This reminds me of the near ruination of Curio. What was once a wonderfully expansive whiteboarding experience (years before digital whiteboarding became all the rage), became polluted with productivity features. Mustn’t grumble as it’s still an ace whiteboarding experience that has redeemed itself with its idiosyncratic but great approach to Markdown support and the latest release (v31) from February of this year introduced nifty sync ideas which are unusual in the sense that their about syncing individual assets within your Curio documents, not syncing Curio itself. It’s great to see some focus once again in features that make Curio a wonderful space to explore creative thinking. George Browning, the Curio developer, tickles me a tad, in that he does his utmost to make Curio look like a solution purely for pre high-school students, gotta love his complete lack of visual design sense!
… we travel similar routes, in different dimensions.
(– I had to refrain myself diverting the thread topic, but surely triggered by your mention of ‘metacognition’; very connected to a certain souvereignity and stance as to discussions, useful for any forum – for not getting rabbi-holed into ‘this is right’, ‘but for me this works’…, or any kind of technical 'solutionism, while missing the reality of different actorial contexts, styles, and needs… all this would be another thread, or book )
but, alas, Curio!
yeah. broke my heart. GREAT app, GREAT (& heroic) chap!
but, in a similar (if different) way it lead me into the ‘too-many-open-floodgates-under-one-UI’ dilemma that broke my link to Obsidian. plus, I am modestly handicapped by an inherent need for clean, minimal aesthetics in apps/work environments. both aspects, taken together made Curio use prohibitive for me.
but otherwise/generally right in a league w/ the Circusponies, Tindeboxes and HyperCards of the world!
PS: the document replacement/syncing is one of the real gems & strongpoints of DT to me. almost any simple drop & replace works here, asides from the tying in via ‘open externally’!
… it’s another of those aspects in foundational digital ergonomics that is (still) missing in Capacities.
Curio also had this ‘automatically export as PDF’ to defined place for document sets that was an early stroke of genius…!
I closely intertwine DT with OmniOutliner for all my research projects. First, all research material goes into DT - books, articles, webpages, images, interviews, oral histories, documents, etc. I organize them by type - there’s a folder for books (and a sub-folder for each chapter), another folder for articles, another for oral histories, etc. Each item has tags that refer to content, subject matters, themes, etc.
Then I process each item, meaning I read it, and pick sections to cull - the specific gems I want to use and refer to - into an OmniOutliner outline. I do this using a Keyboard Maestro macro which copies the highlighted text from the item in DT, pastes it into OO, then goes back and copies a link from the item’s source, goes back to OO, opens a Note field attached to that item in OO, and pastes the link.
The items are organized in particular ways in OO - usually chronologically - so I can look at a date in the outline and see all the items from all my research sources that pertain to that date. If I want to see any more of an item, I click on the link and it opens up the source.
I find this invaluable for my work. I love working in OmniOutliner - very good for writing in and collapsing/expanding items to focus my view. And using KM to navigate between them saves a LOT of steps that used to take up a lot of time.
I would be curious to know more about how you use DT, I’m working in marketing and I try to make my DEVONthink work in this environment based on project, timeline and Microsoft office tool..
In the same vein, I recommend Tabs to Links. One of those little gems about which you think “why do I need this” – until you need it.
For use with DEVONthink, I grab all the links for open tabs in a window, T2L puts them on the clipboard, and I use “New > With Clipboard” in DEVONthink to save the list as markdown. Or, paste the links as a sort of bibliography / reference for an existing note.
Feedly (blog reader): I do most of my business research on Feedly, and make extensive use of its annotation tools to add highlights and notes. I just found out a relatively way to easily import those annotations into my DT database.
Don’t know if I can help much there. I run a solo business, so I my needs are small and focused, and I don’t need to share docs with others. And I do nearly all of my planning work in simple rich text files.
Tabs To Links seems nice. I notice that from the share sheet one can first Copy as Markdown and then do New > With Clipboard. That way one gets a markdown file instead of a rtf-file.
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