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.

Interface Rating:

The interface is very clean and mac-like. The idea of libraries and smart folders should be very familiar to just about every mac user by now.

There is also tagging support and quite a few ways to test yourself on the material you’ve entered. The cards look like cards and there is a certain eye candy aspect to that.

My problems with the interface is the lack of really good keyboard integration: both in entering and editing the content and quizzing yourself. Too many modifier keys are used in entering the cards and editing them. There are also way to many modifier keys used in quizzing. There needs to be some more thought put into the design of the keyboard shortcuts.

In short, while the interface is mac-like and generally looks good, usability could be better.

Functionality Rating:

The categories of funtionality that I will be looking at are based on the bambooapps website, which is essentially the entry and manipulation of vocabulary terms.

Entry

Entering the data is both easy and frustrating. The keyboard shortcut command-n is the normal choice for creating a new item in most apps, but in Keep Your Word it creates a new dictionary, not a new word. Command-a is the shortcut for creating a new word, and there is no option to change it. Entering the foreign word and the corresponding native word into the list is easy, but adding other metadata is much more work than it should be. To add tags and comments you must click to another part of the app or use the keyboard shortcuts to navigate to a certain field, you can’t simply tab over the tags or comments fields. As much as I like the interface of the app, and as much as I like apps with one unified window, there has to be a more streamlined way to enter the data into the app.

I used the import from CSV feature to enter most of the vocabulary into the app. It worked fairly well, but there were some issues. I had some blank tags in my new words, which I attribute to the process I was using to make the CSV file, but it was somewhat annoying. While Keep Your Word is clear about the order the data goes in, it would be very helpful if it offered the ability to change the order of the input fields.

Data entry works, but is more cumbersome than it needs to be.

Organization

In terms of organizing the hundreds of terms that will probably be entered into the app, Keep Your Word does a pretty good job. Groups, smart groups, tags, searching, and more make it easy to organize all the vocabulary in ways that should be obvious to most mac users. No complaints here.

Quizzing

The crucial ability of any flash card program is quizzing users on the items they’ve entered. Keep Your Word has several ways to do this, but none that feel satisfying to me. There are three ways to quiz yourself on your terms: first, flash cards.

Flipping the cards works as expected, but marking your progress is a pain because the keyboard shortcuts, again, use too many modifier keys and there are no GUI buttons to make it easier. The second method is a quiz with the flash cards.

Selecting one of the options flips the card, but the app doesn’t keep track of if you got it right or not. I was also unable to find what selecting right or wrong on the card does to the card in looking through the documentation. Finally, Keep Your Word will generate a printable worksheet of terms. Here is what a portion of the print page looks like.

This is a handy feature I haven’t seen in most other flash card apps. It’s especially good for people who are more comfortable with a pencil and paper to work than their computer. This makes the contents of the app portable, which is also enhanced with the native iPhone client.

iPhone Client

Bambooapps offers an iPhone client for free to augment Keep Your Word. It syncs with the desktop client over the local network, though it only syncs word that are in a collection of some sort (i.e. it won’t sync the entire library by default). It also organizes the cards by collection and allows you to search through the cards.

Reviewing the cards is pretty self explanatory, you tap the card and it flips over.

There is also some basic options to set the font and number of cards to be reviewed. The iPhone client preforms as advertised, and adds value to the package, especially since bambooapps gives it away. The only feature I wish it had is tracking of your progress with the cards. Though this should also coincide with improved tracking of progress in the app.

Sharing

Keep Your word also has a website where users can share dictionaries of vocabulary terms with other users called wordsparade. There are some good dictionaries available and it does enhance the utility of the program.

Value Rating:

Bambooapps is offering Keep Your Word for $25. This is one of the more expensive flash card apps, since others like Genius and Anki are offered for free, and iFlash costs $15. To be fair, the iPhone app is part of the price of the desktop app, and there is the sharing service, which also adds value. But I think they could stand to be more competitive with other apps that are easier to use.

