A KEY issue in all of this is, what happens if the program breaks semi-permanently for you, or the company goes belly-up or decides to charge $1,000 per year. Papers stores the PDFs in a Mac file hierarchy and puts the metadata into a database (perhaps sqlite3?). If Papers permanently broke tomorrow, I’d still have all of my 1800 papers and still be able to search via Spotlight and carry on.

Similarly, Yojimbo puts everything in an sqlite3 database, so a little Terminal work could rescue everything if Bare Bones or Yojimbo suddenly became untenable. What about Evernote?

I wouldn’t trust hours and hours and hours of work to something that I could not work around in the worst case.

Either way, Spotlight is a huge tool for organization and finding stuff.

With that said, DtOP has the intelligent assistant advantage and Evernote has the cloud storage advantage/disadvantage.

BUT
- I hardly use the iPhone app, since the iPhone itself has great note taking features. This is mainly since I hate waiting for the Evernote app – it’s too slow in initializing
- I don’t want my Data any longer on other people’s servers. It just feels wrong.
- After three years, you start paying more for Evernote than you do for DTP.
- Sorting in Evernote is pain in the ass. It’s not good for long-term data storage.
-The more data you have in Evernote, the slower the search is – even if your processor screams as mine does.

So I decided for changing to DTP. It feels better to have power on your data and the AI is a dream for researchers.

BUT
- The sorter is quite nerving, but that’s forgetable if you’re ignorant like me
- The sorter is blocking my workflow. It’s too slow and not responsive enough
- The user interface is a nightmare, but managable.
- The note taking feature is minor to the html-Evernote version. I’m missing the check-boxes, lines, bullet points, etc.
-The OCR seems to me worse than Evernote’s – especially what pictures are concerned

MY (!) CONCLUSION
- Switching over to DevonThink, but keeping Evernote
- Changing from Evernote premium to Evernote standard
- Using Evernote only for harmless stuff and export every note taken there into DTP soon.
-Using DTP for my paperless office and (research) work
-Disabling Evernote’s clipper and browser button
-Using the Sorter – even if it sucks.
-As it is said here: Evernote is the short term memory, DTP the long term one.

>>> Writing this and hoping that the DTP gurus are reading, taking care of it and making their genius app even more killer than it’s now:
- a faster and better looking sorter
- a native iPhone app or, better: using iPhone apps like Camera, notes, etc. themselves since they tend to be fastest
- a web-interface that rocks and which is fully customizable (especially what’s the data choice about) – or, alternatively: a better and faster local web server with better security parameters.
- a much cleaner interface which looks more Mac native
- MOST IMPORTANT: a better and html empowered note taking feature which can be used in hard daily work.

I looked at Circus-Ponies notebook. It seems very much suited for scholarly purposes. However, I am put off by the paper notebook metaphor, and I am not sure you can link files other than PDFs.
Any ideas and suggestions?
Thanks, Gideon