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Nice change in Devonthink
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Posted by Amontillado
Dec 14, 2020 at 12:37 PM
This actually happened months ago. I completely missed it.
Devonthink tags are really groups. The difference is tagging something automatically replicates it to the group for the tag. Untagging something deletes the replicant in the tag.
All good until (in the old days) you created a file in a tag, not in a group. No problem for DT, but if you deleted the tag, the file got deleted without going into the trash. Tags were for tagging, groups were for storing files.
It’s different, now. If you create a file in a tag, DT actually creates the file in the database’s inbox, automatically tagged appropriately.
Later, you can move the new files out of the inbox to their appropriate destinations. If you create a file in a tag and then delete it, the delete operation was really just untagging it. The file remains safely in the inbox.
Sometimes I’ll create a group to use as a temporary workspace. I’ll replicate ideas I want to refer to from elsewhere in the database. Imagine working out a chapter in a book, pulling ideas from a pile of notes.
Good, except if I create a new file in the temporary workspace group, I have to remember to replicate it somewhere.
Using a tag as a temporary workspace is better, because I can delete files in the tag without losing them, and new files are automatically created where they will survive my deleting the tag.
Cool!
Posted by 22111
Jan 4, 2021 at 06:34 PM
Interesting post; not really enlightening; shows that their concept has become quite a mess though, and no wonder they have got conceptual problems, now or even before, since they discarded their first pane, i.e. it hadn’t been a 2-, but a 3-pane outliner, and then the first-level pane went away; they pretexted that this way, it was easier for the non-cognoscenti…
(Not writing from experience - I don’t have a Mac - but from discussions in their forum.)
This being said, they always have some simili-AI (i.e. rules-based, probably new targets automatically being added to this by fixed algorithms, too) for item distribution to folders or the like, and which certainly is a big help; to my knowledge, in the Windows environment, no such “outliner” has become available.
But really crippling software, i.e. outright deleting functionality instead of just hiding them to “beginners”, that’s giving a kick in the balls of loyal “high-end” customers (i.e. not the fanboys who accept everything coming to them from their ersatz-Jesus, which unfortunately is the underlaying “philosophy” of the Apple world to begin with, and even in the Eighties, it was already like that), so…
Speaking of Windows, UltraRecall would have become almost perfect an “outliner” (whatever you call it, we all know we speak of some more general sw category but which hasn’t a real name of its own yet, “Information manager” being too broad a term I think), WITH real tree formatting (bold, etc., with the selected item being “backlighted” in blue or something then), AND that missing “third”, in fact first, pane, the developer refusing to implement that though…
Two more, and both very annoying, examples of my old saying that coders and machine-user interfacing, from a “workflow” pov, well then…
And a third example, OneNote where, among many other things, it’s (at least it was: don’t know about possible newer developments) not even possible to get normal, regular, straight A4 or letter “pages” to write on, with a fixed left border: not everyone wants to “scribble” when they just want to enter textual info (and yes, there might be a workaround, finally: am not interested anymore).
Posted by Amontillado
Jan 5, 2021 at 04:45 AM
I like the Unix-like foundation in MacOS.
OneNote will let you set the horizontal size of text boxes, so that may help, should you revisit OneNote,
My solution in DevonThink is to use rtf notes for something quick. If I want a neater or more elaborate not, I open the rtf document in Nisus. Best of both worlds.