There are several things I like about the Papers screen, notably tabbed document windows and the notes field to the right side of the screen. (I’ve been using a very similar screen setup for years, sizing and placing the Info panel to the right of my document and view windows so that I can always make notes in the Comment field and use other features, such as toggling State, launching Path or URL and so forth.)
I would, however, be disappointed if this were the only view window available in DT Pro. For example, I prefer the Vertical Split view when I’m reading or editing a displayed document, because I can see more of it without scrolling. And I like to have subsets of view windows available, e.g. for a project I’m working on. There are times when the Icon view is useful, especially for choosing graphics and photos related to a project.
There are elements in Papers that are very specific to the sources of material for which it is designed. PubMed ‘pre-packages’ author, title and abstract metadata, but the vast majority of sources DT Pro users might access do not do that in a standardized way. Perhaps DT Pro might capture such information from some sites and depend on the user to supply the metadata manually for other sources. Because the next major update will include metadata enhancements, that’s a good area for discussion. For scientists and academics, metadata such as Author and Journal are very important, but for many other users they are not very important; in my databases I can already identify the journal or other source of most of my content by a search of URL data, and likewise for authors (very precise searches of that kind will be possible in the next major update). The metadata associated with documents, including user tagging, will definitely receive developer attention in DT Pro “next version”.
The right pane of the Papers view is obviously rich text instead of the current plain text in DT Pro. Disadvantages of plain text are that one cannot establish hyperlinks (static or Wiki) in the Comment field, use character formatting or place a graphic element into it. So a rich text notes panel attached to every document would be something I would like to see. But I would like to retain the other information that’s currently in the Info panel, as well. I make a lot of use of that information and quick launching via URL or Path buttons.
I’ve played with Papers. There are a lot of things I do like about it. But as it happens I often do searches that include PubMed as a resource, and I find DT Pro and DEVONagent much more powerful than Papers, both for finding and organizing reference materials and for analyzing them in the database.
But then I’m an experienced user and have found a lot of tricks that are available in DT Pro – which has a lot of features that aren’t available in Papers – but may not be immediately ‘seen’ by the novice.
For example, I used to complain that when I press the See Also button on a document I’m viewing, I lose my scrolling position. No longer. Kludge: select the document in a view window. Now also open the same document by double-clicking on its Name. Read the document in its own window, scrolling down as you go. To check for possibly related documents using See Also, do that in the view window. Result: no loss of scrolling position in the document window. But another approach – perhaps tabbed windows, perhaps something else – can prevent the problem of losing scroll position in the first place.
There are many, many things that one can do with DT Pro (and its sister, DEVONagent) that can’t be done in Papers. Some of those things are obvious to new users, some are not. The challenge is to make the interface more obvious and usable. But don’t expect a ‘pretty’ or ‘fancy’ interface, as such an approach would detract from the emphasis on power and flexibility that has been the objective from the first incarnation of DEVONthink. The appearance of Papers is quite simple and straightforward, which is good.
