I tend to place documents into a Dropbox folder when I'm roaming and let Hazel send that document to my Global Inbox.Ĥ) Web Clipper Extension - DEVONthink To Go may be a chore but the Web Clipper extension for Safari is great and I use this a lot for gathering web content and saving to DEVONthink. I have to admit, it's not as reliable as I need from a mobile solution (especially one that is so key to my business) so I don't use this as often as I would like. I don't have to think about it until I process my Global Inbox and move them to the relevant project database.Ģ) ScanSnap Manager - DEVONthink has superb ScanSnap support and I use my Fujitsu ScanSnap to scan documents and send directly into DEVONthink (or to one of my Hazel controlled folders for rule processing if I know it's a common statement, invoice etc)ģ) DEVONthink To Go - This will be covered in a later post, however if you install DEVONthink To Go, then you can clip content in there on your iOS devices. The rules will process, tag and rename my files and then move them from their original location to the Global Inbox in DEVONthink. ![]() Personally, I import documents in the following ways:ġ) Hazel - I have various folders that have Hazel rules applied to them. This is really handy, especially when you are using your device in Split Screen mode. You can also drag and drop files directly into DEVONthink groups from the desktop or Finder. You can select File then Import and make your selection from the Finder window that appears. Documents can either be imported or indexed. Imported files are copied directly into the DEVONthink database itself, whereas indexed files are stored externally to the database. There are two distinct ways that DEVONthink can reference files. It's all well and good knowing what DEVONthink is for, yet how do we get data in there in the first place? Import or Index?įirstly, it's important to understand how files are referenced. Author Steven Johnson describes what software he uses to write his books, including an insanely useful research database for the Mac, DEVONThink Pro ($79, Mac only).ĭEVONThink is a desktop document database, where you can save snippets of web pages, PDF’s, and any other kind of document.In this post I'm going to discuss one of the most important factors when it comes to DEVONthink Pro Office and that is Importing Data. Suppose you are reading a PDF and want to take notes about it. Its killer feature is its ability to determine which documents deal with similar subject matter based on the frequency of the words that appear in them. This will create a new note in the app of your choice. More powerful than just a regular keyword search, when you’ve got a DT database of thousands of documents, this relationship ranker helps you connect ideas you may not on your own.īack in 2005, Johnson inspired me to try out DEVONThink, and I used it to put together the first edition of the Lifehacker book. Here’s what my database at that time looked like: Collect, analyze, summarize, write: View all your data in one place, use tags to quickly organize documents, and write in editors optimized for plain text, rich. You can see in the left pane that the “Lifehacker book” folder contains one subfolder per chapter. Johnson described months of collecting bits of research and dropping them into DT, then using that research as a starting point for his manuscript. For me, already-published blog posts were my research. DEVONthink adds standard annotations to PDFs that are compatible to other viewers, e.g., Adobe Acrobat, too. So I exported my blog’s post database, wrote a couple of scripts that massaged the files for use in DT, and dropped them in. Write When all collecting and researching is done it’s time to write: term papers, project reports, your thesis. Collect the materials you want to use by replicating them to a new group in DEVONthink. From there I set up my chapter folders, and dragged and dropped the items I’d use for those chapters into the corresponding folders. Like Johnson, I used a small percentage of the posts I’d written–you can see above that almost 4,500 items went unused in the “post archives” folder. But like Johnson said, starting out with a big database of research and piecing it all together is a LOT more practical than staring at a blank page when you start writing your book. ![]() ![]() Here’s Johnson’s post at BoingBoing, How to write a book, and here are more details on how I turned the Lifehacker blog into a book. Here’s a gallery of screenshots of DEVONThink in action for the Lifehacker book.Īs far as I know, there’s no true DEVONThink equivalent for Windows.
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