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Searching without hope of finding, and holding on for dear life.
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Posted by Captain CowPie
Aug 11, 2007 at 01:20 AM
Jim wrote:
>Like many of you I have been searching for some time for a piece of
>software that will help me to organize all of the information that I have flying at me.
>And like many of you I have been frustrated. I have used Zoot, UltraRecall, Onenote, a
>few other different outliner programs, Ecco, and Omea Pro. None of them quite did what
>I wanted. Zoot comes closest, but I need to be able to store graphics, and the text based
>nature of Zoot precludes that.
Jim, good luck on your Mac purchase. I am getting ready to join the Dark Side when they update the Mac Pro, hopefully right before Leopard comes out. I am in a similar situation as you, searching for a good software program to meet my needs.
I plan on trying out DevinThink and Tinderbox first. But having researched them recently, I heard that Tinderbox slows down considerably with a lot of graphics. You might want to test this with a demo before purchasing.
Either way, let us know how the purchase goes. I am excited to make the jump soon.
Vince
Posted by jamesofford
Aug 12, 2007 at 04:34 PM
I am in love.
My new Macbook and I are getting acquainted, and I am enjoying myself as I have not done in a long time with computers. A friend of mine, who has been a Mac partisan for years sent me an email congratulating me on coming back to the fold. One of the points that he made is that while these days all computers work, the Mac goes further to make things work elegantly. He’s right. This computer is a joy to use. From the beautiful user interface, to the fact that the computer moves seamlessly from one program to another. Sigh. Also, the core duo 2 makes a big difference to the way I work because I tend to keep several different programs open at a time, punch a function key and poof-all the programs that you are running are available and ready to switch to.
As David mentioned, OS X is not the same as the old MacOs. It is taking some getting used to. However, the differences are not so great that I am lost, and when I do run into something different, it usually is pretty easy to deal with.
Now on to the PIM front.
I downloaded Devonthink Pro. I have not really exercized it as much as I would like yet, but there are a few things that I can say.
First, it took in all of the PDF files that I had stored in my reference folders without a hiccup. That’s little over 2000 files in several different folders. All the PDF files imported fine. And Devonthink found many duplicates. The duplicate finding was done by analyzing the text in the files because they all had slightly different titles.
The search is lightning fast, even with that many files, and that many words.
My first impression is that this program will work well with my PDF issues. Only one problm is that most of the issues with organizing and searching PDF files is in my work. I am a research scientist in an industrial setting, and I am constrained to use a PC at work. I need to keep all kinds of information organized including PDF files I download from the internet, meeting minutes, emails, project documents of all kinds. I would love to be able to do that in Devonthink, but need to keep that information on my work machine. The PDF files from the internet(Journal articles mostly) I can put on my personal machine, but not work stuff. I may be able to pull that information in by putting it on an external drive and inputting what amounts to aliases into Devonthink. I don’t know.
However, I will keep the group up-to-date on what I am doing as I go along. If you are interested in knowing whether some feature exists in Devonthink, or whether some feature works as you would like, feel free to ask me to test it out. I am happy to give things a try.
I will also post links to other sites that have info on Devonthink as I go along.
Finally, I am going to look into other programs like Eaglefiler, Yojimbo, Mori, Notetaker and the like. Now that I am cross-platform(albeit on two different laptops, I haven’t gone so far as to install Parallels yet.)I can do some comparisons and let the group know what things feel like.
One last thing, if you have been thinking about making the switch to a Mac, if the software that you need to use exists on a Mac, make the jump. I don’t think you will regret it.
Posted by Hugh Pile
Aug 12, 2007 at 06:58 PM
Jim,
Two small Mac programmes worth investigating: Sidenote, http://www.chatelp.org/?page_id=5, a simple pop-out note-taker, and Skim, http://skim-app.sourceforge.net/ , a PDF reader and annotator. Both are donationware. I use Sidenote and have heard good reports of Skim.
H
Posted by jamesofford
Aug 14, 2007 at 04:27 AM
Well, the Macbook and I are getting along pretty well. I am having to learn some new things, but all in all it’s still feeling pretty good.
I have been focusing my time on two programs:Devonthink Pro, and Papers.
Devonthink is truly an excellent program for managing data. I pumped all of my PDFs into it, and now I can search them easily and quickly and pull out the stuff I need. A far cry from the old days on my XP machine. I still need to figure out Smart groups and a few other things, but so far, so good.
Papers is also pretty good. It is build for academic researchers to search for and store published papers. It works pretty well. Right now I am slowly working through the PDFs that I have to add the metadata that Papers needs to sort the PDF files.
More on both of these later.
I am going to go exploring and download Eagefiler and Yojimbo to see how they work with my PDF collection.
I will try to keep people updated on how things are going, and once I have had a sufficient amount of time to put everything through its paces, I will try to do a comprehensive review.
Posted by Chris Thompson
Aug 14, 2007 at 03:44 PM
If you’re looking for a really hardcore pure outliner, with all the major features of More as well as a swath of new ones, be sure to check out TAO:
http://artec-software.com/products/neo/en_index.html
(Note that this is a completely different and unrelated program from TAO Notes for Windows.) TAO doesn’t get the press of OmniOutliner, partly because it is a little harder to use, but if you’re looking for something more sophisticated than OmniOutliner (a pretty good program in its own right, IMHO) or Opal, it’s worth looking at. I’ve used all the major outlining tools for both Windows and Mac, and it’s definitely the most feature rich, and the truest to the spirit of old outliners like More and Grandview.
As an alternative to DevonThink for managing PDFs, also look into Yep. Yep has a much better UI and is very strong at handling tags (DevonThink’s main weakness), but it doesn’t have some of the bells and whistles of DevonThink.
If you’re looking for a hierarchical, outline-based task manager similar to Ecco, try to get in on the OmniFocus beta. I use that program every day and now consider it essential, but I’ve always liked the outline metaphor for managing todos, tasks, and projects.
Also, be sure to read Ted Goranson’s semi-regular ATPO column online. He does a thorough job surveying all manner of Mac outliners.
Whichever way you go, have fun! There’s no shortage of either outliners, information management, or writing tools for OS X. In particular, outliners are a real strength of the platform.
—Chris
Jonathan Probber wrote:
>For straight outlining, OmniOutliner Pro seems
>to be the bomb. I’ve been on my MacBook now for 2 months after years of Windows, and I’m
>really enjoying it.