Apple’s original implementation of “smart” file management isn’t just limited to the Finder, and in fact, you’ve probably seen it more often in other applications like Address Book and Mail.

Here are some ideas of how you can harness the power of these two applications using the same idea as Smart Folders.

Smart Groups

Address Book provides support for smart groups which allow for dynamic content, just like a smart folder. As new content is added that meet your guidelines, the group will automatically update.

Creating a Smart Group is as simple as going to File and selecting “New Smart Group…” or by clicking the plus icon (+) in the lower left corner of the Address Book window. Then give your group a name and set of criteria. As you add your second criterion, you’ll have the choice for your group to consist of any of your rules or all of your rules.

Here’s some ideas for useful smart groups.

Upcoming Birthdays

Interested in who might have a birthday this month? Set the birthday criterion to include entries that occur within the next month. (This will include all birthdays within a month of the current date or when you click to view the group.)

Missing Email Addresses

To see a list of people who you do not have an email address for, set the email criterion to include entries that are not set.

My Coworkers

Most companies offer their employees an email address that uses the corporate domain. If you created a smart group for “email” that contains “yourdomain.com” then you will have a group that is always updated with all of your coworkers. An extra bonus, these Smart Groups also show up and autocomplete in Mail.

Or Anything You Want

Since the Address Book allows for a “notes” section on each card, you can use this region to “tag” cards and then use a smart group to show results based on that information. (You could also repurpose one of the other standard fields for this use.) For example, throwing the word “family” into the appropriate contacts’ card would allow for you to create a smart group that just showed your family members.

Currently, Smart Groups cannot be synced to iPods or iPhones. While they also cannot be synced through MobileMe to me.com or Windows computers, they can still sync through MobileMe to other Macs.

Smart Mailboxes

Mail has its own flavor of smart file management too with the implementation of smart mailboxes. To create one, use the Mailbox menu or the plus (+) icon in the lower left of the message viewer and select “New Smart Mailbox.”

Give your smart mailbox a name and choose the appropriate criteria for your mailbox. With the ability to create criteria based on recipient, subject, mailbox, date, message, attachment and more, you can create some pretty powerful mailboxes to help organize your workflow. Here’s a few suggestions.

Recently Viewed

Most people process tons of email on a daily basis and frequently people have multiple email addresses for different purposes. With all of these messages, is there an easy way to find that email you were looking at last night?

Sure! Create a new smart mailbox and select “date last viewed” and choose “is in the last” and specify a number of days.

Recently Sent

If I wanted to quickly find an email that I had sent recently, I could create a Smart Group that showed me messages in the mailbox “Sent” that were “date received” in the past 2 days. Also make sure you tick the “Include messages from Sent” checkbox.

Emails from My Family

Remember the family smart group we made in our Address Book earlier? We can create a smart mailbox to show us all the messages from those family members.

Select “Sender is Member of Group” and then choose the appropriate group from the drop down menu.

Similar to Smart Groups, Smart Mailboxes do not sync to iPods or iPhones nor to me.com or Windows computers through MobileMe. They will only sync via MobileMe to other Macs.

Do you use Smart Groups or Smart Mailboxes? Have any tips you’d like to share? Share them in the comments.

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Mac OS X offers a computing experience that, according to many, is still unparalleled by its competitors. Built on a rock solid UNIX foundation and continually adding refinements that make interaction easier, OS X has a lot of powerful functionality that many users were unaware existed. One of these is the idea of “Smart Folders” and with a little primer, you can begin using them to make your Mac experience easier (and faster).

A Brief History

The idea of these Smart Folders are not unique to OS X. In fact, the idea started originally in the mid ‘90s with the now defunct BeOS. When Dominic Giampaolo, a software developer for Be, began working for Apple in 2002, some of the best elements of the BeOS made their way into Apple’s modern operating system. We know these features as “Smart Folders” and Spotlight, both of which launched in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, two years after Giampaolo began working for Apple.

A “Smart Folder” (or “Search Folder” as Windows Vista calls them when Microsoft introduced its version in 2006) is based on the idea that this folder is basically a “virtual folder” of its actual contents. This virtual folder doesn’t physically store copies of its contents inside but rather utilizes a database to store attributes about the files (defined either by the system or the user). This offers several advantages: they have a small file size, the ability for on-the-fly fine tuning of the criteria used to define the content as well as allowing the content to dynamically update as new files meet the criteria. Whoa. What does all of that mean? We’re getting there.

Smart Folders Save Time

In short, Smart Folders save you time. You basically give them a list of rules to follow and they automatically fill themselves with content based on the criteria you’ve defined. It’s important though, to realize that these Smart Folders do not actually represent copies of the content, but merely virtually link to them. If you delete a file out of a Smart Folder, you’ve also deleted it from its original location.

How To Make Smart Folders

Making a Smart Folder is quite easy. In fact, if you’re running Leopard or Snow Leopard, several of them have already been created. You might recognize them due to their trademark purple folder icon (also used to serve the same role in other applications, but we’ll discuss that in future articles). In the left side of a default Finder window, you’ll see an area called “Search For” with entries for “Today,” “Yesterday,” “Past Week” and some more. These are built in smart folders that automatically search your entire system for files meeting those criteria. But we can do far more powerful things with Smart Folders if we make our own.

