Horses for courses: Voodoopad, Tinderbox, Curio, Devonthink, etc

Posted by Prion
Mar 4, 2013 at 10:23 PM

Thanks for the concrete suggestions, I actually saw some of them already but noticed some new ideas upon re-reading them, thanks.

I learned that there are some things I absolutely need to keep separate.

1) Task management is not the same thing as keeping a project structure. In the list of things that need to get done I just keep the tasks with very little background information. I know what project a certain task comes from when I see the task and new tasks are generated when reviewing the current status of each project with all their data and this takes place outside my task manager.
This was quite a liberating insight for me.

2) where to store pieces of information is not my biggest problem. Like Steve Z. I use Devonthink as my data warehouse. Other software would probably work, too, as long as it provided custom URL for every piece of information I deposit there, that is crucial for me and I use these custom links a lot.
Devonthink has a lot of things going for it but their implementation of tags drives me nuts. As a scientist set theory is probably deeply engrained in my brain and DTPO has a couple of oddities that makes using their tags like walking around with grit in my shoes.

3) The kind of information that I have the biggest problem finding a good home for is not the pieces of information as such but which connections I draw between them, this is separate from gathering the information in the first place and the most personal thing in the whole process. After a lot of trial and error I am coming to the conclusion that a wiki might be the best solution for this. Tinderbox, as nice as it may be otherwise, is too content with its splendid isolation to fulfill that role (I may keep using it for other jobs, though).
I evaluated Devonthink also as a candidate for the wiki, too, but although it knows some Wiki functionality (Wikilinks) it does not display backlinks, i.e. incoming links from other pages, which is crucial for me.
Voodoopad may not be as powerful as Tinderbox in that regard (what is?) but provides backlinks as well as custom URLs, talks to Spotlight, takes graphics more gracefully and may also scale better with size than Tinderbox.

Thanks for your comments so far.
Prion