Advice needed from Mac owners

Posted by Hugh Pile
May 2, 2007 at 09:47 AM

Kenneth Rhee wrote:
>Thanks for the suggestions and the offer for discount!
> >Has anyone tried other
>bibliographic software such as Bookends or Sente?
> >Yes, Scrivener was the program I
>was thinking of.
> >I also forgot to mention Mellel as a potential
>wordprocessor.
> >Has anyone tried Devonthink extensively?
> >Thanks.
> >

On bibliographic software: I don’t use it, but there has been some discussion of it on the Scrivener forum. You may find that some programmes play better with Scrivener than others.

On DevonThink: I use it, and like it. In order to exploit its functionality to the full, your database(s) need to be large (so that it can can carry out its semantic analyses and make useful forecasts of how it should group future filings). It’s quite possible to index files outside DT, but DT also allows them to be imported where they can’t be searched by the Mac desktop searcher, Spotlight. This has provoked criticism, and DT has committed to make its files searchable by Spotlight in its next major release. This however is unlikely to be until after the launch of the new Mac operating system (i.e. late 2007/early 2008). In the meantime a new, rival programme, called Eaglefiler, that uses tagging rather than folders and whose database can be searched by Spotlight, appears to be gaining in popularity: http://c-command.com/eaglefiler/

On Tinderbox: Kenneth you may have researched it thoroughly already. However, if not you may find the contributions on the subject to the Scrivener and DevonThink forums and the apto site useful. apto did a useful review: http://www.atpm.com/10.10/atpo.shtml. Although three years old, the review isn’t out-of-date in its description of the fundamentals, in my understanding. In particular, look for contributions from AmberV, who is a Tinderbox (and Scrivener) user and a fan. Tinderbox is clearly one of a kind.

In general, the user issues in the Mac world of information management and structuring will be familiar to anyone from the Windows world: for example, tagging versus trees, proprietary versus native formats.