Think vs. Pather finder or Pathfinder

DEVONthink Tips
1

With the new capabilities of panther and pathfinder to render documents in the finder window, has it occurred to other users that the relative utility of think is diminished?  Put differently, with mac os x 10.3, are some users who, like me, have used think primarily as a browsable and editable documents database so far, and who are now considering that the finder suffices or nearly so to replace it?

I can think of several advantages the finder has over DEVONthink for this application.  There are other things that think is good at, such as concordances and possibly searches (and, although I never got the database to learn the correct categorization of my various mathematics documents, I had often imagined that this feature could be very interesting if it did work for you.)

Regards,
Yon

2

Personally I don’t think there’s any (!) improvement in Panther’s Finder - the same old bugs still there and the sidebar is (in my opinion) almost completely useless. Labels? I missed them during the Mac OS X Public Beta days but don’t need them anymore.

But to get back to your question - this probably depends on the way you’re using DT. It’s not an indexing utility or preview application (although some users use it that way) - it’s a knowledge base and information manager. And therefore the value remains unchanged (and will be even bigger with v1.7.6).

3

Hi Christian,

I acknowledge your remarks about DT being primarily a knowledge base application.  However, it seems natural to me that more knowledge base like functionality would be progressively integrated into these finder applications.  

I am imagining that a really revolutionary software could result if Devon ever got together with cocoatech, who write ‘pathfinder’, to build a fully finder-integrated knowledge base type application!  -What do you say??

Regarding the stability of the finder, I am interested to see how DT copes with organizing my enlarged database when I rebuild it.  

(Although I now have the 1.7.5 update of think, I have been reluctant to resume heavy use of the software, for fear that the new features that were added in this release might have created new problems for me.  However, if the release is solid, then with time I will undoubtedly gain confidence in it.)

Regards,
Yon

4

  1. A combination of Finder/Pathfinder and DT is a nice idea. Maybe an option in the future (currently there’s really no time at all for additional projects).

  2. Wait for v1.7.6 which will be much faster (importing of documents usually 2-4 times for example), uses less memory and creates smaller databases. Should be available next week. But if you’d like to have a beta - just let me know!

5

yeah, the new finder is oversold. nice to hear someone saying it in public.

i’m delighted that devontech’s changed its mind to put cross links in the next version. all the format stuff that’s been going into the last few updates - obviously they’ve been pleasing people who know about these things, but i haven’t understood a word of it. so - time to give writers some, at least for an update or two.