[NewsPoster]

This is going to be like reviewing a car by focusing on how great the radio is. DevonThink is a massive application that might as well aim to be your personal Wikipedia. Every thought you have, every note you make, everything you spot on the web, you can throw it all into your personal DevonThink database. So far that sounds very much like Evernote -- and it is indeed similar -- but DevonThink is equally focused on arranging and sorting that material.

Evernote, for comparison, is very good at collecting material from all sorts of sources -- and you organize it by notebooks and tags. Save a note into a notebook of your choosing, add the tags you think best describe it. DevonThink has its equivalents to this, but it also processes what you save on its own. It makes connections for you: artificial intelligence that can group your notes and clippings by subject or type.

In theory, the aim of DevonThink is to gather up information for a specific purpose. Evernote is a grab bag of everything passing by, but DevonThink is for getting notes and sources for a book or a research paper together. Really, it's for any project, but it is specific: you are building up material that you will use for that work.

The personal version limits you to one -- presumably sprawling -- database, but the Pro one lets you create many. Consequently, you have separate databases devoted to these specific projects. Create a new blank one for a report, and then start dragging material in. You can drag emails, you can clip from webpages, you can type new notes.

We selected a few thousand documents relating to a particular book project, and dragged the lot into DevonThink in one go. It copies the documents, rather than just pointing at them, so it takes quite a while when you're loading up that many -- but it also means everything is in your DevonThink database: you don't have to remember to move thousands of external documents if you switch to another Mac.

One consequence of having all your material in one place, though, is that it becomes a bit of a silo. There is web sharing, and you can make a connection between your Mac and cloud storage service Dropbox, or another computer for backups -- but it's involved, and not really satisfactory for collaboration. We believe most DevonThink users will use the application at their one main Mac.

It feels as if DevonThink is very strong on Macs, but still has a way to go with how we all tend to share and work on data across multiple devices now. There is a separate DevonThink to Go for iOS ($15 on the App Store) but it reportedly has issues with synchronization. These are expected to be fully resolved in the new version 2, but that has been in the works for over a year.

DevonThink is not an easy application to master in any of its versions but it is an easy one to start. As well as its core strengths of handling so much material in so many ways, it also has the benefit that you can just use what you want. Start simple, and build up as you need to: you don't have to study a manual and become an expert before you can even begin.

The Personal edition of DevonThink costs $50 on the Mac App Store. You can also buy it directly from the developer, where you will also get a generous trial offer on the Personal, Pro and Pro Office editions, allowing you to try any of them free for 150 hours each. Pro costs $80, and Pro Office is $150 both from the official site. If you find your needs are better suited to one of the more enterprise-level products, they aren't available on the Mac App Store at this point.

Who DevonThink is well-suited for:
Writers, academics and researchers who gather a lot of material in their work

Who DevonThink is not for:
People who need to share their work, or collaborate extensively with others

-- William Gallagher (@WGallagher)

[jscotta]

The biggest problem with DevonThink is that its approach to synchronization and collaboration. The current approach was fantastic for the 1990's, but today, having multiple devices and a need to connect with and collaborate other people is critical, for all but a few. And that was assuming that their sync issues with mobile devices was already working perfectly. It is just the wrong approach.

They could have used the syncing tech that the OmniGroup developed, if they wanted a cloud-based server to keep databases in sync. Or they could have had taken an approach that Marketcircle took with Daylite and had a DevonThink Server that kept the devices in sync and with collaboration contacts. Either of these approaches would have been world's better than their current approach.

In fact, the extremely poor sync and collaboration services is what forces me to use Evernote even though I think that overall DevonThink is a better product.

[xdox]

I've used DevonThrink Pro since it was originally released...several years now. I definitely agree with jscotta re syncing between machine: a much needed feature. Another feature I'd like to see is database encryption. That said, the app has use far beyond described in the review: think of it as document organization and storage for any PDF. I have long used separate databases for investment records, tax records, legal document, and miscellaneous. It really was one of the first document storage apps, but it does need the additional features listed above.