1. To get started, when in the Finder, go to the File menu and select “New Smart Folder.” You’ll have a Finder window that looks like a search window. (You can also start this process simply by searching from a Finder window.)
2. Next, using the bar beneath the title bar of the window, select the location you’d like this folder to search. The default options are your Mac, your home folder and Shared (any other computers you may connected to). If you’d like it to confine the search to a specific folder, simply navigate to that folder and use the Spotlight function built into the Finder window. (Type something into the field to bring up a search; you can then delete what you typed to move to the next step).
3. Unless you’ve specified some phrase or string in the Spotlight search region in the upper right of the window, at this point you’re not going to be seeing any search results. Let’s give it some actual criteria to search.
4. Click the round plus (+) icon on the right side of the window to show another bar beneath the search location. Where it says “Kind” and “Any” is your first search criteria. These work in pairs. You can change “Any” to documents, images, movies or anything you want. Instantly, you’ll see your search results start to populate based on your selection. Perhaps instead of searching by kind, you want to search by name, contents or date. Clicking “Kind” will allow these changes as well as a mystical “other” option which gives you tons of options for a plethora of different uses. Since OS X is media friendly, you can also select criteria that corresponds to metadata in your media files, such as aperture value of a photo, sample rate for an audio file, video bit rate for video files and more.
5. You can continue to add additional criteria by clicking the plus and adding another row of criterion. Each additional criterion further fine tunes your search. For an item to appear in the results, it will need to meet every rule you have created for it.
6. If you want to save a Smart Folder search, click the Save button in the upper right of the window. Your searches are saved in “Saved Searches” inside the Library folder of your home folder. There’s also a checkbox to automatically add your new search to your Finder sidebar.
7. Editing a Smart Folder is as simple as right clicking it in the sidebar and selecting “Show Search Criteria” or selecting the same option from the gears menu once you’ve double clicked a saved Smart Folder.

Again, the beauty and power of Smart Folders comes from the fact that once you’ve defined the rules, this folder will automatically continue to update as new files are created or saved that meet its criteria.

Folder Inspiration

Smart Folders sound great and once you’ve set one up, you’ll see the process is pretty simple. It’s also pretty powerful but, for inspiration, here’s a few examples of interesting and useful Smart Folders that you could create on your system.

Recent Documents: To view all your recent documents, set the kind to document and the last opened date to within the last 3 days.

Important Files: If you use Finder labels, select “Other” and choose “File label.” Then pick the file label that matches your desired results.

By Device: Have several cameras? You can use “Device make” and “Device model” to specify a particular camera (as well as any other EXIF data).

Do you use Smart Folders? Have any tips you’d like to share or comments on this post? Let me know what you think; I’d love to hear your feedback.

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Many readers are likely familiar with the Getting Things Done craze of the past few years. This task oriented methodology has spawned a system for managing the chore that is email, with battle-cries of “Inbox Zero!” resounding around the Internet.

While I’m not exactly an “inbox zero” kind of guy (close enough I suppose), I have found that the concept of “desktop zero” rings quite true with me. If you’ve ever seen a computer desktop covered in icons, we’re talking about the antithesis here. Read on to find out some compelling reasons to strive for desktop zero, and some tool tips on how you can easily achieve desktop zen.

When I was young I bought a coin dish from a garage sale that read, “A clean desk is the sign of a sick mind.” (I added it to my already over-cluttered desktop in my room.) While I still find humor in that memory, the computer nerd in me is pretty particular about my digital workspace being neat and tidy. Just as inbox zero brings clarity, closure, and a sense of accomplishment to each day, so can keeping your computer’s desktop free of clutter and unnecessary files or folders.

A Clean Starting Place

I find it quite satisfying to boot up my machine, and have nothing but a hard drive “cluttering” my desktop. It feels like turning to a clean page in a Moleskin, or using a full-screen text application — there are just no (or very few) distractions to getting started with your work. Not to mention that if you need to drop a file there temporarily for quick use before deleting, it will be easy to find when not amongst dozens of other items.

A Sense of Organization

I’m quite particular about a sound data hierarchy to file things under, yet another place where my physical and digital lives are at odds with one another. If my desktop is littered with random files (email attachments, web downloads, the latest file lazily saved to the desktop to file later) and folders, it just means they aren’t in the place that I should be looking for them in the long term. Though on occasion I’ll relent and (temporarily) drop an alias (‘shortcut’ for those of you new to Mac) of a folder on the desktop if it’s for a project I’m working in the majority of the time. At least that way, stuff it still in its proper place when I’m through.

Revel in Your Wallpaper

Here, we move from the arguably practical reasons to the more fun, and subjective. I love a great wallpaper image on my desktop. Sometimes it’s a great repeating vintage wallpaper pattern, or a too-cute-for-words picture of my kids, or a photo that I took and really liked. Every now and then it’ll do wonders to just zone out for a few while looking at a great image on a clean desktop.

HUD Style Interfaces via Geektool

If you’ve tooled around Flickr (with Mac on your mind) or followed the Featured Desktops on Lifehacker, you’ve seen them. A killer mash-up of geek chic, stunning design, and useful information result in some of the coolest desktop Head’s Up Displays you’ve seen. Some are as simple as using Geektool to push logs to the desktop, while others style the fonts, work along with the wallpaper, and sometimes even a custom theme to all of OS X. The results are generally nothing short of spectacular — and you’re not going to get there with a multitude of files strewn about.

Sound interesting? Well it’s not hard to do. More than anything it’s a mindset. But having a process — and better yet, good tools — will help you clear that desktop in no time at all. Luckily there are many utilities and applications available to drill directly down to just what you want, wherever it may reside on your hard drive. But we’ll start simply first.

A Temp Folder

The things that tend to trip me up most, are those temporary files that I need for a short period of time and then forget about. If I’m just emailing a file or printing something, I drop it on my desktop, perform whatever action I need, and then usually delete it. However, sometimes it’s a bit of information that you may need for more than just a few days. At this point I’ll drop it into a folder named ‘tmp’ which resides in the root of my Home Folder. (example: ~/Nick/tmp) It’s as easy as that. Oh, and as an extra tip, add that tmp folder to your Dock as a Stack view for quick access!

