Surveying the field I adopted two, Journler and DEVONThink, after I demoed a dozen more (and did this all, probably, while I should have been writing).įirst, I poured all my notes into Journler, a fabulous but sadly abandoned gem of a program. Journler allowed me to think of my infobase as a structured whole, rather than as disparate segments, and it prompted me to habitualize the process of capturing and synthesizing the random bits of data flowing past my writing desk every day. Primarily the import to Journler standardized all my file formats. From the transition I got a fairly fixed TXT/RTF/RTFD/HTML set of documents, augmented with some PDFs, various image and audio files. When I outgrew Journler (and you always outgrow these packages, always, eventually, each and every one, no mater what the developer says about capacity and growth potential when you sign on) I transitioned to a beast of an application called DEVONThink. DT ultimately showed itself to be both constricting and superfluous. (see my Dating DEVONThink post about this) But DT further refined my file formats and got me to add tags to files in a common data set rather than categorizing by topic into groups.Īlong the way I played with Evernote, MacJournal, SoHo Notes, Mori, EagleFiler and Yohimbo. I’ve written about these attempts, and my struggles with DEVONThink, elsewhere. In their own way each of these apps was lacking, but as a group hey all demanded attention to their own set of quirks that their programers thought of as features. You had to conform your dates, workflow, ideas, cataloging, to their app’s functionality. ![]() So, now, while my data format was standardized, thanks to Journler and DT, and, as such, much more usable, the whole process was still not stable, not at least for any time horizon of more than a year of two, since everything was still in someone else’s app. I was dependent on one or another of these applications to make sense of it all, which was kind of where I’d been all along. Now I’m using a system that is stable, and sustainable, and scalable one that seems to fall into the background while I work one that is as future proof as can be.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |