Devonthink

Update: 43f Deals & Discounts

Merlin — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 14:00:09 +0000

Just some quick reminders and news on a few current discounts and special deals available for 43f readers.

30% off DEVONtechnologies applications - This one ends tonight. Check out with code "en-promo-43f-200610" for 30% off most all DEVONtechnologies apps -- including the very swell DEVONthink Pro. After midnight tonight (GMT, I'm guessing?), she is, as Daryl Hall and John Oates might say, gone.
10% off A2 web hosting for life - Ends January 10th 2007. Signup with 43f's web hosting service to get excellent pricing and service, plus a lifetime 10% discount. Just checkout with code "YLUSPXAWOAQAVL". A2 are very patient and helpful with me, and I suspect they will be with you as well.
35% off 43f ad space - Federated Media continues to offer a perfectly zany 35% discount on all graphical banners that are booked through their zesty online platform.

In somewhat related news, the Working and Living Life Smarter Conference announced last month is being rescheduled to a TBD date next year. Registrants have been notified and received refund info, but you should feel free to ask any questions to either the conference's organizer, Kay Ethier (sales at aboveandbeyondlearning daht com), or me. Will update when the new dates are announced -- I imagine that we'll have another discount to offer for 43f readers.

”Update: 43f Deals & Discounts” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on November 15, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

43F Discount: 30% off DEVONthink Pro and other DEVONtechnologies apps

Merlin — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 16:39:27 +0000

Our friends at DEVONtechnologies have extended a very swell offer to readers of 43 Folders.

From now through November 15, you can get a 30% discount on any of the DEVON apps (excluding PhotoStickies) -- that includes DEVONthink Personal, DEVONthink Pro, DEVONagent, DEVONnote as well as the Infoworker's Pro Bundle and the DEVONthink/PhotoStickies bundle.

Just use the code "en-promo-43f-200610" when you checkout to receive your discount.

FWIW, 43f doesn't see any dough out of this -- we just like DEVON's stuff (definitely don't miss their amazing freeware Services for OS X) so we're happy to facilitate readers getting a break on their software. Ain't we grand?

If you're new to the wonders of DEVONthink as your unofficial outboard brain, check out these previous 43f posts.

”43F Discount: 30% off DEVONthink Pro and other DEVONtechnologies apps” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on November 01, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

DEVONthink: An appreciation of "smart groups"

Merlin — Mon, 22 May 2006 11:52:04 +0000

Using Smart Groups

I've recently gotten way back into DEVONthink as a means to capture, wrangle, and analyze all the reference material in my world.

If you're new to this amazing application -- and at the risk of far exceeding my understanding of both the human brain and this particular piece of software -- DEVONthink learns the neural pathways between the stuff you know or say is related. But, more importantly, it prompts you on the relationships you probably don't know exist (yet). This is awfully useful and wildly stimulating to the busy front parts of my own brain, such as it is.

I'd seen the power of the app before and have been way inspired by how the heroic Steven Johnson is using it, but the learning and experience curves always seemed just a bit steep for me, given the returns that it yielded in my too-brief usage. Still, I was quite smitten with the concept.

Flash forward a year and a half. I've now had DT Pro v. 1.1.1 in battlefield action for the last few weeks, and have been dutifully feeding it anything I find that seems tangentially interesting or useful; a few custom Quicksilver triggers mean one-click, no-look addition of any data type, from web pages to text selections to photos, full PDFs, and movie files. Thus far, this includes stuff like:

most of the more interesting contents of my hard drive (transparently "synced" with DT every week or so)
all the text files in which I "live" (over 300 -- also synced)
all my Safari bookmarks (over 3000)
all my del.icio.us links (also over 3000)
full text of all my 43 Folders posts (over 400)
full PDFs and excerpts from a ton of books, manuals, and slide shows
RTFDs or full web archives of over 100 interesting wikipedia pages (this is definitely the fastest growing sector)
any interesting quotes, quips, snarks, canards, nuggets, scraps, emails, web pages, or random ephemera that cross my transom

My focus over this time has been strictly on capture, rather than trying to make anything particularly useful of it all just yet. But I've recently started grouping and classifying occasional clusters of content using the app's killer feature: really smart AI that finds associations between items based on a concordance of common words and similar previous relationships you've established.

So, I have the start of a potential post underway that will re-introduce DT in more detail (which I've been building right in DT, natch), but I was moved today to share the insane usefulness of DEVONthink's "Smart Groups."

After weeks of mumbling to myself about the need for tagging in DT (and trying a few interesting and useful experiments), I finally did a little research (a/k/a "read the manual") and realized that several of the (metric assload of) AppleScripts available for use in the current edition can create a simplified version of this for me. The scripts are drop-dead easy to use. You just create a new, blank group, title it the word or words you're tracking, and then link to the appropriate AppleScript from the "script" field of the group's "Get Info" window (see image to the right). This does a serviceable job of creating and automagically updating collections with all matching docs each time you click on it.

So, in the example illustrated at the top, my "knowledgeworkers" group creates a folder full of "replicants" (think: OS X aliases, not Roy Batty) for any docs that contain the string "knowledgeworkers." The smashed-together names, as you might gather, shows you how you can fake tagging by adding keywords to the comments field of any documents; scripts in this thread make it super-easy to "tag" multiple documents at once.

