Possible answers are: something along the lines of what Adobe has done with implementing “Workspaces” and further refining them in CS4, so you have the basic “Image Editing” workspace, the “Video” workspace, the “Pre-press” workspace, etc, etc, etc. The question is: how do you evolve all the power and complexity that’s present in DEVONthink, into a better user-experience, without taking some of the power away from people who want/need it. It’s very large, it has to do a lot, and it’s probably the one Apple application people complain about the most. On the flipside of all that: how d’ya feel about iTunes? This is probably the ultimate instance of an Apple application which began as one thing, and has gradually grown to encompass everything and the kitchen sink, doesn’t really use any Cocoa frameworks at all it fakes everything and lives off in an alternate universe coded in C++ so it can be cross-compiled across multiple operating systems, and act as a hub for all the shiny Apple gear, you plug into piece of s–t Windoze boxes. It is, however, not exactly the ideal Apple app, and probably not going to be winning any Apple Design Awards anytime in the near future. None of this is an excuse for poor UI design, and DEVONthink is gradually and consistently getting better. What I like, and use, depends on the database and what I’m working with and that reflects my personal needs, which may not be the same as yours. By simplifying the interface, you are inevitably going to wind up stepping all over something, that I (and a few thousand other people), are presently using, and find very handy. The problem with all of DEVONthink Pro’s different views and options and features is: they’re in there, because somebody – usually a collection of somebodies – finds that particular feature extremely useful/possibly critical, to their continued use of the product. Doing simple things requires insane levels of finger-dexterity, hitting 7 function keys at the same time, and works better when you have a mouse with at least 9 buttons, 3 scrollwheels, a gear-shift, and foot-pedals.ī’okay, I exaggerate slightly, but not much. I’m not going to wander off on endless tangents, but to sum it all up: vi is very fast, small and simple, whereas emacs is everything and the kitchen sink, LISP, and some cast-off UFO parts that happened to be laying around. Some of the complexity can be compared to the neverending religious war between the dual, classic *nix editors: vi and emacs. You’re going to discover that once you pass a few thousand documents, the application slows to a crawl and starts falling apart at the seams. Try loading all that crap up, into anything else that’s out there. I have databases with tens of thousands of groups, and hundreds of thousands of documents, and DEVONthink continues to work… rapidly, and reliably. I have never found anything within the same class as DEVONthink which is not a client to some very large SQL back-end running Oracle (or occasionally MySQL). My databases MUST be reliable and they need to work. I wound up using and sticking with it, because at the end of the day it IS an engineering-driven application and Christian is a remarkably gifted engineer/programmer, who has managed to maintain and evolve an extremely complex application which winds up intersecting with the OS in myriad places, and does an incredible job of dancing through the minefield and dealing with all the broken crap and problematic frameworks which are under Apple’s control, and cannot be changed/revised, until Apple gets around to dealing with it. I think the basic problem with DEVONthink is that it does a LOT.
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