Conclusion Overall Rating:

The Interface is very mac-like and pretty, but it’s hampered by clumsy keyboard shortcuts and some interesting design choices. I think the app suffers from confusion about it’s workflow. Most all apps have a certain workflow that users are encouraged to follow, this makes the features of the app easy to use and more intuitive. The problem with Keep Your Word is that the app has an ill-defined workflow that leads the program to feel clumsy in places. Anki is my flash card program of choice, and perhaps I’m biased towards apps that keep track of your progress for you, but I think that adding meta-data to the words could be better and tracking your progress while reviewing the words could be done much better.

While Keep Your Word does what it says it does, it lacks an element of polish that keeps it from being exceptional, though there is definite potential it.

Interface Rating:

Overall, MathType has a usable, if somewhat utilitarian, interface. The top two rows are palettes that contain all of the available symbols. The majority of these are also included in the light version, which doesn’t contain the other two tool bars. The second row is user definable to include symbols that you commonly use. Simply drag the desired symbol into the bar from the editing window. Below that there are several tabs with common equations, symbols, and constants for various disciplines of math for easy access. There are also two blank tabs in case you fill up the bar above them. You can also assign keyboard shortcuts to any symbol, which significantly speeds up the data-entry process. Note that the light version doesn’t let you add or modify shortcuts, though, so set them all up during the 30 day evaluation period if you want to change some of them.

Here is the main equation editing window.

MathType 6.0 also lets you type some common LaTeX symbols which it will then convert to a regular expression. I’m no TeX expert, but it seems to work pretty good for basic syntax. You can also export data as LaTex or MathML files, although I don’t know enough about either of these formats to give an accurate review of that capability.

LaTeX Entry.

There are a few oddities in MathType’s interface, but they are pretty minimal once you get used to them. One difference between editing in MathType and using a word processor is the fields that MathType creates to contain data. In the example below, there is a fraction with two fields, one for the numerator and one for the denominator. Additionally, there is one for the superscript that contains the curser. Once you’ve finished with a field, you can just use the arrow keys to select another field.

Data Fields

Another difference that can be kind of confusing at first is the different “styles” that MathType uses. The default is the “Math Style,” which doesn’t allow spaces and italicizes all non-math characters. So if you try and enter plain text, it comes out in italics with no spaces between words. To fix this, just go to the menu bar and choose Style>Text, or press the keyboard shortcut, cmd+shift+e. This mode allows you insert spaces and type text without any modification.

Styles.

Functionality Rating:

MathType is a very useful and functional app that can be used anytime you want to easily add symbols and equations into a document. I’ve primarily used it for math homework and chemistry lab reports. It provides a great way to integrate typed answers with equations, which students typically write out by hand leaving reports inconsistent in their styling. Using MathType also allows you to complete repititous homework easily by copying the same basic formulae, changing the numbers, and crunching them again. One thing that MathType does not do is solve problems for you, which is probably a good thing, since you wouldn’t learn anything if it did.

Here are some examples of what MathType can do.

One application that may not be immediately obvious is that of chemical equations. These typically contain many subscripts and superscripts that can be tedious to write out in standard word processing software. MathType makes short work of these and they turn out looking very professional.

This program also integrates fairly well with common applications such as Pages from the iWork suite. The light version doesn’t allow you to save equations, although you can copy the data and paste it directly into a document. If you want to go back and edit the data later, simply select to object, copy it, and paste it into an editor window.

iWork ’09 also allows you to link equations to documents, so that when you edit them the changes are reflected automatically. Since I don’t own a copy of Microsoft Office, I can’t speak to Word integration, although MathType does include a plugin that allows you to cobble the two programs together.

Value Rating:

Although $97 is fairly steep for an application like this, the large student discount and very functional light version will make it very attractive to a large number of people. I would recommend shelling out money for the full version only if you find yourself wishing to reset or add more keyboard shortcuts or if you simply need some of the symbols the light version doesn’t include. I’m also not sure how well the light version integrates with LaTeX and MathML, so that might be another reason to plunk down some money.

