I’ve had my new MacBook for about a month and a half now and have been evaluating a lot of different tools to help me organize my research and writing efforts. The good news is that there’s a lot of great software out there. The bad news, such as it is, is that this abundance of great software can make it difficult to choose just the right set of tools and get back to work. However, I wanted to note a couple of tools that have made the cut for me.

The first piece of software that I want to mention is DEVONthink Professional, from DEVONtechnologies. The license for this one isn’t cheap, and I agonized over the decision of whether or not to buy it. It helps that they offer a fully-functional trial version that works for 150 hours, because you’re going to need it to really evaluate this software. DT Pro has a pretty steep learning curve, and it’s poorly documented. Well, let me qualify that: The documentation describes how to use the application from a functional standpoint, but it doesn’t address the more important question of how to effectively use DT Pro to solve your information management problems.

I haven’t been using DT Pro long enough to be able to give a really comprehensive review, so I’ll just talk about one of my favorite features. If I’m reading something interesting on a web page, or in someone’s web log, I can highlight the text of interest and use the “Take Rich Note” service (installed with DT Pro) to clip that text to my DT Pro database. Like everything else in the database, that clip is instantly indexed and searchable. DT Pro can tell me if there are similar items in the database, and can offer intelligent suggestions about how best to classify the new clipping. While I was evaluating DT Pro, I found a number of other very nice applications for “clipping” stuff from web pages and archiving them in a database, but none of them offered the kind of advanced classification technology found in DT Pro.

If you decide to look into DT Pro, I strongly recommend that you spend some time hanging out in the DEVONtechnologies User Forum. Bill DeVille (a DEVONtechnologies employee) and several other veteran users of DT Pro can provide you with a lot of insight into how DT Pro actually works. You can also check out the del.icio.us bookmarks for the DEVONthink tag to find some good reviews and usage tips.

The other software that I want to mention briefly is Journler, which I’ve just discovered. I was actually looking into my options for a blogging client for Mac OS X when I came across Journler, but it appears to be much more than your basic blogging client. I’ve only just started playing with it — in fact, I’m using it to write this post — but it looks like a pretty amazing piece of “donationware” (free software, with a suggested donation). Journler is modestly described as a “daily notebook and entry based information manager.” It appears to be pretty tightly integrated with iLife and other standard Mac applications like AddressBook and Mail. I’ll try to write more after I’ve had a chance to use it for awhile, but as long as it’s free, I’d recommend your taking a look too!