I discovered the Scrivener website today and I’m very existed with what I saw. I was wondering lately if I should get a Mac… guess I have my answer now!
Since I don’t have a Mac yet to test Scrivener, can someone help me with the following question? I’m looking for software not only to write a book (Scrivener seems perfect for this task) but also a software to collect interesting info either as I find them randomly or as part of a specific research. It should be able to collect as many different kinds of info as possible (text, pictures, videos, graphs, emails, websites, RSS feeds, etc.) from as many different sources as possible (hard copies, digital, online, etc.). It should also feature a powerful search function and support different ways to organize the info.
Can Scrivener help in the research side as well? I read posts on this forum where people are recommending one of the following: DevonNote, DevonThinkPro, ScrapIt Pro, EZNote X. Any other recommendations to help collect data? Comments on the ones listed?
i tried various things after i switched to mac – circus ponies notebook, eagle filer, devonthink pro office, and filemaker pro. they are all good, but after a time i realized that filemaker pro and devonthink pro office were miles ahead of the others in both power and usability. i discarded everything else and have never missed any of it.
devon think pro office will do everything you describe and quite a bit more. i used ask sam and access for over a decade back when i was a pc. they were comfortable tools. i missed them when i swtiched to macs, but now i wouldn’t go back, even if they started selling access and ask sam for osx. devonthink is better than ask sam, especially since the recent upgrade. it’s easy to use and will take just about any sort of file you give it. i doubt you’ll need any other research database.
Within reason, Scrivener can do a lot of this itself. In fact that was one of the design goals behind it: to have a piece of software that not only addresses the actual writing process, but the nebula of data collection and generation that accumulates around the text. In my opinion, this purpose is only getting better as time goes by, too. New ways to manage data and blend it with the concrete results of the manuscript will be available; new ways to visualise the connexions between things in a spatial environment; new ways to analyse persistence search parameters; expandable meta-data; and more. Within reason, Scrivener is a great tool for collecting, organising, and cutting through data problems. Many of its features, built to aid in the writing process, are also quite useful in other realms as well. Its corkboard; ability to “tape together” ten short research ideas into one place and expand them all at once as if working in a single document; the new enhanced scratch-pad. I do say within reason though. Scrivener is not a database, which means that there are realistic limits to quantity at a technical level—though for most people these limits are way beyond anything they will ever approach. For the most part the project file format is very robust, and Scrivener’s ability to handle sheer bulk is among the best. I’ve tested corkboards with thousands of items; edited documents a million words in length, and never saw it shrug.
The main limit is in the amount of data in gigabytes. The project format is designed so you can pack up your entire project and carry it with you by just moving a single file to another computer. Visiting a friend for the week? Not a problem you’ll everything you need to keep working. This ability backfires when it comes to huge data stores though. It makes backing things up on a regular basis prohibitive. For something like a book, you really want to back up at least once a day, if not more. If you have three or four gigabytes of research data, that can add up awfully quickly. There are strategies for handling situations like that. With a little preparation and planning you could create a meta-data skeleton template of your book, and spool off new backup projects from this template, which consist of only the draft portion from the primary project—just to provide one example.
But there probably is a line where something else is required. Probably two lines. One would be whether or not Scrivener can perform the analysis you require (while it has a good search tool, it isn’t quite as strong against something that offers multi-stage Boolean operators, regular expressions; recombination & cascading; and a few other advanced search methods—though finding software with all of that is not easy; most will only offer one or two if any. DEVONthink, for instance, is great with multi-staging, but crumbles when it comes to character precision and sequencing; Journler (now defunct so I don’t recommend it) offered brilliant R&C, including stepped granularity enactment on searches! but didn’t have so much for Booleans. Out of all the searching systems I’ve used, Tinderbox is probably the best—but then it has an entire embedded programming language devoted to constructing and enacting on search results), and the second would be how much hassle you are willing to put up with if there is a lot of space consuming data. DEVONthink is definitely the most popular solution to turn to in that case. There are also many lighter, less complicated software packages out there. One thing about Mac software, you will find, is that there is a thriving community amongst authors and data collectors. We have a lot of really high quality applications in this department, from bulk databases like DEVONthink, to programmatic data analysis and visualisation with Tinderbox, to extremely efficient idea collection and browsing front-ends, like Notational Velocity. Many of these programs simply have no analogue anywhere else—nothing is even close. So if anything, you’ll have a lot to play with and see what fits. Most have generous demo periods.
