3.1 - Comparing DEVONthink

To get started with DEVONthink, let's head over to the DEVONtechnologies.com website. And that's the company that makes DEVONthink. 

Once you land on their website, you can see DEVONthink is front and center, but they actually have several applications. They have DEVONthink, which we're going to cover in this course. DEVONthink To Go, which is the mobile version, and we are also going to cover that in this course. DEVONagent is a variant of DEVONthink. It allows you to search the web. And DEVONsphere allows you to find connections between files on your computer. If you're interested in my contextual computing ideas that I talk about on Mac Power Users, this one may be for you. They also have some additional little apps and a nice discussion of artificial intelligence here. 

For particular users, they have interesting websites and explanations for DEVONthink that, I think, are definitely worth checking out. I'll go ahead and click on the attorneys one here, against my better judgment. And you can see they've got a whole page listed with ideas of ways to use DEVONagent and DEVONthink together to run your attorney law practice. You know, one of the things you can do is build a digital file cabinet for your documents that's much more powerful than Finder. In fact, this is what I do at my law practice. And then they explain some further things you can do with their products. And it goes on and on. And they've got those for various categories. So if you fall within any one of these, you may want to check it out. And then the User Portraits is kind of fun too, where they talk to people who use DEVONthink to get their work done and ... and how they use it. 

The Support page is also something you want to keep track of. They have the Support Center, Questions and Answers. Handbooks and Extras is very useful, where they've got a bunch of different documentation you can download. There's even a Take Control ... book, which I'm going to recommend at the end of this course. So there's there's a lot you can use here with DEVONthink to get more resources and get better at the application. 

And then finally is their blog, where they keep you posted on the application. One of the things I love about DEVONthink is that even though this application has been around such a long time, it continues to evolve. They're currently at version 3.7.1 as of May 6. And you know, next month they'll probably have another update for the application as well because they just keep rolling. But we're here about DEVONthink. So let's go over to the Apps column, and then click on DEVONthink. 

In making your decision as to what version of DEVONthink you want, you want to take a look at the different editions. There are three versions of DEVONthink. There's the Standard, Pro, and Server versions. 

And throughout this course, I'm going to be using the Pro version, and that's the one I recommend you purchase. The additional features you get with the Pro version really are worth the price difference, and if you want to get the most out of DEVONthink I believe you need to use the Pro version. With the Pro version, you get the optical character recognition, which is the ABBYY engine, which is very good, scanner integration, image capture support, imprinting for PDFs and images. And while some of this sounds odd, as I explain it here, I'm going to cover all of this throughout the course. You get the ability to archive email, manage downloads. They have a concordance view, which is really powerful. You can group items automatically using the artificial intelligence. Custom metadata, which is really useful. Form views and bookends integration. All of this and way more is going to be covered throughout this course. But you need the Pro version to get most of these features. 

If you want to use DEVONthink off a server so other people can access your data ... maybe you've got some remote worker that you want to get into your DEVONthink, then you would need the Server edition, which gives you that web interface. I'm going to cover this throughout the course, but I really would recommend, if you want to take DEVONthink seriously, get yourself the Pro version at a minimum and the Server version if you need to use it with other people remotely. 

I'm going to go back to the DEVONthink page now. If you want to download and buy the application, you can do that right here as well. I'm going to cover that in the next video. 

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