DEVONthink and DEVONagent, like many other Mac applications, make heavy use of toolbars. The tools give you immediate access to frequently used functions such as for navigation, switching views, creating and deleting items as well as searching. But there are many other tools available for you that you don’t see on a first glance. (more)

After two weeks without OCR, we have now finished our workarounds that circumvent the PDF bug in the ABBYY engine and just released public beta 3 of all editions of DEVONthink as well as of DEVONnote. (more)

We have finished the main work on the by-pass circumventing the bugs in the ABBYY OCR engine that kept us from releasing it to the public two weeks ago. We have just posted a beta to our beta tester group and are now preparing to release a new public beta as soon as we have received enough hopefully positive reports from our beta testers.

Matthew Bookspan of TheAppleBlog has just published a comparison between DEVONthink Pro Office and Evernote Premium. Matthew did a great job working out the differences between the offerings and comes to this conclusion: … (more)

Just a quick update on our progress on the OCR side. While ABBYY was unable to reproduce the bug that affects the conversion of a multi-page PDF into separate images, we have now written a by-pass that does this before feeding the data into the OCR engine. This has also other advantages, e.g. the ability to run OCR also on very large documents without running into memory problems. We are now writing the new thread handling that we need for this workaround and hope to begin internal testing tonight or tomorrow morning. (more)

Last Friday we had to release DEVONthink Pro Office 2.0 public beta 2 without an embedded OCR engine – which is truly annoying for you and us.

Starting with version 2.0 of DEVONthink Pro Office we are moving from the IRIS engine to the ABBYY FineReader engine which produces way smaller PDFs, is more accurate, and much smarter to embed into our application. Where the IRIS engine was an external program remotely controlled by DEVONthink, the engine provided by ABBYY is a true framework that we can directly embed and control. You will see this soon in a much improved ‘OCR Activity’ panel and no other OCR windows popping up for every page. (more)

Just in time we have released the second public beta of DEVONthink (and DEVONnote). This beta comes with many enhancements, e.g. simple PDF editing abilities (splitting files, merging files, copy/paste for PDF pages), a new RSS preferences panel, and a more responsive web interface that now also displays QuickLook previews if possible. In addition, DEVONthink Pro Office nearly also came with a brand new OCR engine but technical difficulties with embedding the engine properly forced us to delay this feature but we will deliver it as soon as we and ABBYY are able to find the problem. Read more about the update on our news page. (more)

New York Times author and book writer Steven Johnson, who wrote about DEVONthink in a fabulous article in the New York Times in 2005, has just published another great article on Boing Boing mentioning DEVONthink, “How to write a book”: … (more)

So far the DEVONthink and DEVONnote 2.0 public beta launch went pretty well, which is, I think, a good sign :-) But we are currently under heavy load from all the various enquiries, from bug reports to upgrading questions. So if you sent us email and have not yet received a reply — please be patient. We’re answering one question at a time but we will answer all of them.

We have promised that we would release DEVONthink 2.0 as a public beta before Christmas, and that is just what we have done today. All three editions of DEVONthink as well as DEVONnote are immediately available for downloading as 2.0 public beta. We have also updated all product pages as well as the feature comparison for all editions. Read yourself what’s new in DEVONthink 2.0 and DEVONnote 2.0 and have a look at our short news article, too. Finally, don’t forget to actually download the trial. (more)