Hi, b.3. No offense taken. I am a very heavy database user. I’m not one of the developers. But in fact we do listen to user comments and there are plans for a future major upgrade that will take into account a great many issues raised by users.
The current database structure and it’s backward compatibility with OS X 10.3.9 make Spotlight indexing rather impractical. Spotlight cannot index the text-based content of the ‘body’ of the current database. Of course, Spotlight can and does index the external files associated with Index-capture of Finder files, but that’s not very useful integration with the database itself. Those limitations will disappear in the future, with a revised database structure.
The current strengths of the database design, including scalability, speed, management of a variety of file types and AI assistance will be maintained and extended. The large scripting dictionary, which allows power users to customize many routines for their own needs, will be retained as well. The power and speed of search queries will be extended (take a look at the query operators in DEVONagent as an example).
The developers are considering useful approaches to user features such as tagging, and to annotation of documents regardless of the file type.
Attention is being given to making the introduction to powerful information management as painless and intuitive as possible, especially for new users. This focus will also extend to the overviews and feature illustrations in the DEVONacademy.
But the DEVONthink applications will not be Yojimbo, Papers, Yep or EagleFiler. The focus of DEVONtechnologies is to make their applications the most powerful and useful information management applications in the Mac marketplace. User comments and criticisms are welcomed.
As a heavy user of my databases, I’m looking forward to the future major upgrade myself.
But in my role in support services I often suggest how various user problems or questions can be addressed in the current applications. Precisely because DT Pro is a deep and rich application, when I need to so something for which there’s not an immediately obvious approach, I’ll try to figure out a workaround or kludge to accomplish my objective – and so I’ll often respond to a user’s question with an illustration of how I was able to do something similar. I’ll often take a brute force approach, using just the currently available commands in the menu or contextual menu options.
Example. A user had created a database by Indexing files from the Finder. Now he wants to convert that database to an Imported (self-contained) database. So I suggested that he simply select and export as files and folders the entire content of the database. Then create a new, empty database and Import all of the exported material into it. That works. That’s a semi-manual procedure and can be completed in just a few minutes.
Christian Grunenberg, the CTO of DEVONtechnologies, then gave an even better response, which we should post among useful script examples. Christian responded with a script that will do the job automatically, requiring the user only to invoke the script. That will also take a little while, but the user is freed to do something else while the script is doing its magic.
Example: Long ago, I found it irritating that, when I’m viewing a long document and decide to click on the See Also button to look at possibly related documents, I lose my scrolling position on returning to the original document. I found a kludge, which is to open two views of the document and perform the See Also routine on a second view of the document. A bit awkward, but it works. A better solution will be in a future version of the application, perhaps using tabbed documents.
When I make a suggestion like that, I’m not denying that losing the scrolling position is a major irritation and there should be a better way. I’m just suggesting that some existing tools exist to mitigate the irritation in the short term. 
Can I make “attached” notes and comments about a document I’m reading, possibly including hyperlinks to other documents or notes, without messing up the original document and regardless of the file type of the original document? Sure. I’ve got a kludge to do just that. I expect a future upgrade will provide a more elegant solution, but I don’t have to wait. And those notes and comments will still be available and useful even after the more elegant solution emerges.
I did a lot of bench research years ago, including the early days of molecular biology. For many research needs, there was no pre-existing lab equipment available to order from a catalog. One often had to design and build equipment from readily available materials at a local hardware store, grocery store and electrical hobby shop. Want to do electrophoresis and thin film chromatography? Accurately calculate the density of the protein coat of a bacteriophage? Sure. Use what’s lying around or build it. Successful kludges were often a major part of the fun of doing research, and often required dropping preconceptions and figuring out what could be done with available tools and materials. I think that will always be a characteristic of interesting research. Sure, some of the methodologies we developed are now part of the standard literature, and one can order off the shelf equipment we had to design and build. But there will always remain a ‘bleeding edge’ where one has to use kludges, new and sometimes awkward ways of using what’s available…
DEVONthink Pro can and will see major improvements. But what I like about it is that it’s rich enough that I can do things with it that I can’t do with other software. Can all the possible ways to do things be documented? No, I’ve been amazed by the wide range of things users do with their databases. The online Help and the user documentation describe the available features and commands. DEVONacademy pages – sample databases, tutorials and movies – were created to illustrate uses of some of those features and commands.
But a law office will use DEVONthink Pro Office quite differently than will a journalist, a medical researcher or a writer of novels. What they share in common is the need to manage document collections and mine and analyze information.
