I Think Not

The DEVONthink Pro beta is finally out. I’ve been waiting a long-ass time for this. In the interim I stopped using DEVONthink.

I’m not a big Spotlight user. I know DEVON had a pretty chart on their website explaining that their shit was hotter than Spotlight – especially for textual correlation! – but getting into a DEVONthink workflow just doesn’t seem worth it.

DEVONthink is schizophrenic, and only more so in Pro. On the one hand, it’s got AppleScript through-and-through. On the other, it (poorly) duplicates functionality in scads of established applications: RSS reading as in Safari/NetNewsWire/NewsFire, photo organization as in iPhoto, outlining as in OmniOutliner, PDF reading as in Preview, full-screen text editing as in Ulysses, and of course hooking WebKit to throw an entire goddamn browser in there. Add importers/exporters for myriad formats to the mix and we’re left wondering: spend all day in DEVONthink or all day coordinating between it and a dozen different applications?

“Whatever you prefer” is the likely response, and it’s fair enough. But between Quicksilver, creative use of Spotlight and Smart Folders, and some sensible (but oh-so-obsolete) hierarchical organization I feel like I have a more full-featured workflow that takes advantage of inter-application communication in the way it was intended rather than a do-everything solution in the fashion of Emacs.

Add me to the list of disillusioned ex-DEVONthink’ers who sigh "well, if I had a research assistant to input thousands of documents like Steven Berlin Johnson maybe all that textual correlation would be worth it.