#Devonthink vs. eaglefiler how to#

But I’d be hard pressed to say it’s not relevant, so I’ll chalk it up as useful. While this serendipitous insight may be of limited academic value, I can say with reasonable assurance that I wouldn’t have thought of the Tralfamadorians while investigating virgin births in the local shark population. They looked identical to Billy-because their sex differences were all in the fourth dimension… There were five sexes on Tralfamadore, each of them performing a step necessary in the creation of a new individual. No link was immediately apparent, so I glanced through those notes and found the following quote about the seven Earthling sexes:

By surfacing documents you may not have thought as relevant, this can facilitate serendipity in research.Īs an anecdotal example, for this document on GM potatoes, DEVONthink returns a number of related articles I’ve saved-including one on Peruvian potato farmer, another document on how genetic modification is transforming agriculture in Europe, and one on a certain incident in which Pringles are ruled as potatoes.Īnother example: the previously pictured article on a fatherless baby shark is suggested as a candidate for my folder on Slaughter-house Five notes. Perhaps the most unusual feature of DEVONthink, the “See Also” bar displays a rank-weighted list of documents related to the current one. Even non-traditional document types (RSS feed items and mail messages, for example) are fair game, and it’s scriptable for those fringe use cases the folks at DEVONtechnologies haven’t thought of (my NetNewsWire-to-DEVONthink script is one). If the file is searchable with Spotlight, DEVONthink can perform smart analysis on it. No wonder he still uses it today.Īs I mentioned, DEVONthink can handle any document type you can give it. No wonder Steven Berlin Johnson raved about DEVONthink in 1995. In short, DEVONthink takes an entire class of advanced tools otherwise restricted to researchers and search engines and unleashes it on your personal data set. (This function-”automatic class management” in information retrieval-speak-is invaluable in the paperless office: should you choose, DEVONthink files all your bills away with a single keystroke.) In fact, it can treat entire documents as search queries, a feature that seems useless until it almost magically reveals documents related to the one you’re looking at, or offers to automatically file it into the right folder. While other information managers hold to an archaic notion of binary relevance (either a thing matches your query terms or it doesn’t), DEVONthink incorporates much more nuance into its reckoning. (I put “artificial intelligence” in quotes because DEVONthink’s brain owes more intellectual debt to the work of information retrieval than machine learning.) It’s the “artificial intelligence” features of DEVONthink that really set it apart from the crowd of personal information managers. The real value comes in the content analysis functions that are applied to everything you throw at it. At this level, it’s similar to (though, to my knowledge, more robust than) a number of related products. On its face, DEVONthink is a versatile database that can store and retrieve just about any type of data available: PDFs, web clippings, emails, MS Office documents, bookmarks, multimedia, RSS feeds, etc. In general, even with these “smart tools”, the onus remains on the user to a) do a thorough job classifying and organizing his or her information, and b) to know exactly what terms to search for when seeking said information. What’s astonishing is that even in 2010, almost none of these performs more than the most rudimentary information retrieval functions. “Everything buckets”, as one category of information managers are called, are seemingly everywhere. What’s more, we should only have to dig for a given piece of information once a good information management system should facilitate easy retrieval the second time around. In short, we simply deal with too much information every day to deal with it all.

#Devonthink vs. eaglefiler how to#

I’ve written before about personal information management: why it’s important for everyone-not a subset of ‘power users’-and how to evaluate information management systems.