Fresh and Hazel

If you don’t mind spending a few dollars, there are a couple of applications/utilities that I swear by for this kind of organization. (It’s worth mentioning that there are many applications that can fulfill these actions, but these are ones that have proven themselves to me.) Fresh ($9) hangs just off-screen as a transparent tab, where it gives quick access to recent files, as well as a ‘Cooler’, which functions very similar to my tmp folder idea above. Hazel ($21.95) can monitor files and folders and perform actions on them based on user defined rules. So perhaps you’ve got a temporary file on your desktop for 3 days, Hazel will see it’s been 3 days (based on a rule) and move it to your tmp folder where you can access it later on. Hazel’s terrifically powerful, and we’ve written about it before if you want to learn more.

We all approach our workspaces differently, and get different uses out of different methodologies. It’s entirely possible that Desktop Zero is not for everyone. For me, it was an easy and rewarding change to make, but as with all things, your mileage may vary. If you’ve got an alternative method for keeping your desktop (or any portion of your computer) clean and tidy, we’d love to hear your secrets too.

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Picasa web users will recognize the “new” features for the desktop version, which haven’t previously been available on locally installed instances of Picasa in the past. They include face recognition, which Picasa calls “Name Tags,” and support for geotagged photos with location data.

With Name Tags, Picasa will analyze your photos and group them according to faces it find in them, at which point you’re able to assign names to these faces, and then search your library based on people you’ve tagged. If it sounds like Faces in iPhoto ’09, that’s because it is, with the exception that when signed into your Gmail account with the app, Picasa will offer auto-complete suggestions of names you start typing.

Google also baked-in location support in Picasa 3.5, which resembles iPhoto ’09′s Places organizational feature. That means photos with embedded geotagging EXIF data, like those taken with the iPhone’s built-in camera, or using an Eye-Fi Geo card, can be optionally displayed on a map in Picasa 3.5. If you’ve taken your photos without embedded location information, you can simply drag them to the appropriate location on a built-in Google map to achieve the same effect.

Version 3.5 also brings an improved importing process, so that you can star your favorite shots, upload to the web, and share with your Google contacts all in one fell swoop. Tagging is also better than it was before, with better batch tagging, quick tags, and tag counts for image groups.

If you’re looking for an alternative to iPhoto, and you’re already very plugged into Google via its various personal information management apps, Picasa is a good choice. It isn’t much of a resource hog, it’s very good at combing and organizing your computer’s image files without much intervention on your part, and it plugs into your existing Google account information to fill in a lot of blanks. If I weren’t a MobileMe user (which I might not be for long after yesterday’s announcement), I’d definitely consider using Picasa as my full-time solution.

Picasa 3.5 is available now for Mac and PC, though not for Linux, and it’s an English-only download. It’s completely free, which is something iPhoto ’09 is not, if you haven’t purchased a new Mac lately.

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After so brazenly bragging about Apple’s legal department’s request that one of Microsoft’s ads be pulled last week, Redmond has quietly made changes to the ad in question to make sure that it accurately reflects reality, which is what Apple wanted in the first place. Kind of puts a damper on Microsoft COO Kevin Turner’s bubbly enthusiasm, I’d imagine.

Last week, he basically did a little dance for joy when he received the call from Apple legal, and trumpeted the news to the masses to make sure everyone knew that Microsoft had indeed scored a direct hit, even going so far as to call it “the greatest single phone call” he’s ever taken. The ads in question are the Laptop Hunter series, in which Microsoft gives random people a sum of money and challenges them to find their perfect laptop, at which point they get it for free. The ads were created by Crispin Porter & Bogusky.

The specific ad Apple took issue with is the “Lauren” ad (not that “Lauren” ad, the other one), in which Lauren and her mother are shopping for a computer under $1,700. At one point, they comment on the MacBook Pro’s $2,000 price tag, asking “Why would you pay twice the price?” As of the latest notebook lineup refresh, Apple’s top-of-the-line MacBook Pro no longer costs $2,000, coming in instead at a much easier to swallow $1,700. Which, coincidentally, is actually within Lauren and mom’s budget.

Microsoft, for its part, is saying the minor change doesn’t change “the focus of the campaign,” according to AdAge.com, so it’s clearly still counting this as a win. I’m willing to bet Microsoft’s legal department has been in contact with Apple on quite a few occasions, yet COO Tim Cook doesn’t break out the noisemakers and party hat every time that goes down.

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I had a chance to review the newest version, but first let’s see what’s new:

• Field-specific cleaning: TuneUp will now allow users to set which metadata it saves by default. This is also available on a per-album basis, which is great for mixtapes where you want to save artist/track name, but keep the original album title.
• A greatest hits toggle: TuneUp will allow users to avoid compilations when matching songs to albums. This feature makes it easier for users to keep songs organized by the album on which they originally appear.
• Playlists on Mac: Mac users can now choose whether they’d like TuneUp to create playlists of dirty/cleaned songs.

TuneUp Reviewed

I was very excited to give TuneUp a try. I love music and have a large iTunes library, so any help managing it is very welcome. I tried out the four basic features of TuneUp, and my experience with each is outlined below.

Clean is a two-step process. First, you drag-and-drop one or more songs from iTunes to TuneUp. Then, you verify the results and click Save. TuneUp identifies tracks by taking an audio fingerprint of each one and sending them to an online reference database.

Right away, I was disappointed that you can only clean 500 songs at a time. When I first read about the software, I assumed you could do your entire library at once. I have around 12,000 songs in my library, so if I wanted to clean my entire collection it would take me a minimum of 24 “cleans.” Luckily, most of music is tagged correctly, so I anticipate only having to clean about 5 percent of it, but if I were super-neurotic and wanted the whole thing done, I would have a lot of work on my hands.

