I recently came across an blog entry from earlier in the year by Steven Johnson about Devonthink Pro (http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/movabletype/archives/000230.html and its usage as a good database for notes (such as one would take while reading books, etc.). He praises it due to a feature by which the bigger the database becomes, the better the searching therein becomes, because of its ability to not only do normal word-for-word searches, but also associative semantic searches (in which words with similar meanings, or word associations), which are also found/recommended .

I personally have been looking for the ideal program in which to store my notes and snippets (as well as other electronic material), that would have such a search ability. From readersí experience here, does Devonthink do it for you? And ñ since my only mac access is through the PearPC emulator which is too slow for heavy use ñ is there any equivalent on the PC?

My dream program would be one that could interface with a bibliographical database program (e.g. EndNote, Bibtex, etc.), or have its own, such that when notes are taken about a particular book, the material is necessarily given the metadata of that book (publisher, year, etc), in addition to the page number from which the notes were lifted from the book. Thus, if one then used this ìchunk of textî (quote or paraphrase) from the database, and put it into a word processor, all the bibliographical info necessary would be at oneís fingertips, either automatic (like EndNote tries to do with word), or manual; the important thing is that the quote is safely linked with its bibliographical data, such that one neednít reinput the bibliographical data into every single individual note out of fear that the note would be lost from its biblio data. Just entering notes into the notes pane in Endnotes, for ex., doesnít cut it; the digital equivalent of individual chunks of notes on individual note-cards is what Iím envisioning,

Due to the nature of my academic research, I need unicode support, to use non-latin languages. I assume the Orbis feature of Nota Bene would do this, but it doesnít support unicode and most non-latin fonts, so itís a no-go.

I have been using Onfolio as my database for my notes (which I have just been taking in Word) & other clippings & files, but it doesnít have the semantic search, nor the bibliographical abilities I mentioned, though the recent academic edition does have a level of interface w/ Endnote for things taken off of the net.

Anything else on PC, or otherwise?

Nothing like DevonThink on the PC; I haven't tried it on the Mac. I have lurked in Mac forums where DevonThink was the subject of discussion.Opinions are very divided, it seems, among Mac users, depending upon the perceived effectiveness of the artificial intelligence (semantic associations). As I recall, the outlining in DevonThink is rather primitive. (I'm not sure of that. It might apply to another Mac program called Tinderbox that I often confuse with DevonThink, since I have used neither.

Stephen Diamond

Stephen, I'm wondering if the Ask Sam/Citation combo would work for you?

While Onfolio is great for web pages, I'd think that if you're looking for note-keeping power that either MDE Infohandler or ADM would be better.

This weekend I downloaded a pile of journal articles from Highbeam. I just highlighted what I wanted to copy, dragged it over to IH, and IH automatically opened up a new infoitem. Real easy.

I find that no matter how good the search ability I love the ability to set keywords and to find the articles that are a match for whatever combination of keywords I select.

Daly

I appreciate all the discussion regarding the topic.

My main problem with Zoot - and with Biblioscape, for that matter - is that they do not support all languages; i.e. foreign scripts, by using utf-8/unicode, is not available (i assume since Zoot doesn't even permit for rtf). My research requires the ability to enter things in non-latin languages; and one particular need is the ability to work in right-to-left, for Arabic and Hebrew.

I've downloaded some of the software recommended here - Zoot (see problems above), Idea!, MDE InfoHandler, ADM. ADM is not doing so well in the titles of the notes with the non-latin script, nor is it coming up in searches. InfoHandler looks promising; i have yet to really try Idea!.

None of the above, however, really answered the issue of semantic searches, which is one of Devonthink's main selling points.

What Daly mentioned about Biblioscape would really be ideal, if not for the problems i mentioned above. I gave it a try a few months ago, and even had some correspondence with Paul, the developer, but he said no unicode for quite a while, maybe up to a year.

Semantic searching, anyone? I downloaded AskSam as a trial, but besides being expensive, i also couldn't get the non-latin (arabic) fonts to show. Any other suggestions in general?