Summer 2009 PIM roll-call

Posted by Hugh
Jul 28, 2009 at 05:59 PM

My usage tracks Steve’s - except that I hardly use Windows nowadays, preferring the uniformity and harmony of working on the Mac.

- I spend most time in Scrivener. Whilst I too am probably more “holistic than random-chunk” in writing approach, I like many of the application’s other features, such as full-screen, keywords and synopses.

- I too use DevonThink for large-scale storage. Development of Version 2 has certainly been slow, but because I owned a licence for 1.x, I’ve had seven months’ partly “free” use of the 2.0 betas.

- I have licences for previous versions of Tinderbox and Curio. I may upgrade one or both when TB goes to 5.0 and C to index cards, but I haven’t quite had the use out of them so far that their prices would justify. Having praised both applications here, I’m pleased that TB has proved useful for you Steve. For some users on the Mac, getting to grips with TB seems almost like a test of intellectual virility, irrespective of intrinsic value! But your Tinderbox “adornments matrix” sounds very interesting and potentially very useful.

- Because DevonThink hasn’t so far handled snippets very well, and Scrivener isn’t designed for them, I too bought a licence for MacJournal - as a snippets bin. With its Quicknote entry it’s performed that function very well, better than Journler. But now that DT appears to want to be the absolutely ultimate Mac datastore, and is threatening to have a quicknote entry too, I may eventually move all my research and ideas over.

- I use TAO for outlining. It would be the perfect outliner if it were guaranteed stable and not so darn complicated to learn and use.