Two mature Mac apps that have always baffled me

TidBITS Talk
1

I am wondering – does anyone here use DevonThink or Tinderbox?

They are both mature and complex apps, but I’ve never been able to work out exactly what they are for.

I would be most interested in hearing from anyone who uses either of them.

2

You’ll perhaps find this of interest, the remarkable Beck Tench shows how those two apps can interact.

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3

I’m a long term DT user, it’s my primary data store, the archive of all my various projects.

4

I use DevonThink. Sometimes as a brain dump for my millions of tabs, often as an archive for projects and more recently as an archive for paper (scanning)

5

I’ve been using DevonThink 3 for some time now. Every piece of paper. Every email I want to save. All of those PDFs and ebooks. Recipes from the New York Times. They all get scanned (if necessary) by my ScanSnap S1300i scanner and then imported into DT and hand-tagged so I can find them later. I’m barely using a fraction of its capabilities but what I use suits my needs. Prior to me embracing DT, I had made a good system in Filemaker Pro.

I found the Field Guide by MacSparky to be handy. DEVONthink Field Guide - MacSparky

There is also a Take Control title that is regularly updated as DT is updated. DEVONtechnologies | Take Control of DEVONthink Updated (January 2026)

I should also mention that I haven’t jumped to DT 4 because DT 3 does exactly what I want.

Hope this helps.

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6

I’ve used DevonTHINK for a long, long time, especially when my ScanSnap scanner still worked (I know there has been discussion of this at TBT). Every document that came through my office was scanned, OCRed (sic?), and added to DT. Saved some PDFs from other sources too, as searching in DT is much better than Spotlight.