Even when you do just want to do some simple keyword searches through your database, DT blows Spotlight away. With DT, you can do full boolean searches, fuzzy searches, wild cards, case sensitive/insensitive, etc. Then on the search results, it can show you words that are similar to the one you searched on, by either spelling or context.

It’s a huge program, and takes some time to really get up to speed with, but now that I’m using it, I can’t go back.

It’s much the same as once you go Mac, you can’t go back to Windows. Now that I use DT, I can’t go back to organizing my papers and research any other way :)

The thing it’s so good at is finding documents that are similar in context and content to the one you’re looking at. All Spotlight can do is find files in your machine that contain some similar word, and you have to tell it what word to search on. Instead of worrying about what word is best to search for, and just getting a huge list of documents that contain that word, DT will find all documents that are *similar* to the document you’re reading, and rank them accordingly.

Tight integration with Safari is another thing DT does well. Looking at some page that you want to hold on to? Use the Services or AppleScripts to send either the link, the HTML or a full web archive to DT. DT will process the contents of the last two, and add those contents to its knowledge about topics.

It’s hard to say much more in a blog comment (although there’s a lot more I could say). One good article you might want to check out is http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/movabletype/archives/000230.html, and then watch some of the videos that the DevonThink guys provide. They can be very eye opening.

Quick list of 5 things (for the Pro Office version):

1) “See Also”
2) Auto classify
3) Safari integration
4) Fantastic OCR engine
5) Email indexing