Technofile: We're all familiar with gadgets which can handle our music, video, text and even organise our day. What about a gadget that can help organise your thoughts?

Anyone who has ever worked for some time on a computer knows that pretty soon you end up with hundreds of documents. Little notes filed here and there. Great huge folders crammed full of Word documents, with lists of everything from the shopping to the company report to the eternal "to do" list.

For a long time, I ran my life using "stickies" - the PC equivalent of plastering little Post-It notes all over your PC until you can barely see the screen. The only advantage was that I could quit the stickies application and then actually see my screen.

But it took me a long time to find a little bit of software that would actually help me to think and organise life, instead of creating thousands of little scraps of virtual paper.

DevonThink (sadly, only available on the Mac) is a sterling information management application which helps you store and organise text files, PDFs, web pages, movies and music, among others.

The idea behind it is that by dumping all your little notes into it, it will do the organising for you and also allow you to search intelligently across the whole archive.

It will even create links between related information.

Now, you might think that such a tool would only be of interest to writers, academics, students and journalists. But "mindhandling" tools like DevonThink are also useful to hobbyists with collections, family history buffs, music lovers and even photographers, since DevonThink will handle images too.

Part of DevonThink's secret is that it contains a small amount of artificial intelligence. This means it can show you which other documents are related to the ones you are working on.

For anyone writing a report, a speech or even a book, it will also build a concordance of every single word used in any document.

It's also possible to surf the internet and clip important information directly from within the application. So it becomes a sort of "uber" bookmark manager.

DevonThink goes above and beyond the normal duties of application in the field know as "outliners".

These are commonly software programmes designed to organise your thoughts.

And, in fact, they get their name largely from the outliner function which can be found in Microsoft Word. Commonly used Windows programmes in this area include Lotus Notes, Maple, AskSam and NoteMap.

Not only that but there are outliner programmes for handheld computers, notably Pam devices. These include Bonsai, BrainForest, ThoughtMill, ListMaker and InfoSelect.

So however you want to brainstorm on your computer, you might find it easier to use these types of programmes, rather than drowning in a sea of virtual stickies.