Why did a DT 2.0 thread disappear from the forum?

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21

FWIW, I couldn’t care less how well (or poorly) DTP handles email, calendar, contacts, and to do items. I don’t use it as a PIM.

I also don’t worry much about tags, because I’ve found that tags don’t scale to the volume and diversity of material that I deal with.

But it’s great for sorting through dozens (or hundreds) of technical papers on a wide range of topics, regrouping those papers as my needs change, and tracking the evolution of ideas.

Now, I’ll admit I haven’t paid much attention to the DTP competitors mentioned here. But nothing that I’ve seen has indicated that they can handle databases in excess of 2.25 million words. DTP does, without a glitch.

Katherine

22

I’m in the interesting position of agreeing with all three of you on DTPro. The UI is a bit dated, the program would benefit from tags features and smart folders, I’ve looked at other programs and am using Together, I don’t use DT as a PIM, although I do like that I can keep emails directly related to a project in the DT database rather than have to go out of DT and into Mail to find them (I also have kept contacts in the database on the same terms and found it adequate), I’m not crazy about the fact that it’s a proprietary database (but can live with it as long as I back-up), would like to see improvements in getting things back out of DT in the same format that they go in, like the OCR capability, would like easier link capability, etc.

All of that said, I use DTPro primarily for research and long term record storage (e.g. financial, business records) and it is terrific, as Katherine notes, in handling large amounts of information. I love the AI capability, how easy it is to find related information, and believe DevonTech will continue to raise the bar in that area. Still, I’ve found Together to be more intuitive, with a great UI, and I use it to capture and store what I consider more transitory types of information, and current/topical items that I need to located and pull quickly.

An example is writing: I use a Together library to capture story/article/book ideas, track expenses and income, sources, reading lists, and final copies of articles/stories/essays. Once I decide to pursue a project, I use DT and Devon Agent to capture all of the heavy research. In this stage of it’s development, Together’s search capabilities are rudimentary; an example would be searching for E-Trade. Type E, it will bring the document up as a possibility, type E Trade and it won’t. This and the lack of highlighting search terms in found documents make it unsuitable for large-scale information gathering/storage–at least for me at this time.

For me DT and Together exist quite companionably, and often snippets of quick preliminary research or “found” information captured quickly in Together, end up in DTPro. I look forward to DT Pro 2.0 and evolution of Together, and have found both to have responsive developers.

23

well said, JPars.

One point of clarification, I’m not sure anyone is (at least recently) talking about using these apps as a PIM in the sense of managing task lists, etc… I don’t think either of these apps is suited for that.

And I may well end up with a “companiable” relationship (I like that term) between the two. There is no question I will eagerly await DT Pro Office 2.0 to see where the developers are taking this.

And I forgot to mention, I do like the interaction between DevonAgent and DT Pro. They have served me well over the years, are very well constructed, very stable and useful with (I agree) a responsive development team. I hope 2.0 does what we are hoping it will do.

24

Just 2.25 Million? My main database has over 78 million words (almost 900,000 of them unique). When DT Pro Office loads it eats all 4 GB’s of ram my MacBook Pro has and goes to a 2 GB swap (this off of a reboot and nothing else running). However, when it does finally open, it has no issues dealing with the huge volume stored within it (the first search takes forever and hangs my whole machine, but after that its clear sailing). I know I’m taking both my Mac and DT Pro to the very limit and both perform as expected.

That said, I‘ve been a DT user for years and have to admit this wait is hard. I’m not going to jump ship, because, honestly, nothing else could handle the size and scope of my database other than DT Pro.

I really hope that 2.0 (or alternate product) will carry true encryption and not just password protection, that and allow even larger databases (I just like having all my eggs in one basket).

Honestly though, update the UI & increase DB security and I’m a happy camper.

25

I gave Together a try today and quickly found two details that killed it for me, compared to DTP:

  1. You cannot use Cmd-F to search within a PDF. I did a search in Together and it found several of my PDFs correctly, but I had no way (besides opening the PDF in Preview) of finding out why it thought the PDF was a match. It appears that only text and webarchives are sub-searchable, whereas with DTP PDFs feel just like regular text.

  2. Tags are not related to Finder comments. It won’t see tags I’ve placed there, or write its own tags there. Whereas DTP can import Spotlight comments as Comments, and export the same. This makes using tools like Hazel to pre-set comment tags very useful.

John