I like collecting stuff. Not collecting stamps or coins just for the sake of it, but gathering stuff I might need in the future. I got many topics I can research from time to time downloading PDFs and saving links. I’d say that I’m getting more pleasure from preparing to some activity than from this activity after I got all preparation done. This is my first problem.
My second problem is that I tend to forget stuff. It makes researching mostly a waste of time. Sometimes I download a file only to find that I have 3 copies of the same file in several tmp folders.
That’s why I was trying to sort everything I download… It takes a lot of time and gets complicated. Much better principle is tags. I used Leap a bit, but tags it’s using break when restoring files from Time Machine (from NTFS drive) and it is not flexible at all.
I tried Evernote and other similar apps for mac, honestly, Evernote is close enough to what I need but it lacks text formatting and crosslinking functions, it can’t create nested notebooks and can do nothing with PDFs apart from importing them.
I recently installed a beta of DEVONthink, I must say that it is more interesting than Evernote but it is indeed beta because it doesn’t even have a good WYSIWYG editor, PDF annotation bugs, but at least you can link PDFs from text notes. “Similar documents” AI function doesn’t have much use. Looking that it have been beta for a year or so we will probably have to wait another year for release.
People advised to try a Wiki. I did, but no Wiki can work fine with PDFs. Though, the whole idea of Hypertext is probably what I need. Sorting, tagging and connecting documents with ideas to form a single big idea. The problem is that I read a lot of scientific articles which are in PDFs and it’s not a case to save text to HTML for example… But, actually, I’ll try to research around converting PDFs to HTML with images. I checked how Adobe Acrobat exports PDFs to HTML and RTFs and it’s horrible. I’m not saying that it takes whole 5 minutes to export one book.
In conclusion, I still haven’t found any software which would fully satisfy me. There are applications which have several features from the set of features I need, but none does everything I want, not that I wanted too much:
- Be able to create rich text nodes,
- Insert images, movies, audio files and PDFs,
- Have everything searchable,
- Tag everything,
- Be able to sort nodes to folders and smart folders,
- Be able to crosslink files,
- Add small notes (as clouds) to everything,
- Annotate PDFs,
- Have a usable intuitive interface,
- Run on a mac offline.
Are these features so hard to make?
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