Corporate greed (buy and dismantle), mismanagement, or short-sightedness which kills a product. This is a risk of large corporations.
Death of the developer, who is the only holder of the source code (or only one who understands it). This is a risk of genius software developers who have done no succession planning. (E.g. Annotation Edit, developed by a wonderful German man who suddenly passed away, forcing subtitlers and captioners worldwide to switch to Windows software as they gradually discovered the horrible news . Hopefully Mark Bernstein has a succession plan for Eastgate Systems!)
Based on @eboehnisch ās reply, Iām satisfied that the DT āteamā is able to survive the death of one developer.
As a user of DT over 20 years now, I can say that it has outlasted many other applications, including ones by big companies that would have seemed good bets for longevity at the time (i.e. Aperture) ā as has been pointed out above. In fact, because it is the core app of the company (unlike Aperture was with Apple) it is not as likely to get shut down as with a big company where it is just part of larger portfolio of apps and services.
The DT team, though small, is not just a one man company and never has been, so that is good. Also, most importantly, they have built in excellent Export functionality which makes it easy to get all your data out of DT. True, none of the special features of DT can be exported, but all your data can be, and that is a huge feature which bodes well in case of future extinction of the app.
All this has been said above but I just wanted to chime in as a long time user that as far as software goes, it has been remarkably stable and dependable for a long time so far, and hopefully for many more years to come.
Iāve been using DT regularly for approximaely 10 years 6 months. As it has matured and aged, so have I. (not so sure about the mature!) Along with Things, DTs one of the longest apps of its type for which Iāve been and want to be a loyal customer.
I had intended to use DT for my law library but apart from indexing the pdfs, thousands of them,āIāve shelved that idea, not because DT4 isnāt up tp the task, on the contrary, but Iāve had a private access website developed to my requirements which not only makes it easier to understand how to use it but is for me better than DT To Go which Iāve never got the hang of despite having the DTTG app. ( i shall also be ditching Air Table once iāve transferred all the info to my website, AT has become too slow for my liking, nothing to do with broadband speed, everything to do with the. number of records in my database.) Another DT product I use regularly is DevonAgent Pro. This ātinyāapp is so powerful that Iād need to spend/waste hours scouring the web for the individual sites whenever I want information.
As for WordService, thatās a daily usage.
I admire what DT has achieved and in my small way continue to be a loyal supporter, in the expectancy that it will outlive me.
Of course knowing or having confidence in the future plans of an app in which one has invested a lot of time and effort is important. There are others and if and when DT decided to take a breather and break from the real world, then likely another or others would pop up and take over.
Count me in also!!! Ruined the web for me ā previously, it was so easy to stay on top of A LOT of infoā¦. They wanted us to use G+ insteadā¦. That was a nightmare.
Another attorney here ā this is why I have a third seat for DT running on a MacBook Airā¦. It gets a couple reference libraries synced to it. DT4 adding chat (I did need more context window) has obviated the need I had for a chroma database. I find DTTG to be excellent for on the go capture and for single item retrieval in a pinch. At work, there is a separate DT license for client matters, in which we have approximately 40k PDFs of stuff in one database that we never fully coded, but DT is totally happy to produce immediate search results and always able to pop up relevant hits.
I have been using DevonAgent all along (that app helped me run an entire trademark litigation survey in a week by myself, btw) and instead of having a local AI model go out and search, I had supergrok write a small python tool that feeds the DevonAgent results to a local model. Itās janky yet as far as the intermediate script goes, but I get all the DA results and pre-analysis, and can then have the model verify and suggest searches I might use to verify concepts. That part is handy. Also, having the model validate vocabulary in domains Iām not familiar with, or summarize specialized vocabulary from a narrow topic is insanely helpful, but the initial search and destroy mission is trusted to DevonAgentā¦ itās just so good.
I think thatās the issue raised above where people ask what theyād do if DT went awayā¦. Iād cry. DT has saved so much monkey work, and made it so easy to work with data in so many waysā¦. Itās not that it couldnāt be done without, itās that itād be a huge pain and time suck otherwise!!!
