Devonian Times Masthead

The DEVONtechnologies Blog

Understanding DEVONthink's Interface

February 28, 2023 — Jim Neumann
Screenshot of DEVONthink's support assistant, showing a tutorial.

DEVONthink offers a wide range of features, but is therefore certainly not one of the applications with the most minimalistic interfaces. While we try to avoid jargon, sometimes the terms being used in our forum, handbook, or elsewhere, may not be familiar to you and you may get lost in a conversation. In order to make sure we’re all speaking the same language, we have added a helpful new tutorial.

In DEVONthink’s Help > Tutorials, you’ll find the tutorial Understand the UI. Since windows are the centers of the most activity, we focused on clarifying them. Providing a simple dissection of DEVONthink’s windows and their parts, this aims to clarify the names and terminology you read in all our support channels, including other tutorials. Each slide covers a different section of a window. This should be a quick reference if you want to know what the item list is, for example.

Also, in the built-in Help and our handbook, we have documented these items in more depth. You’ll note, each tutorial slide points to the relevant section of the Help. There you’ll find for example:

  • The chapter Windows, describing the various windows and their components including a deeper discussion of each sidebar.
  • The chapter Inspectors.
  • The chapter Documents, where some other window elements are described.

Now when someone mentions the Import sidebar or tells you to have a look at the Concordance inspector, you’ll understand and know exactly where to look.