The beauty part is you don't have to use these ersatz tags at all; if your needs are modest and you just want to find all the items that contain both "learning" and "amygdala," for example, it's a breeze. The smartypants concordance eats stuff like that for lunch and excretes constantly updated results right into your designated Smart Groups buckets. Nice and easy.

Like I say, I'll probably have more to say on DEVONthink soon, but if you find yourself dealing with very large amounts of information that need to be stored, synthesized, and re-combined, there's a lot to love in DEVONthink. It's had a subtle effect on the ways that I collect information, but I have a feeling its impact on what I do with it might be pretty profound.

”DEVONthink: An appreciation of "smart groups"” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on May 22, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

James Fallows on Mac thinking tools

Merlin — Sun, 04 Dec 2005 13:24:01 +0000

Mac Programs That Come With Thinking Caps On - New York Times

_The Atlantic_'s James Fallows -- who also wrote one of my favorite pieces on The David -- has done a piece for the New York Times_ on the various "thinking tools" for the Mac. He covers all the goodies, including Devonthink, Tinderbox, Circus Ponies Notebook, AquaMinds NoteTaker, and my current steady date, OmniOutliner Pro (including a nice shoutout to Ethan's _amazing Kinkless GTD for OO).

These programs are of obvious interest to the Mac community, but the much larger community of non-Mac users also has good reason to keep an eye on them. Some are simply better than their current Word counterparts, illustrating features and approaches that PC users will want once they have seen them. The companies making two of the programs discussed here have announced forthcoming Windows versions.

Others may follow next year, when Apple Computer begins producing Macs based on Intel processing chips like those that PC's use. That change will make it easier for software vendors to create both Mac and PC versions of their programs; the introduction of the Mac mini, discussed here two months ago, makes it easier and more practical for users to switch back and forth between platforms.

[ Thanks, Brian Oberkirch ]

”James Fallows on Mac thinking tools” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on December 04, 2005. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Les Orchard: Envisioning a Tiger/Tinderbox mashup

Merlin — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 16:13:19 +0000

Still Seeking an Exploded Tinderbox for Tiger » Archive » Blog » 0xDECAFBAD

Les has some very cool thoughts about a "Tinderbox for OS X":

But, what if Tinderbox could surrender all of those functions up to TextEdit and MS Word and other desktop apps? What if all of the “notes” in a Tinderbox document were just documents and files, and all of the relationships managed by Tinderbox (ie. spatial, links, aliased) were just encoded as extended attributes?

In this scenario, the file system is the Tinderbox document. Don’t want to use your whole hard drive? Make a new disk image and compartmentalize things. Tinderbox could become the world’s most revolutionary Finder rethink ever invented. And the thing is, I can see all of this being enabled by Spotlight and extended attributes.

The possibilities of apps like Tinderbox, Devonthink, and to an extent, even Curio get much more interesting at the idea that they might open up completely to the built-in architecture of OS X. Probably a bit ambitious for any variety of reasons, but the possibilities are tantalizing.

In (almost completely) unrelated news, I'll be talking at Mark's Tinderbox Weekend on Saturday here in SF, leading a discussion on Tinderbox as "trusted system." Looking forward to that.

”Les Orchard: Envisioning a Tiger/Tinderbox mashup” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on November 16, 2005. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

DEVONthink: Integrated Information Manager

Merlin — Wed, 01 Dec 2004 16:22:23 +0000

The latest release of DEVONthink [download] seems to scratch several itches I’ve been having lately. Specifically, I confess that I’ve been dashing (very unproductively) between a mountain of txt files, Mail.app, Entourage, two Moleskines, and an Instiki wiki trying to fashion the best solution for managing an amorphous collection of work, web, writing, and extracurricular projects. No single solution has been just what I needed, and, frankly, it’s been debilitating to try and maintain it all (Danny calls me the “patient zero” of productivity fads). It’s like tending rabbits, I tell you. While I know DEVONthink won’t solve all my problems, it looks very promising at corralling some of my thornier information management issues.

So far, I love the way that DEVONthink imports and manages stuff as well as how it draws informal but often rich semantic connections between documents. It has taken everything I've thrown at it so far (incl. Word files, photos, and Quicktime movies), and it still feels fast and stable (knock wood). I’m still getting my head around all the features and am still trying to find the best way to keep a database maintainable and well-organized, but I’m definitely intrigued.

I might also add—coming as this does on the heels of my reviewing two products that many of you found too costly—that DEVONthink rings up at just US$40 (further discounted for students). Given the power behind this app and the flexibility of things you can build with it, I find that gobsmackingly affordable.

So, DEVONthink nerds: if it suits you, consider sharing your thoughts on how to put the app to best use. I’m looking at you and your buddies here, Mr. Fred Reynolds. I know you guys have some pretty hot-rodded setups, and I’d love to hear how you do it. Ditto for good links to tutorials and tips on other sites. Also you can trackback this entry with posts about personal setups and novel uses you've found.

”DEVONthink: Integrated Information Manager” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on December 01, 2004. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"