Overall Overall Rating:

Ultimately, MathType is a very useful application for the often overlooked practice of simply typing math. It offers a solid, though bland, interface and full functionality. With various pricing arrangements, it’s also a fairly affordable app. MARS’s advice: Try it, you’ll like it.

When I reviewed AllSecure I mentioned another app as the main competitor to it, Wallet. I decided to review Wallet to help round out my secure information manager reviews. (this app was downloaded as a trial from Acrylic’s website)

Interface Rating:

The interface for Wallet is almost exactly the same as the interface for Apple’s Address Book.

Groups are on the left side, the entries list is in the middle, and the item inspector is on the right. It is very clear and very intuitive for anyone who has ever used Address Book, which I would bet is the majority of mac users. The interface is functional and attractive, not bad.

Functionality Rating:

Taking into account what Acrylic advertises on their website, the functionality of Wallet is as follows.

Secure Information Manager Wallet is a secure information manager much like AllSecure and 1Password. There are three types of information that Wallet displays by default: serial numbers, passwords, and credit cards. These aren’t the only types that Wallet supports by any means. When creating a new group of items, you are given the option to create and label whatever fields you want for storing information.

This is enormously useful and is is fairly unique to Wallet. Bringing a secure database that is as easy to use as Wallet to the field is a good accomplishment.

Password Manager The second primary function of Wallet is Password management. It has the standard features of program in this field, such as storing username/password pairs with the URL, a strong password generator, and auto filling. Importing existing data through text files (commonly known as comma or tab seperated values) was easy and worked well. After I exprorted my data from 1Password and imported it with Wallet, the entries weren’t reconized as passwords right away. I found that if I draged my imported items to the passwords section it allowed me to connect the dots, so to speak.

Very intutive, it works. Password organization and management in the program work as well as could be hoped for, but the browser side is less than impressive. Wallet does have a menu bar app that will auto fill login info without leaving the browser window, but you must enter your master password every time you fill login information.

While this arguably provides greater security, it’s an unnecessary hassle. The auto fill only works with Safari, which means that it is competing directly with the keychain; and since the autofill is much less convenient and doesn’t really buy you anything that the keyhain isn’t already doing better, it is kind of underwhelming.

Syncing This is another one of Acrylic’s claimed features, placed prominently on Wallet’s homepage. While it is nice to have MobileMe syncing built into the program, it doesn’t do a whole lot for you unless you also have the iPhone version (as the keychains are synced with MobileMe). I didn’t get a chance to test the iPhone app, but syncing your secure information over the internet is a very good feature. Actually beating 1Password’s iPhone app in this respect (as it only syncs over Wifi).

Misc The ability to attach files to entries is also included in Wallet. While this feature isn’t earth-shattering, the implementation sets it apart from the competition. You can Quick Look the encrypted files directly from the entry in Wallet. I know of no other secure information manager that offers this feature on the mac platform. It’s very convenient and adds to the mac nature of the program.

Value Rating:

Acrylic is selling Wallet for $20, which I think is a very fair price. It does offer features above an beyond the built in system utilities, and does so at a very reasonable price. It’s primary competitors generally sell at about twice the price for very similar features.

Overall Rating:

Wallet is a good, polished app that provides much needed features to the OS X experience. It could do a few things better, such as password handling, but its existing features are solid and it preforms as advertised.

Interface Rating:

Like the other two apps, GimmeSomeTune consists of a floater and a preference window. Instead of living in System Preferences, however, GimmeSomeTune’s prefs are accessed from a menu bar item.

One difference in this application is that you have some degree of customizability over the floater, including font face, size, weight, and opacity of the overall window. One quirk, however, was that it wouldn’t let me set the play/pause shortcut to ctrl+space, claiming it was already used as a system wide shortcut.

Some additional feature unique to GimmeSomeTune include the ability to update iChat status based on your current music as well as support for last.fm.

