Man, believe me, even if you can’t justify it now: get a DEVONthink Pro license. If you can’t afford it right now: save money to get it. It’s really really worth it.
I literally started with “pen and paper”. Because I didn’t know that DEVONthink 2 exists. The very moment I read about it I knew: That’s it! And that was DEVONthink 2. Now it’s DEVONthink 3.
You won’t use “a fraction of the features”. You’ll use what you need - but until you really use DEVONthink you can’t have an idea of what might be useful.
Search the forum, you probably won’t find a single user who did not extend their usage.
Devonthink saves me days a year from moving and filing papers
I don’t remember exactly how many years I was with the pro office version, but it certainly came out much cheaper than Evernote.
I very strongly concur with @pete31’s view. I was fortunate enough, rather blindly, to go for the Pro licence when I initially bought DEVONthink (just after DEVONthink 3.0 was released, in fact). At that time I really had no idea that I’d use it for more than a simple document store. I didn’t understand Custom Metadata and consequently saw no use for it. I didn’t think I’d want to archive email. I didn’t consider it useful to imprint Paid on invoices—although I did have an inkling it might be useful to use OCR on pdf files.
I hadn’t even the beginnings of a clue that I might one day import 19,000+ diary entries from Day One and use AppleScript (of which, at the time of my licence purchase, I was merely dimly aware and had never used) and custom metadata to enhance them.
I’ve archived emails and imprinted Paid on more invoices than it makes me happy to recall. OCR works silently in the background when I import pdf files and it’s now second nature to regard all of those files as searchable.
This is so true! Everything is available to he or she who reads this forum.
Yes, I have very strong views on this that I try not to let spill over into fora like this one. It is peripherally relevant though. I am pretty much Open Access BUT I am concerned to protect payment for what I am going to pre-emptively call Real intellectual work or intellectual property that deserves it in some sense. I really hope one day to get the chance to talk to these developers about it. It is not a problem I feel I can solve in my own head as it were and I have no set opinions.
In general, among the parallel problem of academic over production, predatory journals etc., the problem is finding stuff that is useful now and DEVONthink 3 has a kind of convergence on two of my bug bears!
I’m not sure what to say about DT’s pricing. As a card carrying member of CLUE, the CLueless User Establishment, I’m required to say it’s hideously overpriced.
The thing is, though, DT serves me in many roles. Because DT is a daily driver I’m in a comfortable arena in each use case. Sometimes it’s just a note-taking tool. Other times, I’ve got thousands of PDF files to keep in order.
For any one purpose, particularly my more casual uses, DT is expensive. Considering the overall return I get from the money I spent, I’m not unhappy.
I wish DT included some graphical front-ends. A node map browser that worked like The Brain, for example. Linkage between nodes could be based on optional layers including groups, tags, and see-also searches. A corkboard of virtual index cards drawn from DT documents, that would be nice, too.
DT’s server feature gets used once a year for an annual audit of the books I keep for a 501(c)3. For once a year use, the server is overpriced except for the fact I have daily peace of mind. If a board member ever had a doubt about something in our books I can present complete, organized records on demand. I hope our board members trust me, but my happy zone is being able to stand aside and let the records show on their own I’ve been honest.
Filing in DT keeps the records constantly curated, too.
I’m definitely reconsidering my purchase and going for the Pro version.
After trying a few other document management services, I do feel that DT offers more for my needs as a researcher.
Trying apps like Eagle Filer and Find It shortly after DT, and finding that there are many features lacking in both make DT an easy choice for comprehensive management and organisation.
I can definitely see it as an investment for future use as well.
I also appreciate the replies. Many good comments in here.
I can understand my needs are completely different from everybody elses’, and I certainly see the value in DT as a single, one-off purchase.
Thanks for your thoughts
You will probably be aware that you can upgrade to Pro at no premium over what an original purchase of Pro would have cost (i.e. Price of Standard + Upgrade to Pro = Price of Pro).
I really appreciate that you came back to say “ok, I’m going to do it differently”; that in no way invalidates your feedback. I’m grateful that you value others’ experience in the way you do. So thanks for that
Thanks!
To be honest, I think I was just frustrated after purchasing the license and finding a few features “missing”, which I had been spending a few days/weeks getting used to.
