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DEVONthink is a a knowledge management solution and freeform database application for users who need to store a lot of text or image contents to collect, store, edit and retrieve data. DEVONthink can import files in many common formats: plain text, RTF/RTFD, Simpletext files, PDF, source codes, HTML, XML and a variety of image types as well as URLs (.webloc, .mailloc, .ftploc and .inetloc).

You can modify, rename, duplicate, touch or delete all objects stored in DEVONthink’s database, and all advanced text editing functions of Mac OS X are present, including fonts, styles, rulers and alignments up to find & replace, check spelling and speak text.

Without the need for indexing, DEVONthink fully or semi-automatically classifies elements, lists similar contents and words immediately using fuzzy algorithms, finds and compares text and even images, summarizes texts intelligently and provides high performance concordance tools. As a Cocoa application it’s integrated into Mac OS X including it’s own Services for storing and summarizing text clippings, has advanced text editing functions including rulers, and provides a Finder-like interface with contextual menus, Dock menus, different views and drag-and-drop. DEVONthink is the first product based on the powerful. language independent DEVONtechnology.

DEVONthink works on a “group” metaphor. When you create a new group by checking an icon in the toolbar, a new folder icon appears in the left pane of the interface window. You can then drag files into that group’s folder from the Desktop, or create new documents in DEVONthink itself to be stored in the database or exported.

The contents of a group folder are displayed in the right pane when the folder icon is highlighted in the left column. You can click the folders “flippy” triangle to display a list of the folder’s contents. Click on a particular document icon in the left pane and it will be displayed in the right pane.

You can drag pictures, text files, HTML or HML files from the Finder into the browser window or onto the application icon. DEVONthink will import all of the data and store them as contents. It can resolve aliases, scan through packages and import original files or folders, and accepts any graphics format supported by Cocoa, plain text, text clippings, source codes, RTF, RTFD, Simpletext and HTML. For images, you can create thumbnails (automatic) and optionally sharpen them for better quality. So, it’s possible to preview and work with images even if the originals are temporarily not available.

DEVONthink stores all imported contents in its knowledge base and creates external references only for images.

Internet addresses dragged or pasted from a browser or elsewhere to DEVONthink create special URL contents that can be opened in your default browser by clicking on them.

To save changes made in the knowledge base to disk, use the Tools > Backup & Compress command, which cleans up the KB and writes all changes to the file system.

Files are stored in - /Library/Application Support/DEVONthink/. You can also configure DEVONthink to autosave in the Preferences.

The main purpose of DEVONthink is to collect, store, edit and retrieve data. So, many of the key features address these issues.

To group contents manually, select the desired items and then select “Group” from the “Content” menu. You can also create new groups from the Content Menu or a toolbar icon.

To move recently imported contents to a group, just drag them to the group icon. You can also let DEVONthink classify and move contents automatically by selecting Auto Classify from the Content menu. A dialog box will inform you if DEVONthink does not find any group with similar enough content to classify.

If you need to file an item in more than one group, you can make a replicant copy using the Content > Replicate command. When you modify a replicant, all copies will be updated. Titles of items with replicants are shown in red in the browser windows. Items with duplicates (same content but different attributes) are shown in blue.

Double click on a document icon when the folder contents are displayed (a handy slider on the toolbar adjusts the icon sizes), and it will open in a separate document window for editing.

If you click on the “see also” button in a content window, DEVONthink opens a pop-out drawer containing a list of similar contents. Bar Graphs show the degree of similarity. You can select any item from the list to view it, or just double-click and it will open in a separate window.

Click the “Classify” button, and a drawer with a list of the most appropriate groups will appear. Below the list is an LED rating the quality of the results -- red=poor; yellow = quite accurate; green = dead on.

A pop-up menu in the lower left corner of the content window displays a list of what DEVONthink considers to be the keywords contained in the displayed content. When you select a keyword from the menu, DEVONthink lists all other contents with the same keywords. To activate this feature, click the checkbox on the left hand side of the menu.

A “concordance” of the displayed content document appears when you click on the Concordance button, and displays a list of statistics in the pop-out drawer about the frequency, length, and weight of every word the document. You can also get a concordance from the tools menu.

To search for specific contents, use the “search” dialog from the tools menu. To broaden your search, you can use the spelling and context buttons to show words that similar spelling or similar context to those you have entered. You can also use the search field in the browser toolbar. This mode of searching uses the Boolean “Or”-operator and is case insensitive. All searches can be made exact, case insensitive or fuzzy (to catch also slightly different spellings). Wildcards and boolean operators are allowed. Additionally, you can look up similar words or words with similar semantics.

