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Favored "bucket" app - DEVONthink v. Keep-It vs. EagleFiler etc
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Posted by JakeBernsteinWA
Jul 6, 2018 at 02:50 PM
MadaboutDana wrote:
I would recommend Notebooks like a shot, if the desktop versions weren’t
>so much less powerful than the iOS version. Alfons has been working on a
>new version for a long time now, but news has become a trickle. I might
>have to harass him!
I just saw a recent Tweet from him that Notebooks 2.0 for macOS is due out *this summer*. I already decided to try out Notebooks—very impressive. I’m somewhat confused at the lack of Tagging though…seems like that would be a no-brainer.
>DEVONthink is awesome, but I couldn’t use it for everyday bucket listing
>- it’s just too cumbersome.
That’s been the nagging feeling I’ve been having about it, even though I use it every day.
>I find myself using KeepIt more and more, as it becomes increasingly
>stable (and multi-featured); the developer is impressively committed.
>And the always-on-top compact view is awesome!
Yep. Trying out Keep-It slowly and this is interesting. I wish it had a quick entry universal hot key, but hey, that’s what Keyboard Maestro is for, right?
>I tried to love EagleFiler for years, but somehow it never quite did it
>for me. But it’s not bad.
Just feels outdated to me.
>Having rejected DayOne (after making years of journal entries), I’ve
>just invested in Mariner Software’s MacJournal. Which is actually very
>impressive, with a very wide range of features at a very modest price.
>It could easily be used as a bucket-list app, in that it accepts
>attachments, recordings, links, tags, hierarchies of
>journals/sub-journals, ebooks and all kinds of other stuff - and has
>useful timeline and calendar views as well. Having said that, I’m still
>in the early stages of blast-testing it, so I won’t give it my ultimate
>five-star recommendation until I’m convinced it does everything it says
>it does.
Just downloaded the trial of MacJournal. I’m curious, but like others, hope I don’t get too attached right away without assurances that it will continue to be updated!
>Cheers,
>Bill
Thanks!
Posted by bigspud
Jul 8, 2018 at 01:53 AM
I kinda agree with Paul Korm.
Use default file generating options when possible, only because it limits the work into taxonomy and curation of anything “special” within the native filesystem.
To that end my bucket is the browser ‘downloads’ folder. hazel is trained to keep everything there fresh, until well, unfresh. And then my preference is to sort by file extension. I use DTPO to index a good few folders of these extensions. my devonthink bases are large enough now that I use foxtrot search in the filesystem, and sometimes ammonite if I need to search the breadth of both devonthink and the remaining sorted files.
god knows I wish there were better support for the mac tagging interface for all of this. suggestions welcome!
living inside devonthink or keepit or et al seems to become painful if they are used as the dump/bucket/scratchpad. just my opinion that they excel at focussed work rather than the catchall.
Posted by JakeBernsteinWA
Jul 8, 2018 at 06:00 PM
bigspud wrote:
I kinda agree with Paul Korm.
>Use default file generating options when possible, only because it
>limits the work into taxonomy and curation of anything “special” within
>the native filesystem.
>To that end my bucket is the browser ‘downloads’ folder. hazel is
>trained to keep everything there fresh, until well, unfresh. And then my
>preference is to sort by file extension. I use DTPO to index a good few
>folders of these extensions. my devonthink bases are large enough now
>that I use foxtrot search in the filesystem, and sometimes ammonite if I
>need to search the breadth of both devonthink and the remaining sorted
>files.
>
>god knows I wish there were better support for the mac tagging interface
>for all of this. suggestions welcome!
>
>living inside devonthink or keepit or et al seems to become painful if
>they are used as the dump/bucket/scratchpad. just my opinion that they
>excel at focussed work rather than the catchall.
I tend to use Indexing with DTPO and it works great. The one problem is when I forget to “move to external folder” and find myself wondering where a file is and realizing it’s simply stuck inside DTPO. Not a huge deal since I’m on a Mac or iPad full time and DTTG2 works incredibly well, but there you go.
