why us dtp? (seriously)

hello, dtp-user.
this is not meant to be a provocation. i’m really interested in your opinions.

i use dtp since its first open-beta. (or better: i used it less and less and then it became useless because i forgot to import half of the data i needed for a job). first i found it very amazing but then i really began to ask: “why devonthink pro? i do have a quite capable database with my mac os and the search engine spotlight isn’t really bad. i may open all of my text- and media-files in one interface and have no problem to arrange files as i like. and a “right-click” produces a zip-file that is very convenient for archive- and take away-purposes. so what’s the real benefit dtp offers me?”

i didn’t find a satisfying answer.
but i have to admit that i didn’t use the sophisticated ai sort- and search-functions dtp has, because i didn’t understand precisely how to use it (for my data, not in general.)

what do you think about that?

Yeah, me too have problem understanding how to exploit the best from this software.

I’m using it for organize and edit some text which contains researches and my notes. It has all tools i need for edit a text and a very very fast search system very useful for locate che information i need.
I can keep all my files ordered and well archivied so i can access to all of them easily.

Having all data included in one file is very handy too.

thank you for answering, xizzy.

open textedit from the dock is much faster. concerning the search capabilities i’m not quite sure, what’s the best. but it is not that important for me, as spotlight is good enough for my needs.

on the other hand i’m keeping my data twice on the disk as i’m not bold enough to delete the non-dtp-version after importing. (i twice had a great loss of dtp-data as my database was corrupted and couldn’t be repaired. dtp showed me a warning, but all backups proved to be damaged as well.)

but dtp doesn’t really store “all data in one file”. attachments are attached with an “files folder” (and i think that’s quite better than store it in one file). the same thing i hav no problems to do with mac-folders and the finder as a viewer.

i accept your arguments, but with that in mind i happened to wonder whether there are no other benefits i can use in my daily work.
luix

Have you tried to store, e.g., more than 20,000 text clippings in the Finder? You’ll have to manually name them, no AI to help you file them, no sophisticated search function (Spotlight is fast, but still rather primitive.) Also, in the Finder, you cannot view and edit them as fast as in DEVONthink Pro, and you can’t view Web pages side-by-side, and treat them like local documents. Just some of the advantages of using DEVONthink Pro for information management…

Of course, the AI is a key here for managing many thousands of documents.

Eric.

That, to me, is the compelling reason why I stick with DTPro, even when I’m sure I’m missing many key features and I think the documentation is lackluster. But being able to deal with such a vast quantity of granular data makes it worth the money for me.

I’m finding more reasons to use it, too, the longer I stick with it. I just discovered that I could opt-click and it would slide out a drawer with documents that have that word (by frequency). And I’ve been using heavily the option to search on just a selection of my database.

In my case, I had a few folders of abstracts of a couple hundred articles. I did searches just in those folders and was very, very quickly able to narrow down the list of articles I wanted to find.

Could I have done the search another way? Sure, but it would have taken me much, much longer.

Maybe there would be a market for Devontech to build an application that uses their AI in a spotlight-like search for the hard drive (very awkward sentence). That would be AMAZING! Of course apple would probablly snap the idea up for a susbsequent OS. Don’t let that stop you though DT.

thanks for answering.
i see - and that’s what i assumed - dtp show its power when your gathering and sorting thousends of files, notes etc. and not, like me, “tens” of them.
maybe its too powerfull and therefor less handsome for me.
sigh

Then maybe you should consider DevonNote. I deal with hundreds, not thousands of files (so far), and it seems ideal for that. Cheaper than DTP, too.