Being able to store “everything” in its database is a major advantage DT has for me over others apps like HBN. That way I’m free to save and organize data in DT without any dependencies on external file/folder organization.
One HBN feature I like is that its files can behave like folders, containing other files/folders. I wish DT documents could have “subdocuments” instead of having to explicitly create a parent group to encapsulate related documents. As I’ve written before, DT tends to impose its hierarchical group/document structure in ways I’m not always comfortable with. And I also like HBN’s Library, which DT only approximates with its limited History window.
A certain combination of things DT does reasonably well have made it more generally useful for me than other apps which may be superior at doing a limited number of more specific things. And when DT is insufficient in some way (e.g. as a news reader) it can usually be integrated with an app I prefer (e.g. NNW) quite easily.
in reply to psmyth: if you use your computer the way you say you do it never runs very quickly and is always paging between applications.
so you don’t notice any particular slowdown with DEVONthink.
i’ve had MacMini’s, G4 400’s, DP 500 and DP 1.25 with HW raid, as well as a full gamut of Powerbooks over the last few years.
until you load them up with memory all of them are slow under OS X, especially switching between applications.
and not just DEVONthink
on the other hand, a DP tower with hardware raid and 2GB of memory is not so bad with DEVONthink. you start to stop to notice the lag as the memory paging happens so fast on the ultrafast drive, that DEVONthink starts to behave almost as well as Macjournal.
i don’t know why everyone is so keen to cripple their text databases with images and PDF’s.
for the record, my DEVONthink database contains over 4000 items, no images, no PDF’s and is only 22.5 MB and twice a year gets exported and reimported for reasons of good health.
I find switching between apps essentially instantaneous. I get no spinning beachball when switching in or out of DT. The only application where I experience delays of this type is in Omnis Studio which is very memory intensive and the current version I’m developing in is an early beta.
‘ronsard’:
I am not crippling ‘my text database’ with images and PDF’s as you put it. I have a research database which links together a whole host of different items including photos, pdf’s, notes, comments etc. For me that is a significant part of the advantage of using DT in the first place. Is it not a bit arrogant to be dismissive of the way other people use a product just because it differs from your own?
You clearly find that you only need to store text notes and you’ve clearly decided that Hog Bay Notebook is the best choice for you, just don’t expect everyone else to follow suit.
I still think that there is something else causing your problem. My database is 20 times the size of yours and running on older slower hardware with a quarter the memory without the problems you describe. Others have made similar comments. I find it hard to believe that a 22.5 Mb database is casuing the problems you describe on the hardware you’re using.
i would be delighted to be wrong about DEVONthink. as one of the original purchasers of the application (i’ve owned DEVONthink since about 3 years now), i have been in from the beginning.
i have done all of the following:
full export of my database and reimport (manual)
rebuild database.
backup and optimise.
verify and repair.
(for the record, just starting up DEVONthink now created +1k of pageouts)
the only doubtful files in my database are a bunch of old word documents that i’m not even sure where they are or how well they came in. i think i ended up converting them to rtf before importing them as they wouldn’t come in otherwise.
how does one go about cleaning house. i would like to clear up decisively if the problem is indeed with my database and not with the application.
Okay: Please remove this post, then, for those of us on powerbooks (15" GB) who not only find DevonThink perfectly speedy. . .but who know Hog Bay and any other of the perfectly nifty “notebook” apps to be a whole other ball of wax. You want a notebook, great! Hog Bay is great!
DEVONThink is something deeper. . .but I think I’ll let De Ville tell the tech part!
zozo219, that’s exactly my point. DEVONthink because of its demands on one’s system resources, effectively becomes the heart of your computing life. I would never recommend DEVONthink to a new user as the purchase of DEVONthink entails adding 512MB for DT alone. Even that is not the whole story, as paging in and out of DT is a huge slow down.
It’s great to be back with a snappy notebook application with a great search function - which is Hog Bay Notebook. Granted DT got there first with finder-like organisation and search capabilities.