Since I knew doing my whole library in one evening was not a realistic goal, I started by cleaning songs and albums that I knew for certain were incorrect. I scrolled down, found an album, and then simply “dragged and dropped” it into TuneUp and let it work its magic. Although it took quite awhile, I was very, very happy with the results; every song I dropped in was found and properly tagged.

Cover Art scans through your collection, identifies songs that are missing art, and then searches various web sources for artwork which you can save back to iTunes.

When I had an iPod video, I didn’t care about cover art; I just thought it was a waste of space. With the iPhone, my views on cover art completely changed. The iPod app on the iPhone displays music in such a way that the artwork is actually important.

I am happy to report that the cover art feature worked very well and even scanned my entire library at once, unlike Clean. I clicked once to start the scanning process and walked away. When it was done scanning, I clicked the “Save All” button and walked away again. I will admit that it took a long time to both scan my library and save the artwork, but I didn’t care because I didn’t have to be present while it was working.

This scanning of my entire library approach was how I envisioned the cleaning process would work, and if it did, the software would be perfect. You could “set it and forget it.”

Tuniverse (formerly the “now playing”) tab shows information about the current track including live videos, artist news, and merch.

The section reminds me of Last.fm, but is poorly executed. It has tons of subsections, including videos, bios, concert notifications, album recommendations, song recommendations, Google news, tickets and merch, all of which makes it a bit too busy and not nearly as polished as the rest of the UI. I understand what they were going for when they included this extra information in Tuniverse, but ultimately it feels unnecessary, and I think TuneUp would actually benefit from ditching it altogether.

Concerts alerts based on your collection.  Never miss another show.

This tab was a total surprise and is awesome. It goes through your music library, looking at all of your artists, and then lists concerts in your area (in my case, NYC — which it automatically detected) in chronological order. I love going to see live music, and if I have the artist in my iTunes library, I am interested in seeing them in concert, but rarely check to see what shows are coming up (this is just me being lazy). This tab makes finding concerts and purchasing tickets almost too easy!

Overall Verdict:

TuneUp is a great piece of software that does exactly what it claims to, but at the cost of being somewhat time-intensive. I highly recommend TuneUp to anyone looking to clean up their library, but offer the warning that it isn’t as simple as dragging all your music in and walking away for a few hours. If it were,  it would truly be the “magic pill” of music organization.

I look forward to future updates where TuneUp becomes faster, more accurate, and ideally becomes a one-click solution, but even in its current state, I will gladly use and recommend it.

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So what does Fresh do? From the Ironic site, here is their description:

“Fresh was born on that sinking feeling we have whenever we head into the Finder to ‘Find’ that file that we are working on, just downloaded, or like to keep handy. Fresh is designed to hide itself when you are not using it — keeping your onscreen clutter of windows more manageable.”

Translated, Fresh does multiple things:

1. Using the Fresh Files Zone, it’s a replacement for the Finder Recent Items/Folders/Drives feature.
2. Using the Cooler Zone, it is an enhancement for the Open (not Save) dialog box in that you can quickly drag files as email attachments or insert files into another document via drag-and-drop.
3. Using either zone, you can organize your items with tags and filter either the Fresh Files or Cooler Zones by those tags.

The Main UI

Let’s take a look at Fresh. Here is what the app looks like when launched:

Fresh Main UI

As you can see, the two zones are delineated by color (not customizable). The Fresh Files Zone is on top and shows the recently open/edited items. (Note, the blurred items are blurred by me, for privacy…that’s not a “feature” of any sort.)

The Cooler Zone below shows files that I have dragged into it for quick re-use (emails, discovery of files).

If you are a mouse-driven user, then the drag-and-drop Cooler Zone is very useful. If you are keyboard driven, then Fresh’s UI can be a little clunky to use. One good thing is that in the preferences, you can define a hotkey to bring Fresh to the forefront:

Fresh Main Preferences

Tagging

Within Fresh, it is pretty easy to Tag items either within the Fresh Files or within the Cooler Zones. Select an item, right-click it and then click Edit Tag.

I would argue that the folks at Ironic Software are pretty Tag “happy” seeing how they provide TagIt for free and the rest of their app suite supports tags (Yep, Leap, Deep).

Regardless, I don’t really see the point in tagging items within Fresh. The application seems more about discovery and convenience, not about “organization.”

Here is an example of the tag UI:

Fresh Tag UI – Type your tags here

Conclusion

I would say that Fresh does have a bias toward the unorganized masses — no offense folks. For those who keep their desktops clean as well as their download folders empty, this application might not be that useful.

When I first installed it, I thought “hey, maybe I won’t need Default Folder X anymore.” Well, that was wishful thinking. Fresh is pretty, but it just isn’t that functional for someone like me (hyper organized anal retentive). However, for $9 it’s a cheap tool if you like a slick UI wrapped up in a one-trick pony.

My recommendation is to save the $9 and not buy Fresh. Use the Finder. Use Spotlight. They work and they are included in the OS for free.

* I know, I dated myself with this terrible music lyric reference. Get over it.

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You’ll obviously want to decide what sort of grouping works best for you and the contacts in your iPhone’s Favorite list. Start by editing your favorites list, and ordering the contacts by your desired categorization. For me, it’s ‘Friends’, ‘Family’, and ‘Work’. So I’ve created a new contact for each.

The first name field looks something like ——FRIENDS—— and then a bogus 1 (234) 567-890 number has been created (since the Contacts app will argue with you if you try to create an empty listing).

Then make sure to favorite these new contacts to add them to your list. Once in the list, move your new separator contacts to the top of the ordered categories you previously decided on. Sure, it makes your Favorites list just a bit longer, but the usability (at least for me) is increased significantly.