Functionality Rating:

This app offers much of the same functionality as the other two applications, including toggling the shuffle mode. It also adds the ability to automatically fetch album artwork and lyrics for songs that don’t have any. Since most of my songs already have artwork, I can’t fully speak to this feature, but the lyrics fetching seems to work pretty well most of the time. You can also display the lyrics to the current song with a keyboard shortcut if you want.

Overall, this app would earn a 5 star rating in this area except that it would occasionally hang up and crash. I’m not sure exactly what the problem was, but I definitely think the app is still worth a look for the extra features.

Value Rating:

Although still donationware, you can download an unlimited version for free. If you find the app to be useful, I recommend that you donate, however.

Overall Overall Rating:

Ultimately, this is a decent app with a few more features than the other iTunes controllers we have reviewed. We recommend that you check out each of them before making a decision as each has a slightly different feature set.

Both allow you to advance and go back tracks, play/pause, set rating, adjust volume, and more through keyboard shortcuts that function even when iTunes isn’t the active application. (Disclaimer: The free version of SizzlingKeys was reviewed, and Synergy was obtained for free through the Giving Tree.)

Interface

SizzlingKeys Rating:

Synergy Rating:

Both of these apps actually offer similar interfaces. Both are controlled through a preference pane, and display a floating informational panel when you change tracks or play/pause.

Synergy also offers support for Growl notifications and a menubar item with forward, reverse, play, and pause buttons. Both also allow users to customize the hotkeys that control playback. I’ve found ctrl+space to be the best shortcut for play/pause and opt+cmd+left/right arw good for track advances. Overall, both these apps provide a similar user interfaces that are well layed out and intuitive.

Here we see Synergy’s informational and preference panes. (Synergy uses centered panels to show playback information that are similar to the ones OS X uses for adjusting volume.)

Functionality

SizzlingKeys Rating: Synergy Rating: Both of these apps are great at what they do. They consistently control iTunes via keyboard shortcuts without hogging resources. SizzlingKeys also offers some extra keyboard shortcuts including: Put computer to sleep, Lock computer, Activate screensaver, and Put display to sleep (the last one is OS X 10.4 only). The Pro version of SizzlingKeys allows you to toggle the shuffle and repeat modes, skip forward and backward by definable amounts of time within a track, and adjust the system volume (instead of just iTunes’ volume). Toggling of playback modes is also found in Synergy.

Value

SizzlingKeys Rating: Synergy Rating:
You can’t beat a wellmade free app, and that’s exactly what SizzlingKeys offers. The only  case where plunking down money on Synergy is justified is if you really want Growl notifications, which are kind of redundant given the floater both of these apps provide. Even if you want to have control over playback modes, SizzlingKeys Pro is the better deal. Note that Synergy is still available for free from the Giving Tree, so if you want to try it out you  can without spending any money.

Overall

SizzlingKeys Rating: Synergy Rating:
Ultimately, this comparison comes down to two very similar apps, one of which happens to be free. MARS’s recommendation is to download both (while Synergy is free) and see which one you like better. Otherwise, SizzlingKeys offers the most bang for the buck.

The app is one of many secure information managers available for the mac right now. MacHeist has also recently given it out as a loot item (Shareware software given away for free to promote the app). As this version of the app was only released last month, there are not many reviews of it at this time. (disclaimer: data you will see entered into the app is fake. This app was downloaded through MacHeist)

Interface Rating:

This app is one of the prettiest apps that I’ve seen on OS X. This is saying a lot, as there are no shortage of good looking apps for OS X these days.

As you can see, the items you store in Allsecure reside on virtual shelves in a large vault like safe. This theme is consistent throughout the app, even the icon is a vault with a padlock on it. You can organize your entries into several categories displayed on the sidebar to help organize the information. The icons are all vibrant and and portray the contents of the items very well. The different color names are all user-set per item. To edit or enter information into items you use a transparent inspector panel.

This is also quite attractive and offers you different views and fields based on what type of item you’ve chosen.

All together, this app is one of the best looking I’ve seen, period.

