DEVONthink Personal users: You’re not forgotten! As promised last week, we have just released DEVONthink Personal 1.9.9 with all the little enhancements that we had added to DEVONthink Pro in the last months. In addition, we have released DEVONagent 2.1 with a number of really nice features, for example the possibility to access your bookmarks right from the Dock menu and thumbnail tooltips for tabs. Finally, we’ve published maintenance updates for DEVONthink Pro 1.3.1 and DEVONthink Pro Office. Download the new versions here and simply replace your copies with the new ones.

A less well-known keyboard shortcut that works in nearly every Mac OS X application including DEVONthink is Alt-Tab. It switches forward through all panes of the frontmost window. In DEVONthink Pro’s Three Panes view, for example, from: groups to documents to the view/edit pane and back to groups.

Just a quick note that we have just released DEVONthink Pro Office 1.3 (and DEVONthink Pro 1.3) as a final! Finally, after an extensive public beta test, we now declare it officially as read for prime time.

For most people who are like us, being without a computer and Internet access, is unthinkable. We are already getting very uneasy when our DSL line is dead for one, two hours. Can you survive for 24 hours without your computer? To be honest, I think I can. And so I have just signed up for Shutdown Day. Can you, too?

If you want to create a link to a group or other document in a rich text document, you can either write something, select it, Control-click or right-click it, and choose ‘Link to’ from the contextual menu, including navigating through your groups hierarchy. Or, you can simply drag the item into the rich text document with the Option and Command keys pressed (like creating a replicant or an alias in the Finder.)

To archive a web page within DEVONthink, use the contextual menu. First, select the Link document in question to view the web page ‘live.’ Control-click or right-click the background of the page to show options that are affect the whole page, not a specific item on it. Now, choose ‘Capture Web Archive’ to save the current state of this page as a web archive (the HTML code including all images required to display it) directly into the database. Even if the web page changes over time, this captured web archive won’t. (mehr)

Lifehacker has posted a nice review, sort of, of DEVONthink with a good comments thread that also touches a few ways on how to use DEVONthink. Feel free to add your own comments :-)

One simple way to improve the Classify feature of DEVONthink is to exclude certain groups and documents from being used for classification. You could, e.g., exclude groups with indexed backup CDs or archived mailing lists from classification because they are ‘atypical’ for the contents of this database but you want to them in there anyway for easy access. To exclude an item from being used for classification, select it, open the Info panel (Tools > Show Info) and check ‘Exclude from classification.’

We all are back from our Christmas holidays and we are already preparing for an exciting 2007! Steve Jobs already gave it an interesting kick-off with the amazing iPhone and with finalizing the transformating of the computer company Apple Computer, Inc. to the electronics ecosystem company Apple, Inc. that had begun years ago with the introduction of the iPod. Well, if it helps the (Mac) OS X market share, then we’re happy with it. And if they open the iPhone for third-party applications, we’ll definitely have a close look at it, promised! ;-)

The whole DEVONtechnologies team wishes Bill DeVille all the best for his 75th birthday. Enjoy your wonderfully prepared and tasty Hallelujah Crab at Juban’s (Baton Rouge, Louisiana, U.S.A.), Bill!

Yours Eric Boehnisch-Volkmann & the DEVONtechnologies team