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.

It supports converting numerous formats to various ebook formats easily, and has a built-in reader for the ebooks as well. It will also use the feeds from popular magazines and news sources to generate ebooks that can be read on the go. Finally, it supports downloading ebooks to Stanza the popular ebook reader for the iPhone. These features make it a worthwhile download.

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.

We will be covering the apps in the bundle over the coming weeks, so watch the site or subscribe to the RSS feed.

I feel qualified to judge two uses in these apps: first, as an aid to the writing process, and second, as a tool for capturing and organizing research. As a college student in a liberal arts school, I have to write a lot of papers. As such I feel qualified to speak to whether a program in question can help the writing process, this will also include note taking in class. Also, as a former academic debater, I feel qualified to speak to the research management aspects of many of these programs; both for capturing information and for organizing it for quick retrieval later.

I’m already starting work on a DEVONthink Pro 2.0 review, but I want to wait for the official version to be released before writing it. I have started using it now simply because the feature set is so deep. I just want to fully wrap my head around it before trying to describe it to other people and objectively judge it. You will probably see another review or two before DEVONtechnologies releases the full version (i.e. the non-beta version).