Searching without hope of finding, and holding on for dear life.

Posted by jamesofford
Aug 12, 2007 at 04:34 PM

I am in love.

My new Macbook and I are getting acquainted, and I am enjoying myself as I have not done in a long time with computers. A friend of mine, who has been a Mac partisan for years sent me an email congratulating me on coming back to the fold. One of the points that he made is that while these days all computers work, the Mac goes further to make things work elegantly. He’s right. This computer is a joy to use. From the beautiful user interface, to the fact that the computer moves seamlessly from one program to another. Sigh. Also, the core duo 2 makes a big difference to the way I work because I tend to keep several different programs open at a time, punch a function key and poof-all the programs that you are running are available and ready to switch to.
As David mentioned, OS X is not the same as the old MacOs. It is taking some getting used to. However, the differences are not so great that I am lost, and when I do run into something different, it usually is pretty easy to deal with.
Now on to the PIM front.
I downloaded Devonthink Pro. I have not really exercized it as much as I would like yet, but there are a few things that I can say.
First, it took in all of the PDF files that I had stored in my reference folders without a hiccup. That’s little over 2000 files in several different folders. All the PDF files imported fine. And Devonthink found many duplicates. The duplicate finding was done by analyzing the text in the files because they all had slightly different titles.
The search is lightning fast, even with that many files, and that many words.
My first impression is that this program will work well with my PDF issues. Only one problm is that most of the issues with organizing and searching PDF files is in my work. I am a research scientist in an industrial setting, and I am constrained to use a PC at work. I need to keep all kinds of information organized including PDF files I download from the internet, meeting minutes, emails, project documents of all kinds. I would love to be able to do that in Devonthink, but need to keep that information on my work machine. The PDF files from the internet(Journal articles mostly) I can put on my personal machine, but not work stuff. I may be able to pull that information in by putting it on an external drive and inputting what amounts to aliases into Devonthink. I don’t know.
However, I will keep the group up-to-date on what I am doing as I go along. If you are interested in knowing whether some feature exists in Devonthink, or whether some feature works as you would like, feel free to ask me to test it out. I am happy to give things a try.
I will also post links to other sites that have info on Devonthink as I go along.
Finally, I am going to look into other programs like Eaglefiler, Yojimbo, Mori, Notetaker and the like. Now that I am cross-platform(albeit on two different laptops, I haven’t gone so far as to install Parallels yet.)I can do some comparisons and let the group know what things feel like.
One last thing, if you have been thinking about making the switch to a Mac, if the software that you need to use exists on a Mac, make the jump. I don’t think you will regret it.