OS X Odyssey 687 - DEVONthink Personal Edition Version 1.9 Mini-Review
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An integrated text and RTF editor including a real-time paragraph/word/character count and other editing and highlighting functions make it easy to enter short notes, write letters, articles, although I prefer the more extensive text manipulation functions in Tex Edit Plus for these tasks, but happily, OS X Services support in both applications makes it convenient to shift data back and forth without having to copy/paste.
In version 1.9, the text editing capabilities have been significantly extended including a new submenu for inserting bullets, page breaks, the current date and time as well as for embedding a picture into rich texts, an option for displaying invisible characters such as spaces, tabs, line and page breaks, and enhanced character, word and paragraph statistics.
DEVONthink 1.9, released this week, comes with an overhauled user interface and more than 200 new functions, commands, file formats and other improvements.
The first thing I noticed about DEVONthink 1.9 is that it starts up and initializes substantially quicker than version 1.7 did.
The interface revamp is not terribly dramatic, bit is does have a cleaner look and seems more intuitive. There are five optional views that can be selected using an icon button cluster in the button bar. The views are list, icon, column, top browser, and the default left browser.
An Actions menu is available via a toobar button or a Control click contextual menu,
As before, Classification of documents for rlevance appears in a Cocoa window.
The most notable new features are:
• Automatic linking of words to other documents with the same name (automatic Wiki-style links)
• User-definable labels
• An improved "Go" menu for easier navigation
• An "Action" button for people with a one-button mouse
• A completely rewritten search function and a command for synchronizing the database with files on disk
• Importing and exporting is now handled by a flexible plug-in architecture
• The accompanying AppleScript scripts have been improved and new scripts have been added
• DEVONthink now supports all major QuickTime features such as zoom or automatic playback, and PostScript files are automatically converted on-the-fly to PDF.
• For PDF documents, the integrated PDF-to-Text engine has been updated to version 3.0, and DEVONthink 1.9 better supports texts in Asian languages.
The integrated Safari-based web browser displays web pages directly within the DEVONthink workspace. Conceptually, this is very convenient, and the Safari-based browser is fast, but in practise it needs some work and is too cumbersome for regular surfing.
To view a web page in DEVONthink , you have first to create a URL document ("Content > New > Link"). Then name the new document with the URL (with or without http://). Alternatively, drag any Internet location file from the Finder or bookmark from Safari into the DEVONthink browser or onto the DEVONthink icon in the dock.
As soon as you select a link document, DEVONthink will start to load the website in the preview pane (in horizontal or vertical split view). A progress indicator will appear in the status bar. You can also double-click it to open the page in a separate window or use the contextual menu to open it in an external browser.
Like in Safari, you can navigate back and forth all visited web pages using the back and forward arrow buttons in the status bar, stop loading with the "X" button and reload the page with the round arrow button. Selecting the URL in the status bar or option/command-clicking a link opens the current or linked page in your default browser, e.g. Safari.
However, to make this feature really appropriate for routine use, there should be a one-click command to create a Web page document with a conventional URL field and preferebly tabs. There is also no Bookmarks function, althugh it is possible to create on manually by making a folder full of URL links.
If you enter a URL as the name for a new link, DEVONnote automatically sets the URL of the item too. E.g. create a link, enter "www.apple.com" - that's it.
Via the contextual menu you can grab complete web pages or frames and store them as separate RTF or HTML contents in the DEVONthink database.Depending on where you're opening the contextual menu or if you have text selected, various options appear: "Capture Note", "Capture Page", "Capture Frame", "Capture Image" or "Capture Link". They are all context-sensitive, i.e. they appear only when applicable.
You can also just grab the page's location. Control-click the page background and select "Copy page location to clipboard" to copy the URL of the page you are viewing to the clipboard. This also works for images, frames and links. You can then rename the generated link document or use the contextual menu or "Action" menu command "Set Title As" to rename the document to any piece of selected text.
The Web browser in verion 1.9 is easier to navigate and supports Java, JavaScript and plug-ins.
Emails can be imported using a provided AppleScript and all documents that DEVONthink does not natively recognize can be "printed" directly into the database from any other application.
A new log panel keeps the user informed about files that could not be imported or any other incident. Additionally, to keep the most important functions always at hand, many new commands have been added to the contextual menu and can also be accessed via an "Action" button.
DEVONthink Personal Edition already works with the database core of the forthcoming Professional Edition, which is significantly faster than in previous versions. DEVONthink Personal Edition 1.9 indexes text documents 6.5 times faster than Mac OS X 10.3 and 2.2 faster than the latest build of Mac OS X 10.4 ("Tiger"), XML files even up to 2.7 times faster than "Tiger".
The new preference panel in version 1.9 allows you to configure DEVONthink more easily, but also to modify DEVONthink's behaviour to a much wider extent. The preference panel is divided into logical sections, just like the system preferences. Select the section you want to check or modify with the icon at the top of the preferences window.
General preferences
Editing preferences
Labels preferences
Import preferences
Images
PDF & PS
Quicktime
Thumbnails
Web preferences
Backup preferences
Update preferences
DEVONthink provides the main features of many standard applications such as Finder, Sherlock, Safari, TextEdit, Stickies, Preview, iPhoto, QuickTime Player and Help Viewer with one consistent, easy-to-use Mac-like interface.
Key features:
- Stores whatever you like, from texts, images, PDF, HTML and XML over text clippings, iChat logs, scripts and Microsoft Word/RTF files to links
- Is able to index contents only instead of storing them in the database
- Integrated browser based on Apple's WebKit ("Safari Engine")
- Helps you to sort in new stuff ("Classify", "See Also", keywords etc.)
- Advanced text editing including rulers, highlighting realtime statistics and display of invisible characters
- Lightning-fast, intelligent search function
- User-defined labels
- Dynamic Wiki-style links and static cross links
- Built-in outlining capabilities
- Easy-to-use interface providing Services and a Dock menu
- Supports Services (like CalcService or WordService)
- Supports drag-and-drop in both directions
What's unique:
- Im- and exports Finder comments
- Captures contents from the built-in browser or from Safari
- Imports e-mails from Apple Mail
- Plays QuickTime movies and MP3 files
- Stores aliases to local files
- Groups or ungroups documents, organizes them into hierarchies
- Works with much more file formats than all alternatives
- Batch imports and exports data extremely fast
- Works flawlessly with huge databases (>300 MB)
- Does not need indexing but searches faster than the competition
- Uses all major features of Mac OS X
System requirements:
DEVONthink requires at least Mac OS X 10.2.7 or higher with 256 MB RAM recommended.
DEVONthink must be registered after the trial period for US$ 40,
Available for downloading from:
http://www.devon-technologies.com
Charles W. Moore
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