Advice needed from Mac owners

Posted by Franz Grieser
May 2, 2007 at 06:56 AM

Kenneth

>I also forgot to mention Mellel as a potential
>wordprocessor.

Mellel is a decent word processor with a nice outlining feature.
But in my opinion, Mellel is no reason to switch to the Mac - unless you need to write in Hebrew or in an Arabic language.
For a writer, Scrivener is a good reason to switch.

>Has anyone tried Devonthink extensively?

I used it before I got Scrivener. Now, I have all research inside Scrivener.

I found Devonthink somewhat clumsy compared to Infoselect. This may sound strange as IS is surely not a tool that is elegant to use. But I never
found Devonthink comfortable to use. What is more: I could not use its full power, i.e. the built-in AI. As I have a mix of English and German notes in my databases, DT had problems spotting similar items when I looked for them: It would only suggest German notes when I started with a German note - though there were dozens of English notes on the subject in the database.

Unless you have huge piles of research material, I suggest you first try to put the material in Scrivener. If that does not work, it is easy to move the data into Devonthink or Tinderbox or any of the other data-collection tools. RTF is widely supported on the Mac. In fact, the text editing engine built into Mac OS X uses RTF, it is used by the developers of Scrivener and other writer’s tools on the Mac. So, RTF is an excellent choice for exchanging formatted text between Mac applications.

Franz