The App Store has a few possible solutions as well:

• Fast Contacts is sort of a ‘kitchen sink’ option that does all kinds of sorting with your contacts data. It’s $1.99.
• Q Contacts adds a search feature to your list, and buttons next to the results allow you to text, email, or call the contact right from there. The two latest reviews when I looked seem to like it, but ask for more speed, and a Favorites list…maybe this won’t help solve the problem I started this article with. It’s free though, so give it a shot.
• InTouch Contacts appears to be another full-featured Contacts alternative that sorts in 5 different views, though it’s not immediately clear if you can create any custom lists. This one will cost you $2.99.

If you’ve got some useful tips for managing a lengthy Favorites list, or know of a killer contacts app for the iPhone (or iPod touch), do tell! It’s nice to share, and that’s what the Comments are for.

Author’s Note: I’ve been using this technique for a while and don’t recall whether the original inspiration for the idea was my own or not. I’m getting up there in my years, so if this was something I actually found elsewhere, it’s poor memory to blame for the lack of a shout-out, not a lack of respect…

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Both of these apps have some functional overlap and some unique differences. Here are the categories for comparison:

• Capturing data
• Managing data
• Sharing data
• Unique features
• iPhone Application

Capturing Data

There are many ways to capture data in these applications.

• Drag-and-drop files in the application’s main window (both).
• Import from a variety of other applications (DTPro: Import menu + AppleScripts).
• Native support for many file formats. Evernote Premium account is required to support files other than PDF. DTPro supports native iWork files, Mail.app/Entourage mail messages and more.
• Import of web archives via bookmarklets (both).
• Mac extensions: DTPro Office Sorter & Evernote’s Clipper.

DEVONthink Pro Office Sorter

Using the Sorter (which extends from the left or right side of your desktop), you can drag-and-drop items (documents, pictures, etc.) and they are automatically redirected to DTPro.

Evernote’s Clipper

Using the Clipper (available via the menu bar), you can either select text and go to the menu or press command keys to send the information to Evernote.

Managing Data

DEVONthink Pro Office Main Window

The DTPro main window utilizes a folder metaphor, similar to the Mac OS Finder. There are many ways to view and work with the data. Further, you can quickly create new files (Rich Text, Text and more) directly from the application.

What really makes DTPro valuable is the Artificial Intelligence (AI) engine. Rather than manually tagging content, DTPro uses its engine to create relevant links between content.

Lastly, DTPro includes an OCR engine that converts images and PDFs into editable files so that you can search for text within each item.

Evernote Main Window

Evernote Premium takes a different approach to managing data. The primary mechanism for organizing information is via user defined tags. You can also create different notebooks for different purposes (for example, PDFs or Office files).

Evernote allows you to quickly add new notes (via RTF) as well as take photo notes via your iSight camera. And, like DTPro, the app uses an OCR engine that converts images and PDFs into editable files. Just note that this OCR conversion is done via the Evernote Web service, not natively in the Evernote application.

Sharing Data

Both products enable you to share your data. With Evernote, you can specify which of your Notebooks you want to Publish to the web. You can then share the URL. Note, unless you use Evernote Premium, all of your data is sent insecurely to Evernote’s servers.

DTPro has the ability to publish its database to a local web server, of which you can either password protect or make public by sharing the IP address and directory.

iPhone Application

Both products have the capability of viewing your information via an iPhone application. For now, Evernote performs better due to its native iPhone app.

Currently, you can access your DTPro content via a web interface on the iPhone. When I spoke with the Devon Technologies CEO, he explained that a native iPhone app is on the roadmap.

DEVONthink Pro Office iPhone web app – Main interface

In order to use the DTPro iPhone web app, you first must set up the web server within DTPro. Next, you use the web app to search and view items (no edit).

Evernote iPhone app

With the native Evernote iPhone app, you can capture photos and voice notes, create text notes and view your captured data (including documents). The interface is pretty seamless and other than network lag, performs pretty well.

Unique Features

What makes Evernote Premium unique is its ubiquitous access. You can get to your data via a variety of apps (desktop, iPhone, web). What makes DTPro unique is its artificial intelligence and rich auto-categorization of your information.

Support

Both products have excellent support, including online video tutorials, help systems, blogs, and more. Devon-technologies also has a very active end-user support forum.

Conclusion

Ultimately, either app will serve you well. However, there are some issues with each.

With Evernote, you have to ask these questions:

1. Do you want your data on your computer or someone else’s?
2. Do you mind tagging all of your files and defining your own criteria for organization?
3. Do you mind that some captured data is not true WYSIWYG (some files do not maintain formatting)?
4. Are you prepared to have limitations on viewing large files (PDFs greater than 35 pages) in any of the apps?
5. Do you mind having to export each file one-by-one, as Evernote does not have a standard export mechanism for your files?

With DTPro, you have to ask these questions:

1. Do you want to spend $149 (retail) or $45/year (Evernote Premium account)?
2. Do you mind playing with beta software? 2.0 of DTPro is in beta and won’t ship until the first half of this year.
3. Do you want to spend the time learning DTPro’s UI? It isn’t challenging, although there is much more to learn than Evernote.
4. Do you mind running a local web server to view your data via remote access?

What other choices do you have?

• Circus Ponies – Notebook 3.0 ($49.95)
• Reinvented Software – Together 2.2 ($39)
• Bare Bones Software Yojimbo 1.5 ($39)

Each of these apps are excellent and are moderately priced. None of the three apps mentioned above have direct OCR capabilities or an iPhone app. Further, only Yojimbo has the ability to view its data remotely or via the iPhone by utilizing another application, Webjimbo ($30) from Flying Mac software.

Conclusion

I decided to part ways with Evernote and move forward with DEVONthink Pro Office, because I wanted more control of my data and the artificial intelligence features were very attractive to me.

What about you? Which tool (if any) do you use for information management? Or, do you use file system and avoid apps like these altogether?

