I’m a long-standing DTP user but have never explored DEVONnote. I am now prompted to take a look following its arrival in the Mac App Store. I have to say I have a fetish for note apps and use Evernote, Springpad (jury still out on that one), Notational Velocity/Simplenote and a wide variety of plain-text editors for iOS (Elements, PlainText, Nebulous Notes et al) which are now in vogue. I recently reviewed a number of notes apps on my blog:
if anyone is interested. So I really would like to find out what DN can bring to the party - especially if it makes integration with DTP better. I’ve read other forum comments, some of which suggest that if you have DTP you don’t need DN. But what do people think?
For starters, I image that what people think is what they’ve posted to the forum on this topic (there are many threads on this topic, as you know). Since DN is a wholly-contained subset of DT, I’m not sure what “[making] integration with DTP better” means. However, as Bill pointed out, it’s a useful input mechanism. Like you, I use lots of methods to take notes - including DN - in part because I’ve never agreed with myself on a single solution that meets all situations, and in part because it’s the getting of stuff into DEVONthink that is the most difficult thing about it.
[size=85]BTW, nice blog. A needed improvement over ATPM and other venerables.[/size]
I suppose what I meant was whether these is any advantage in working DTP and DN together rather than having stuff scattered over other note-taking applications. I’m like you and have never found one killer solution.
Thanks for your views; I confess I haven’t trawled through all the forum posts on this topic but I will do so.
I’ve tried DN alongside DTP and I could not find a advantage in doing so myself. While Bill D. has found utility in using both, there are options that work better for me. I use the take note hotkey feature in DTP often for short, quick notes, and there is also the Sorter, which I rarely use just because DTP is always open on my machine.
I am also using NV with the preference set to keep individual, plain text files. I index the NV folder in DTP and attach the synchronize script to the folder to keep it updated. I also keep the NV folder in the Dock, so when I create a text file in DTP I can drag it to the NV folder and then delete the original document in DTP. It sounds like a lot of work to create documents in DTP just to export them so that they can be imported again via an index, but it really is not difficult. korm has created a script that simplifies this process by sending the document directly to the indexed folder. It works well, but creates a document named ‘DEVONtech_storage’ in the indexed folder when it runs. The ‘DEVONtech_storage’ document does not appear in DTP, but it shows up in NV, so I use the manual process instead.
The above process also works well with the Hog Bay products, better in some respects as you can create sub-folders in the ‘Dropbox>PlainText’ folder and sync the sub-folders to specific databases. However, the new OpenMeta tagging support in the latest release of NV is winning me over, thus the reason for using NV over PlainText. Hopefully Simplenote will sync its tags with the NV OpenMeta tags soon.
Wow… just what I need to hear! There’s a lot of information here and I think I have more than a few areas to investigate. Unlike you, I don’t keep DTP open all the time* because I tend to use it mainly as an archival tool.
I keep my current DTP file in an encrypted volume on Dropbox so I have access to it from wherever I happen to be. For that reason I open DTP only when I need to do something and then close it to allow the sync to take place.
I use DN for “one-offs,” stuff that doesn’t belong in one of my DTP databases. It’s slightly faster for topics with only a handful of items, rather than hundreds, but it’s easy to move material to DTP if a topic gets big enough to justify it.
I use Notational Velocity for grocery lists and similar disposable notes. Super lightweight, and syncs with SimpleNote on my iPhone.
I dislike EverNote. The mobile version is slow and clunky, and I find getting material out of the program to be unnecessarily difficult.
Katherine - I agree with you on Evernote. And Springpad, the new darling of the notistas isn’t a whole lot better (worse in some cases). Plain text notes, as you say, are quick, easy and transportable.