PIMs, Writing Software, and Windows XP, Vista, and OS X

Posted by jamesofford
Nov 27, 2007 at 06:34 PM

Folks:

I have never been one to get involved in OS wars. OSes seldom drive computer purchases, applications software does. I have always liked the Mac a little better than Windows, mostly because of the software that I use. I have had a Windows XP machine at home for the last 6 years, and it worked fine for what I needed it for.
That being said, I just switched from Windows XP to Mac OSX. There were two drivers for me. One was the availability of software on the Mac. I currently use DevonThink Pro for most of my data accumulation. I also have Eaglefiler. I like them both. The other driver was cost. When I was shopping for laptops, there was little difference between a Macbook, and a Windows laptop running Vista, and so that and the availability of Devonthink made the difference.

There is lots of good, useful software on the Windows platform. And it is encouraging to see so many different info managers on the Windows side. I have always liked Zoot; Onenote has had a place of honor on my machine at work ever since the very first beta. Ecco, Evenote, the list goes on. There are also lots of good info managers on the Mac side. Devonthink, Yojimbo, Eaglefiler, Aquaminds Notetaker, Mori, and so on.

The bottom line is, decide what you want to do-then find the software to do it. At that point the choice of an operating system will be obvious.

On another note, I have been busy with work and haven’t had a chance to exercise Devonthink Pro and Eaglefiler to their full extent. I have been stuffing them both with data, and soon I will be turning to how to organize the information when you get it in, and how to do searches to get it out.

I’ll let everyone here know how things are going in that area soon.