Dating DEVONThink

Doug

Worst of all is the incredible slowness with which the database opens and is backed up. This is seriously crippling. I’m talking minutes, at least four or five, and far more for some users, which can be a disaster when you need info rapidly and don’t have the app already open. It routinely stalls shutdown if you set it up to back up then. Its alternative feature for backing up in the background is equally clunky – it’s intrusive and freezes the app for the minutes it takes to do it. All this seems to be due to a very badly written compression process. I know of no other app which takes so long to do any of this – though EagleFiler gets close when launching.

Syncing SN is also a huge hassle. You can’t just copy over the database, but have to make a special backup, copy this over to the other machine, then reopen the app there to update. This is unbelievably clunky in this day and age. MobileMe syncing is fine in principle, but I have never been able to get it work. The app spends long minutes apparently syncing but in fact copies nothing over. Preferences for this are confusing, as there are two different places where this is set up, and none of the troubleshooting methods recommended have any effect. Yojimbo and MacJournal, on the other hand, both of which also sync through MobileMe, work smoothly and seamlessly with never a problem.

However, having said all that, I still find myself unable to give up SOHONotes altogether, despite many attempts. For serious database work (research, business – I’m a journalist and writer) I use DEVONthink Pro Office and Tinderbox. For notes that I know I need to have with me always I use Evernote, because of its great syncing to other machines and the iPhone (iPhone Touch in my case), its OCR ability (allowing “scanning” with an iSight cam), etc. For notes that I need unfailingly rapid access too but don’t want to have clogging up my iPhone Touch, I use Yojimbo, and have transferred a lot of this kind of stuff over from SOHONotes. I have also given up SN for MacJournal for journaling entries. But for a lot of other routine material I still use SOHONotes, as I find I just can‘t manage without the advantages of its interface and ease of input.

If all this sounds like overkill, it is, and I’d cheerfully give up SOHONotes if Yojimbo, Evernote or MacJournal provided its features – but they don’t. Nor, incidentally, does EagleFiler, which I find also runs very slowly.

To answer MacGregor very briefly, the main differences between these apps, apart from those mentioned, are that SOHONotes, DEVONthink (or DEVONNote) and EagleFiler allow hierarchical nested folders, while Evernote and Yojimbo don’t, relying instead on tags. This is fine if you prefer tags, but not if you like to organize visually by hierarchy. DEVONthink is a heavy-duty database app with sophisticated AI searching and organizing features and OCR, and is really in a different class, though it will do all of what SN does (and much more). DT Pro also allows you to have more than one database, and to open them at the same time. You can scan directly into DT and SN, and take iSight pics in EN which it can search for text with fair accuracy. Only EN syncs to iPhone and iPhone Touch, though the devs of Yojimbo and MacJournal some of the others say this is in the works, I think I’m right in saying.

Sorry this is long, but I hope it’s of some help to MacGregor and others looking for comparisons. Note apps are a vastly over-subscribed field in the Mac world, so it’s impossible to discuss them all (Voodoo Pad, Notelist, etc, etc). But none of them seem to combine all desirable features. It’s frustrating to see how SN could easily lead the pack, but is held back by some very strange policies by the dev.

I have Evernote and Curio and they are great for different reasons. I am trying to work Evernote, Curio and NoteTaker into something of a seemless mega app.

Yet, I would really like to see how that would compare to the Devon and SOHO stuff, but I don’t want to spend to much time and disk space playing around with these …. Soo ,…

Would someone please compare ALL of these!?!?!?!? Every time I read a review of NoteBook or this one on SOHO notes it is as if the reviewer never heard of the other dozen apps that do the same thing!!!

Why read a review that says exactly what is on the software’s box?? Can we have a little critical thinking here?

In general, I see note-taking as a personal preference. SOHO works well for me, and the tasks I need it to perform. I’m an iPod touch user who spends most of their day in a non-Wi-Fi zone, so the iPhone app isn’t critical for me. The desktop application is pretty awesome though!

My problem with Evernote is how strict it is — if you make a new notebook and populate it with a few entries, you cannot manually rearrange the order of the entries within that notebook!!! That seems absolutely insane to me — organizational software that will not allow you to organize anything? Come one!

In Evernote, if I create a notebook with entries called “Monday”, “Tuesday”, “Wednesday”, etc., I cannot manually put them in whatever order I want. I would have to SORT them alphabetically, by date created, etc.

This is a pain in the butt, and I’d love a simple notes program that worked like MyNotes but that was better supported by the developer and that allowed me to organize my content INTUITIVELY and organically. Any ideas?

Zengobi’s Curio wins, hands down. As to Soho’s non-note features, I’d rather use Yojimbo or EagleFiler.