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Advice needed from Mac owners
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Posted by David Dunham
May 2, 2007 at 01:30 AM
Yes, anyone from this forum can contact me before purchasing Opal.
Posted by Kenneth Rhee
May 2, 2007 at 03:11 AM
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.
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
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.
Posted by Chris Thompson
May 3, 2007 at 04:49 AM
Another bibliography manager worth considering is BibDesk. It’s meant to integrate with TeX/LaTeX (which is phenomenally well-supported on OS X), but it’s a good Mac application in its own right, and it’s free.
You don’t mention what sort of writing you do. If your needs lean towards the academic (long articles, theses, etc.), LaTeX through TeXShop is worth a look. LaTeX is actually very usable on OS X due to the system’s fast PDF engine, system-wide spellchecking (and grammar checking in Leopard), etc. I don’t recommend Pages for long, multi-section documents. There are subtle bugs in the current version that only crop up in multi-section documents with tables of contents, etc. Word is always a solid choice, but it’s not a speed demon on Intel machines, though that will change when MS releases the next version. Mellel is very good for long academic writing. It’s a gem that doesn’t get enough good press.