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> Lots of hand-waving elevator pitch, but I just never see anything explaining how the fuck it's actually useful. No idea about DEVONagent, but the trial of DE
by sndean 4y ago
> Lots of hand-waving elevator pitch, but I just never see anything explaining how the fuck it's actually useful.
No idea about DEVONagent, but the trial of DEVONthink I've done suggests it would make sense for someone with a few TBs of PDFs (e.g., me). The OCR plus search function makes it like a better Finder. I just can't justify paying $200 for that.
- kstrauser 4y agoI love DEVONthink, but I understand that it’s not for everyone. What I appreciate is that I can automate an awful lot of routine tasks. For instance, if I drop a PDF of my bank statement that I downloaded from the bank’s website, DEVONthink will recognize that it’s from my bank based on the URL metadata that macOS attaches to it. Then it OCRs my statement (no idea why or how my bank manages to send it as an image), finds the string like “Closing date: X/Y/Z”, renames the file like “Bank statement - 20ZZ-0Y-0Z.pdf”, and moves it to the directory where I keep them all. I pair it with Hazel, which monitors files that show up in my ~/Downloads folder and does stuff with them. (Examples: moving bank statements to the DEVONthink inbox folder. Opening any *.ics files with Calendar.app so that they’re added to my calendar, then deleting them.) I could totally do all those things myself. I’d sure hate to go back to having to, though.
- sndean 4y ago> Then it OCRs my statement (no idea why or how my bank manages to send it as an image), finds the string like “Closing date: X/Y/Z”, renames the file like “Bank statement - 20ZZ-0Y-0Z.pdf”, and moves it to the directory where I keep them all. If you can have it do that automatically... then, okay, I think you've convinced me to do another trial. That's pretty cool.
- kstrauser 4y agoOops, my bad. Hazel does the OCR, because the day I was setting that pipeline up, I was able to get it working first. DT definitely does all the rest. I have smart rules set up in it for all the bank / credit card / loan statements we get, certain types of email I archive, and a bunch of other stuff. In all cases, my workflow is the same: get a file onto my computer and into DEVONthink’s inbox somehow. For email, that’s using the DT plugin in Mail.app to import the message(s). For downloaded files, it’s using Hazel rules to move them into it. Again, none of that’s stuff I couldn’t do by hand, but neither is really anything we do with computers, right? I’d rather script it up once and let it handle the toil for me every day.