@mog have you looked at tinderbox for things? Its ability to add unlimited metadata, have structured data templates, links, and run calculations on that stuff (say to apply court rules for filing dates, etc) is way more robust than airtable could getā¦. Granted, tinderbox has a huge learning curve because it is also un-opinionated but it may be able to supply the structured data side of law practice for you that does seem tough to accomplish from DT.
Agreed - I would be sorely disappointed if Devonthink were to disappear.
Regarding the original question of what else could/would one use, I believe EagleFiler is the next-best alternative that currently exists which performs at least the basic tasks that Devonthink does. Plus it supports Applescript so customization is possible.
There are a huge number of features that Devonthink has which EagleFiler does not, and Devonthink is widening that feature gap regularly. So I see no risk of Eaglefiler taking Devonthinkās user-base as long as Devonthink exists.
But if for some reason Devonthink were to disappear, my initial workaround - and likely that of many others - would be to use EagleFiler for the features it has and then figure out other solutions or scripted integrations for the missing features (most notably OCR and AI).
I have to agree with this. Weād lose out on a lot of the secret sauce DEVONthink brings to the table, but at least having a Swiss Army knife for file manipulation and and coding, itās like one of the only other creatures near this class. Way back in the 90s PCDOCs and certain DMS software was heading in this direction, but they never really got there imho. In the windows world today, outside of some DMS that would be grossly overpriced and under-capable, thereās nothing like this. Iāve seen a lot of LLM based attempts to get into this world, but they use the LLM to ācheatā featuresā¦. I digress, and could go on for a decade on this whole idea, and Iād be waxing on XEROX parc concepts and old ideas that should be driving our concepts of digital information but arenāt even faint glimpses in the market ā¦. LOL
The closest I ever saw in Windows was askSam - Back in 2008 or so I was pondering whether DT2 vs AskSam better met my needs. Then suddenly one day the software just vanished with no warning.
Oh my word, this gave me flashbacks of telnet, gopher, usenet, and my Oscar the Grouch system extension and the Star Trek screen saver!!! LOL
I miss Usenet and sending steg messages in images out in the open! And gopher!!! I used to run a machine just to keep my IRC bots to hold and mod channels for me ā those were the fun days!!!
So if you know that, why are you asking! even Apple could ceased to exist tomorrow. What you should really think about is your exist strategy, in an event that you need to.
Devonthink fits my idea of practically future proof.
If Devonthink were to evaporate as a company tomorrow, individual copies would continue to run.
First, regain some tenuous grip on sanity in the wake of the apocalypse.
Then, export to files and folders to preserve hierarchy and export metadata to JSON to get tags, etc.
At that point, depending on where I was going with the documents, Iād spend a little time with scripting. Come to think of it, this is also an argument for Markdown over RTF. I could add tags from the JSON as YAML frontmatter in Markdown files.
Thatās future proof enough. Iām not trapped. If Iām a little stuck in Devonthink, itās like Hotel California. Iām a prisoner here of my own device.
Thank you for that. Iāve just looked at Tinderbox site and listened to user comments on the video? Obviously i havenāt trialled it, but on the face of it not for me. I prefer words to shapes and re-arranging my ideas into a structure isnāt really me.
Hereās where DT wins for me. A couple of weeks ago I needed to find the source of a phrase - two words - in some caselaw where unusually for me I hadnāt made a note of the case name. First, I searched where I thought it was, but no. Next using Spotlight and waded through the numerous possibilities but no. That took a couple of hours. Next. morning, I entered the.phrase in DTās search and āinstantlyā found it. Iād forgotten how powerful DTās search is.
Iām willing to bet anyone 100 darseks that, if and when the day comes, some clever person will write a script or other bit of code to automate the conversion of all of your DEVONthink data to any of a variety of other formats.
. Hopefully Mark Bernstein has a succession plan for Eastgate Systems!)
