The other Devons...Agent, Sphere

Software
1

Does anyone use DevonAgent or DevonSphere?

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I use DevonAgent as a backup research tool (I’m a law professor), just to make sure I haven’t missed anything with my usual academic search databases. I also use it if I have a general research query that I know will give me too many results to be useful. In short, it’s a useful tool. I bought it as package with DevonThink Pro Office.

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I have DEVONAgent but have not made much use of it yet.

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Keep wanting to - but honestly - just cannot find the time to sit down and get to grips with it properly. As a result, I don’t yet understand how to use it properly.

That, and I’m not entirely sure what I could use it for - as in, don’t quite know which ‘search’ to automate.

Also bought it as part of the package.

5

Well it seems it can even predict the future :roll_eyes:

Untitled

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Well I’m done with DEVONAgent. The Devon software always seems so promising in theory, and fails so miserably in practice. A “deep web” search for “Mabo NEAR Queensland” (one of the seminal court cases in Australian indigenous rights law) brings up the same wikipedia entry that’s been reposted on a dozen sites, each filled with banner ads. The manual just says the plug-in documentation is available on-line but DA itself can’t find it. It also fails to find this helpful post which DuckDuckGo returns as the #1 hit for “customise devonagent”:

http://www.macdrifter.com/2013/11/devonagent-for-custom-searching-sponsor.html

2 Likes
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I tried DevonAgent several times, managed at least to basically understand how to search something with it, didn’t even basically understand what the different representations of the results are about, didn’t find anything with it or nothing that google wouldn’t give me more easily. Probably this is a great tool for specific use cases. Probably it’s not intended for normal people like me.

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Had it for over a decade. Used hardly ever. I want to believe, but I can’t

1 Like
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I tried to use DEVONAgent as a custom tool to search our company Jira and Confluence sites. Worked for a few days on setting up the plugin, but it could never quite work the way I wanted it to, if it worked at all.

I can’t imagine that a desktop tool can keep up with a regular search engine.