Categorization and all that

Following up on my "Popularity" ramble, found that tool I needed. DEVONthink for the Mac (since I’m a Mac guy). Actually DEVONthink Pro Office had all the features I wanted (OK, so maybe product naming isn’t their strong suit).

While not perfect, it’s the best overall tool I’ve found. This version can suck in all my email, documents, and I can set up some tools to send interesting web pages to it. Also, it can suck in del.icio.us bookmarks, for that extra feature. Only downside is that it copies all the documents into it’s own private store, while indexing them. Can certainly understand how much easier that makes things, but it does duplicate all the data, which seems conceptually wasteful. But, disks are cheap, and music, pictures, and home movies take up most of my storage these days anyway.

And, it has instantaneous and flexible search options, so I can look for (meat NEAR vegetable) AND milk, and other such complex queries. Combined with DEVONagent, which can apply that same search ability to the Internet, and have fully customized "search sets", and they make a powerful research and database/archive/retrieval tool. And, I can set it up so I can access the data remotely, or copy the database to my laptop and take all the data with me (the good side of copying over all the data). I’d like to combine it with cryptography, but store the database on an encrypted disk image, and all-in-all I’m pretty happy with the combination overall.

Dec 12 2006