When you purchase an upgrade to DEVONthink 3, the license for 2.x is superseded and invalidated.
You can use the DEVONthink 3 license for 2.x, however it will consume one of the seats just as version 3 does.
And though I know this particular situation…
The 2.x line has been out of development for some time now. Also, the OCR engine in DEVONthink Pro Office is also incompatible to macOS 10.15 Catalina and later. We strongly encourage people to upgrade to DEVONthink 3 sooner rather than later. Select DEVONthink Pro Office > Purchase to open our online store with upgrade options specific to your license. The Pro edition would be the natural successor to Pro Office.
I guess my question is more along the lines of actual use. Does anyone wish they could go back to DT2? Are there features/capabilities you miss, or is it truly better in every meaningful way?
The two things I’ve heard in scouring previous threads are (1) lots of complaints about losing the 3-pane view (though if I jump in with DT3, I guess I wouldn’t know what I’m missing in that regard) and (2) some comments about the new seat limitation (which makes sense from a business standpoint, though in this increasingly multi-device day and age, a default 3-seat allowance would seem more reasonable/future-proof).
Upgrade to V3. It introduces a lot of improved features (especially if you’re a markdown user, but for many other features as well, such as custom metadata).
TBF, some people were very unhappy about one or two of the UI changes (e.g. there is no direct equivalent of the 3-pane view) though I believe most of those concerns have more or less been addressed in subsequent updates, so at least there are usable workarounds. Or perhaps people have just moved on…
I certainly wouldn’t go back to V2. The only reason I’d contemplate it would be if I needed the web server capability (or more than two seats) and couldn’t afford the much higher cost of that version. For everything else, I find V3 better.
I do. I STILL can’t get the same easy workflow I had with a fully functional 3-pane view. The suggested workarounds pale in comparison to the quick and easy flow that 3-pane view provided. That was the beginning of the end for me.
And In my case I have moved on.
The straw that broke this camel’s back was the data loss I experienced.
Sure if you haven’t had the issue you can poo poo the experience of those of us who have. But if you are the one caught with critical data gone forever IN SPITE OF 2 YEAR ROLLING BACKUPS (and yes I AM shouting because it’s such a big issue!) then no amount of “well it doesn’t affect most folks” will mitigate the significant harm that occurred TO ME.
I’m really glad that so many thousands of people have had no problems. I wish you well , I truly do. What I had happen should never happen but I will never again tust DEVONThink with anything critical.
Obsidian. It’s working quite well for me. The only thing I am still using DT for is to clip as rich text web articles. Which are then dissected into the attachments for illustrations or pictures and the text as markdown and put into Obsidian.
I had many thousands of hours in 2.x; lived in it, breathed in it.
It was almost 9 months into alpha/beta testing 3.x before it just dawned on me that 2.x’s time had come to an end for day-to-day operations. As much as I loved it, 3 gracefully put it to rest.
Yes… I liked DT3 from the beginning (though obviously didn’t have your in-depth experience…) and never thought of going back to V2 once I started on the beta. I still think 3 pane view would have been better retained, but can live with the workarounds easily enough.
Obviously, there are still things that I would like to see improved: e.g. the recent improvements in markdown support are very welcome, but it’s still not really suitable to use as the only editor (for either markdown or RTF) because it still doesn’t have typewriter scrolling despite it first being asked for in 2009
It’s still one of the most impressive programs on the Mac, though, and along with Tinderbox, it’s one of the reasons why I won’t consider switching to Windows any time soon.[^1]
Cheers!
[^1]: The other is Window’s ridiculously antediluvian keyboard layout mechanism. It’s 2021 — it’s been possible to type an em-dash on the Mac without Alt+3 random digits for decades. Has nobody in Microsoft ever tried typing anything requiring symbols and accents in Windows? As for putting their main modifier key in the single least convenient position on the entire keyboard — was this a practical joke that went horribly wrong or did they just hate typists?
Obsidian can reference other file types easily within notes. I am already transcluding some PDF files and other file types into Obsidian notes without any issues.
In any case, nearly all my notes were plaintext files anway so once converted into Markdown I don’t lose anything. I also have a number of Rich text notes. By far the greatest number of items that I stored in DT were archived email messages.
I have never used search in all PDFs in over 20 years so I don’t care that Obsidian doesn’t search the contents of the PDFs. It does have a great search within the notes which is good enough. Realistically though if I have to resort to search I’m already in trouble. I use searching maybe once or twice a month if that. That’s not just in DT but anywhere. I have a well defined fiel system that I can locate things with.
In Obsidian I am creating some additional links out to the larger file system. I’m still playing with the best way to do that but there are several options.
Just by way of reference with over 87K individual items across 5 separate DT databases I had less than 700 PDF files and they were mostly also duplicated out in my main file system.
I had found that DTs automatic clasification was invariably horrible and that wherever it wanted to classify items was NOT where I really wanted them so I also never used that feature.
The feature I really liked, 3 pane view, is being implemented by me in Obsidian with a liberal use of combining the local graph view with MOC notes that I can traverse easily.
As I said I don’t use search and I have a pretty detailed filing and naming scheme that has taken a bit of tweaking to make work in Obsidian but it does work. With that in place I can find any given item easily.
In fact I’m finding I can link more outside stuff, like all the scietific papers in my bibliographic system and more much more easily in Obsidian than I could in DT. DT could do it but it’s fast and simple with Obsidian so I do more linking and find more useful connections.
The one area that is still TBD in Obsidan is how to store the roughly 80K individual email messages in my email archive in a way I can easily look at them. I am looking at several options for that right now but all of them so far have issues. As a backup I have already exported out all the messages that were in my Archived email DEVONThink database as Unix mailbox files, one for each group of messages in the DT DB, and am looking at several readers for that that might work. I don’t need to refer to them often but when I do it’s critical that I can find them quickly.
Three Pane View was a window layout found in some other applications whereby one pane only shows folders, one pane shows only files in a selected folder, and a third pane shows a preview of a file selected in the second pane. There was also a global sidebar on the left, so four panes total.
Here is a blog post on approximating the same layout in DEVONthink 3…
Here is an example of the actual Three Pane view in DEVONthink 2.x. The middle pane only shows groups. The top right pane only shows files.
Here is an example of the approximated layout in version 3. The Navigate sidebar only shows groups relative to a database. The item list shows both files and groups, but this can be switched to show only documents as discussed in the blog post.
Wasn’t there also some element of intelligent filtering that could be applied with multiple items selected in the left pane? I remember reading something recently along those lines that people had built their entire workflow upon (though without first-hand experience, I had some trouble following the explanation; I’ll see if I can find it somewhere to link here). It sounded like v3 couldn’t duplicate that functionality, which would explain their frustration.
