If you’re using DEVONthink Pro (Office) for reading your RSS feeds you need to select each feed that contains unread news to read the articles. To read all unread news in one place create a smart group that searches for items of kind ‘HTML Page’ with the ‘Unread’ flag switched on. It shows a blue blob as its icon indicating that it’s a smart group looking for unread items.

If your favorite app is not directly supported and so DEVONsphere Express does not update its panel live to your current document you can simply drag the document to DEVONsphere Express’ search field. It automatically focuses on the file. To drag a file you’re just editing or viewing drag its icon in the document window’s title bar (if available).

DEVONsphere Express delivers instant See Also results on almost anything you’re working on, from web pages in Safari to email messages or Pages documents. Double-clicking opens found items in the default app for their type. But you can do more. (more)

Last week we explained why one could want to exclude groups or even whole databases from tagging in DEVONthink or DEVONnote. In addition both groups and documents can be individually excluded from classification, see-also, and search. Nice, but why would you do such a thing? (more)

DEVONthink and DEVONnote treat groups and tags, basically, the same but display them different. That means that if Exclude Groups from Tagging is unchecked in a database’s properties, the group(s) in which an item is filed also appear as tag(s) attached to it. When assigning tags to an item other groups are proposed as tags while you’re typing. If you like this behavior you can quickly file a document in multiple groups and later find them either by their tags or in the respective groups representing the tags. (more)

Michael Malzahl has updated his DEVONthink Arbeitsbuch, an introduction and step-by-step guide to DEVONthink in German language. If you have purchased a copy of this ebook from us you’ll receive an update notification and download link soon.

If you’re often “printing” web pages as PDF to your DEVONthink database, you might enjoy the following hack: The little bookmarklet switches a web page shown in your web browser (definitely works with Safari and Firefox) to design mode, making it possible to edit it on the fly before printing. Edit as you like, the changes are, of course, not saved to the originating web server. Don’t worry, reloading the page brings it back in all its beauty. (more)

All our apps are highly scriptable using AppleScript, OS X’s native scripting architecture for Cocoa applications. But if you’re more into Python and Ruby, you can use that, too. MacRuby and this thread in our user forum with example scripts on how to use Ruby to control DEVONthink Pro (Office) give you a hand up.

While tags and groups are technically the same, their different way of presentation can be more flexible, especially in large DEVONthink knowledge collection spreading out in many directions. Using the tags bar (which you show and hide with View > Show/Hide Tags) you quickly add single tags to documents or remove them. Automatic completion makes adding already known tags easy. (more)

German power user  ”Denkenswert” writes in his blog about how to use DEVONthink more productively. In two articles he talks about how to use pre-fab and user-defined templates to work faster with DEVONthink. (more)