I’m with @cornchip—no need to fix what isn’t broken!
These tools all overlap quite a bit. So, it’s true that you might not get much more out of DEVONthink (or any other tool) than what you’re already using/doing.
And folks shouldn’t discount the time-cost of onboarding. Using new tools means learning to use new tools. It’s easy to overlook.
Still, here is one example of what DEVONthink can do above and beyond the approach you’ve described:
That is cool! Although I do annotate pdfs sometimes, my usual reading workflow is to take notes in my own words. I find summarizing an article or book helps me process and retain the information.
For sure. The automation extracts comment annotations as well, so if you type out notes inside the PDF, they will also show up in the reading session notes.
(You could also use this, for example, to write tasks inline as you think of them in the PDF. Or you could tag specific highlights, and then either automatically or manually process those tags to do different things.)
I have hard DT mentioned many times here and on MPU, but I have never given it much thought and haven’t really looked into it. Thanks for the reminder.
I wonder, is this a similar program to EagleFiler? I recently came across this as a good way to back up emails. A bit cheaper than DT - anyone have any thoughts on how these compare. Perhaps DT is more powerful and “professional” than EagleFlier, but are they in the same ballpark?
Cheers
k
If you were only to use DT as a digital file cabinet, yes, you could consider EagleFiler a simpler alternative (in fact it’s what I’m using these days and is really nifty, I thing EagleFiler deserves its own thread). But DT is a much more sophisticated tool for organizing your thoughts and research.
I haven’t used EagleFiler, but many here have compared the two.
Perhaps relevant:
Thanks - I had read through those threads, but that seemed a bit older and curious what people were still thinking.
I don’t do a lot of research, so I think Bear notes works for my meager writing/notes needs. I do like EagleFlier for email backup, so I think I will stick with that route.
Cheers
Thanks Ryan - I downloaded Devonthink to go and when I see the one time purchase in iOS it says $39.99 - is that the discount price or am I missing something?
If you want a nice step up from the Finder but are not sure about going all the way back to DEVONthink, you might consider EagleFiler: Collect notes, e-mails, and Web pages on your Mac, and search them instantly.
See the original blogpost linked above and my earlier post. The discount will be available this Friday through Monday so it is probably not active just yet.
This exclusive promotion starts Friday, April 29th, 2022, at 9 a.m UTC and ends Monday, May 2nd, 2022, at 6 p.m.
Ive been using DT for less than a year. I think if you’re familiar with computers generally and don’t mind a bit of study time, shifting to DT isn’t as bad as it might seem. The biggest headache for me was actually gathering up all the files I had everywhere and dumping them in DT. That took far more time than figuring out how to get started.
I came to DT because my workflow was failing, but I didn’t know where the problem was or how to fix it. There was just friction where there shouldn’t be (which of my 5 cloud services might I have saved this file to? Which app should I write these notes in?), and by chance I saw DT mentioned somewhere (I forget where) and for whatever reason my brain said “hey, this needs reading about properly”.
I vaguely pick up the manuals to read a few pages every now and then to learn more, but for knowledge management even just having my files in one place, learning to use the PDF annotations and highlights function and taking some time to understand the search function was worth it for me. I’m very aware that I’m probably not even scratching the surface of what DT could do for me.
Fun fact: just today I got to use my newfound knowledge on Boolean search operators for the first time! “Oh, you need a reference that talks about species X and species Y within a sentence of each other? Let me see what I can find”. First time I’ve been able to do that without having to try and remember where I might have seen something and then checking it with my eyes like I live in medieval times 
THE FUTURE IS HERE.
We all use search all the time, and yet it is still vastly underused. Especially in DEVONthink! Thanks for sharing that example.
Purchased. Now the learning curve begins.
A few resources to get you (and others) started: Both the official DEVONthink Manual and free Take Control of DEVONthink 3 are excellent resources and must-reads, and the DT community is extremely helpful (plus the DEVONtechnologies team is very quick to respond on the forums).
Great, thank you!
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I will re-iterate the point made about resources. Use the DEVONthink 3 Forum. They have at least one guy there all the time. @BLUEFROG, he is great. Most questions you have will appear via a simple search there.
I just bought it. I got the Pro version and with the discount it came to about $140.
For those new to DT here are a couple of things you may wish to note:
In Preferences/Sorter you can add the sorter to different locations on your desktop which makes makes getting stuff into DT easy. I have my Sorter set up as a small icon in the Menu bar. You’ll want to experiment with the arrangement that works best for you. Also, you can create shortcuts for search and for getting stuff into DT.
In case anyone is wondering, the discounts apply for an upgrade from standard to Pro.
