If you are a knowledge junkie and you use OS X, you gotta check out DEVONthink and DEVONagent. This is my discovery post. I quickly reached my purchase threshold today and bought these two little guys as a bundle for $65.
I didn't even try them first. Yesterday I read Liz Lawley's post that she had purchased DEVONthink and I made a mental note. She had some great links that got me very interested. Steven Berlin Johnson made a good case for DEVONthink in his NYT piece Tools for Thought and sold me decisively with his subsequent detailed blog post Tool for Thought. Then the NetNewsWire 2 smart search I created found even more evidence of its value and led me to the Intelligence Times Two bundle deal.
I'm an optimist and get pretty excited when I feel like perhaps I'm onto the current holy grail of knowledge apps. When I opened up DEVONagent it started out with the search field loaded with DEVONthink. I pressed the button and it went out on the NET to get me a Fast Scan of everything I ever wanted to know about DEVONthink. It found 71 pages. It didn't take long to try out the Deep Scan. How about 1706 pages and 41 megs all ranked with colorful bars for relevance?
Remember how I wanted a desktop search tool and complained about Google a while back? I've been very pleased with NetNewsWire's newsreading, searches and smart search subscriptions, but DEVONagent takes me further into where I want to go. I'll keep the NNW, but this desktop search tool with smarts and easy transfer to DEVONthink is what I've been waiting for. Cool!!!
I'll follow up with you as the dust settles!
[Note: I used the made up word, knowledger in my post title in place of the word knowledge-worker. I wanted an add-on word like worker that wasn't limited to work. It needs to include play, hobby, curiosity and passionate amateur connotations too. But, I couldn't think of a good word so just shortened the word to knowledger and crossed my fingers when I hit the post button.]