Devonthink has been the one constant in my Mac dock (along with the Finder) since I switched from Windows in 2003. Its capacity to soak up any file and retrieve it years later with minimal fuss is marvellous to behold.
I’m a journalist, and keep all my articles in the same database as my references, so that it makes a growing store of information that I mine and re-mine every day. My main database now stands at about 7 gigs and 15 million words*, and yet working with it there’s no sense that it is carrying all this data.
I don’t understand half of what AmberV is talking about re analysis, but I’m used to that. I just tell Devonthink Pro Office to seek using basic search terms, and lo, it finds, including all the words I’ve plugged into Scrivener projects.
I tried using Scrivener to store research material, but found the benefits of using DT to search across all my references far outweighed the benefits of having references integrated into Scrivener. It’s also much quicker to get material into Devonthink, along with related URLs, the ISBN of the 21st Century.
But different horses for different courses: your usage may differ.
of which maybe 15,000 are strictly necessary. Devonthink does encourage outrageous packrattery.
Another vote for Devon Think Pro Office. I have multiple databases, from URLs to PowrPoint templates to Emails to Music to Recipes to Research, and DTPO has been superb fr my needs.
You could throw everything into a single database, but I prefer to have some structure to start with. This supposedly helps DTPO’s artificial intelligence features.
I tested DEVONthink for real work during the latest months, for a series of essays for which I had to sieve huge amounts of researches in different formats (PDF, plain text, web pages, scanned documents…). I cannot imagine how I could have done without it: there were references that I had completely forgot, and that sprung out when doing a comparative analysis.
Indispensable, more than useful. And it works perfectly with Scrivener (by exchanging text, URLs, outlines - and even by indexing/archiving a Scrivener’s document content).
I’m afraid I’m going to be very boring, and recommend DevonThink Pro as well. I only use half of its functionality (if that), but I find it completely invaluable, both for academic endeavours and for managing background information in any other area of my life. I have three different databases: the main one is for reference material (academic, writing, general interest), then I have two much smaller ones – one for personal documents (so that I don’t mix private data with non-sensitive data), and one for recipes (which have no overlap with anything else).
DevonThink Pro seemed expensive to me at first, but it has proved to be worth every penny (and more).
Another alternative may be… the Finder! Never used DevonThink in any of its various incarnations , but I used and admired DevonNote until I got Scrivener and Apple bestowed Spotlight upon us. I’ve found that for my purposes (book and look and short journalism with multiple sources), either Scrivener itself (for long and short articles) or, for my book, text/rtf files in the Finder (searchable using spotlight comments or whatever your favorite metadata tagging system) will find what I need. However, even my accumulated book files probably only add up to under half a gigabyte, and they’re almost all text or rtf. ( Except for some web links, I could probably almost use Notational Velocity or another plain text editor.) Just a few dozen pdfs and not enough graphics files to even bother about.
I tag my research files with a date (my book is a chronological biography, so it’s mostly sorted in folders by year the event described occurred) and keyword (for items that transcend a single year’s interest) and so far, I’ve been able to find whatever I need. I’m sure DevonThink would work a treat but I just prefer to keep my toolkit as simple as needed – but no simpler!
Please let us know which apps you try and which you wind up settling on and why.
Before starting to actually use DevonThink, I was also tempted by using Spotlight + Scrivener. I discovered the difference in the two approaches while using DevonThink, and after writing a short essay without using it.
Both Scrivener and Spotlight (but also DevonThink) do textual searches, and searches on tags (metadata). The advantage of DevonThink is the so-called ‘artificial intelligence’, that look for semantic concordance between documents. This can really find related documents that one could not find with the other kinds of search.
This advantage becomes particularly evident when you keep a single database of all your references. With Scrivener, I find natural having a dedicate database for each project. With Devon, the norm is having a centralized database for all the academic documents (or for any specialized field of research).
Another thing I found very useful in DevonThink Pro Office, is the ease with which you can OCR scanned (or photographed) documents, and insert them in the search flow. There is a new feature announced, that would make data representation particularly effective: the representation of relations between tags as a web or a cloud. A bit like a Tinderbox map, without the editing capabilities of Tinderbox.
My hint is that Scrivener is all one need for short and casual researches (or even for school). An external database (like DevonThink) becomes indispensable when it is time to separate single projects and your main (huge and growing) archive.
In the quest for simplicity, I’ve several times investigated using the Finder rather than Devonthink. Each time I scurried back to Devonthink.