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DEVONtechnologies this week released the second public betas of their new DEVONthink and DEVONnote information manager applications, and I downloaded Professional Office Version 2 to take a looksee. Already one a powerful productivity tool for OS X, this major update adds even more convenience, functionality and versatility to DEVONthink Pro Office.

To recap a bit, DEVONtechnologies insists that DEVONthink is not a “database,” and of course it’s much more than a database program, although it serves as one quite well, but the real genius of DEVONthink is that it does so many other useful things extremely well. The 1.x versions of DEVONthink Professional Office added email archiving, OCR, scanning, and Web sharing to the base DEVONthink feature set, which includes ability to open both Microsoft Word documents and PDF documents with formatting intact as editable text.

New features in DEVONthink Pro Office 2.0 include splitting and merging PDFs and the ability to copy and paste PDF pages from one document to another. RSS feeds are sped up using multi-threading and have a new, customizable RSS preferences panel. Also, any document can be emailed directly from within DEVONthink Pro Office. We’ll take a detailed look at some of the new features below.

Supports MS Office, PDF And Now iWork Files

DEVONthink 2.0, in addition to Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) and PDF, also can now import and display OpenOffice and iWork (Pages, Numbers, Keynote) files, skim PDF packages and any other file formats that support or are supported by Mac OS X 10.5 QuickLook.

Before the Version 2 beta could access my DEVONthink databases, they had to be converted to the new DEVONthink 2 format, a process that went quickly and happily leaves the existing Version 1.x files undisturbed. The downside, I presume, being that any revisions you make with the Version 2 beta database will not be backward compatible with the older final version of the application.

New User Interface Appearance

I really like DEVONthink’s new user interface appearance, which has been refreshed and feature-enhanced without changing its familiar core functionality.

QuickLook Support

DEVONthink Pro Office taps into Spotlight importers and plugins for indexing and searching files, and also happily now supports QuickLook previews in its web interface. Support for PDF display in browsers other than Safari has been added, with the Sorter (see below) now able to create web archives from OmniWeb and Firefox and name documents more reliably. Email archiving has been sped up and converting databases and exporting files made more reliable, although I hadn’t experienced any problems in that department with Version 1.x.

The “Sorter”

Perhaps my favorite new feature is the ‘Sorter’ panel that lets you add data to your databases even when DEVONthink Pro is not open. A Global inbox replaces the erstwhile import destinations chaos and you can link any DEVONthink database group to be accessible via a pop-out tab in the OS X Finder.

If the database connected to a Sorter box is not open at the moment, the Sorter stores your data until the database becomes available (e.g. when you open it in DEVONthink) and flushes the box content automatically. You can manually dispatch data still stored in the Sorter to DEVONthink by clicking the Sorter’s action menu button (in the lower right or left corner) and choosing ‘Send to DEVONthink.’

New Speedier Database Engine Uses Less Memory

DEVONthink 2.0′s new database engine is speedier and less of a memory hog than the old one, and multiple databases can be open simultaneously. DEVONthink now stores all files in their original file formats (big improvement) so they no longer need to be converted when importing and can be edited using external applications. All documents can be accessed from outside DEVONthink using a standard URL.

A New OCR Engine Based On ABBYY FineReader

Networking will be included in the final release, and is faster, more accurate, and produces much smaller PDFs than the engines used in previous releases.

My only major criticism of DEVONthink is that it has been and continues to be not terribly intuitive to use and requires a fairly steep learning curve, but that is partly due to this application’s remarkably deep feature set. Once you get it figured out, it works really well.

The public beta releases of DEVONthink Pro and Pro Office 2.0, DEVONthink Personal 2.0, and DEVONnote 2.0 require Mac OS X 10.5 or later, and will expire on March 31, 2009. DEVONthink Professional Office sells for $149.95, DEVONthink Professional for $79.95, DEVONthink Personal for $49.95, and DEVONnote for $24.95. You can download the beta versions here.

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I’ve found the need to now keep them organized – and it’s driving me crazy! Every couple of weeks I attempt to reorganize my many iPhone apps, and along the way I’ve hatched a few ideas that I think would greatly improve the organization of the platform (at least for those of us who are somewhat compulsive about such things).

First, here’s an idea of what I’ve got stacked against me – 47 apps and 5 screens of icons. (I’m sure my numbers aren’t outstanding by any means – How many apps are you wrestling with?) I try to keep them grouped with like functionality (games, locations, news, utilities, etc), but each time I add or remove something it generally throws my iPhone feng shui off completely! And don’t even get me started on every time I would update one of my apps. (However, Apple saved me a little bit of sanity with last Friday’s 2.1 update – which in case you hadn’t found yet, seems to install the update to an application, in place of its deprecated self. Woohoo!)

But I’d still love to see a little more flexibility in the way I’m able to situate and thumb through the applications on my iPhone. (Think Apple will allow someone to develop something to manage interface tweaks and sell it in the App Store? Me either.) Before I detail the interface customization items I hope to see on the iPhone, I think it will make things a bit clearer if I use the analogy of a Virtual Desktop. In OS X we have Spaces to divide-up our desktops. On the iPhone there are as many horizontally-scrolling screens as you desire, to place and organize application icons. I’ll be referring to these iPhone screens as desktops, as I feel it makes more sense within the context of my interface wish-list below.

