http://www.acuriousmix.com/2014/09/03/designing-a-personal-knowledgebase/

Very interesting. Thanks, Jim.

Reading the comments, however (which are as informative as the blog itself), I am drawn to agreeing with those few who say, in essence "Do whatever works, even if it's imperfect". In my personal experience, this is one of those many areas of life where striving for the best can easily become the enemy of achieving the good.

Agreed. That said, the comments include several interesting tools that I had personally never heard of before, such as

- Anki http://ankisrs.net/ similar to Supermemo, discussed here in the past http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/532/0/supermemo
- Weavi https://weavi.com a sort of public Gingko

It does, however, perpetuate what appears to be something of a general belief about DEVONthink – that it doesn't do subfolders. Actually, it does. It's not an obvious feature, but it's a convenient one. Under the 'Data' menu (in all versions of DEVONthink), there's the option to 'Group items'. In fact, this simply means, make a subfolder within an existing group. By selecting items using the 'Command' key (on a Mac; Ctrl on a PC), you can create as many subfolders as you like. You can create subfolders within subfolders, too.

And of course DEVONthink also has tagging. Not sure if you can group those yet, but I intend to find out!

On the subject of groups vs subfolders. I think the reason DEVONthink refers to folders/subfolders as 'Groups' is because there's a fundamental difference in the way the data is handled. If you group stuff in DEVONthink, and especially if you group stuff in subgroups, if you later decide to 'ungroup' the items in a subgroup, they aren't deleted – they're simply moved back into the parent group. This appears to apply all the way up to the top level of the hierarchy – you'll find the 'group/ungroup' options on the context menus for top-level groups, but also for any item, because you can have single-item groups if you want.

It's a very powerful feature, and has made me very happy! It means DEVONthink can be used as a hierarchical information manager in just the same way as any more conventional two-pane outlining tool, but with the added advantage that you can spontaneously decide to group/ungroup a large selection of items on the spur of the moment. This, in combination with Spotlight integration, extensive tagging/labelling options, and the outstanding export/conversion features, makes DEVONthink into an amazingly powerful information manager.

On conversion: you can save stuff in DEVONthink as e.g. PDF files (side note: it has an exceptionally good PDF rendering engine - I don't know how it does it, but web pages saved as PDFs in DEVONthink are vastly superior to web pages saved as PDFs in any other information manager I've experimented with; excellent format preservation), and then decide to convert them to rich-text or plain-text files later on. I've just converted a web page that took up 1.5 MB in the database to a rich-text file that takes up around 25 KB. DEVONthink creates a copy, so you can decide later whether you want to nuke the PDF and just keep the rich-text file, or vice versa.

Of course DEVONthink also has its Auto Classify feature, too, but that doesn't work in the Personal version. Looks like I may have to CRIMP the Pro version after all...

Rather against my will, because I've already invested in so many alternatives, I'm very impressed by DEVONthink. Not least because its capture function is so stable (synchronisation with the iOS app, on the other hand, is not very stable! but there are signs they're working on that!). So far, I've not had any crashes, wobbles or memory moments with DEVONthink, which sets it apart from all the others (Yojimbo, Together, especially Stache, and even Scrivener).

MadaboutDana wrote:

It's a very powerful feature, and has made me very happy! It means
DEVONthink can be used as a hierarchical information manager in just the
same way as any more conventional two-pane outlining tool, but with the
added advantage that you can spontaneously decide to group/ungroup a
large selection of items on the spur of the moment.

Can the same item belong to more than one groups? Or would one need to use tags/labels for that?

No, I don't think so - at least, I can't see/find any way of doing that. You'd be looking at tags and labels, in that case, and presumably making use of the (Auto) Classify function as well. I won't pretend I know how that works, because it's not available in the Personal edition!

It's worth mentioning that items in DEVONthink can link to other items, in certain instances. Again, I've not explored this in detail yet, but if you've got a text/rich-text/editable item, you can link from *within* the item to any other item. Since you can turn more or less anything in DEVONthink into an editable text item, this represents another level of flexibility.

There's also a general 'Link to...' box, which may offer even more options, like linking to targets within other items, but... no, I've not explored that yet.

I can see I'm going to have to reinstall the Pro edition! But I refuse to be pressured into installing the Pro Office edition! Aaarrgh!