For instance, I’ll often find a document or piece of information that has a relationship with one of the themes I work with, but isn’t an exact fit–the sort of thing that sits on the borderline of too good to throw away, not good enough to keep. I stick it into Devonthink’s inbox, and about once a week use the artificial intelligence to suggest where each of these disparate pieces of “might be useful” information could go in the database. I almost always find a place for it. I accumulate some cruft, but I also gain some nuggets along the way.
Another advantage of Devonthink over the OS is the ability to clip a piece of text from a web page, rather than save a webarchive or PDF. I’m often on the hunt for phone numbers: with DT, when I find what I’m after I can highlight it, hit a hotkey, and have someone’s contact details go straight into the relevant project folder, along with the URL of the web page I collected the information from. If I’m using the system tools/Finder, this involves a bit of cutting and pasting. Not a huge time saving, but something I’ve got very used to doing.
There endeth the Devonthink evangelism, at least for now …
I think Paolo pretty much nails it here. Of course, it all depends on your project(s), but it does sound as though DT (and maybe others like EagleFiler) work best for writers (such as academics) who maintain a huge database of info that’s used for different projects.
In reply to bashosfrog (clever handle, BTW!), I should point out that you can easily clip text from a web page using the Finder. Using the Services menu, I’ve set up a hot key combo (in my case command-*) that clips highlighted text to Bean, a free, lean RTF editor. I have similar hot keys set up to clip items directly to Scrivener, and you can do this in TextEdit, Notational Velocity, and probably any other editor.
Every so often, I save these clippings into the appropriate folder in the Finder, sometimes tagging with keywords as described above. When it comes time to write an article or book chapter, I import the folder into a Scrivener project and work on it from there.
If I were to use the same info in multiple projects, I could find it via the tag, save a copy into a different folder, import the original text/RTF clipping into another Scrivener project, set up a Reference link in SCrivener, etc etc.
Wow! I’m overwhelmed by the number of replies in such a short period of time and the depth of knowledge and analysis displayed in the answers. The people on this forum are very generous and thoughtfull. Thank you so much for the feedback. DevonThink and Scrivener it will be. I can’t wait to switch back to a Mac… something that should happen within the next month or two… as soon as money permits!!
I started working on computers in the late 80s with Macs but was forced to switch to PCs for work purposes about 9 years ago. Even though I’ve had some success, I always missed the ease of use and stability of Macs. But worst, some specific software titles that I’ve come to depend on were available only for the Mac platform. And now DT and S confirms once again that Mac is the leading platform when it comes to innovations.
The only software that I will miss from the PC is a password and URL management utility called RoboForm. If any of you know of a similar utility for the Mac, I would appreciate hearing about it.
1Password! It’s a great password management utility, and also works as a database for storing credit card wallet information, serial numbers for applications you’ve purchased, secure notes, and so on. It also has a free iPhone version of the application, or a pro version for a slight charge. The pro version is also available for the iPad. They can all be kept in sync with one another. From other people that have switched, I’ve heard they like it even more than RoboForms.
Thanks Amber for the tip about 1Password. I looked it up and it seems to fit my needs. Other users online recommended two other possibilities that apparently worked on Mac and PC: LastPass and KeePass. I didn’t test their merit myself but LastPass gets good reviews, so I thought I would pass on the info. Also, there is a note on the RoboForm site stating that they will have a version for “Safari on a Mac” by the end of 2010.
Two other options are URL Manager Pro and Web Confidential, both by Alco Blom.
AFAIK, they still work fine at least up to Leopard. The interface is not as nice as 1Password.
These days I use 1Password 95% of the time, but still have Alco’s applications and they work fine for me using 10.5.8
I second Eddie’s motion about Alco Blom’s bookmark and password managers. They are solid and reliable, and he is a very nice guy, always responsive to e-mail. But unfortunately, he has not yet adapted to Snow Leopard, now over a year old. You have to run his apps on Rosetta, which means they are slow to load. And they are not integrated well into a browser.
Following Amber’s suggestion, I downloaded a trial copy of 1Password, tried it out for a while, and then bought it. It’s fast, reliable, and makes logins a snap. I tend to dump cookies and clear caches often, so I was always having to re-log. Now it’s a breeze to visit sites, do business, and move on.
Like Eddie, I will hang on to URLMP and WC, but probably use them far less. One very nice feature is collecting URLs in folders and then publishing them in HTML. I do that often for students or other researcher-writers.