Information Capture Overload: Come on you lazy bums, share your process with me! When capturing information from the web, I use a number of tools; perhaps too many. * DEVONtechnologies Devonthink Pro Office. Most powerful tool, in most ways, and most expensive. (I think I got it will a full bundle of the other tools and search agents for $200.) Does a good job of discovering relationships between *all* the information you capture, all on its own. Has excellent OCR if you need to scan docs or capture information on the web that for some reason is text-captured in imagine. Great search, auto-generates a concordance based on how unusual the words are. The Web search tools are very good at finding related information on the web and generating information maps based on all the major topics discussed in an article. A variety of capture tolls: directly from the web with storage as Web Archives (downside, kind of an Apple thing, though a well established one), capture form web as PDF, support for snanners, great OCR, and great support for RSS. Very popular tool for academics. Great place to store capture a large number of research texts and find see the relations that Devonthink finds. As for organizing your research, Devonthink does a decent job of this by lexically analyzing your materials. Provides lots of ways for you to organize your data. Tags, groups, symlinks (of a sort), multiple databases. Export to Evernote through provided AppleScript, but as its an AppleScript its not as seamless as if it were provided directly by the application. Backing up a lot of items through your databases will quickly burn through your Evernote quota. Cons: Unlike Evernote, its not cleanly integrated with the Web. Fugly interface (though Yosemite has made it a bit more tolerable, w/o Devon doing anything). It did finally introduce a backup service for your database to Dropbox. But this is really for disaster recover. Very nice, but you cant really *do* anything with this database backups directly from the web of from a dropbox application. No integration with iCloud. Wrote an iOS companion application that was expensive and shockingly bad. __________________________________________ * Pinboard. Lightweight. Clean interface. Decent search. Paid service but cheap. Stores full text of articles (rather than just links) for a bit more money. Easily assessable (totally web based). And see who else has bookmarked an article (although users can make their bookmarks private on an individual or global level). Integration with Twitter clients (you can send link from a tweet to it) and reader applications like ReadKit. Supercool feature: in Lauchbar 6, theres an API for users to create their own extensions and actions. Someone wrote one for Inboard that is freaking amazing. By typing just a couple of keys you can pul up LaunchBar, see your most recent Pinboard bookmarks, visit them on the web, or actually search through them from *directly* within Inboard. Cons: Not really a lot of intelligence about the relation of any two articles. ________________________________________________________ Evernote: Too well known for me to really say anything about it. Free unless you you upload too much data. The fact that its a web-first, cloud-first application is a huge draw. Accessible just about anywhere. Cons: see the features from Devonthink. Lacks most of these, or does not do them as well. ------------------------------------ For a lot of stuff, Im using all of these, redundantly. Capture to Devothink, Pinboard it, Evernote it. bit.ly/1tzxcht
Posted on: Sun, 26 Oct 2014 18:11:46 +0000
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