I hate to be rude or seem like I’m rushing the wizards. None the less I have delayed several projects waiting on the new DevonThink or DevonThink Pro versions. Which have lead to holding off on various purchases which have lead to holding off on other projects… blah blah blah… Can you just give me a hint or ROUGH estimate when both will be available and the differences between the two?? Things a falling apart at the seams here, I need to make a few plans. If it’s not possible to give an estimate I fully understand.
Thank you for your time and consideration. Also thank you for your excellent craftsmanship.
A new version of DEVONthink is due on tuesday, DEVONthink Professional shortly afterwards. But, if you want to have a look at the latest beta of DEVONthink Pro, please drop me an e-mail.
Concerning the differences between the two edition: Just have a look at these two pages on our website:
So does making DT (PE and Pro) ready for Tiger mean making DT contents available to searches made through the Spotlight menu? Does it involve any use of Spotlight in DT itself?
To explain…
As I understand it, system-wide Spotlight searches can only return whole files. DT currently keeps all its data in monolithic database files, so individual DT documents wouldn’t show up in Spotlight searches. Are you somehow making DT content visible to Spotlight?
Also, I’ve thought before that it would be cool if DT would add a feature so that searches performed inside of DT in the normal DT way would also query Spotlight in parallel. That way, relevant information elsewhere on your computer – such as in Mail – would show up in searches. DT could perhaps display the search results in two lists – one for DT content and one for Spotlight results – or it might show all results in one list with external, Spotlight-found files marked by a special icon or color or something. Ideally, any useful external files could be quickly imported into DT from that search-results list through a contextual menu item or something (at least for file types that have import filters). This would be a killer feature to me. And since Spotlight apparently returns results so quickly, the performance hit would be minimal.
No, it means adapting the code to all the changes (and new bugs!) of Tiger. Also, DT will use the new PDFKit and WebKit to handle PDFs and web archives better. E.g. DT PE 1.9.3 will already be able to archive web pages completely with all images on Mac OS X 10.3.9 (which already contains the new WebKit).
No, due to the limited way Spotlight works, this is currently not possible. We’ll change the database structure with version 2.0, and then Spotlight will also return documents stored in DT.
Thanks for the quick reply! Those changes sound promising, and I can understand why changing the database structure to work with Spotlight will wait until 2.0 …
So does using PDFkit mean that we’ll be able to annotate PDFs inside of DT, which is a feature of the new PDFkit? That’d be a killer feature. Also, I read that the new Webkit allows for simple WYSIWYG editing of html files … will this be implemented in DT? Being able to make simple changes to captured webpages – bolding, highlighting, etc – without having to go into raw html text-editing mode would be a powerful way to effectively annotate webpages.
Will these newer versions require tiger? That’s fine by me, since I plan to upgrade to Tiger asap, but some users may want to know.
Looking forward to the updates! And especially to the Pro version, which I will almost certainly buy (assuming it comes out sometime this year )
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