Yep is an indexing and tagging application that is specialized on PDF files. Leap’s browser shows thumbnails of the files it finds, which, in my opinion, is a much better way of presenting a large number of files than Coverflow. You can also limit the search to certain file types (e.g. When you’re in search of a specific file, you can enter search criteria and Leap filters down the files in real time. You can then add your own tags which are stored either in the file’s Spotlight comments or in Leap’s database. Leap indexes all the files in your Home folder and initially adds tags based on existing metadata, the file name, its date and the folder it resides in. The reason I mentiond them here together, is that, firstly, they work great together and, secondly, they are actually very similar in what they do. Yep and Leap are actually two separate apps. Here’s an overview of the apps I came up with after researching and filtering, in no particular order. I looked for well-supported apps, since I’m going to be trusting them with my precious data and I wouldn’t want to end up in a tight spot with some important documents in a database of an app, who’s developer has moved on to greater things. I found lots of apps that let you take notes (which is much better than keeping your notes in individual files), embed numerous types of files and search and tag your data. So I did some research, looking for apps that would help me manage my collection of data easily and efficiently. Spotlight? It’s much more powerful than meets the eye, but using its query language isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. You have the Spotlight comments field in the Get Info window, but that gets crammed quickly and there’s no way of browsing them either. Out of the box, Mac OS X just doesn’t have that many easily accessible ways of managing a large number of files. With the number of files inhabiting my machine, managing them with the Finder in folder hierarchies is quickly becoming a hassle. It’s incredible, but my main hard drive has about 350 GB of stuff on it and I only have a faint idea of what may be hiding deep down in the most distant crevices of my Mac.Īnd it gets more daily: Emails pop into my inbox, I download stuff from websites, I create new documents… if there’s one thing I can say for sure: the amount of data on my Mac is only going to grow over time, so I better start thinking about how to manage all this stuff more effectively. Files, PDFs, Word and Pages documents, Excel and Numbers spreadsheets, emails, notes, web clippings, movie files, images, outlines, databases and more. And the effort required to create a DevonThink snippet database large enough to make the "See Also" function useful is a substantial investment.I don’t know about you, but my Mac is full of stuff. My question: is it worth the effort? Is the pain of accumulating enough 50-500 word snippets in DevonThink during research worth the gain you receive from it in the writing process? Converting previously-read articles to 50-500 word snippets can be very time consuming. These associations allow you to get a much more in-depth use of your previously read research that you may have forgotten about or never made a link to on your own. Reason: short, focused snippets allows DevonThink's "See Also" AI feature to come up with many overlooked associations between your snippets. In short, he advocates for creating 50-500 word focused text snippets from your research readings and placing them in DevonThink for future use. Steven Berlin Johnson talks in this much cited article about his research workflow using DevonThink.
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