Kitchen or tool shed?

Discussing the “mental kitchen,” the December 2007 issue of Harper’s quotes poet W.H. Auden: “…few labor saving devices have been introduced into the [writer's] mental kitchen — alcohol, coffee, tobacco, Benzedrine, etc., — but these mechanisms are very crude… Artistic composition in the twentieth century A.D. is pretty much the same as it was in the twentieth century B.C.: nearly everything is done by hand.” Too bad Auden died before discovering marijuana or modern software. Not that I know anything about marijuana; I’ll leave that to wiser men like Bill Maher. However, I do know a little bit about the “mental kitchen,” the “cyber tool shed” where I work. So I’m going to take a few blogs to go over the software you might find there.

  DEVONthink is the Big Foot on my desktop. It’s my goto program apart from WORD. I use it to hold all my research, and there’s the rub. It’s grown too big and slow. So while its virtue lies in its capacity, so do its problems. It’s like the story of the omnipotent man who built a house too large to live in. Here’s what’s going on. DEVONthink (DT) is a database, but not any database. It’s a place to store and clip your work, anything on the computer, even Quicktime (I think). What makes DT unique is that it can function as a brainstorming assistant. The people who developed the software for DT like to say that it offers artificial intelligence, which it does depending on your definition of A.I. Having said that, no other database I know does what DT does. For instance, it’s canny. It has the ability to make connections. It can suggest a hierarchy of files where newly imported information might be filed. It can also connect highlighted paragraphs (in the database) to related information stored elsewhere its file system. That’s a leap. That makes it more than a memory aide or sophisticated filing system. The program will make associations that might not otherwise be apparent to the writer. It has the potential for dialogue, at least among its stored parts. Unfortunately, it needs a computer with more than 3 gigs of RAM to make it live up to its potential.