I just sent the following mail to the Mac list at Progress:

Hello again,

I just wanted to follow up on the DEVONThink application I mentioned a few weeks ago. I read a use case for the application in a comment attached to an article on the web.

To remind folks (and fill in the people that are new to the list), I sent a message a while ago (included below) pointing out these two apps that I think are really interesting on their own. One was NetNewsWire, which is pretty self explanatory, and the other was DEVONThink, which looked cool, but I couldn’t tell how useful it was.

DEVONThink can be found at http://www.devon-technologies.com.

The use case that I found really interesting is this one (found at http://www.envestco2.com/macwhispers/0000009.html, search for DEVON):

Whether or not the rumor is true in its specifics, I have no doubt that Apple is working on this or a similar application.

I’ve got MS Office X and use it to edit and share Word documents with colleagues. But I DON’T use Word for my own writing and note-taking. Why? It doesn’t have Mac OS X Services. My working environment involves flowing information into DEVONthink, which holds and relates my reference materials, projects and notes, and handles text, RTF, PDF, Word, and HTML documents, as well as images. DEVONthink has quite amazing abilities to recognize words in context, to classify documents, and to find relationships between documents. Limited Boolean searches are available, and the results are essentially instantaneous — every word in the database is held in the database’s concordance. I do much of my draft writing within DEVONthink, as it has rudimentary word processing capabilities similar to TextEdit and is great for managing drafts and updates. If, while writing, I want to look up a word or phrase within the database, DEVONthink’s Lookup Service will do it for me. Final output goes to Create (a fine Cocoa page layout application) for documents intended for PDF and/or HTML, or to (ahem) MS Word.

For example I can use Safari to find an interesting article in Science Magazine Online, select the text, press ‘Command-)’ (a shortcut for DEVONthink’s Service to import RTF files), and the text is immediately entered into the DEVONthink database — an instant, self-documenting addition to my reference collection!

Mac OS X Services allow for flows of information between Cocoa applications that can make for important new levels of interoperability between applications. What I need is a really mature Cocoa word processor — I haven’t found one yet. Apple or Nisus, please provide one, with lots of new Services tricks.

The rumor they are talking about is whether Apple is working on a new word processor code-named Document. That discussion is interesting in and of itself.

Anyway, I tried doing this workflow last night… and promptly registered the application. It seems to work pretty well, and the standard edition that is coming soon promises to be even smarter about it. Once Apple releases the Safari/WebCore SDK at WWDC, they (Devon) should be able to not only rip web pages into their database, but also display them with full formatting right inside the app.

Neat stuff.

Sujal