I have no doubts the DT developers have heard all this before. It’s a little selfish of me to make such noise and racket over something I could have avoided if I spent more time working out what all the documentation referred to in the beginning.
@Amontillado, you can connect Devonthink with Obsidian.MD, which (as it is still in beta) is free, and use it and its wonderful (free) plugins for their graphical front-ends.
I agree with many others here. If you’ve been testing/lurking on this forum for 3 years, just buy the Pro version already. You obviously think you need the software, or you wouldn’t keep coming back to it. Assuming you’re in the app most days it is cheaper than a lot of other software out there. I think I paid around £200, so in a year that’s £16/month, and I plan to use it far longer than one year so that price will keep dropping… if you think that’s expensive you’re in for a terrible surprise when you enter the professional workplace and discover the pricing of [essential] Adobe, GIS, CAD, Microsoft software, etc. etc. Add a few professional subscriptions on top of that to your industry’s magazine/journal, and you’ll realise what a bargain DTP is.
I’d never paid this much for a “non-work” app before (I bought DTP initially to corral my own notes though now use it for pretty much everything) and I did the maths before I purchased it, and thus realised what a bargain it was spread over time.
My only regret is that I didn’t know software like this existed 15 years ago when I was a student. I think of all that “wasted research” that isn’t in a database, and in fact in most cases doesn’t exist now as it was on paper, and then cry inside a little (not wasted of course since it got me a degree and a job to pay for DTP, but all that missing research makes me sad!). If I could be 18 again, my studies would be very different with the technology I now use. Youth is wasted on the young!!
Actually it turns out I have more to say on this (seems I have lots of thoughts on this issue ). I 100% agree with @BLUEFROG that DTP is an investment, not an expense, and I want to expand on that.
I read a comment recently that talked about how task management and weekly reviews etc only work if you have a belief that your work and your time are valuable. If you believe that how you spend your time matters, you will invest in thinking that makes you use it wisely.
DTP is the same for me. I purchased it because my previous system of organising notes wasn’t working, and hadn’t for a long time. I believed that making notes and saving information was a valuable activity, but my system was failing because it had got too unwieldy (lots of things saved in different places, which slowed me down when I needed to find something). I could have carried on without it, accepting the compromise that modern digital life is messy and complicated and you have to remember that you saved one thing in Dropbox and another thing on GDrive, but on discovering DTP I decided to invest in a system that would remove this annoyance from my life. I believe that having easy access to all my research and notes is important, and I believe it’s worth investing the time and money to use this software. I could have gone on without it, but I recognised the value of building better workflows for myself. I now use it for many parts of my life, so the investment was definitely worth it.
In contrast, I recently had to go without Microsoft Excel for a month due to licence changes with my employer. Google Sheets makes me want to throw myself dramatically of a cliff, and don’t get me started on Numbers… My new licence kicked in this week, and it is SUCH A RELIEF. But, Excel isn’t an investment. It is a tool that I need to be able to do my job. It doesn’t add any value to me as a person or an employee, it’s just the hammer I need to build my work. DTP isn’t a hammer for me. It can be, and probably is for many people, but for me it’s the uniform and toolbox in this terrible metaphor. Opening it up is like flipping open the toolbox lid and deciding what I need today to do good work. And it’s a good toolbox, with little bits squirrelled away, because you never know when that one weird screw you kept will be perfect for a job you have in mind. And as any DIYer or tradesperson knows, sometimes all you need is to flip the toolbox lid and stare at it while you ponder the problem at hand, and the answer will come to you
This, so much this. Tortured metaphor and all.
Once I split up my databases into some basic categories, I felt more comfortable dumping every weird link or piece of ephemera into what I call “The Scrapbook” which had the knock on effect of everything else being more easily sortable, if that makes sense. Now when I am doing creative things, I have all the notes at hand for those projects in their own database and The Scrapbook is there for wading through to see if there is that one weird screw that might be useful.
I can’t overstate what a change creating The Scrapbook was for me. It was like a Super Category that took away the stress of “I know this will be useful but don’t know where to put it right now” and turned it into “I can easily drop this here, knowing that I’ll come across it later when I am looking for something else entirely”.
). I 100% agree with