Nice change in Devonthink

Posted by 22111
Jan 4, 2021 at 06:34 PM

Interesting post; not really enlightening; shows that their concept has become quite a mess though, and no wonder they have got conceptual problems, now or even before, since they discarded their first pane, i.e. it hadn’t been a 2-, but a 3-pane outliner, and then the first-level pane went away; they pretexted that this way, it was easier for the non-cognoscenti…

(Not writing from experience - I don’t have a Mac - but from discussions in their forum.)

This being said, they always have some simili-AI (i.e. rules-based, probably new targets automatically being added to this by fixed algorithms, too) for item distribution to folders or the like, and which certainly is a big help; to my knowledge, in the Windows environment, no such “outliner” has become available.

But really crippling software, i.e. outright deleting functionality instead of just hiding them to “beginners”, that’s giving a kick in the balls of loyal “high-end” customers (i.e. not the fanboys who accept everything coming to them from their ersatz-Jesus, which unfortunately is the underlaying “philosophy” of the Apple world to begin with, and even in the Eighties, it was already like that), so…

Speaking of Windows, UltraRecall would have become almost perfect an “outliner” (whatever you call it, we all know we speak of some more general sw category but which hasn’t a real name of its own yet, “Information manager” being too broad a term I think), WITH real tree formatting (bold, etc., with the selected item being “backlighted” in blue or something then), AND that missing “third”, in fact first, pane, the developer refusing to implement that though…

Two more, and both very annoying, examples of my old saying that coders and machine-user interfacing, from a “workflow” pov, well then…

And a third example, OneNote where, among many other things, it’s (at least it was: don’t know about possible newer developments) not even possible to get normal, regular, straight A4 or letter “pages” to write on, with a fixed left border: not everyone wants to “scribble” when they just want to enter textual info (and yes, there might be a workaround, finally: am not interested anymore).