DTPO is one of the applications that I happily relied on in sharing databases between home and office. While I think the improvements in DTPO2 are really good, the limitation of DTPO2 to Mac OS 10.5+ has proved to be an impediment to this. At work I’m under a very intellectually challenged IT regime, the U.S. Navy, which is Mac hostile. However, I was fortunate enough to get a Mac G4 excessed from our graphics department but it is limited to Mac OS 10.4.
Since DTPO2 came out I’ve been trying to get it to play nice with DTPO1 at work without much success. DTPO1 doesn’t recognize DTPO2’s databases and DTPO2 converts those of DTPO1. I tried exporting files and folders and then indexing them in both versions, creating one lightweight database for each version, first in DTPO2, then in DTPO1.
While this takes away some information management functionality it avoids duplicating gigabytes of information and the difficulties of synching two versions of the same databases.
Then, when I tried to open an article in the DTPO2 I got a “File Missing” message even though nothing was moved, just indexed. Apparently DTPO1 overwrites the “DEVONtech_storage” files and DTPO2 can’t read the DTPO1 versions. Re-indexing in DTPO2 didn’t help until I deleted all the DTPO1 DEVONtech_storage files (which also lost the URLs from clippings).
So I have a couple of questions:
- Is there a better way to share databases/source files between the two versions that I might be missing?
While I appreciate that desire of the developers to design to the latest and greatest OS to add features I was disappointed to see no provisions for some degree of cross-version database compatibility or, alternatively, a Mac OS 10.4- capability with a somewhat reduced feature set. So…
- Is there a way to add some degree of cross-version compatibility, perhaps through the DEVONtech_storage files?
At this point I would just like to be able to use DTPO2 at home to collect and manage information and DTPO1 at work to access it. Otherwise, it looks like I may have to go back to DTPO1.