Things are a bit different on the Mac side of the equation. I don’t know where the root cause is, but this is a very common occurrence for me and it only seems to happen when browsing DEVONthink To Go files through the Files app. But it’s logical and follows the traditional file and folder design.ĭEVONthink often fails to integrate well with the Files app on iOS. I love that Files lets me browse content from some apps, but it’s up to each developer to make this happen. I find that general browsing is easy in both the iOS Files app and DEVONthink To Go. Maybe this will be solved in a future iOS update, but right now DEVONthink To Go searches file content of most formats and the Files app searches none. This makes it completely useless for almost everything I do with files. Tap and hold to access a contextual menu and then tap the “Tags” item on the pop-over.Įven worse than all of these minor meta data complaints is the fact that the Files App does not search file content. I’m betting a lot of readers don’t even know how you access the tags on a file in the iOS Files app. It feels like an afterthought in iCloud Drive and the Files app on iOS. Meta data is a powerful tool in the DEVONthink design. This is a very powerful way to create a dynamic organization of information that iCloud Drive fails at. That makes them useless for finding content.ĭEVONthink To Go, on the other hand, actually indexes tags for search. In the screen shot below, the iCloud Drive tags with check marks exist on the file, but they do not appear in the list of tags to browse in iCloud Drive. That’s because the iCloud Drive tag list is dark magic that has no methodology that a user can see. While I can have tags on files, I would have no way of knowing that without looking at the file. More importantly, I can’t understand at all how iCloud Drive builds up its tag list. Searching for a tag in iCloud Drive is useless. Importantly, tags can be searched as part of a global search box or filtered discretely through browsing a list of the tags in a database. The tags are isolated between databases, if that’s important to you. Each file in DEVONthink can be tagged manually (with auto-complete) or inherit a tag from a folder name. DEVONthink is the clear winner even before you finish the first paragraph because it supports nested tags, flags, document notes, and read status.Įven just looking at iOS, DEVONthink tags are far more useful and easy to understand than iCloud tags. This section is a little unfair, mostly because Apple’s meta data stinks. But., I’ll tell you now, the answer is almost always to delete the sync location and start over. There’s also direct support from DEVONtech to help resolve the issue. I rarely experience errors with DEVONthink sync with Dropbox, but when I do there’s some minor amount of notification. This requires a long tap-dance to keep the screen awake long enough to finish downloading all the data. The major issue is that when the device goes to sleep, so does the syncing. With a lot of data, it can feel nearly impossible. With a lot of databases, this is a real pain point. DEVONthink, on the other hand, generally requires an app delete and reinstall when setting up a new device from a backup. iCloud just pulls everything down with no fuss. Where iCloud has an edge is in new device setup. With iCloud all of that is mostly hidden. I can also manually once a complete resync or recreate a sync-point. I can see what databases are currently syncing and I get a progress meter. It’s not a stark difference but it’s there.ĭEVONthink provides basic feedback on sync status but at a high level. It also seems to do all of this faster than DEVONthink using Dropbox. In my experience, iCloud starts syncing as soon as the app is open and shows a representation of the file until it finishes downloading the full object. While I trust Apple and iCloud, given their history, I like the DEVONthink model better.Īs for performance, I think iCloud is faster but less predictable. It has its own encrypted sync store which obfuscates everything from the middlemen. 1 The secret sauce with DEVONthink is that it’s not just using a Dropbox folder to hold the file objects. The Files app uses iCloud while DEVONthink To Go hangs off of Dropbox, Box, or WebDAV. The main reason to use the Files app or DEVONthink To Go is to sync data between devices. For some the differences may not warrant the extra expense so I’ll attempt to break down the good and the bad for each document syncing option. After a few weeks I can say that it’s a good start but has a large gap when compared with the more feature complete DEVONthink To Go. As a longtime fan of DEVONthink on both the Mac and iOS I was skeptical of Apple’s new Files app for iOS.
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