Plain text is amazing. It’s an incredibly flexible format, offering many benefits, with next to no downside. On the other hand, plain text is… well, ‘plain’. No font changes. No bold or italic. No images. It’s like a world with no picture books. (more)

Applications like Apple Pages, the venerable Microsoft Word, and similar word processing applications may be full of features, but they are also locking your data up in formats that can only be read by those apps. A great alternative is plain text. (more)

When it comes to network safety, many corporations and individuals turn to firewalls and network monitoring applications to control what’s happening. This can keep intrusions at bay, or at least make the life of a potential intruder a bit more difficult. However, these methods can also cause DEVONthink’s synchronization engine to seemingly fail, especially with Bonjour connections. (more)

A question pertaining to the Properties pane recently came up on our forums. This can be found in DEVONthink with the menu command Tools > Show Properties. It seems to imply it’s a place where you can add things like comments, keywords, authors, etc. to any file. However, this is not true. The Properties pane allows you to view and edit the metadata supported by the file, but does not let you add data to the file which is not supported by the file’s structure. (more)

Many people use the DEVONthink browser extensions to clip information from web pages into their DEVONthink databases. We have extensions (or add-ons, different name but the same thing) for Safari, Google Chrome, and Firefox. (more)

ePub and Mobi (the Kindle format) are solid file formats for electronic books. But they are harder to handle than, e.g., PDF or plain text as they are designed for reading on an ebook reader. They are not really suited for using them inside other applications or for long-term archiving. (more)

iOS 10 comes with a great but somewhat hidden feature: Print to PDF. It allows you to save any document that you can print as a PDF and send it by email or clip it to DEVONthink To Go.

In the Share sheet from any app choose Print. The print preview dialog appears. Now instead of printing “pinch” on the print preview like just as if you’d want to enlarge it. It opens — now as a PDF — in a separate dialog. Choose Share again and send it anywhere you like. (more)

For those of you who are using the Opera browser for your web searching, it is possible to add our Clip to DEVONthink extension to it. We don’t have an Opera-specific version but with an Opera add-on, you can use the Chrome extension. (more)

We had a MacJournal user contact us, wanting to switch to DEVONthink. While we have no control over how easy or hard this may be, we took a look at what options there are. Nicely, the MacJournal folks have simple but useful export options (we always applaud when developers resist the urge to lock in someone’s data). (more)

Today it’s normal for most people to stare at computer screens all day long, something that was unbelievable just 25 years ago. Whether we’re shopping online, chatting and tweeting, or working in our DEVONthink databases, we spend a lot of time in the light of our screens. If you are experiencing headaches, blurred vision, watery eyes, or have trouble getting to sleep, here are a few simple tips for you. (more)