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DevonThink for Automatic Content Discovery

19th December 2012 by 4 Comments

I’ve got a lot of content in my DevonThink system. As you can see here, over 805 files in the Inbox of my gfDefaultInbox alone.

Note: Click on the images for fulle

 

 

I’ve been promising myself to spend some time looking into LISP, and I KNOW that I’ve been collecting content about LISP for a year or so. So, lets do a search in my database for the word “lisp”

 

 

 

So there a few matches there, but I want to get a look at all the content I’ve got about LISP in a single folder. I thought, hey, I can do that with a Smart Group  that is defined with Meta Tags.

Here is the definition for the Smart Group to build a folder with all files that are tagged LISP or lisp

 

 

Now you can see that I’ve a got a folder, mostly PDF files, that have been tagged by me to have quality LISP content.

 

One small thing that I only noticed recently, when you search for a term in DevonThink and then open a file from the search window, it will take you directly to the first page of that term.

And there a keyboard shortcut to keep moving through the document for the next instance of that term.

That little trick let me review over a 50 files in less than 5 minutes.

 

 

 

DevonThink is the schizz people. It does things that you want do. It’s taken me two years to get this far and I just keep going deeper and deeper.

Other posts in the series

  1. DevonThink for Automatic Content Discovery (This post)
Filed Under: Blog, OSX Tagged With: , ,
About Greg Ferro

Greg Ferro is a Network Engineer/Architect, mostly focussed on Data Centre, Security Infrastructure, and recently Virtualization. He has over 20 years in IT, in wide range of employers working as a freelance consultant including Finance, Service Providers and Online Companies. He is CCIE#6920 and has a few ideas about the world, but not enough to really count.

He is a host on the Packet Pushers Podcast, blogger at EtherealMind.com and on Twitter @etherealmind and Google Plus

  • Kurt Marko

    You put me on to Devon Think and I’ve been gradually easing it into my workflow for the past month or so. The curve is steep, but I’m finally starting to see some payback; for example the Spotlight integration saved me some time just today. As I start to build a research document library, I sure hope they build a good cloud backup/sync solution so I’ll have a consistent view across all my devices (that is, once I download DevonToGo). It would be nice to have a similar Web (Chrome) and Android client too.

    • http://etherealmind.com Etherealmind

      I’ve been tinkering with DevonThink for a long time and it’s just starting to pay good dividends. I’ve mostly been using it as a way to organise a collection of PDFs, but starting to use it as a database for mind maps, text notes and other contents.

      I believe that a web interface will be in the next update or version.

      • Kurt Marko

        Besides PDFs, I’ve also been using DT for bookmarks and Web pages…great way to keep that stuff organized. Probably won’t use it for notes since Notational Velocity (2, the fork) and SimpleNote are great for my needs.

  • Michael Gonnason

    I have not heard of the before, seems interesting.

    Edit: awwww Mac only