So here’s what I’m looking for in customizability (I say it’s a word, ok?) of the iPhone interface:

• Vertical Scrolling
  Let’s have the ability to scroll our desktops up and down as opposed to left and right. To me, it feels more natural to go up and down anyway, as that’s what I do most often when reading email and similar actions on my iPhone.
• Smooth Scrolling
  This would present an option to scroll smoothly through multiple desktops, or to use the ‘sticky’ methodology that we currently have with the horizontal interface.
• A Combination of Vertical and Smooth Scrolling
  In this scenario, I could have more than 4 icons tall on a desktop (say 4×7), where I could scroll smoothly in a vertical fashion. But then retain the ‘sticky’ left/right scroll to other desktops of application icons, where I could again scroll smoothly up and down.
• Keyword or Tag Apps
  This may be a bit trickier – possibly implemented through the iTunes interface – but I’d like to assign keywords (or tags) to the applications, and then assign those keywords to their own desktops. This way I could know exactly which desktop was my ‘news’ desktop, or my ‘games’ desktop for instance.

All of these ideas are intended to bring more organization to the interface of the iPhone. I believe that as more and more applications become available, the more cumbersome and limited the current interface will start to feel. I think the suggestions I’ve made here today would go a long way towards scaling to the fast-approaching needs of iPhone users. That being said, I’m no design or Human Factors guru, so maybe I’m way off base here. So this is where I open the floor to the rest of you – what would you like to see in the way of organization options for your vast (or not so vast) collection of iPhone-installed applications?

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I thought Daylite 3.7 by Marketcircle was just another PIM, kind of like Microsoft’s Outlook or Entourage. Daylite is not just another PIM; it is a business tool that organizes your data better than any other application I have ever used.

Currently, I am part of FiniteComedy.com, a small video production company that makes video for the web. Creating and producing video content creates tons of projects that require plenty of attention.

My Old System

I had been using a kludge of applications to keep myself organized. I regularly used a combination of Google Calendar + iCal integration and GMail and its Contacts feature. I’ve experimented with 37signals and its Highrise web application — Highrise is an online address book, contact manager, task list web application; I don’t believe it has a calendar. It is a fine web application, but for some reason it never stuck with me.

I have also had a lot of past experience using Microsoft Outlook, but hardly used Entourage.

Enter Daylite: Installation

Installation is done via an installer (no a drag and drop install here). It takes up 141MB of space. While installing, Daylite asks if you want to create your own database or take a look at other databases to get a feel for Daylite in action. I created my own database. At that point, I did not know exactly what I was doing, but I figured I could learn as I go. A “database” in this context is just a term for your Daylite set up. Daylite also asks for personal information and you can import your address book and iCal information. You can also import all or some of your iCal calendars. Those of you who have jumped on board with Google CalDAV integration will be annoyed to know you cannot import these calendars.

The last step is choosing from a template. There are a number of specialized templates to choose from including Film & Video, Law, Print & Design and more. There are also blank and General templates. Each template contains some presets for categories, keywords and settings. I tried General to get a better overall feel for the program.

Life with Daylite: First Thoughts

I started using Daylite like I would any program. I just jumped right in. First I wanted to create a new contact. The default toolbar has often used (or the most useful) functions. When I hit the “New Contact” button, a window pops up with plenty of options for any contact.

After a couple minutes of use, I saw that Daylite provides you with a wealth of options in presenting you your data. To some this may be daunting. In my opinon, this is the kind control that is needed to keep track of multiple projects and data. Connecting projects to contacts is a snap. Just add some one to the “Linked” section. That way, when you look at a project, you can find whoever is connected to that project. Projects can also be linked to to-do lists.

Daylite also puts in an icon in the menu bar with quick access to create new contacts, appointments, notes and more while you are not in the actual program. Daylite is very stable and crashed only once during the testing period.

Daylite has an odd way of searching. The search field looks like a spotlight search, but you must hit enter to get results. Not a big gripe, but I thought it was odd (or at least inconsistent with the Mac interface nowadays) that the results did not populate as you type.

It seems that every bit of information in Daylite can be displayed in at least three different ways depending on how much information you want up on the screen at one time. Personally, I like seeing as much information as I can on someone or some event to get a bigger picture on what I’m doing.

Life with Daylite: Project Management

I have never been completely satisfied with the project management solutions I have tried. The best thing I had found to manage projects and link them to contacts is just using a dry erase marker and my whiteboards. It is an inelegant solution that does not provide any of the comforts of a computer-based solution, but it kind of works except for space issues.

Daylite has excellent project management capabilities. I am currently trying to set up a live taping of “ChannelFlip Tech” and some other shows at the Digital Life Show held at the Jacob Javits Center in New York City this September. There are several elements to this project. There is my contact at Digital Life, my co-host and his schedule, potential sponsors, and material for the show.

Setting up the project is simple. Create a new project and input some data like a name for the project and due date. It is the “Linked” field that I found the most helpful. You can link a project to a contact, an organization or a group. The Digital Life project can be linked to my contact at Digital Life, my co-host, sponsors and any one else who has a contact file.

Daylite’s project window shows you your different projects and you can choose to see the data in different ways. You can get a feel for your projects at a glance. I am not completely familiar with every feature yet, but I know there are many other customizations that could make Daylite more useful for my particular needs.

Daylite: The Rest of the Features

There are some very good components to Daylite. There is a calendar that works as you would expect any calendar program to work. It does allow smart calendars which is nice. Events can be categorized, although they can be assigned to only one category at a time.

There is an Appointments feature that takes your calendar data and lays it out like the Contacts section. It is pretty much an alternative view to just looking at the standard calendar.

Contacts are presented in a similar way to projects. You can see your contact list, selecting a contact will show you what is linked to that contact. I am using the “General” template so there is plenty of data fields already. Contacts also support smart contact lists. I am a big fan of smart lists that actively change as information changes. It saves a lot of time over the long run. The “Organizations” feature is similar to the contacts, just organized by organization instead of individuals.

“Opportunities.” You can add a New Opportunity to the Opportunities section of the application. I have never seen this kind of function before. This feature is obviously geared towards a business. Since I am pursuing advertisers and sponsors, this is a great section. Once an opportunity is acted upon, you can create a project. “Opportunities” is like a pre-Project zone.

