bmhardy wrote:I have seen suggestions for using DevonThink or EverNote, but I don't understand why. What is the motivation for using one of these apps vs. just using the file system and the Finder?
I realise this is way too late for the original poster, but just in case someone else has the same question, here is a sort of answer.
DEVONthink is a heavyweight "storage and retrieval solution" that is really aimed at professional researchers who need to be able to put a lot of disparate files together, categorise them, and -- crucially -- search for and find related material. You can conduct searches that, for example, will look for a specific, single word occurring NEXT to another specific word, NEAR another word, or even within a certain number of words of another one (you can specify the max space between the words -- 10, 32, 4, whatever you like). Search is extremely fast. Using one of the special search terms, I can search a database containing over 4 million words and get a list of hits in less than half a second. The hits are ranked according to relevance, and you are given a kind of "See Also" list that shows related material. The program can also auto-group files with similar content into folders of related material if you don't want to do it by hand. However, it can only do that effectively if you have already done some work on sorting things by hand, so that it can tell what the common elements are. (This is rather a crude summary of a complex program.)
It is not something that most people need, but if, like me, you have notes and research material collected over 25 years, on psychology, history, and miscellaneous, it can be a great help in bringing order to the chaos.