I use Together as my favourite set of smart buckets, a catch-it-as-it-unfolds kind of application, where research, stuff to refer to later, important information from serials to photo IDs and scanned passports. A general set of information which I only break down into large chunks Home, Work, Build, Technology, Design, and a few big current projects. If I had to ask myself ‘now where did I shove that?” I probably put it in Together. I like it’s visual qualities the best of all the info managers, the tagging and layout, ease of use…the shelf, the landscape view, all great.

I use VoodooPad for two things, I use it for generating notes and output for my students, the web output is good and I use it on my college site. It’s one of the few info managers designed to produce output of some form, for communicating. I also use it as a Daybook, a scratchpad, jotter kind of thing, I do a fresh document each month and it functions as a record of phone conversations and other random bits. I like being able to mix stuff I grabbed and stuff I’ve written in the one page. I have a Quicksilver trigger that will append some inputted text to an inbox page for that day. It’s quick and I can look back and see what phone conversations had what actions planned on what day.

I use DTPO for specific projects, I suck in a project’s Finder folders and documents, including media,images, etc. I also include project specific email and contacts. I only do it when a project is pretty mature so I only have a few databases, about six or so. I’m more likely to look there when I’m assessing my project material than in the Finder for example. I like being able to have my stills from a film in one folder on it and different sets of them created by reference only to the original, so I can keep a record of what stills went to which person. It’s kind of like a meta-FInder, a slow thing to appreciate but great when you do. So DTPO is for particular things in my usage and more detailed and slow in a way. I use Together in a more general way, it’s certainly more responsive and present.

I know this because people often ask for features from those other apps (and so often when this or that feature will be implemented), but often don’t really explain why. I’m trying to be original and come up with ideas that address “needs” and yet sometimes it feels like I’m receiving a checklist of “wants”.

The whole arena seems very volatile. Maybe it’ll settle down.

Anyway, thanks for your thoughtful comments, as always.

Actually, our attention spans might be very low. I speak from my own experience of jumping from one app to another, then another, never quite learning about the subtle features that set each one apart.

I most recently went through this cycle with a series of “media library” applications: Dazzled by Delicious, went on to Booxter, the “Pedia” series (BookPedia…), then Librarian. Having tried them all over time, I decided that the Pedia series best suited my needs and I’m now in a longer attention span as I use them exclusively.

It’s unfortunate that a group of similar apps cause some of us to be very fickle in the short run but, at least in my case, the cream eventually rises to the top.

As an aside, I’d like to note that though there are legions of Quicksilver users, I didn’t find it to be worth my while, so I moved on to the next one.