DEVONthink Pro Office ($150, Commercial, Version 2.0) is a comprehensive data management application.
In a previous post about Organization Apps I wrote that I will be writing about different organization apps from the perspective of a student. In particular, I said that I’ll be writing about them with two use cases in mind, for organizing research and for assisting the the writing process. I also want to add an additional use case for such applications, taking notes – either in class or outside of it. DEVONthink is one of the most popular applications in this category and has probably the most extensive feature-set. As usual, I’ll be rating the application in different sections and then give it an overall score at the conclusion.
Writing Tool Rating: 
What makes an application a writing tool? It has to be more than just simply a method of capturing the the words from the writer. A good writing tool has to empower a writer with different ways of organizing the material in front of him. It should also have the tools to add most of the necessary formatting the author needs. DEVONthink does a good job on most counts but is missing a few features to make it a first class writing app.
What does it do well? The statistics are some of the best in any app I’ve used. It has a good live word count and the list of common terms is very helpful to see how many times a word has been used. Either plain text or rich text files work well as the base of your writings, because either can easily be merged or split. The full screen mode is a welcome feature; though, it is a bit odd that there is no typewriter scrolling. The different views that DEVONthink offers give you many different ways of visualizing and working with the different documents that makeup the text. All of these things show the flexibility of DEVONthink. It is probably the most flexible application that I’ve used.
There are a few things it’s missing which I would consider any stellar writing app to posses. First, it doesn’t understand footnotes in RTF documents. This affects me as a scholar, it’s not quite as relevant to the average user, but it keeps me from composing anything of length in DEVONthink. The comments field for documents is also somewhat hidden, which makes it harder to use.
That said, DEVONthink does a good job as a writing aid. It’s not quite as good as a dedicated drafting application like Scrivener for this purpose, but it does such a good job that it warrants serious consideration.
Note Taking Rating:
Many of the same aspects which make DEVONthink a good writing application make it a good note taking application.
In the classroom, DEVONthink does it’s job as a text editor quite well. Full screen use of the OS X text system with all it’s power works very well for taking down information and thoughts during lectures. DEVONthink doesn’t have an audio recording feature, which means that you’ll have to rely on another application for recording the audio. This is not necessarily bad, but it does complicate things a bit.
The bigger lack here is the lack of outlining support. Sure, you can use the outline functions in the OS X text system, but falls far short of using a dedicated outlining app like OmniOutliner or Notebook. That in particular is one of the favorite note taking methods of many students and some form of it would greatly enhance DEVONthink.
For taking notes on electronic documents and keeping a notes database DEVONthink excels. Notes can have wiki-like links between documents to build relationships between documents. The links are automatic and work very well as long as you’re somewhat careful about naming the notes. The PDF annotations are well implemented and very useful, especially since most course materials and reading will be in PDF format. There is also a system-wide shortcut for taking a note quickly and saving it to your database. It also supports the more advanced notes left by the PDF reader Skim.
DEVONthink is great at keeping and organizing notes, which brings us to the last use case.
Research Management Rating:
This is DEVONthink’s forte. If you need to manage and make sense of a large amount of information – not just a measly collection of a few dozen PDFs – then DEVONthink is invaluable. It will store pretty much any file in its database, in their original formats (as the database format is really just a package file). That means a lot to a person like me who likes to keep his files as close to the file-system as possible. If DEVONthink were to ever go away, you data would still be there apart from the application.
The multiple views of your information also serve to make your data more accessible to multiple paradigmes of organization.
Version 2.0 introduces tags to the app, and these are done in a sensible and fairly unique way. Tags and folders are almost the exact same thing, so you can organize and find your data in both a standard hierarchical folder system and a flat tag interface. DEVONthink is the only application I know of that does this. It is powerful, flexible, and easy to use.
The Pro Office version also includes the ability to archive email from the most popular applications/formats. A download manager which will literally suck entire websites into the database. But the best feature of it is the ability to turn scanned PDFs into PDFs with text into them. Not only does that make it easier to extract text out of scanned chapters of books, articles, class handouts; but, the application also indexes the text for search.
Speaking of which, search is easily the most powerful part of DEVONthink. Searches are fast, highly accurate, and the results are much more usable than Spotlight. For someone who knows Boolean Logic the search is even more capable. DEVONthink understands most of the operators and even makes use of fuzzy logic to narrow the terms. All that is to say, DEVONthink’s search algorithm is very powerful.
DEVONthink’s index works so well that it will actually compare the language of your documents and can show you not only which documents are related to it out of your data, but it will also tell you where it should probably be filed based on what other the contents of other documents. These search and relationship functions do degrade when you add more data to the database, they actually grow more powerful and useful.
Despite all these features and power the application actually runs very fast. Opening databases is fast and searching is miles ahead of Spotlight in terms of quickness.
This is unquestionably the best-of-breed application for organizing massive amounts of information: offering better features and power than not only other apps in this category but the file-system and system search.
Conclusion Overall Rating: 
I’ve been testing a lot of different applications over the past months to gauge their effectiveness and aiding the student. If I had to pick one organization application as the most useful for a wide range of needs, DEVONthink is it. The learning curve can be a bit steep initially and some versions are not exactly light on the wallet, but you will reap the benefits of your investment if you take the time to use it.