An item can belong to as many groups within the same database as you wish. "Replicate" the document or "Replicate" a group -- ⌘L (command-L), and move the replicants where you wish. Or, select a document or group and use the "Replicate to" contextual menu item to send the replicant to a destination in that database. Replicants are similar to aliaes -- they are pointers to the same document. There is only one physical document -- changing any aspect of any replicant changes all replicants simultaneously. Replicants cannot cross databases. The Tools > Show Info command for a selected document or group will tell you where all the replicants for that document or group.

I recommend Joe Kissell's book (Take Control of Getting Started with DEVONthink 2 -- http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/devonthink-2 as well as the various tutorials in Help > Support Assistant.

DEVONthink's user forum is a broad and deep resource for all experience levels, and the support staff is very friendly and helpful.

Check out the Hacker News discussion of this. Lots of interest to people here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8270759

Hot dang! I can see there's an awful lot still to explore. Thanks, folks!

UK readers interested in DEVONthink will also find some useful resources on Amazon (the Kindle edition of Kissell's book is GBP 7.40).

There's also a nice summary of DEVONthink's top features at Macademise: http://macademise.wordpress.com/2013/12/02/organising-your-research-and-the-rest-of-your-life-with-devonthink/

For what it's worth, I am currently experimenting with DEVONthink to go, and while it can be very temperamental, when it does work, it works fast and well. I'm in the middle of a large project involving quite a lot of research, and am regularly syncing reference material over from the desktop (trial) version of DEVONthink to my iPad, so I can read it while I'm doing other things. This has the advantage of preserving DEVONthink's indexing. While there are other ways of doing the same thing (notably by using a synchronised Dropbox folder to transfer files to Readdle Documents, which is also capable of creating full-text indices), the DEVONthink option is very convenient. It's also easier to add notes.

I posted this link without having read it - but I read the article and comments last night. I thought it was very interesting!

DrAndus - as I read the article I was wondering how well ConnectedText would fit the ideal "personal knowledge base" the author was describing. I would be interested to know what you would think about it. I am not a CT user, but was experimenting with it last night.

Same here ... reading Alex's essay I kept thinking "ConnectedText". I know he says "Wikipedia works well because the effort is crowdsourced. But I’m just one person, and so I can’t spend all day pecking away to create some record of my learning, otherwise I’ll spend all my time documenting, rather than actually using my PKB." But, no matter what the solution, there's eventually time needed to "peck away" and curate one's collection of information. CT can be highly functional with very little investment.

jimspoon wrote:

DrAndus - as I read the article I was wondering how well ConnectedText
would fit the ideal "personal knowledge base" the author was describing.
I would be interested to know what you would think about it. I am not
a CT user, but was experimenting with it last night.

Well, I've gone through a very similar process of searching for the ideal PBK on the very pages of this forum here a few years ago, and as you know I found it in CT. But I haven't tried any of the Mac software discussed on that blog, so I can't draw any comparisons. But I would still suggest checking out CT to Alex. There are plenty of Mac users using it via Parallels etc. very happily. Moreover, many of the general weaknesses of web-based wikis mentioned in the blog post and comments do not apply to CT, as it is a lot more than just a wiki. It has all kinds of analytical, visualisation, and organisational tools that plain vanilla wikis just don't have.

I wouldn't say it ticks every single box on Alex's list, but I don't know of any single software that could. On the other hand, some workarounds do exist, such as using Autohotkey and Python scripts for instance to semi-automate certain processes (such as capture and input).

Paul Korm wrote:

But, no matter what the solution, there's eventually time needed to
"peck away" and curate one's collection of information. CT can be
highly functional with very little investment.

I completely agree. Certain analytical tasks and decisions just can't be automated, especially not the decision on what to include and exclude or how to categorise and tag the data. CT, being a wiki with markup, may end up a bit fiddly at times, but one can reap the benefits later, when running queries and finding info easily and being able to make new connections.

Paul Korm wrote:

Same here ... reading Alex's essay I kept thinking "ConnectedText".

Actually the whole category of Zettelkasten software is focused on this problem of creating and managing a personal knowledge base, so some of the other software on this list may also be of relevance:

http://www.zettelkasten.de/tools/

http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/5298/0/zettelkasten-software