Morning Pages

Regular visitors will know that I have long been a devotee of DEVONthink as a place to store and search through all my notes and research. I don't think I will ever completely ditch DEVONthink, because it has years worth of stuff in it now and is an invaluable resource. Also, nothing comes close to the serendipity of DEVONthink's search engine. (Serendipity apps like MyMind and Napkin are better, but narrower in their focus). Even as recently as yesterday evening, I was looking for an article that I though might be useful for the Lovecraft Investigations and DEVONthink threw up five other pieces that I had forgotten about but which broadened the scope of the idea I was noodling with.

So, DEVONthink is great. But... Its mobile apps suck. I and others have defended them in the past but they are just not good. Partly this is due to the sheer amount of info most of us keep in our DEVONthink databases - sync is slow, downloads are unwieldy etc etc.

And so enter Keep It,an app that has been around for a while but which I only really kicked the tyres on over the past few days. Keep It is DEVONthink with all the rough edges smoothed away, it's Evernote for people who don't need to use Windows. It looks great, it syncs fast (although TBF, I have a lot less in there), it acts as a drive so you can drop files into it straight from the Finder, it presents Web Archives and PDFs really well, especially on iOS, and it is an all around joy to use.

I'm employing Keep It as a place to store project-specific research and notes, so that they're available for whatever I'm working on. The big research library remains in DEVONthink, so I still get to make use of that serendipity engine and then drag anything I find there straight into Keep It, which then processes it and updates in seconds.

As a bonus, Keep It's web clipper is superior to Evernote's - it can turn a link into a web archive or a PDF and it does a great job of scrubbing adds and noise from the page when it stores it.

If you're a Mac user looking for an alternative to DEVONthink, Evernote, Walling etc, give Keep It a try.

Have a good one.