Readwise is a great piece of software that iterates quickly. What strikes me most about this feature is that it adapts to many of today’s in-APP content annotations, such as articles, and unifies these annotations into Readwise. After all, from the efficiency and experience of reading, must be directly from these apps to read and comment on the most convenient.
For the endless stream of these excellent online information processing APP, combined with my current use of several software, there are the following recommendations:
1 For the mobile phone in a variety of web page notes
I use Devonthink to capture these articles, but to read them, I still use some mobile apps and annotate them, and aggregate those annotations into an online application like Readwise.
2 Reading books (PDF format)
For a large number of books, Marginnote is Maybe by far the best （https://www.Marginnote.com/）. The advantage is
- whether it’s horizontal, vertical, scanned with mixed images, low-definition books, etc. , you can use the OCR function to extract the important parts, parse out the text, and make cards in whiteboard.
- after reading a book, you can create a mind map (each map node is made up of cards) by focusing on different chapters.
- you can easily see the frame of mind for reading a book in a whiteboard view, or you can combine and reorganize the reading notes (cards) , etc. .
Instead of reading a single PDF Book Document and annotating it on different pages in certain places, you’re likely to see one point as a reader, which is inconvenient for your association of ideas. But in the whiteboard view of Marginnote, what you see is a picture of a knowledge (annotation) framework that is useful for both memory and association of ideas.
That is to say, when you use Adobe Acrobat Reader to read a book and annotate it, the fragmentation and separation of annotations (knowledge notes) is too strong. Imagine opening a page with acrobat reader and seeing a comment that is a separate point of knowledge. This is not Ideas of the same era as the visual layout of whiteboards and cards, which is formed by Mind Mapping after reading a book.
Unfortunately, Marginnote has a lot of bugs that make me worry about its stability. although the Heptabase（ https://Heptabase.com） is growing fast, it’s still a long way from the Marginnote experience.
3 All kinds of video courses, audio interviews
In the era of rapid development, multimedia materials are becoming more and more popular, which is also the reason for the rapid development of TikTok. A large number of people prefer to watch videos to gain knowledge, which has led many media or educational institutions to produce a large number of video lessons.
But if you need to watch the whole video or listen to the audio to know the information contained in it, is undoubtedly outdated practice.
I prefer to put these videos or audio on something like Lark minutes（View Lark minutes ) . These videos or audio after uploading, can be automatically transcribed into text, and support the translation of multiple languages. Lark Minutes also offers a lot of video storage space. When the number of videos or audio clips exceeds 10,000 or more, I can search for keywords to locate a particular conversation timestamp in a particular video to be relatively accurate in locating the data.
4 A structured database of small projects (requiring online collaboration)
For some small project repositories, especially those with structured information that requires online collaboration, I use Notion.
5 Common notes to organize, summarize (Second Brain)
As a daily contact to learn knowledge and other notes, insights and so on, are organized into the Obsidian. For example, a discussion of an issue can include many personal insights, links, references, and updates. The advantage of Obsidian is not only that it’s fast and easy to edit on computer and phone (which is easier than Devonthink in my opinion) , but also that Obsidian documents can be indexed and searched on Devonthink.
6 Visual analysis and Carding of the whiteboard for the problem event
For the visual analysis of a complex problem or event, using online whiteboard software is very intuitive and in line with the human brain habits of thinking. At the moment, I use Miro (https://Miro.com/) to analyze things and draw pictures, which is really convenient. Similar software is whimsical, Heptabase, and so on. I also used the Heptabase analysis to comb through the issues and accumulate some knowledge.
To sum up, my own experience with software is that different software has its own distinct advantages in different scenarios, and the software that solves problems to the top in some of these areas also gets amazing valuations. Even Notion, Miro, and Airtable, which are highly valued in the industry, still don’t solve all the problems of scraping, reading, annotating, taking notes, searching, collaborating, and so on. For example, the Notion’s search function is a far cry from Devonthink’s.
In view of the fact that more of these materials will be stored in the cloud in the future, such as Lark minutes, Notion, Miro, Heptabase, readwise… Devonthink’s ability to search for local files is very powerful.It is recommended that cloud file searches for other apps be enhanced in devonagent and more in conjunction with Devonthink to maximize file information searches, that DT will be an indispensable step in the user information workflow.
I’ve purchased Devonagent Pro, and I’m hoping that DT will continue to enhance devonagent’s ability to search for data in various online databases, cloud drives, files in apps, and information within files (close to Devonthink’s ability to search for local files) , and automatically integrates search results.
- Mark
I also use Reader, but I tweaked my workflow to accommodate this and control it manually.
