Tuesday, March 28, 2006
DTP
I finally went ahead and updgraded from Panther to Tiger — 10.3.9 to 10.4.5. I put it off because of the time I knew it would take, and also wanting to wait until many important issues were pretty well worked out in the new system. It has taken a lot of time to prepare the old system for the upgrade, but now the new system is faster, more agile, just works better globally. Worth every minute of the effort — 3 or 4 days now. Spotlight, Autmator, Dashboard are worlds unto themselves.
The big one though is whether you can continue to use the programs you rely on. I had been using HogBay Notebook — a clever and elegantly simple program to work with text. It was like an extension of the Finder. But the developer changed directions and now, with the new system, I was faced with having to pick a new notebook type program. I went through the usual suspects, I tried out NoteTaker and Circus Ponies Notebook among many others, never got to StickyBrain — there is such a long list of these sorts of programs. Before he left the NYT to go back to the Nation James Fallows did a survey article about many such Mac programs. I am posting this to recommend a fantastic program I stumbled on, that does all and more than I expected. Matt Neuberg did a couple of reviews of the program for TidBits.
DEVONthink Pro is just an amazing program. I use it principally for text, but it can aggregate all sorts of information. It is very stable and fast — although they protest on the forums it is not a Finder replacement — but is sure comes close, as is true of many of the notebook type programs.
So the past few days have been a crash course on a complex program that is simple on the surface, but very powerful — something like Filemaker Pro for text. Anyway, if you do a lot of writing, if you work with many text snippets, it is worth checking out. It is a Mac only program and probably would best be run on Tiger.
One thing I do: I go to the forums of an application I am considering — you get a real feel for the sort of user and maintenance issues — and the level of involvement of the developer. The forums sparkle with useful advice and give you a sense of confidence. I’d also use the downloadable tutorial to learn — it seems better than the system help files included when you install the program.
[I have no connection to the company.]