Functionality Rating:

To rate the functionality, I’m going to take into account the features AllSecure’s website advertises and how it’s implementation compares to other apps in this category.

Secure Information Manager This is the primary function of the app, and what its probably the best at. There are many different types of information you can choose.

You can see all of these in the main window above. AllSecure will store and handle all these pretty well. This is a fairly good range of types, but I wish there were more. 1Password offers more types by default in its secure information storage or wallet items.

Entries are searchable and can be added to different groups. There some problems and missing features however. You can’t group items by type other than having them be a part of a group. There is no import or export, which is a real deal breaker for me. I don’t really want to keep all my private data in a app that cannot export the data to another app. This is especially bad because just about every other app in this area exports to some format or another, including 1Password, Wallet, and KeePassX.

Also missing is form filling data, such as name, address, and credit card info. EdgeRift talks about how insecure the Safari autofill is and implies that AllSecure will replace that with a better, more secure, solution. This isn’t quite true, as there is no way fill anything other than username-password pairs with AllSecure. If EdgeRift is going to replace the Safari autofill feature, then they will have to address this issue.

Password Manager As a password manager, AllSecure does all the basic things you would expect. It stores password and username pairs and the URL.

Password generation is accessed through the key icon next to the password field.

It offers most of the options that one would expect, though not as many as other apps such KeePassX or Apple’s Keychain Access.

It has the ability to auto-fill the information into the website forms. This only works with Safari and you have to go to the inspector for the item you want and click the arrow next to the URL. Certainly not as nice as the built-in browser password managers or either 1Password or Wallet. Wallet does much the same thing, but it also has a menubar item that will fill the login info into the webpage without you having to leave the browser window. 1Password has browser plug-ins for all of the common OS X browsers which offer access to all the password management features of the app, in the browser. AllSecure trails the pack in this case, and doesn’t have a good password experience compared to the other apps.

Secure Document Archive The final main feature of AllSecure is the encrypted storage of files. The metaphor is safe deposit boxes inside the main vault, which works very well. However, there are some problems with the implementation of the feature.

As you can see, there are only three options available. Adding files, deleting the contents of the box, and extracting all the files in the box. You can’t see a list of the contents of the box, and you can’t choose to just extract one of the files. You also cannot work with a file that is in the box, like you could with an encrypted disk image. To work with the contents of the files, you must extract the whole archive (which could take a while if it’s large, so you are not going to be putting music or videos into these boxes). Work with the files on the desktop or elsewhere, delete the files in the archive and re-add the changed files and other originals back. You also have to securely delete the files you extracted, which many people don’t know you have to, or don’t know how.

The other programs I’ve mentioned handle files a bit differently, but in a much more user friendly way. Wallet and KeePassX offer the ability to attach files to entries, so you can see the encrypted files, Wallet will even let you quicklook the encrypted files. None of these apps are as good as a true encryption solution such as TrueCrypt or an encrypted disk image created with Disk Utility. But, there are some notable missing features that keep this function less than useful right now in AllSecure.

Misc Both Wallet and 1Password offer iPhone apps and syncing of encrypted info to the iPhone. AllSecure doesn’t offer an iPhone app. There is a rumor that there will be one sometime down the line, but nothing solid.

Update: EdgeRift has confirmed to me in an email that an iPhone app will be released along with version two of AllSecure in the future.

Value Rating:

EdgeRift is charging $40 for AllSecure. I think this is over priced. Arcylic is charging half that for Wallet, which does everything AllSecure does in a slightly better way. Agile charges $40 for 1Password, which handles passwords and secure information in a far superior way. The value of AllSecure just is not up there with that of its main competitors.

Overall Rating:

AllSecure offers one of the best interfaces on OS X. However, the functionality isn’t on par with it’s main competitors in this space. The value of the software isn’t near the others, the closest program, features wise, Wallet is half the price of AllSecure.

AllSecure is a promising application, but EdgeRift either needs to lower the price to reflect the true value of the software, or it needs to spend more time to develop AllSecure into a mature app before becoming truly competitive with Wallet or 1Password.