AndreasE wrote: Problem of course: A lot of things fit in a lot of categories - and sometimes they are not where I am looking for them. Solution up to now: Spotlight and it's clever brother SpotInside (a Spotlight plus the ability to look within the files that meet the criteria).
Devonthink features "Replicants", i.e. you can have the same entry appear in as many instances and contexts as you want. Although they look like copies they are not, i.e. if you change one the other instances stay in sync (unless you expressedly *want* to leave an unchanged copy which is also possible.
For example, you run across a website with some information about Piranesi which you haven't seen before. Now, where to store the information? In the branch of your info tree concerning itself with "architecture"? Or "drawing"? Or "18th century"? Or "nightmare"?
1) You could make one copy of the website and deposit it in any of these categories, hoping that you will still think of it when you need it in another context sometime in the future.
2) If you were diligent enough you could deposit copies of this note elsewhere in the tree.
Problem: It is rather tedious plus the copies reside independently of one another from now on. But what if some scientist discovers tomorrow that one of the drawings on this webpage was actually created by somebody else? In this case you will have to hunt down all the copies individually and change them, one by one.
What I do is this: I highlight the part of the webpage that interests me (excluding ads, if present, for example) and press a hotkey that will create a note inside DTP including working hyperlinks and a metadata field containing the URL of the webpage for future reference.
Inside DTP, I highlight the relevant items in the folder hierarchy I have created over time ("architecture", "drawings", "Piranesi" etc) and press the button "classify". Done.
What this does is deposit the SAME note inside these three folders at the same time. No matter which of the three folders I loook into in the future, the note including the pictures will be there. Spotlight or other search utilities are nice but they still force me to follow links somewhere else or having to remember or search for them elsewhere. Not to mention choosing the correct search term...
When something needs to be corrected, I do it once knowing that all the other places containing this very note will reflect this change, too. The added convenience is that these multiple replicants do not occupy more space than a single note inside my library.
Actually, I find this much more convenient and simple than other ways I have explored before but hey, maybe that's just me. Try it out, they have a demo.
Prion
