An Addendum: I’m not particularly opposed to the current file metaphor for general purpose computing and, from what I can see, it doesn’t look like this is going to change any time soon. So far as I know, Apple’s filesystem plans do not extend beyond a probable future move to ZFS which, while cool, does nothing about the metaphor. I do, however, dislike managing my information – my mind, really, in electronic format – according to the restrictions of that metaphor.
I see DEVONthink as being able to transcend the file metaphor by allowing considerable abstraction. This is where the AI comes in – it’s nothing compared to a human brain, natch, but there are things that I can see making it more useful as it continues to develop:
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Blur the distinction between “folder” and “file.” This has been suggested by myself and others in the form of a “default document” or document associated with a given folder, or by allowing documents to act as containers for other documents à la Scrivener. This seems to me to be accomplishable through a UI trick and controlled through metadata hooks (Add a "DefaultDocument=RECORD( “5bcee020-163e-4e5b-ba56-27be6b72dc8b”) key-value pair – the default document conceivably would not even have to reside in that folder).
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Blur the distinction between “part of file,” “file,” and “series of files.” As with the folder-file distinction, this has been blurred by Scrivener in the form of Scrivenings, or groups of documents merged into a virtual document, and by Tinderbox’s ability to “explode” notes into subnotes given a proper delimiter.
I would like this distinction to be more fundamentally blurred, though – not just in terms of presentation, but in terms of how the AI handles information. This would almost surely require improvements to the AI, and likely would require increases in database size, search execution time, memory usage, and so on. Essentially, this would enable DEVONthink to construct an entire train of thought. Remember Steven Berlin Johnson? What if the examples he cited in his usage of “See Also,” instead of requiring repeated applications of that command, were constructed on-the-fly and merged into a virtual document? Or take a passage out of a book and execute “Build New Database from Document” – and it would create a database with an entirely new document hierarchy, all elements auto-classified, from paragraphs of the documents within your current database? Or if you created a document hierarchy automatically and went through it, deleting uninteresting or unhelpful suggestions, “teaching” the AI’s intuition rather than modifying its initial assumptions (as in the current system)?
An interesting thought experiment, but likely impossible at this point in time… but even without improvements to the AI, this blurring of boundaries would be immensely useful to anyone who has had to explode an encyclopedia or dictionary in DEVONthink, or to anyone who wants a dynamic document, never out-of-date, of the entirety of their novel/address book/hit list/whatever.
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Blur the distinction between “metadata” and “data.” This might be controversial, but I think it bears some thought. Part of my thinking regarding the internal scripting language or whatever is that an RTF document like a form letter can use tokens to reduce processing time ("%%CurrentDay%%",etc) and, through the same fundamental mechanism, you can create a powerful HTML record view for sheets ("%%Interests%%", where “Interests=RECORD(CurrentRecord).Interests” or something with two images linked to the next/previous records, etc). This is, in a way, inserting database/spreadsheet functionality into completely normal documents that would remain human-readable.
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Blur the distinction between databases. DEVONtechnologies, I believe, is doing this marvelously – searches and smart groups can span multiple databases. There are some UI issues that I’m sure they’ll iron out, but they are largely inconsequential. The ability to virtually merge the AI of the two databases might be an incredible feature, especially considering my AI thoughts from #2. I don’t know what or how much is currently being done in this area, though.