All of us here at DEVONtechnologies wish you a peaceful Easter weekend, wherever you are on this planet, whatever culture you’re part of, and whatever you believe in!

Yours Eric Böhnisch-Volkmann & the DEVONtechnologies team … (mehr)

After staying a few days more-or-less in bed with a bad cold, I just needed to go out again and add some joy to my morning routine of replying to customer email. Olivier, one of the numerous Italian ice coffee shops here in town now also offers free WIFI with its excellent coffee — so it was time to give it a try. I like it. And it always lightens up my mind to have a good coffee, see the pedestrians passing by, and enjoy the sun.

With Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard Apple broke scan support not only for DEVONthink Pro Office but for all third-party applications using the Image Capture framework. We have been working with Apple on the issue but still to no avail. We have now signed an agreement with the Berlin based scan software maker ExactCode and behind the scenes we’re both working hard to get the scan support in DEVONthink Pro Office back on-line again. Stay tuned!

We have just posted updated for all editions of DEVONthink as well as for DEVONnote. The new releases include a number of bug fixes, bring compatibility to the latest version of the Fujitsu ScanSnap Manager, and come with all the scripts on board that I have already published here a while ago. Read more on our news page.

Global warming and climate change affect all of us. If you don’t just want to wait for it to happen, you can at least show that you care:

Created to take a stand against the greatest threat our planet has ever faced, Earth Hour uses the simple action of turning off the lights for one hour to deliver a powerful message about the need for action on global warming. This simple act has captured the hearts and minds of people all over the world. As a result, at 8pm on the 29 March, 2008 millions of people in some of the world’s major capital cities, including Copenhagen, Toronto, Chicago, Melbourne, Brisbane, Tel Aviv and Manila will unite and switch off for Earth Hour. (mehr)

After two days of hard HTML and CSS work, our new forum software is now online.The new version 3.0 of phpBB does not only add many useful features for both users and administrators but is hopefully also a bit more spam resistant than the earlier versions. Please note that we have also moved the forum’s address so if you had bookmarked the board’s direct address or suscribed to its RSS feed you should update your links now.

Journalists and bloggers: Don’t miss our updated Press Center. I have added a self-service option for our PR distribution list so that you can subscribe or unsubscribe to our press releases yourself now. A new form makes it easier for you to request not-for-resale licenses for your publication. And, of course, you will find all our recent and older press releases here as well as materials such as box shots, screenshot packages, and our company logo in print-ready resolution.

For me as a studied librarian yesterdays announcement made by the Brockhaus publishers was the news of the day: The Brockhaus, Germany’s best-known encyclopedia, will no longer be published on paper but go online only. In addition, the new business model will be solely based on advertising. This move ends the over 200 year old Brockhaus old tradition of a printed high-end encyclopedia — but may also be solution to counter the decreasing sales of the printed edition. As Brockhaus directly competes with the Wikipedia, the differentiating factor needs to be quality and reliabilty, which will be tough though. (mehr)

If you are, like me, working almost ten hours a day with your Mac, you’re repeating the same hand movements over and over again. If you’re susceptible to RSI (repetitive strain injury; more accessible info here) try the litte utility AntiRSI.

Last week I came across an interesting backup and archival solution: JungleDisk. It uses Amazon’s S3 storage and makes it available as a local WebDAV disk. You can use it to make regular or incremental backups, or use it for longer-time archival, e.g., of your documents. And if you’re worried about your privacy: JungleDisk encrypts not only the transmission but also the files before uploading. The main difference compared to other online storage services is, however, that Amazon S3 charges not for a fixed storage size but per GB of used space and per GB transferred. Rates are as low as 15 US cents per GB and month. The ‘disk’ is never limited to a certain selected size. Check it out. (mehr)