When you’re working on a document or an email message, or when you’re viewing a web page, it often would be useful to have immediate access to a list of related information. If that list were to be updated in real-time, while you jump from app to app and document to document, you would always have associated or related information at your fingertips, literally. That is essentially what DEVONsphere Express takes care of.
DEVONsphere Express was developed by DEVONtechnologies, a company that has been developing information management applications for a long time. DEVONtechnologies have even developed their own Artificial Intelligence (AI) engine to make searching and managing information more powerful.
DEVONsphere installs as a menu app. Once installed, you can set it to automatically update its suggestions, which is in my opinion, the way you should be using DEVONsphere at least in the beginning — just to see how quickly and accurately it will suggest related information.
Options for DEVONsphere include automatically showing and hiding, automatically suggesting, and automatically indexing. When you install the app, it will only index the local volume; any external volumes you’ll need to add by hand. From then on, all added volumes are indexed.
DEVONsphere interface
Previews of the related data — which can be email messages, web pages, document pages, images, etc. — can be created directly or via Thumbshots.com. The latter is somewhat faster but results in worse quality thumbnails.
DEVONsphere’s Preferences allow you to choose from 17 categories, including archives, property lists and code. Finally, in the interface itself you can set suggestions to appear in real-time, or only when you click on the radar icon. There’s also a switch that lets you use DEVONsphere as a sort of Spotlight on steroids. Personally, I think Spotlight is powerful enough; it’s the automatic “See Also” functionality that I found interesting and useful.
Context menu
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