In the quest to pander to powerusers like deVille et co., DT has never succeeded in an agile tool. I will make my point again. DT is like a Mac truck. I don’t need or want a Mac truck in my computer to take care of note taking and outlines.
By the same token, I won’t run Microsoft Word (well I will sometimes to rescue some advanced formatting from clients on windows PC’s) - as it takes up about 10% of one’s processor just as the base line for having the application open.
Since I’ve stopped running DT (and what use is a notebook application if one can’t keep it running all the time), my computer (2 GB) show about half of its memory free. When DT was open all the time, usually RAM was down to the quarter. This leaves me a lot more RAM for opening up Photoshop or Final Cut Pro for visual work.
When I tab into Hog Bay Notebook and back out again, I experience almost no slowdown in work process. Just what I want from a notebook.With DT, there was always five or ten seconds of background paging before some kind of normal response time from the interface unless I had recently rebooted (all the RAM is free, no paging).
So I repeat - unless you are working with PDF’s and images within your DT file, you can save a lot of system resources and have a much snappier computer by switching to Hog Bay Notebook for your note and outlining tasks.
I will keep DT around now to create a DB of all the PDF documentation/white papers I have. I don’t even want those in my notebook file slowing down my note taking and searching my own notes.
So it’s not that DT doesn’t have its uses. It’s just that as a pure notebook, there are quicker choices that work faster. And speed is an essential quality in a core notebook.
ronsard, after reviewing your posts in this thread I’ve been considering three explanatory hypotheses:
[1] You are trolling this forum
[2] You just “don’t get it”
[3] Both of the above
I’ve finally settled on hypothesis [3].
Hog Bay is a nice little outliner/notebook. I use a couple of outliner/notebook applications myself. I’ve looked at several such applications, and I don’t use Hog Bay, although I could live with it as a partial replacement for one of the notebooks that I do use.
Hog Bay is intended to organize and search a collection of text files. It can link to other file types such as PDF, but it can’t read them. Then it can search and find text strings contained it the collection of notes. And that’s all it can do. If I want to find a phone number, that’s great. But if I want to think about information in my collection, Hog Bay isn’t very helpful.
How big should a Hog Bay notebook be? According to users on their forum, 60 MB seems to be a practical limit. That’s nice. But my DT database contains hundreds and hundreds of megabytes of text. Could Hog Bay match DT’s search speeds for my collection? No way.
I use notebooks for these purposes:
[1] To hold transitory information that I don’t want to put in my DT database. Hog Bay could do that for me.
[2] To lay out and draft the structure of a project report. Hog Bay could do that, but not as well as my favorite notebook.
[3] To communicate back and forth with DEVONthink while I’m doing drafts and layouts. Hog Bay could do that, but not as well as my favorite notebook. (Actually, I’m beginning to use DEVONnote as my notebook for such purposes.)
[3] As a publisher of final output for some of my project reports via PDF and/or HTML output. Hog Bay doesn’t cut that for me.
This isn’t meant to be a putdown of Hog Bay, which does what it is designed to do very well. It doesn’t have many resources, and doesn’t use much RAM or CPU.
DEVONthink is an entirely different paradigm for storing, managing, searching and mining information.
[1] DT can manage very large databases, very much larger than any outliner/notebook.
[2] DT can read the text content of many more file types, and can handle many image file types.
[3] DT can search large databases very quickly.
[4] DT (especially in conjunction with DEVONagent) is unparalleled as a Web research and information tool, with many facilities to aid the user.
[5] DT has artificial intelligence features to assist the user in classification of new content and, remarkably, to identify content that may be related to a viewed document. While resource intensive, these features, such as See Also are incredibly useful to the user and are not available in the simple outliner/notebook applications (except, of course, for DEVONnote!).
[6] I won’t take the time here to list the many thoughtful details added by DT’s developers to simplify the user’s experience in working with what is, in fact, a very deep and rich application that, for many purposes, can replace a team of research assistants.
