CLUB INTERVIEWS

A brief chat with friends of Club MacStories.

DEVONthink has been in development for several years now. What kind of changes have you observed in the tech industry that required you to evolve the app in new directions?

When we released DEVONthink 1.0 in 2002 people were usually using just one device: their Mac. They had their data on the machine and worked with it. Many still bought their software on CDs, and we were among the first to sell solely online. Then came the iPhone and shortly after the iPad. At the same time, online services such as Dropbox or Apple’s own iDisk appeared. People began to use multiple devices and thus wanted to have access to their data from wherever they were.

Consequently, we had to evolve DEVONthink from a single-machine workplace application to a whole ecosystem that allows our users of today to not only organize their data but also make it available on all their Macs, iPads, and iPhones. And as our users are very privacy-sensitive – many are lawyers or scientists – our challenge was to implement all this without sacrificing functionality or forcing our users to sign up for a service they don’t want or trust. In 2002 DEVONthink was one application; today it’s four editions on the Mac, an iOS counterpart, and a sync mechanism that ties it all together.