I noticed on Macintouch today a link to a companion product for Devonthink called Ammonite (soma-zone.com/Ammonite/). This product helps to generate tag clouds. Does this product have Devontechnologies blessings?
Thanks for the tip.
How is Ammonite working for those who have tried it? It appears to be extremely slow and has crashed on me multiple times here. I don’t know if that’s just because my system is so old or if it’s a general issue with the app.
It hangs whenever a different database is selected in the app. Sometimes the hang resolves; usually it doesn’t. Nice UI, though. Much better concept than Tags View.
The author of this tool hasn’t informed us before releasing it to the public and therefore we were as surprised as you are 
Unfortunately the tool seems to be quite unreliable and slow, maybe the next release will be usable.
Ammonite is interesting more as a concept then a actual program, since the current version is buggy and tends to crash for me. I suppose I could live with it, but I really don’t want to start having to apply bandaids to DevonThink for features that I had the impression would be forthcoming with further releases (in particular a tags view mode).
One of the main reasons I use Devonthink is because it’s stable and able to deal with large document collections, it’s the reason I recommended it to my company and had them purchase it for me. When I start having to load it up with bandaids that create missing features and cause who knows what problems with overall stability, it’s a little annoying.
I am very much hoping now that work on getting the initial DevonThink To Go out is nearly done, and work on the next version of Devonagent in the same state, that a little more time would be taken with the flagship DevonThink itself to finetune it a little and add all the features that didn’t make the 2.0 release and add some of the most requested missing in action features, the top of my personal life being, smart groups, search a date range other than yesterday, today, last week, etc, how about Jan 2004 to May 2004, very simple things that are very common search criteria when searching for a series of documents.
This is the part where Bill posts a 92 step workaround to achieve the results I need 
No argument – I would enjoy a simple date range search.
But in the interim, I come up with my infamous kludges to accomplish tasks for which a clickable button doesn’t yet exist.
Perhaps that’s from my long-ago training in laboratory research, when the equipment (and techniques) to do something new didn’t exist. One had to figure out how to make do with what’s already in the lab, plus perhaps what could be picked up at the local hardware store on a budget of $15. You built your own Warburg apparatus, or disk electrophoresis gadget or whatever. Or you adapted a gadget used in sugar manufacture to help distinguish properties of closely related strains of a virus that had been separated by an ultracentrifuge.
Sorry about that. But given all the tools and gadgets already available in DEVONthink, I can’t resist figuring out how to use them to do something that wasn’t explicitly built into it – hopefully, in less than 92 steps. 
Certainly would be a useful/logical feature that now, having been requested years ago, seems long overdue. 
I appreciate where you’re coming from Bill and have learned quite a few tricks from your well thought out answers, I wanted to make sure you know I meant no disrespect. I too work around the lack of features that I need, but wanted to state that what I’d really like to see are better smart groups, with at least a flexible date-range search criteria, iTunes being the overall desired ‘gold standard’ for smart group features overall.
I was only trying to pre-empt a workaround, when really I’m asking for a very basic smart-group feature 
Hi,
just to add to the discussion: My use of Ammonite has been quite productive; it adds a simplicity (using and searching through tags) to DTP I missed beforehand.
I did experience some crashes… but the programmer of Ammonite has been quite helpful and is currently busy to work on the crash-data to improve the program.
I am happy to have spent the little amount to support the further development.
Regards,
Rolf
I agree. Helpful and responsive. Ammonite is still betaware, IMO, but heading in right direction and deserving of support from DT users.
Ammonite have released a new update today (v1.4.1) that makes very significant advances in speed – scanning database tags very rapidly – in comparison to earlier releases. I’m very pleased to see that Soma Zone is rapidly improving this utility.
I tried the 1.4.1 release today for the first time-don’t know how I overlooked it before nor how I missed korm’s update in this thread. The latest version is indeed vastly improved, so much so that I finally like it enough to keep it installed, and also pay for it. If you haven’t tried 1.4.1 because of poor performance with an earlier version, it deserves a second look.
Another update for Ammonite 1.5b1 adds some interesting support for date searching. The user can search on date added and date modified for the entire date range of the documents in the database. This is something that has been often requested for Smart Groups in DEVONthink. Note that in the 1.5b1 release there is a problem with the dates being truncated on US English systems and it has been reported and a fix is in process. This version also adds support for searching on file types.
To add to Greg’s note, 1.5b1 has a very interesting search panel that allows for setting search parameters combining file type, tags, and create/modify dates or date ranges. I don’t recall seeing the creative and simple approach used by Soma Zone for its search panel, which for basic searches is an improvement over smart groups in most Mac apps. It’s worth spending some time with the app just to see a new twist on an old problem.
[size=85](Not affiliated with Soma-Zone in any way.)[/size]
I noticed that Ammonite added a new feature with release 1.6. Search results in a DT database can be saved (replicated) to a DT group from inside Ammonite. To be clear: it creates replicants, not a smart group.