DEVONthink Professional puts information in its place

DEVONthink Professional 2.0 is a file manager with a brain. Using artificial intelligence, it helps classify, connect, and even auto-sort documents, PDFs, images, Web pages, and more. For writers and researchers, it’s a great way to organize and draw meaning from large document collections.

DEVONthink Pro indexes files for fast searching much like Apple’s Spotlight does. But what it does with that index sets it apart. Its star feature is an ability to draw connections. While viewing a document about networking, for instance, DEVONthink can show that it might be related to a forgotten article about excelling in your field. The program can even suggest that the file might fit in your “Job Hunt” folder with other articles about networking. A keyword analyzer, which highlights a document’s key ideas, generates a ranked list of a document’s most prominent words, while a concordance view displays the frequency with which words occur in both single documents and whole folders.

Version 2.0, released recently in a second public beta edition recently, makes significant improvements on Version 1.x. Notable new capabilities of Version 2.0 include a search for words in proximity to each other, an option to save canned searches as auto-updating smart groups, and a widget for quickly saving documents destined for DEVONthink even when the program isn’t running. The beta is still missing several features promised for the final 2.0 release, including the ability to tag files and annotate PDFs. But DEVONtechnologies expects to add those features by midyear and has done a decent job keeping beta users updated on the program’s development.

DEVONthink Professional, priced at $80, isn’t the easiest program to appreciate at first. But add a couple of thousand documents, and its capabilities and utility shine brightly.

--Michael Fitzhugh, tech writer