Praise for Devonthink and Devonthink to go

DEVONthink To Go
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I am a veterinary clinical pathologist in formation and at the moment I spend my time learning from results of chemistry analyzers of serum and also the results from haematology studies.

I have a database named “Clinical Pathology” with a “Books” group. I have uploaded there a lot of great books and applied OCR to all of them. I have this database synced with my iPhone and iPad and I cannot stress HOW MUCH this has helped me to learn.

Some times I see abnormalities in chemistry studies that I can’t understand, I just pull my iPhones out and search or go to my favorite books on the topic and search. The speed of the results is great and also the speed of the rendering of my book.

The things I didn’t understood or knew are then at the moment learned and I proceed to do some flash cards on other software.

Just wanted to thank the team for the effort. I just have a couple of books that I need to scan to import to Devonthink, I think I’ll buy a hand held scanner or something like that.

Best software I have purchased in a long time.

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I just use my iPad camera, saving a .pdf file to DTTG
Scanning documents is a feature of the Files app

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I may try that for chapters. Do you scan hole books this way?

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Whilst YMMV, if you find the Files app to be unsuitable you might try Readdle’s ScannerPro with which I have had good results.

The upper class professional solution would seem to be described by @rfog in their parting words of this post, which left me wanting to need it :smiley:

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Thanks! I’ll try the files app or scanner pro to see which one I prefer.

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Thank you!
We appreciate you taking the time to share your experience and your gracious comments. :heart: :slight_smile:

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I’m absolutely sure You will need it once I finish experimenting with it!

Got it last week and once technical service told me what I was doing wrong, well, I’m in love with it. I Will write later this week in that thread to explain how I’m using the ET24 Pro and what is capable to do.

Advance: it even do MRC compression!!!

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I’ve scanned a few books
It goes faster if there’s two people; one to hold the device and the other turning the pages

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Wanted to piggyback off of this thread because I was having this feeling today (maybe there should be a praise subsection in the feedback section).

It just seems like as my journey with the app continues, I find more and more things where using DTP just aligns perfectly with how I think.

I started using DEVONthink as a repository for the 1000s of PDFs I get in my law practice. See previous post here.

But I have continued to struggle with the problem of organizing case documents and creating chronologies of my legal cases and otherwise just trying to make sense of the 1000s of pages of material I get from the government in my more complex cases.

Most recently, I was using Aeon Timeline to create a chronology, but ultimately found it too confining, at least for the initial part of case analysis. Analyzing a complex legal case reminds me of that quote, “I would have written a shorter letter, but I didn’t have time.”

Aeon Timeline just didn’t give me a large enough of a canvas to get it all out of my head. Instead I am using DTP to basically create a wiki of my legal case and as I go all I have to do is hit the double brackets and “poof,” I have a new note to expand on another topic, with links to all the relevant parts of PDFs, etc. I don’t mean to knock onto Aeon Timeline, it’s just I think it might be more useful of an app to me after I have done the initial process of sorting through everything and am ready to refine down to the essential facts of my case (ie ready “to write the shorter letter”).

Also to keep from clogging my hard drive with 500 GB of case documents, videos, etc, I simply save all that material to a 1TB Sandisk Pro Thunderbolt external SSD and then index it. With the 2500 Mb/s RW speeds, I can’t tell any difference between accessing the files on the external hard drive and my internal drive.

This is not to say that I never run into frustrations working with DEVONthink, but basically I rely on this app for so much and to find myself continually finding new ways to expand my use of the app after four years of daily use, just speaks volumes to the usefulness of this app.

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I find I rely on it more and more and get more utility out of it as time passes. Often learning about features that were there all the time. It was good to do it slow and steady though in my view. Basically it is one of the main reasons I am on Mac really now. In my own mind it is ‘part’ of Mac as it were if that makes sense.

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A tripod mount for the device might come in handy here.

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