I posted this while replying to a full screen mode conversation elsewhere and am realizing it deserves its own topic.
If i had a wishlist for DevonThink 2.0 final it would be
Bring the smart groups to at least iTunes 9 levels. If people want to nest smart-groups, then let them. Those who don’t understand it, won’t use it, those who do it’s really nothing more then adding the same functionality already present, but making children inherit the qualities of the parent groups.
Figure out what the final Tags implementation will be and finish it.
Touch up the parts of DevonThink that haven’t been touched at all in version 2. Full screen mode in particular.
Oh my goodness, I can’t aggree with you more. Current Smart Group creation is about as BACKWARDS as any other Smart-whatever creation in other Mac applications.
Finder’s Spotlight Smart Folders and iTunes recent decision to include complex nested filtering has been a wondrous addition.
A common usage I’d like to see would be the ability to reference other Smart Groups much like iTunes has allowed for “Playlist is/isn’t X”.
After two months of daily use with DTPO2, here’s my suggestions:
*like the OSX finder, it would be helpful if you could include individual files (not just groups) in the favorites bar. This would be handy for ongoing notes, short to do lists, etc.
*The inclusion of a ‘back button’ (the little triangle/arrow thingie ) like the one on the Mac OSX finder which not only returns to the earlier document view (as it is now) but returns you to the previous folders/ folder structures that you were in.
*PDFS: A better way to annote pdfs (it’s virtually non-functional at the moment) , and a way so that the notes are searchable… Or some true integration with Skim so that the annotations on Skim are searchable.
As well, a screen-capture (select-square) option so that you can cut-and-paste non-OCR’able text or images.
*A replicant and link manager window so that you can easily replicate or link multiple documents to multiple places.
*A ‘timeline’ type of file which has views as a spreadsheet or a time-line.
I may have missed something, but I don’t think this was ever implemented. I would like to vote for such a feature, too. Many is the time I find myself having to “start from the beginning” to navigate to a group that I went to a short while ago. It would be so much easier to “go back”.
I don’t know if this will be helpful or not, but I use the Three Pane view primarily and I’ll often open documents in their own tab, especially if I am using the ‘See Also’ list. When I need to navigate back to a particular group, I’ll click in a document’s tab from that group, then click in the document to make it active, type ‘Command-R’ to reveal, and the document pane is updated with the group I want to jump back to. Typing this out makes the process sound convoluted, but it actually works rather well.
Thanks for that. I have been experimenting with tabs myself, so I can see how it would work. The only thing is that you have to think in advance that you might want to go back somewhere. The great advantage of a proper back button is that the option to go back would always be available, so if you suddenly realise you need to go back and look at something when you weren’t expecting to need to, you can do it, whatever view you are using.
The Simile timeline widget http://www.simile-widgets.org/timeline/ is a nice Ajax-y timeline, and it might be embeddable thanks to WebKit. Might be easy to do and worth looking into?
Note that they can run off of a local disk without any web server. The timeline data is typically in JSON. Its relatively trivial to convert many tabular formats to JSON.
simile-widgets.org/timeline/ … k/jfk.html
JFK Assassination timeline: a minute by minute development when John F. Kennedy got shot on November 22nd, 1963 in Dallas.
simile-widgets.org/timeline/ … gions.html
Religion Timelines: recommended to be viewed on a huge monitor, mashing the Jewish history with the Christianity timeline together to be seen side-by-side.
Since it’s been almost a year since I started this thread and quite a while from the official release of DevonThink Pro Office 2.0, I thought that I’d post a short list of what I’d consider to be the top missing in action features, which didn’t make the 2.0 final cut.
#1: Smart Groups that are less dumb Search by date range. Nesting? The gold standard still being iTunes smart groups.
#2: Tags need some help. A tag view, whether a tag cloud, something less of a kludge and less awful than ammonite, tags are a brand new 2.0 feature which definitely needs some work. The possibility of views similar to DevonAgent were also mentioned. Any progress really would be welcome.
#3: Mail. There were mentions by Christian of being able to index in the entire Mail mailboxes library without having to import all of it. This would be really ideal and provide a great overview of mail, or only sections of mail which relate to specific projects and bring to bear the power of DevonThink on the much less powerful data management features of Mail.app, without having to constantly import everything and effectively maintain 2 copies (or more) of exactly the same thing.
The smart group that grabs duplicates should have the option to delete all but one exact duplicate of an object, perhaps by criteria like “keep the one first saved or most recently saved” or something…
Search by date range. Nesting? The gold standard still being iTunes smart groups.