First, I want to say that I use DevonThink Pro 2 extensively and love it. Also, I am not expecting the iPad app to be anywhere close to the Mac version for obvious reasons BUT this app is far below what it should be.
I make most of my annotations and notes on pdf’s primarily on my iPad for school and work. With the DTG app there is no functionality for any kind of highlighting, annotations or notes. This should be a basic function for this because there are many other apps that easily do this on the iPad. I have to open up the file to PDF Expert then sync it back to DTG and delete the file of PDF Expert. That is a terribly slow and annoying workflow.
The sync function is also slow and buggy in my experience. When trying to sync one database (437 files, mostly pdf’s and .docx) it generally will crash either the app or the mac. Also, with all the integration in the cloud it is a little ridiculous that we have to be on the same internal network as our Mac to sync the app. This is probablimatic because if you forget to sync and you don’t have your Mac you are out of luck. Yes, I realize that in actuality it is my fault for not doing this but with the technology out today (i.e. Dropbox, Box, iCloud) there must be some workaround for this in the future.
While I love DT the DTG app is very limited in it’s scope (especially for the price tag!)
Please upgrade your app to make it more useful for use users
I really hope that DEVON invests its development time into other areas to improve DEVONthink To Go, such as tagging, moving/deleting/replicating documents, searching, syncing, etc. DEVONthink To Go was not designed to compete feature-wise with the various PDF annotation apps, and I just don’t see the lack of annotation tools as a missing basic function. As you mention, there are many other apps that do this easily on the iPad, but that’s what they were developed to do.
FWIW, I’ve moved to PDFpen on both the Mac (PDFpenPro) and the iPad, and I index PDFpen’s iCloud folder in DEVONthink. There are other combinations that are cheaper using DropBox, Skim, GoodReader/PDF Expert, etc. that also do pretty much the same thing. My experience is that it works much better for editing and annotating PDF documents, and the documents are still available in my DEVONthink databases.
Right now we are working to implement a new sync process that should address many of the sync issues.
I think we would consider adding annotations if we found a drop-in solution. However, at this time we feel that it’s better to use DEVONthink To Go in combination with apps who are specialized for PDF annotation, editing Word documents, etc.