MacVoices #1066: Joe Kissell Helps You Get Started with DEVONthink
Mac expert Joe Kissell takes on a challenging subject in his latest book, Take Control of Getting Started with DEVONthink. Why challenging? DEVONthink is a sophisticated program that is almost in a class by itself, providing tools and capabilities to help organize and find virtually any kind of information. Joe talks about some of the ways DEVONthink works, how it fits into a paperless workflow, how it manages the documents and information it organizes, and some of its many capabilities. This Take Control book has some different features, including a screencast; Joe talks about the reasons for the differences, and how they facilitate your getting started with DEVONthink.
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MacLevelTen – The Mac Media Group
Take Control of Getting Started with DEVONthink
The Real Paperless Office by Joe Kissell on Macworld
Update: The Paperless Office by Joe Kissell on PCWorld
I have used DevonThink Pro for a number of years. Unfortunately, this interview does not reveal the depth or breadth of DevonThink. It is not just a tinkerer's scrapbook. This interview--presumably the author's book as well--merely skims the surface of this application. DevonThink is an information manager with great depth. When you get information that you want to save for later reference--whether that is an email, a web page, a pdf file, or a writing that you create yourself--all of this can be stored and indexed for easy search and recall in DevonThink. The application is also quite easy to use initially. You can store and index things easily--because the structure of the application tracks the ease and familiarity of the Finder. By now, most of us have thousands of documents and writings on the hard drives of our computers. DevonThink can index these files--even your entire hard drive--and incorporate the index of those files within the DevonThink Database so that you can search and find, within DevonThink, all the files on your entire hard drive. BTW, you can do that in a much more refined way than you can with Spotlight. After using DevonThink for a number of years, I have the appreciation that I am using only a small portion of the capability of the application, and I want to use more of its complexity. I was hoping that Joe Kissell's book might help me plumb the depths of the application. After listening to this interview, however, I doubt that the book will be helpful to me, and I will look elsewhere.