The DEVONthink knowledge base is located in the folder “-/Library/Application Support/DEVONthink/”and separated in a couple of files, all named “DEVONthink -n database”. Additional files are collected in the “files” folder. To backup the complete knowledge base, simply copy the whole folder to backup media. A complete backup both the knowledge base is also produced by DEVONthink when you select “Tools> Backup & Compress”. This command compresses the knowledge base and writes modifications back to the file system.

Optionally, DEVONthink can write backup copies of the knowledge base files automatically every time you open the application or compress the knowledge base and quit. Configure your preferred option in the preferences.

You can also move your knowledge base back and forth between two locations -- for example your office desktop Mac and your PowerBook. Just copy a complete DEVONthink folder from within “Library/Application Support to the Application Support folder on another machine or another user folder on the same computer. Activate “To DB folder” or “Into Database” in the import tab in the preferences to copy all image files automatically to the DEVONthink folder or the knowledge base itself when adding them to the knowledge base. The knowledge base size is theoretically unlimited.

You may also store the knowledge base at another location than the Application Support folder if you wish.

Other Features

I’ve found DEVONthink very convenient for opening Word documents, since I don’t use Microsoft Word, but one from time to time receives Word files as attachments.

DEVONthink allows you to set the background color on selected text. Simply select the block of text you want to highlight, choose Tools > Show Colours, check the option box “Background” and then select the color of your choice. This is useful for highlighting interesting contents clipped from other data sources like emails or Web pages.

DEVONthink provides its own Dock menu that you can use to open the import dialog windows, create new plain text, RTF, or HTML contents, create new content from the clipboard, and open the search dialog with one click directly from the Dock. You can also use the Services menu to copy selected text as new content into DEVONthink. Just select any text you would like to store and choose Services> DEVONthink > Take Plain Note or “Take Rich Note” from the application’s main menu.

DEVONthink Personal Edition 1.5.3 also now imports iChat log files (requires Mac OS X 10.2).

DEVONthink also comes with a bundle of three scripts to automate the following functions:

Action Import
A folder action script to import new files and folders. Use the script “Enable Folder Actions.scpt” to enable folder actions and afterwards the script “Attach Script to Folder.scpt” to attach the import script to one or more folders (those scripts are located in the folder /Library/Scripts).

Finder Import
A toolbar script to import the contents of the folder of the active Finder window. Choose “Customize Toolbar...” in the Finder and drop the script onto the toolbar.

Mail Import
A script to import all messages of all mailboxes of Mail as plain text.

I couldn't find much of anything not to like about DEVONthink Personal Edition. It's a very nicely conceived and executed database application that does what it's advertised to do, and I didn't find any significant bugs. It laubnches quickly even on my G3 machine, and is fast and stable. It will take a while to get up to speed on how to exploit DEVONthink's power and rich feature set efficiently (I’m not there yet), but I think it is worth climbing the learning curve. I’m giving it a 5-A Applelinks rating.

System Requirements
Every iMac, eMac, Power Mac, XServe, iBook or Powerbook with at least Mac OS X 10.1 and 128 MB of RAM. It may also run on some older machines equipped with a Power-PC 604 CPU when using XPostFacto. DEVONthink 1.5.3 is now stable on Mac OS X 10.1.

DEVONthink Personal Edition 1.5.3 is now much more friendly to test drivers permitting 30 hours of use before showing a registration reminder, instead of simply counting the days from the time of the first launch. Additionally, the registration panel has been improved to make it more user-friendly. Other improvements include up to 30 percent faster retrieval of similar words based on the context, better support for “.mailloc”, “.ftploc” and “.inetloc” files, many more minor interface changes and some bug fixes.

A Single User License costs $44.95. However, throughout April, 2003, DEVONtechnologies is celebrating its first anniversary with a one-month “Happy Birthday” offer: Everyone who buys DEVONthink PE this April will pay only $30dollars, $14,95 off the regular price. This offer is valid for all customers buying at the DEVONtechnologies Online Shop and is limited from April 1st to April 30th.

For more information, visit:
http://www.devon-technologies.com/products/devonthink.html

Personal Edition (PE): DEVONthink PE is limited to 5000 pictures and has no automatic grouping. Also, there is no import of web sites and the AppleScript support is very limited.

Standard Edition (SE): DEVONthink Standard Edition, which will be available in Q2/2003, has none of the above limitations: it groups contents automatically and imports web sites. Additionally, it features an advanced memory and database management system, supports multiple knowledge bases, more document formats, is fully scriptable and introduces categories. Modifications are sychronously written to memory and to disk, which leads to a smaller memory footprint and much higher data security.

Enterprise Edition (EE): The DEVONthink Enterprise Edition, available in Q4/2003, is a full-size client/server solution with multiple databases, access control (privileges, encryption, locking) and a database optimisation method called »Dreaming«, which improves the results of any search dramatically. Also, the Dreaming process reduces the file size of the DEVONthink database.

Charles W. Moore

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