Is there really only right click and moving in drop-down menus?
Is there no dual pane explorer style…?
For commonly used destinations, add them to “Favorites” in the global side bar. Or open the destination database or groups in a new window and drag documents from one window to another. Or, use the Tools > Show Groups & Tags panel and drag documents from the inbox to the destination group.
There is also using the ‘Also & Classify Window Pain’.
You can view it by clicking on the ‘magic hat’ up toward the top of the document.
What’s nice about that pain is it gives you suggestions for groups… with the exception that I’m only seeing 6 out of my 300 groups. There is a move to button there that lets you move to a group.
One of the most powerful parts of the program is the also lists at the bottom of that window pain. As you click on documents, that part will fill up with related content to the document you are looking at.
I would like to see some way to move using the keyboard. In Evernote I do this by adding tags to a note. I can pretty much process all ‘untagged’ notes using the keyboard.
Surely that pain can’t be nicer than that pane. 
Spelling is a pane
I will panestakingly review your suggestions.
Thank you all
- Auto classify gives no sensible suggestions. Is no option.
- Two windows is a pain (not a pane). Feels like 1966 usability.
- Favorites is unusable because I would need to mirror my whole folder structure in favorites.
Any usable suggestions? Maybe by the manufacturer?
I mean, come on, this is such a basic feature. The whole inbox idea is rendered useless if there is no intuitive way to “move” stuff out of the inbox.
Seriously… check out the ‘also & classify pane’. Not the ‘auto classify’ (which isn’t working for me. This is one of the highlights of the program that separates it from others out there. It can be viewed by clicking on the magic hat after you have a note selected. It’s grayed out unless you have a note selected. Or you can click on help -> in the search box type in 'also and it will show you the menu item to select.
This pane won’t show you results until you start creating groups and placing items into it.
If you have a list of inbox items, select the first one, create a group for it and move it there.
now select that item in the group and open the ‘also & classify’.
It should show the score of the group matched with the item.
As you create more groups, you’ll have enough information to process the inbox by looking at the groups which are recommended for the item. Just click on the ‘move to’ button and it’s gone.
There are two approaches to this:
- create very general groups and rely more on searching to find what you need
- create specific groups and rely on searching.
For me I almost always start with searching for an item. However, I still want to process the inbox, weed out things that didn’t transfer well or things I don’t want to store.
Thank you SpiralOcean,
I really do appreciate you effort to help me.
I have imported my whole folder structure that had grown over 10 years. Each former folder is a group. I must have 200 to 400 groups, named and filled in a sensible way. And each with sub-folders/sub-groups.
None of the suggested “also’s” comes-up with anything remotely usable.
I also noticed that, whichever file I choose in the Inbox, the “also-suggestion” is always identical. How can it be that every new file has an identical “also”?
What am I doing wrong?
I can only speak from my observations about how this is working for me.
In my trial usage… I’ve imported notes from Evernote, about 3k notes. So far I’ve been pleasantly surprised by many of the connections I’ve found in the also window.
The top part of the ‘also & classify’ pane should be recommending groups suggested for the file. About %90 of the time the group recommended is the group that it is already in. When working from the inbox it has done a great job of recommending the group that I would put the item in and I can just click on the ‘move to’ button.
If you aren’t seeing more groups there may be a couple things happening.
The ‘also & classify’ pane is only working from the database selected. If you are working out of the global inbox, it won’t offer suggestions. So you’ll need to drag from the global inbox to the database. Then click on the database so it is selected, and select the file from the database inbox.
I’ve noticed sometimes groups aren’t appearing. If a group doesn’t have any files included in it, then it won’t show up as a suggestion.
I hadn’t imported all my files saved in my reference folder on my computer… I did after reading your post, and can see what you are speaking of where the also isn’t always what I expected. The same with groups.
I’m still in the demo trial of the software and haven’t put it through it’s paces yet with getting new items into my structure. It is odd that when I select a file that is in a group, sometimes the group that it is in won’t appear in the suggestions for a group. Or it won’t be the top group.
It would be nice to ‘correct’ the software when it is not doing what you want, and hopefully improve it’s recommendations.
If you are choosing a file in the inbox, and it is suggesting a group to move it to, then try moving it to that group to process your inbox to 0. I’m assuming the more identical items that are in a group, the better the matching gets. However, if there are a lot of odd items in a group, it may throw a wrench into the suggestions.
I treat the also’s as a way for me to explore. They are suggestions, sometimes on and sometimes off. They only work with text documents or documents that have a lot of text that it can analyze. It hasn’t worked with audio or images for me… but that would be something pretty amazing if it could find patterns between pictures and offer suggestions for other pictures to visit.
I’m going to keep experimenting with process the inbox as new input arrives to see how this works. I probably won’t stick with the software if I end up having to manually drag items from the inbox to groups in order to process the inbox. I want to have a minimal effort with moving around the software. My main note collection software right now is Evernote. I process the inbox by adding tags to items and then manually drag groups of notes between a home notebook and work notebook. Then rely on searching to find items.
If you’ve imported all your folders/files into the application… try searching for something you want to find and see how it does. Then select the file in the search results and see what the also window recommends.
It may be wise to leave your structure as it is, and get some new items in the inbox and see how well it does with recommending groups to put the files into.
Another nice piece about the software is it is indexed by spotlight. So if you are searching for something in spotlight, you’ll see results from Devon.
My main reason for trying out this software is I don’t like my data being on someone else’s server.
Some of the other data I manage is I’ve started scanning all receipts and financial documents into NeatReceipts. I’ve imported all these documents into Devon and testing searching for receipts, warranties, manuals and the like and have had excellent results with the OCR and recognizing text from scanned images.
Keep us posted with how you are faring.
I may be misunderstanding what you’re after, but can’t you open a second DT window with option-command-N? Then both windows can be navigated independently to wherever you want for drag/drop.
I try to use the keyboard as much as possible for moving files on the desktop. I use a program called LaunchBar to do this. Especially because I can select an item in launch bar, hit tab, then start typing and a list of matches appear for where I want to move an item. This is easier than scrolling through a list of folders to drag a file to.
This would be the sort of functionality I would want in Devon for moving to different groups or applying tags.
However, the main way I find things is by searching. It’s going after the gmail model of email. Don’t worry about the organization as much, just archive an email and then use search to find it later.
At the minimum, you could have general groups that files are moved to, and rely on the search to find items later.
The problem with this method is the search may not always find what you are looking for. This is where the ‘also’ suggestions come in handy. They may not be perfect, but I have yet to find a system that is perfect for recommendations. Even Netflix offered 1 million dollar prize to anyone who could improve their recommendations by %10.
Out of all the note taking applications out there, Devon is the only one I’ve found that has attempted to tackle this. And all on a users computer. I find that unique and impressive.
For moving items – including a move from one database to another – my favorite is the Groups & Tags pane (Tools > Show Groups & Tags). There’s a keyboard shortcut to toggle its display on/off/.
The group structure of all open databases is available.
That is my favorite solution.
Thank you all
Is there anyway to move items from the inbox using the keyboard only?
Yes, if you can get the Move To contextual menu item open using Snow Leopard Application Shortcuts setting in System Preferences, or something like QuickKeys, etc. Once you have that menu open then use the arrows to move up/down through the list to select the target group.
Guys, would you know if this behavior is intended or if it’s a bug? It’s an pain to move things from Global Inbox into a database Inbox before you can organize things using AI.
It’s not a bug but a known shortcoming. This will be improved in the future though.
I use a script assigned to a keystroke:
http://www.devon-technologies.com/scripts/userforum/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=12684#