Mac Oultiners

Posted by Hugh
Aug 31, 2009 at 06:02 PM

Daly de Gagne wrote:
>Hugh, thanks for your reply dealing with software for the Mac.
> >You mentioned
>“DevonThink is the heavyweight data/manager, info-dump here, with Together and
>Eaglefiler as the simpler possibilities.”
> >Is there any advantage going with
>DEVONthink rather than the other two?
> >How do Eaglefiler and Together compare with
>each other?
> >And am I write to assume that OmniOutliner could do the same kind of
>storage the others do - I ask that because of an example on OO’s page?
> >With the Mac
>products available, is the need for Evernote made obsolete? I recently saw Evernote
>on a Mac, and it didn’t appear to work as well ont he Mac as it did on the
>PC.
> >Thanks.
> >Daly

Daly

As you probably know, DevonThink comes in four flavours of increasing complexity: DevonNote, DevonThink Personal, DevonThink Pro, and DevonThink Pro Office. Pro Office has an OCR function and will also archive email, and is probably the best Mac route into a paperless office, using a Fujitsu ScansSnap.. Pro seems to be the most popular version for most writing and research purposes.

DevonThink’s key feature is that having indexed documents you ask it to import, it draws up a concordance table for each one, recording the frequency of each word used. This allows it to compare the concordances of every document in its database. So not only can it classify and categorise new documents automatically using your existing classifications as a guide, it can also suggest “overlooked” documents it thinks are similar, if you select an existing document and ask the software to “See also.” This - I think - is the core of its so-called AI.

You will see from this that the software will work best with relatively large databases (which incidentally it also seems to search as quickly as, and handle more efficiently than any rival Mac database manager). Large databases throw up the mass concordances that enable the AI features to work best.

Not only that, it’s probably only with a relatively hefty database that you’re likely to need such features. If you have only a couple of thousand documents, you’re not likely to forget what they are or the relationships between them. But go much bigger and the AI functionality could be helpful. Some users have gigabytes of data, tens of thousands of documents and millions of words in their databases.

DevonThink also has numerous other helpful features which I’m short-changing, but I think I’ve summarised its USP.

Neither Eaglefiler nor Together offers features of this sophistication, though to be fair I’m less acquainted with them. Together has possibly the smoother interface, but on its forum there’ve been some reports of slowdowns with big databases. Eaglefiler has been developed by Michael Tsai whose website suggests he has a highly reliable product with a clear development vision.

I regard OmniOutliner as an outliner-with-columns pure and simple, rather than a data-store like the three mentioned above. I use it for structuring rather than storing, and that seems to be what it’s designed for.

EverNote does of course have an advantage the others lack - it operates in “the cloud”. So for accessing documents from more than computer or for filing notes from a mobile phone, it has no rival (DevonThink Pro Office has a web feature though not on an ever-present third-party website like EverNote’s). But as a straightforward datastore EverNote can’t compete with DevonThink, Eaglefiler or Together.