There is also a “Notes” feature. I have never been a big fan of notes outside of putting notes in appointment data or in a contact file. You can link notes to contacts or projects. This seems to be the best way in Daylite to add notes to Projects. This allows for greater organization of notes as the note appears linked to the project, and the project appears linked to the note.

Conclusion

Daylite is one of the best solutions I have used to manage information. However, it is not something everyone needs. If you want to use Daylite as an iCal replacement, then it is overkill. This is software built for a small business that wants to manage its contacts, calendars and projects well. Daylite is priced at $149 US for 1 user, $745 US for 5 users and $1490 for 10 users.

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1. Does the application have a good icon? I mean some of the developers are great programmers, but they desperately need a graphic artist to design them some justice. I don’t hide my dock, so if I have to look at it I want it to be pretty.
2. Do I get convenient options or controls from the Dock’s contextual menu? Take for example, Mail lives in my dock for many useful reasons. One of these is the options I get from right-clicking on Mail’s Dock icon.

   With this I can immediately check my mail as well as create a new message or note. Did you also know that if you drag an item on the Mail icon it will attach the item to a new message? I do this frequently all day and its become part of my workflow.

3. Is the application used daily? I love being able to come to work in the morning and have immediate access to the things I need to do in my Dock. I used to fill it up with Applications, but with this little hack you can enable the Recent Applications menu in the Dock. I’ve found I really only use about 10 applications a day anyway.
4. Files and folders have to have many of these criteria as well. Most of the folders I put in my dock are current project folders, network volumes (they automatically connect if you put them in the Dock), and Downloads.

There you have it, very basic criteria for getting into the Dock. Its prime real estate for developers and more importantly Mac users.

What criteria do you have for your Dock?

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Unfortunately using a myriad of folders to organize all of these books is just getting out of control.

So, I was curious if anyone has any suggestions for a way to manage all of these PDFs/books? Any organizational method you’ve found that you like? Or many an application that does the trick?

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If you’re a scientist – and even if you’re not, so don’t stop reading, O Non-Scientists – there are a lot of .pdf files to deal with, everything from manuals for the equipment to grant forms and, of course, the ubiquitous scholarly papers. It gets so bad that on particularly busy days, my office looks rather as if a copier exploded in it.

Which is where Papers comes in. Papers, winner of the 2007 Apple Design Award for Best Mac OS X Scientific Computing Solution and product of the inimitable Alexander Griekspoor and Tom Groothuis, is a immensely elegant solution to those paper explosions. Papers can find, sort, organize, import, download, export, and email any paper you throw at it. Here’s how it works: first, import the papers you already own, then, using those papers and Papers easy tools, acquire all the other papers you need. Like the similar tool Yep, you can view the first page in a lower pane, but Papers has a more database-like interface, capable of sorting your papers by author, title, date, journal, your rating, and more. A pane on the right shows the title, journal, and paper abstract for easy flipping. A full-screen mode lets you read papers without distraction, and with easy mouse and keyboard control. There is a pane in the normal window mode that lets you take notes on the paper, and a small HUD that appears in the full-screen mode to do the same.

Even better, you can drag a paper to another application – say, Pages, where you’re writing your thesis – and have it appear as an Endnote citation. (Other options are a BibTex key, the title of the paper, or a URL-reference.)

Of course, this is all metadata based, so what if your paper didn’t have metadata added? That too is simple. Seven included search engines, including PubMed and Google Scholar, and more installable ones let you search for and match your paper with the online metadata. Just pull up a search tab, find your paper, and click Match. All those pesky metadata fields, including abstract, are filled. Those same integrated search engines will let you find and download papers related to those in your database in a snap, no browser needed – and even support some academic proxies!

This is, quite simply, one of the best and most time-saving pieces of software I’ve come across in years. If you’re trying to manage a library of .pdf’s on your Mac, you owe it to yourself to try this out. (Thirty-day full-feature trial available at link above; single-user license $42, with a 40% discount for students.) Also, if you’re interested in icons and icon design, check out the designer’s webpage for that library icon here – the use of layers and detail in the icon is fascinating, as is the way those construction layers appear in the setup for the application itself.

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Goals have tasks associated with them, though I found that I never needed this amount of granularity for a goal. Perhaps it is just my style of work but I found myself writing tasks to complete as my goals, and even if they required multiple action items I didn’t need need to store them.

I’ll cut right to the chase, this isn’t a must have application. It does its job well and there isn’t a lot to the application, which in some ways is a strong point. It’s the first version, so I am taking that into consideration for the review.

The LifeShaker interface doesn’t have the Mac experience at all. The uniqueness of the interface is actually a bit of a throw back right away because it feels more like a Java application than a Cocoa/Mac application. Using a full 1/3 column just for categories seems a bit too much when this space would’ve been better suited for the long list of goals a user would enter. Which is the next point, that the goals list was a bit unintuitive for assigning a category to a goal. There is no interface function for it, and just out of pure curiosity I right-clicked on the category column to set it.

Doing this however, exposed a bug that caused the interface to look like this:

This made me have to completely close the application in order to get it to look correct once again.

I gave the application a good solid two week run, and found it had a few issues. On occasion it would freeze when the Macbook Pro was waking up from sleep. I questioned that it might be a problem with Mac OS X, but this occurred on 10.4 and 10.5.

LifeShaker has some polish and work to do. Without integration into iCal or Mail, the idea of manually entering my tasks and goal information into yet another GTD application is no fun at all. It is another goal on top of a pile of many uncompleted goals. Coupled with the interface bugs and the departure from the Mac interface experience, I have to say it is easy to pass on this application for what is now included with 10.5′s Mail and iCal applications. LifeShaker is $29 and has a free 14 day trial.

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