Status of current version

Overall, it most certainly isn’t, e.g. they just released another DEVONagent beta a few days ago. Try Ironic Software if you want glacial paced development. :wink:

Have you replicated any items into the Mobile Sync group as suggested by the read me?

I have not. And I don’t intend to. I don’t need to replicate. I got loads of space… and am looking forward to syncing my database. As I said elsewhere why would I subset a database? I don’t subset my OmniFocus stuff, I don’t subset my music library or my books. Why would/does DevonThink need to be different? I appreciate the option to subset but I don’t need it. Now either you sync or you don’t and it seems to me you don’t sync, you allow some items to be set aside to be copied.

Now don’t get me started on DevonAgent… Art it maybe… but… :confused:

That may be true, but if you want your data to show up on the iPad, it needs to be in the desktop Mobile Sync group.

Katherine

It sounds like it’s not the software, but it’s user’s mis-understanding of the setup? I’m still confused as to how it works based on what I’ve read.

Maybe a quick addition to the DEVONacademy of a video showing how to set up the desktop Sync Folder and how a final sync looks on the iPhone would eliminate a lot of the confusion/frustrations. A 5 minute (or less) video can be much more informative that a written explanation for many users.

It’s a simple procedure to sync an entire database to your mobile device. Just select the database content at the Home level of the database, and replicate it to the Mobile Sync group.

I rarely want to sync an entire database. I manage more than 250,000 documents among a number of databases. They wouldn’t fit on my 64 GB iPads or Touch, even if I didn’t include portions of my music, video and photo libraries. (For that matter, I couldn’t fit all of them, along with other stuff that I want, on the 256 GB SSD in my MacBook Air.)

My video collection wouldn’t fit on my mobile devices if I synced all of them (and nothing else). Fortunately, iTunes lets me automatically sync just a subset. My music collections would use too much space if I synced all of them to my mobile devices, so I settle for a subset, as I do also for my photo collections.

I love the iPad. I spend overall more time using an iPad than a Mac, as it is so light and convenient to carry around and to use for email, Web browsing and reading. I love DEVONthink To Go as a companion to my DT Pro Office databases. When I’m working on a project I sync references and notes from my Mac databases to the iPad. On the iPad I can add notes, and add bookmarks and HTML documents using Bookmarklets – and sync those additions back to the Mac databases.

Steve Jobs calls the iPad magical, and I agree. But its hardware resources have a fraction of the power of a current Mac, and iOS is a subset of OS X that lacks a great many important features of OS X on the Mac – AppleScript, Quick Look, rich text, Services and literally hundreds of others. The lack of Quick Look plugins means that some document filetypes that can be read in DEVONthink on the Mac cannot be displayed in DEVONthink To Go. Fortunately, there are often other apps capable of rendering those documents, and iOS allows one to send a document to another app for reading.

In sum, an iOS device cannot do everything that a Mac can do, nor can DEVONthink To Go do everything that a DEVONthink application (or even DEVONnote) can do. When I’m doing heavy lifting work on my document collections I move to the Mac, where my DEVONthink application (DTPO) provides wonderful tools and assistants for organizing the content, searching, collecting as smart groups, and suggesting related documents (I’m a great fan of See Also).

I mostly sync only parts of my databases, but I have synced the contents of one entire database to my iPad. I just moved all the content into the sync group. Any advantage to replicating it instead?

Thanks,

Karen

Bill, do you–or does anyone else–have a sense of the maximum effective size of a database on the iPad?

So it not that there are sync issues, rather people having issues don’t understand how to set it up? That’s what I’m hearing in the above comment.

I’m still not clear on how to set it up. I haven’t bought it yet and really would like to see something on DEVONacademy in the form of a video demo showing it in action.

That’s fine for your situation, but we all use DTPO (and other versions) in our own way. I, along with others, are just looking for a simple (visual) tutorial on how to setup syncing. Mine is strictly a ‘scanned documents’ database using my ScanSnap S300M along with some web-archives of web pages and text notes. I don’t annotate my documents, I’ve got about 2 GB of documents that would fit on my phone with no issues.

I just want it to sync reliably so I can access my desktop (laptop) data “On The Go”. I don’t need DTTG to allow me to write a manuscript with footnotes and bibliography, just let me see my documents that are on my desktop in DTPO.

And sync reliably.

In summary, there are zero sync issues with v1.x, just a poor understanding of how to set it up? If I bought it and set it up “correctly”, it will sync fine? Guaranteed?

The sync setup is not as complicated as it is being made out to be. There is no need for videos, tutorials, etc., just move or replicate the groups/documents that you want to sync to the Sync group. Then initiate the sync in DEVONthink To Go and select the databases that you want to sync.

If you have ever replicated groups/documents in DEVONthink Mac, then you already know how to do this. If not, the DEVONthink Mac manuals cover this in detail.

I would say that there definitely are issues in how people have set up syncing. Once those are resolved, there might be issues in the software itself. But until syncing is set up correctly, there’s no way to tell.

I agree with Greg, though. It’s really not that hard, and is adequately explained in the DTTG help file. If people won’t read that file, they probably won’t watch video tutorials either.

Katherine

I haven’t had any problems with syncing and DTTG, at least not with the current version. I’ve had problems with the Global Inbox and it wouldn’t delete things after I moved them to their appropriate place using the desktop. I’m not sure if that’s still a problem, but at least I can delete things from the Global Inbox (which I couldn’t seem to do before).

On the whole, I’m fairly happy with DTTG. Smart Folders, Tag support, and PDF annotation would be nice, but the search function works reasonably well and I mainly want DTTG as a portable reference.

Syncing is somewhat unintuitive, as I’d rather select something and right click/select a menu item to sync and have it indicated as being synced with a badge on the item’s icon.

Oh, I didn’t know that DTTG had Textexpander support until I looked here so something in the description on the App Store (and elsewhere) might be a good idea. Having that support means that it’s much easier to work with text.

The main reason is that an average DEVONthink database is between one and 20 gigabytes. Not everyone wants to sync all 20 GB to their iPads. And the solution comes from the times when iPhones had 8 GB of disk space.

Eric.

NO. Even when set up properly DTTG is flakey at best for sync and for some folks just flat does NOT work at all.

I disagree with OogleM that when properly set up, sync to and from DTTG is flaky. I sync back and forth several times a week, using 2 iPads synced to different sets of databases on different Macs. Note: DTTG cannot be used to move content between Macs. Rather, data can be sent back and forth only between an iOS device and the Mac to which it has been paired. Of course, one can choose to pair to a different Mac, in which case any data from a different Mac will be cleared in preparation for Sync to the new Mac.

I do agree with OogleM that some have difficulty getting sync to work, and will add that there may be some Macs with software or hardware configurations that cause complications.

Example: A friend who lives about 20 miles from me had just received his new iPad 2. He installed DTTG and tried to initiate Sync. We exchanged a series of emails in which I suggested procedures to try. No joy.

I invited him to bring his new iPad along and I would sync to it a database from one of my Macs. To illustrate the procedure I set up a new network on one of my Macs, selected content by moving a moderately sized database into its Mobile Sync group, set his iPad to use the Mac’s WiFi network and initiated Sync on his iPad. As I expected, instant success.

He went home, grabbed one of his Macs and had instant success.

However, he then reported that he was unable to pair the iPad and Sync to a Mini that was connected by Ethernet to his router, even when switching to a new network created by the Mac Mini. We haven’t tried disconnecting the Ethernet cable and restarting the Mini, but I suspect that would work.