I’m evaluating DevonThink Pro Office, and based on the launch time alone, I don’t think I’m going to buy it.
No app should take almost 2 minutes just to launch on a 2.26GHz MacBook Pro with over 5GB of free RAM and no other apps running.
Is it supposed to be this bad, or have I run into a bug?
My standard set of databases - more than 38,000 documents and about 39 million total words - opens in less than 20 seconds on my MacBook Air with 4 GB RAM.
Take a look at File > Database Properties for your database. What are the total number of items and the total word count for the database?
There’s barely anything in there — as I wrote, I just started evaluating it.
Total: 9, 596.9 KB.
Words: 330 unique, 715 total
However, I just noticed a countdown timer in the splash screen. It starts at 99 seconds, and the splash screen stays on until it gets to zero.
Do you really expect people evaluating your software to stare at a splash screen for 99 seconds every time they launch it? (Rhetorical question — of course you do, otherwise you wouldn’t have programmed it that way.)
May I respectfully suggest that this kind of behavior is likely to drive potential users away? I sure don’t like it!
Or multitask while it’s loading. 
If you run out of initial runtime in demo, you may request a 30-day trial extension in Help > Support Assistant.
Okay, here’s a reason why it’s VERY IMPORTANT to change that 99-second delay.
DevonTHINK just crashed on me. (I was using the beta2 release of the new scanner plugin.)
Now my workflow, which was interrupted by the crash, will be unnecessarily interrupted for another 99 seconds.
Can’t you reduce it to something reasonable, like 10 seconds?
You will be better off with the 30-day trial extension as suggested.
I found my 150 hour time period was being gobbled up even when I had quit the app. I switched to 30-day trial and I was pleased to find the annoying startup delay had gone as well.
I’d like to publicly thank bscott. It wasn’t clear to me that the 30-day trial disabled that stupid countdown timer.
I just requested the 30-day trial extension, and indeed that fixed the problem!
I’ve been comparing DEVONthink Pro Office to Yojimbo, and so far, I think I’m going to choose the former.
The reasons I like DTPO: It preserves all the original documents in their original formats, and makes it easy to find those files in the Finder. But I think the user interface stinks. I had to read the manual just to figure out how to add tags to documents.
The built-in scanning and OCR counts for a lot, too.
I think Yojimbo has a better (and better-looking) interface. With Yojimbo, I was able to hit the ground running, and haven’t yet consulted the manual once.
But Yojimbo lacks built-in scanning & OCR, and it keeps everything in a single monolithic database file. If I so much as add a tag to a file, Time Machine will back up the entire file again.
I do wish the DEVONthink team should hire Bruce Tognazzini of the Nielsen Norman Group to overhaul the UI. I’d pay $50 more if DTPO was easier to use.