below are three separate conversations-
Jon- I am sorry to hear that DT isn't interested, although i can understand a little bit there point of view. To make DT especially friendly with BE means Sente and Endnote users would come knocking soon. They are able to nicely show BiBTeX formatted stuff- which leads me to my next point.....
There is still a way forward in this that would benefit your users and that requires nothing of the DT people. BE now makes scheduled backups of our databases. Could you create a feature that made another secondary scheduled backup of the entire database in a format of our choosing? If BE were able to export the database in BiBTeX once a week (or whenever the user chooses) then these compatability issues would be resolved as best they can. That way, users could customize their bibtex format to however they wanted it output (I would just want author, title, date, notes, keywords, and abstract) and DT could import the exported .bib file. DT already has the ability to keep itself up to date. This feature would also make BE potentially more usable for other database users. I am not sure about Filemaker, but I think Yojimbo as well as SOHO notes can import either .bib or xml files. So BE's secondary backup could be in .bib (for DT users) or .xml or whatever. Then it is up to the database programs to sync themselves with the resulting exported file. It is a 'meet in the middle' type of approach.
Unless someone can think of another way to make this happen, this seems to be the way forward. Can it be done though? I would sure love it if it could happen (and you'd probably be the first bib.software to have this feature too!)
gke- DT searches are much more sophisticated than spotlight. Here is an excerpt from the site:
Classify: Files documents into the most appropriate group, automatically
See also: Shows similar documents
See selected text: Finds documents similar to a selected test passage
Topics: The most important words of a text, automatically extracted
Fuzzy search: Finds similarly spelled words
Powerful search function: Finds related words, helps broaden or narrow the search
Intelligent summarize: Creates digests of texts based on the contents of the database
Concordance
Group documents automatically by content
With this kind of sophisticated searching you can see why I want to be able to search my BE database, attachments and my DT database all at once. The DT search will often find links between relevant documents that a spotlight search cannot.
Gerben: I think DEVONthink is what you are looking for. I don't have experience with FileMaker so i can't speak to that, but the $500 price tag is enough to keep me loyal to DT. From what you are saying you want, I definitely think DT will work for you. As I said, you can have multiple notes collected in one file on a book that is intelligently searched in DT. You can also replicate any of those notes to different parts of your database. So let say your book is called "The end of WW1". You make a folder with that name and have 15 notes in the file, all named according to the topic. Now lets say you specifically have a folder elsewhere in you database on Germany in WW1. One of you notes on your book "The end of WW1" is specifically on Germany. With a click of the mouse you can "replicate" to file to the other folder so you have it in both spots.
The other beautiful thing about DT is that you can choose to have it make wikilinks for you throughout the database. So let's say you have a file in your "The end of WW1" folder titled 'Casualties of War'. Now anywhere in your entire database where the phrase 'Casualties of War' pops up, the text will be wiki-linked to that file. DT is not only a paperless office, it is a paperless office on steroids.
~I swore to myself that if I ever got to walk around the room as manager people would laugh as they saw me coming and applaud as I walked away~
has recently been released and the next update (3.2) promises to include ability to import from bookends databases. Exactly what I need!! Needless to say, I'm waiting anxiously.