After all my CRIMPing the last few days, the two new apps I’m interested most in are Outlinely and Notebooks. Keep-It remains an ongoing experiment, but perhaps (as you suggest) for a focused use or two. Otherwise, I remain happy with my DTPO workflow and despite the focus on DTTG over the last year, DTPO *is* in active development.
Posted by satis
Jul 8, 2018 at 08:20 PM
JakeBernsteinWA wrote:
>
>After all my CRIMPing the last few days, the two new apps I’m interested
>most in are Outlinely and Notebooks. Keep-It remains an ongoing
>experiment, but perhaps (as you suggest) for a focused use or two.
>Otherwise, I remain happy with my DTPO workflow and despite the focus on
>DTTG over the last year, DTPO *is* in active development.
Davon Technologies are a vital Mac/iOS resource, and they have good products, and they update frequently. But they are SO stubborn about what they want to offer, and how, and when, and their customer support is gawdawful. The tipping point for me was a few years back: I used the app standalone and hated having that pop-out sorter stuck to the side of the screen, so I’d always turn it off in Preferences. But every time DTP updated, it would *ignore* my stated preferences and reset the sorter to launch on restart. I contacted Devon about this numerous times, for a couple of years, and they never fixed it. I got disgusted with having to remember to go into Prefs and re-set my actual preferences every time the app updated, and, added with the UI wonkiness I migrated from DPT to EagleFiler.
(And then Devon fixed that particular bug… without noting it in any of the release notes.)
###
When I first encountered Outlinely I was intrigued to see a desktop clone of Workflowy, and I considered trying it. But the secretive, unrevealed dev(s)/owner of Glam Development did absolutely nothing with the app for the last year until the v. 2.7.8 update last month (mysteriously jumping from May 2017’s v 2.7.2) to merely add multilevel numbering and pdf output options.
And pricing seems off to me. When the Mac app came out in 2014 it cost $4.99 and now it’s $39.99, and the free iOS app requires a $14.99/year in-app subscription to get iCloud sync and search(!). To use it on both platforms would cost $55 the 1st year and $15/year after that. That only makes it competitive with Workflowy/Checkvist after two years, and also puts it in OmniOutliner territory, whose Mac/iOS Pro unlock and sync costs $80 total, with no additional charges.
Posted by MadaboutDana
Jun 19, 2019 at 10:20 AM
Having criticised EagleFiler, I’ve recently rediscovered its benefits.
I’m trying, as mentioned before, to compress down the number of apps I use to manage my vast store of general information, which comprises web pages saved out as PDF files.
At the same time, I’m trying to move away from all-in-one and proprietary databases towards tools that manage individual files (so no user tie-in).
Hence my excitement at rediscovering FoxTrot Pro.
I’ve used Curiota, which is good, but imposes its own structure on folders/files. I’ve been trying to use Notebooks, which would be excellent, except for its PDF-handling limitations (mentioned already elsewhere).
So I dug out my EagleFiler licence again and downloaded the latest version. And discovered that it’s more flexible than I remember. Also, it has one unique feature: a setting that allows you to specify that it should save web pages out as a single long PDF page (so not automatically convert them into A4-sized printable pages, which is what everybody else does).
It took me a little experimenting to find out how to do this (it’s actually ridiculously easy using the one-press import key, which is F1 by default). If you use the context menu’s “Save PDF to EagleFiler” option, you get A4 pages again - which is sometimes useful, but not my preferred approach).
The other thing I hadn’t fully taken on board is that you can set up an EagleFiler library more or less anywhere. It’s basically the same thing as a FoxTrot index. You have to manually initiate a rescan to get it to index files added through Finder or other file management tools, but that’s scarcely a hardship.
So it’s back on my list of Very Useful Info Management Tools.
Cheers,
Bill