Should I move to DevonThink?

[dfay]

I’d say no. I gave it a try again (maybe the 4th time) last night and remain unimpressed, especially for work with PDFs.

DEVONthink: stuck at the bottom of the hill

Just decided to give DT Personal another try with a folder of about 800 PDFs of academic articles. Two observations: PDF rendering is terrible - articles that show up instantly in Quicklook in Finder take much longer to render in DT, and frequently there are large white rectangles which never display, and the occasional beachball. AI isn’t working – after classifying about 70 articles into 40 groups, it still can’t auto classify anything, The “See Also” isn’t bad but it’s not much better th…

I was using it with a folder of about 800 PDFs I had accumulated with no DOIs, i.e. that would require manual intervention. After about 1.5 hours with DT, about 200 of them are now in named folders. Because of the See Also… feature I probably filed about 30% more files than I would have otherwise. But

1. They’re only filed in one folder, i.e. they only have one keyword, and every one will need multiple keywords to be classified properly
2. They’re still going to need manual intervention to get the metadata into my reference manager (BibDesk)

So in the end DT sped up my triage a little bit. But the first issue above is still a deal-breaker for actual use - PDF rendering is the worst of any PDF viewer on my Mac (Preview, Skim, Highlights, Adobe Reader) and unusable in some cases.

Also it doesn’t display epubs at all, just displays an icon, though it does seem to index them.

And when you triage, and use right-click > Move To to put a document in an existing folder, you just get a long list that you have to scroll through, no autocompletion or suggestions.