storing EPS, PDF, mov, mpg, avi, mp4, m4v, wmv etc

Ain't no one arguing that DT is a pretty thing, that's for sure.

Here's why I use it:

Import 50 pdfs - anything from one pagers to entire books. It will index them - and OCR them if need to be for indexing, if you get the Pro Office version. My current db for a Ph.D I'm working on has some 25 million words indexed, with about 301k unique terms. So scale is not an issue.

Here's where the power is - at a most basic search level. Enter a term. It will show you a list of the pdfs (or txt or whatever) files with the term. So far, so simple. Now click on one item on the list and it opens in the viewer. Wait a second... and it brings you to the location in the document where the term is used. So, search for the documents and within the douments. I've not come across any app that doesn't require to you repeat the search within the document.

Then there's the whole 'find similar' feature - happens automatically. You know you have a document all about puppy tails, but it will show you others that might also be relevant, based on the index. You can be quite surprised on that one, especially where you're dragging in a 100 page document with only pages 10 - 35 in mind, and lo and behold, out there on 75 is a whole other thing that is relevant to something else.

Again, the Concordance does the same. Click on a word and it will show you every document with the word, and then where in the document the word is. This saves so much time.

Setting it up and learning to use it is no more (nor less) difficult than Aperture. I have different dbs for different projects. One is all the home documents - insurance policies, receipts that sort of stuff, others relate to other areas of work. You can have multiple dbs open at once, you can search across one, some or all the dbs. And it's easy to move material between dbs - drag and drop.

So with different dbs that are also searchable, if I create a new db for a new project I can still search the others for material that might be relevant, but I've forgotten about or was unaware of.

As for the topographies. Most of my dbs are buckets - chuck everthing in there and rely on search to find it. Ones for the big projects are obviously more organised - keywording, groups, smart groups and so on.

Best advice: start with an everything bucket and see how far that gets you. The help is good and there are some very good tutorials here

http://www.devontechnologies.com/support/tips-and-tutorials.html

I beleive there's even a Take Control Book. There is a syncing system that I've never used, so I won't comment on that. But it's a step beyond Together and EagleFiler and Yojimbo and Evernote. It'll import and index most any form of text - apart from epub and mobi, but that can't be far off now. It may not be for everyone, but it's a very powerful beast.

William

I've used Papers and Sente and Bookends over the years, all these are more reference managers than true indexing apps. Papers in particular has a bad habit of biting off more than it can chew at update time, and each new interation seems to require it getting to .3 or .4 before they abandon some promised features and get it stable again. Sente is the best looking by far, but the tech support on Bookends is second to none.

DEVONthink does have some jargon. It's technically accurate, but technically targeted too.

A duplicate is a duplicate. Just like duplicating a photo in Aperture ;-) It takes up more space on disk, and you have multiple independent copies of a file in your library.

A replicant is an alias. It's like a version in Aperture. They're all pointers to the same file on disk, but it's one file on disk. Delete the last one, and the file is removed from disk.