I love the concept of DevonSphere Express, more than other Devon products. Unfortunately, at the moment, I find it’s utterly unusable.
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Most of the time, the menubar item simply freezes when I click on it. Since the app doesn’t appear in the dock or the cmd-tab app-switching menu, the only other way to get to it is to launch it from Spotlight, which kind of defeats the purpose.
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It consumes way too many resources. DevonSphere and Devonbot together use up > 1 GB of RAM. I have a recent MacBook Pro with 4GB of RAM. But I also have to use a lot of other apps pretty heavily to get things done – two browsers (with multiple tabs open in each, some of them displaying very large documents), a mail client with multiple IMAP account, a time-tracking app, a text editor, and sometimes a development environment, Address Book, Skype and more. Without the Devon processes running, it’s reasonably speedy. With them running, my machine slows to a crawl, negating any benefit from using DevonSphere Express. Yes, it’s worse when it’s indexing, but it’s always bad. (And yes, I’ve tried all the indexing settings: hourly, daily, automatic, manually.)
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The few times I’ve tried to use it – eg, by dragging an indexed PDF document to the menubar item – it simply freezes. Maybe it’s trying to do something, but it’s soooo slow that it might as well have crashed. (We’re talking 5+ minutes of inactivity.)
Potential solutions include allowing users to set limits on memory usage, or providing settings so indexing only occurs after X minutes of inactivity (such as CrashPlan has). But until this is resolved, Devon apps are pretty much deadweight, or worse, in my workflow.
tf2