DEVONthink is still unbeaten when searching for content with keywords in my opinion. I have been playing with Ironic Software’s Leap since the public beta, and although it’s a completely different type of program than DEVONthink, I think Leap has some features which could be used as inspiration. It offers some really nice graphic ways of searching, which I suddenly miss in DEVONthink. Leap and programs like Evernote have really taken advantage of the new interface possibilities in Leopard, while DEVONthink seems stuck in a Panther look and functionality. The other feature which Leap has is tagging, and the ability to enable different groupings across folders has proven very useful in my PhD.
I fully agree. If I’m not wrong, tagging has been confirmed as a feature in DEVONThink 2.0.
I hope some of the tagging features of Leap and Aperture might inspire DEVONTechnologies (and make their way into 2.0). It would be great to have more than one way of tagging, such as a field in the info panel/inspector and a HUD floating panel, for instance, or even custom buttons like in Aperture. For my work it would be definitely great to be able to bundle tags as in del.icio.us (bundles) or Aperture (keyword/subordinate keyword). I wish to be able to tag documents by country, by subject, etc.
I wonder if it would be possible to integrate seamlessly the tagging action of diferent tools like DefaultFolder, Tagbot, Leap and DEVONThink itself. I might add some tags when saving a document using Default folder, and I’d like to see those tags and add some more in DEVON after importing the document.
There’s no reliable, robust, vendor/product neutral standard for storing and sharing user-definable document tags on OS X. Different apps are “borrowing” Spotlight comments for that purpose but that’s a fragile and relatively short-term solution.
This comment (@Ironic Support Forum) from Tom Anderson, one of Leap’s developers, is apropos:
As for a unified DB, we are looking into that. I actually want to create a DB that any program can use, and open source it, etc. Maybe that is too lofty of a goal?
There’s some interesting discussion in that thread, and another I linked to in my post after Tom’s, related to tagging issues in general. I’m referencing it here for cooperative, not competitive, reasons and benefits.