DEVONthink To Go 3 17+

I was a slow starter with DEVONthink. It’s breadth of possibilities to organize information overwhelmed me at first. I bought two books on how to use it, but did not find them all that useful because I didn’t remember what I read. It was only when I started using Devonthink on a daily basis regardless whether I knew what I was doing or not that I really became hooked. I found it is a program that is best learned as you go. And once you get started, the possibilities are wide ranging and dynamic. I use DEVONthink to store any ideas I have, things I have read, pictures I have seen, etc. Then when I want to write something I can do a search, and numerous connections come up between notes that I would never have organized if I was just doing a single research project. I use DEVONthink as my storage file, like a Zettlekasten. I then move to either a mind map program to further analyze, or to Scivener, my writing app, to use its notecard function, to organize my thoughts. I then write using Scrivener. DEVONthink is an absolute must for storing and organizing the many things I study and write about. It is a fabulous program!

I am an inveterate collector of snippets of information, URLs, and articles of interest. DEVONthink To Go integrates perfectly with DEVONThink for the Mac and syncs all of my files perfectly and seamlessly. I love this app for the AI features that help uncover unexpected (to me, at least) relationships among the many pieces of information. The organization and search functions are deep and effective.

But perhaps more important than the usefulness of the applications is the truly awesome customer service. From time to time I have had some issues, and the DT customer service people have always responded quickly (I mean really fast!) even on holidays and weekends. They don’t just give canned answers and move on. They take the time to understand, and they follow up.

These apps and the developers and customer service people are uniformly great. Highly highly recommend DEVONThink!

With DT3 and the iOS companion DTTG, the company has taken a big leap and now offers a better solution to document management and research platform than Obsidian, Roam, Notion, Craft and all others. With new Markdown features (still need improvement), backlinks, better iCloud Kit syncing (syncing across devices it was one of the issues before the latest upgrades), tags, groups and a host of features, it does a great job for people with large amounts of reference documents to manage and edit. The PDF editor in the iPad is really great.

Even if syncing works a lot better, and I have learned that breaking my document base in many smaller databases is the way to go (not to throw everything into a single database), it still depends on iCloud (it also supports Dropbox and others, which I have not tried), and when the volume is large, is still not agile enough to see all documents in sync in several devices, say iMac, MBA and iPad. We need more speed there but I suppose that is Apple’s fault.