fuzzy searches with DT, so that I can stumble upon new concepts!
OK, maybe some graduate student in Psilocybin induced poetry needs to do that but most of us need to FILTER OUT the crap and find stuff that’s germane to what we are doing.
IOW, your product only does maybe 10% more for me than my combination of MS Office, Adobe, Firefox, with some add ons, and the Mac OS itself. Now that 10% might be worth it, if things didn’t work in such a strange and oblique way in DT, such that it takes me hours to figure out how; with, apparently, a notable risk of being worse off, as my data can be arbitrarily and sweepingly destroyed merely by the act of trying to attach a script!
My last use of DT is now to export the files, not up to date of course, from it, back to my other folder, so that I will only be a few days out of date, instead of having lost most of my work for this semester.
Apparently this DT thing does lots for some, but I cannot imagine how, at the least, I can’t imagine how the amount of work one must put in, so that you can make sense of it, could be worth it.
Perhaps I am misunderstanding you, but DT does exactly this. You can index files without importing them into DT.