Product Review
Product: DEVONthink Pro Office 2
Company: Devon Technologies
Contact: 1-800-903-4152
Price: $149.95, with educational discounts available and free licenses to non-profits
Pros: Superior organization of all your digital documents, excellent integration with other software, OCR for scans and PDFs, powerful AI system
Cons: So many features it may take a while to figure out how to use. [Also, I sometimes encountered a strange text entry bug when tagging. However, DEVONtech Support could not reproduce the bug. It was so minor as to be barely worth mentioning, really.]
Excellent
Product Rating: 5/5 Excellent
by Ronald Schoedel, AAUG Member
A little over two years ago I reviewed version 1.54 of DEVONthink Pro Office (hereafter DTPO). I was incredibly enthusiastic about this product then, and I have used it regularly as a means of keeping myself organized. When I learned that the 2.0 beta came out, I looked forward to doing a review incorporating many of the new features. On 25 February 2010, 2.0 Final Release was issued forth from the smart people at DEVON technologies, and it is no disappointment. You can take a look at my review from late 2007 and see that all of the requests I had for DTPO have been met with 2.0, with many more refinements.
First, the concept: DTPO is something of a collector, a database for all sorts of stuff you want to keep organized, from documents to text snippets to web addresses, and so forth. Sort of an “anything bucket”, a phrase I once heard from a friend. The program includes a super smart artificial intelligence system and the capability to manually tag any item you bring into it, meaning finding your stuff tomorrow or a year from now will be just as easy. Maps, images, Word documents, Pages, spreadsheets, Keynotes, Powerpoints, outlines, you name it, DTPO can collect, house, and analyze your stuff, and thus relate it to your other stuff. It’s a huge understatement to say that DTPO is a filing system, because it is really so much more. It’s also not just a replacement or clone for the Finder in Mac OS. It’s more of a working and productivity environment. It’s also like an assistant who can quickly rummage through the equivalent of hundreds of file drawers and find exactly what you need within seconds.
I am running several databases concurrently: one for school, one for a summer trip abroad, another for personal miscellany, and a handful of others that I use from time to time. Version 2 adds this support for keeping multiple databases open. I wasn’t sure how useful that would be at first, until it occurred to me how simple it would be to place the same item in multiple databases if there was a reason for it to be double-filed. Back when I kept paper files, I’d have given anything for the ability to file the same document in multiple locations. Now, it’s as easy as drag and drop. Each database affords me the opportunity to collect related data that can be input from across my system, from the Finder to Safari to most any application, thanks to integrating bookmarklets, Automator Workflows, and AppleScripts.
To make use of bookmarklets, I’ve installed a folder of these little scripts into the main bookmark bar in Safari. Whenever viewing any webpage, I can choose to send ti DTPO for archiving in various forms: pure HTML, as a continuous or paginated PDF, as text only, or as a selection of some material from the page. Collectors of random snippets from the web, this is what you’ve been needing. Stop slinging URLs and oddball sticky notes all over your Mac every time you find some random tidbit you want to keep. Send it to DTPO, let it learn the contents, relate it to other data in your “bucket”, and make it actually possible to find when you want to refer back to it.
When a document is added to DTPO, an index is built of every word in it. As you build up your database and collect more documents, a concordance is built automatically. When viewing one document, clicking a little “magic hat” icon lets you see what other documents are related in content to the one you are viewing, and you can switch freely between them. Each document that is similar has a ranking, so you can hone in on those items most likely to be of use to you. This is like Spotlight, but with the ability to compare results at a glance.
Another new feature is the Sorter. It’s a little tab that rests alongside the edge of your screen, offering a place to quickly drag and drop anything into DTPO, whether the program itself is open or not. An inbox, along with any number of user-specified “drop box” locations, affords you the opportunity to just toss things in to a “shoebox” or “in box”, metaphorically speaking, until you can properly classify them at your convenience. This in basket is just one of several ways to get things in to DTPO, as I’ve already mentioned. Which is why I like this program so much. With several ways of doing the same thing, I can use the method which matches my personality the best. This is just like Mac OS X: adapted to work with you, not requiring you to adapt to the software’s way of doing things. DTPO also installs a PDF service from the Print dialog, to automatically “print” any document to a PDF and file it into DTPO. Oh, and there’s the “inbox” icon that can be added to the sidebar of your Finder windows, making dragging and dropping any document a breeze.
Added to the new version is support for pretty much any document format supported by Apple’s QuickLook technology. Since I switched to Pages and Keynote for most of my work a couple years ago, I was left out in the cold with respect to actually seeing the contents of my documents under the prior version of DTPO. Now, DTPO is a complete document viewing and organizing environment. I was tickled to see some less common document types supported, such as Omni Outliner.
Taking after Mail, iTunes, and Finder, DTPO utilizes Smart Groups, enabling you to quickly see what’s been added recently and what’s unread. Other useful features include the ability to work in text documents directly within the DTPO interface (I am actually typing this review from within the program!), text highlighters, integration with iCal and prominent productivity acts such as Things, The Hit List, and OmniFocus. Just highlight some text, and you’re one click away from creating a to-do list item or a calendar event. How neat it is to create a to-do item in The Hit List, which then has a hyperlink right to the document in DTPO. This same powerful inter-application linking ability allows you to respond to archived emails with a right-click. Built in word and character counters are an extra treat, too.
As a frequent user of OCR, I was really pleased to see the old OCR engine replaced with the ABBYY Fine Reader OCR service. Having used both as part of other products, I have always been more impressed with ABBYY’s produced results and speed. Some of the PDFs I have fed into DTPO with ABBYY were not of the greatest quality scans, but the OCR engine produced incredibly accurate PDF+text versions, which means any OCR’d document is automatically fully searchable both from within DTPO and by Spotlight. Fine standalone OCR software can cost nearly as much as does DTPO, so having it included is a real steal.
As I have mentioned in many of my reviews, I thrive on organization. I like my organizational systems to save me time and effort. DEVONthink Pro Office excels at this. In some ways, it is hard to describe exactly what DTPO does. It is a program that can do different things for different people, based on individual work habits and needs. For this reason, I highly suggest downloading the trial and using it for the generous trial period. DEVON has some nice videos and tutorials available to get you started and to inspire ideas on how to improve your productivity. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that a Mac with DEVONthink is truly a revolution in information management.
I also want to add that there’s a whole lot to like about a company that includes the following on their “store” webpage:
“We at DEVONtechnologies want to make a difference. We want to help any nonprofit organization (in the sense of charities), including religious or governmental organizations, that are active in children aid, human aid, ecology, wild life protection or renewable energy sources. If you intend to use our software in your organization, please e-mail us with a description of what your organization does and we will be happy to offer you free licenses.”
