Becoming obsessed with the idea of a mac

Posted by Chris Thompson
Nov 21, 2007 at 11:28 PM

Scrivener is a really nice app, there’s no denying it. DevonThink on the other hand I think is a little overrated. It needs an update… it is actively developed and one is due down the pipe any time now, but until then, its UI is less intuitive than some of its competitors (Yojimbo, Yep/Leap, EagleFiler, etc.). Note that the “artificial intelligence” feature they tout is a classifier algorithm. That might help you to pin it down if you haven’t tried it. Even if you don’t like DevonThink though, there are an embarrassment of riches in terms of actively developed Mac apps to choose from.

Since this is an outliner forum, it’s worth mentioning that OmniOutliner is pretty much the best single pane outliner on any platform (especially now that NoteMap has ceased active development and doesn’t have columns). If you want something a little more feature-rich (not that OO is not feature-rich, but I’m talking over the top, MORE-inspired), there is always TAO (no relation to TAO Notes for Windows). No question, TAO is the most full-featured single pane outliner currently available on any platform. It’s not as nice to use as OmniOutliner though.

So even though I’m not the biggest DevonThink fan, I really would suggest a Mac. There has been an explosion of software development on the Mac in the last three years, perhaps because it’s become the platform of choice for a lot of geeks, and there is a lot of really great software. OmniFocus is a pretty good stab at Ecco. And there’s no question in my mind that Leopard is much better than Vista. I hate sounding like a platform advocate, because I’m not, but on a rational assessment the Mac is a good place to be right now for a whole lot of reasons.

—Chris

Matty wrote:
>I’ve been following this forum with great interest for the last six months or so with
>great delight since I share many of the obsessions of the community. I am a historian
>working with a combination of biblioscape, brainstorm, whizfolders, microsoft
>word, and I’ve been playing around with zoot. Lately, however, I have become obsessed
>with two programs for the mac, Devonthink and Scrivener. Does anyone have any
>experience with these? Please tell me that they are not that great and I should stop
>fantasizing about switching platforms when really I should be writing.