Bottom line: Yes, DEVONthink uses more computer resource than does Hog Bay (although ronsard’s claim is somewhat exaggerated). But those computer resources are much cheaper than one’s time, if the object is to truly mine and use the information contained in a database. An application with capabilities similar to Hog Bay’s could have run on the original Macintosh. An application with capabilities like DEVONthink’s could not – which justifies, in my opinion, the existence of OS X and modern Macs.
I have been a DEVONthink user from nigh-on the beginning (three years).
I have always liked the application but cursed how bulky and unwieldy it was.
Until HB Notebook 3, hélas, there was nothing lighter that could replace DEVONthink as a searchable notebook application under Mac OS X.
Now there is.
I am sure there are a lot of people using DT - like me - who are not happy about DT’s hoarding of system resources (let’s start with the person who started this thread) - and would be happy to know of a lightweight replacement.
While I understand that your particular use of DEVONthink does require DT, I don’t think that is any reason to be condescending, pretentious or insulting to me.
I’m just sharing knowledge. If that offends you, the issue at stake is larger than my posts.
On a tangent, I don’t know why you couldn’t use Hog Bay Notebook to output PDF’s. Any application will do so in OS X.
On another tangent, I agree with you that HB Notebook type of applications could (almost) have run under a 68020 Mac. That is the spirit of original Macintosh coding (until about System 8-9). To try to use as little system resources to accomplish as much as possible.
Personally for me, it is worth a lot to me to have a notebook application which launches quickly and I can leave open all the time - even when I am running Photoshop and other graphics programs.
And frankly Monseiur de Ville, that is what a modern Mac and OS X is for - working efficiently with large media files in Photoshop, Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro or iMovie and iDVD.
I think it is quite a programming shame that either a word-processor or a notebook would require a hundred times the system resources of a Macintosh of 10 years ago (not to speak of an original Mac). And you can quote me on that.
Because I want a layout with TOC, well-structured sections and an index.
I’m generally in agreement here. I used to program on the Apple II, where the maxim was “Give me 64 KB RAM and I can rule the world.” Actually, though, DEVONthink’s program code is much more compact than several outliner/notebook apps that don’t have AI features and a host of DT’s other features.
I find no need to close DEVONthink while I’m doing graphics editing. But when I do video editing on my ancient TiBook, I close down everything except TextEdit, which I use to make notes in progress.
Now you’ve made my point exactly.
Photoshop is to Paint as DEVONthink is to Hog Bay. Thank you.
Perhaps you are a graphics artist, while I’m a writer using copious scientific and technical references. Perhaps you use Final Cut Pro to produce professional video, and I use DEVONthink to help me dig deeper into topics. You paint in images using very resource-intensive applications. I ‘paint’ in words, using DEVONthink to assist me in literature research. Vive la difference.
Bill articulated very well for me the difference between Hog Bay (which I use extensively, btw) and DT. It seems you both have your respective points to make and you have made them well. If you don’t like DT because it uses so many resources, etc., then don’t use it. It’s great you found something that works for you. I agree with Bill’s assessment, but then again, I have no speed problems or any other problems using DT and find its features unparalleled in any other program. Using DA and DT together, well, it just keeps getting better and better as I learn more about them.
I personally love Hog Bay for what it does and it is my notebook of choice over all others. And Bill likes other notebooks.
So, should be now get into an endless argument about why Hog Bay is better? Or Circus NB? Or some other notebook? Different strokes for different folks.
Sorry, but I check the forums of my favorite programs for useful info and usage tips each morning (especially with DT and DA which have high learning curves), and it can get a little frustrating to keep seeing these endless debates that kind of go nowhere after the first point is made. Trust me. You both stated your positions well and the points are well taken. People are very well informed about them both by now.
Hi, I’ve just downloaded V. 1.9.3, and the speed increase is quite considerable! Finally searching in the main search field (where DT starts searching immediately and adapts results as you type) is working well on my database (more than 11 Mio. words).
