The Services menu is one of the most underestimated features of Mac OS X. It provides useful commands that work from within almost any application on the Mac without hacking them (unlike, say, contextual menu items which run inside another application’s memory space and so can crash it). Both DEVONthink and DEVONagent provide useful commands which allow, e.g., to quickly clip selected text to your database, summarize text, or run a web search. In addition we provide useful Services menu plugins as freeware.

If you are using Instapaper to keep articles for offline reading you may like the ‘Add to Instapaper’ script for DEVONthink Pro, written by one of our power users. Click here to read about it in our user forum. Thank you, bartekb81.

With DEVONthink Pro 2.0 we introduced the Sorter, an small independent application that allows you to add data to your databases even when DEVONthink is not open. But it’s not a simple drop box — there is much more you can do with it (and even more in one of the next releases). (mehr)

DEVONtechnologies is growing again: Last week Golden Retriever puppy Tippy moved in at Bill’s log cabin in Indiana, USA. Tippy has been happily adopted by Rottweiler dog mum Destry and is now keeping Bill and Destry busy. Welcome on the team, Tippy! (mehr)

To make our upgrade process easier I have just activated our new Upgrade Assistant. It asks you for all information you need to upgrade and leads you through the process. This is especially useful if you received your license as part of a promotion bundle and so you need to register your license first before you can request the upgrade details. All feedback is welcome.

Some people wonder and speculate abour why we have set the expiration date of the latest DEVONthink and DEVONnote public beta to end of December 2009 and not, as before, only two months ahead to end of September. The reason is NOT that we are planning to extend the public beta phase in general. It is simply to give more time to download the next beta or the final release without getting locked out of their database before they were able to use the automatic updater. (mehr)

It’s not a secret that we are also developing … something … for the iPhone (and the iPod touch). We are now getting near the point that laboratory testing is no longer enough. We need feedback from real users — like yourself! So, if you are a DEVONthink Pro Office user, own an iPhone, and would like to do some beta testing for us, please email me. Seat numbers are very limited due to the ‘provisioning’ procedure that is required for iPhone applications. (mehr)

Right in time we have released another round of public betas of DEVONthink and DEVONnote. New functions include simple PDF annotations (more to come soon!), an enhanced web interface for DEVONthink Pro Office, a rewritten Dashboard widget, a new Take Note hot key, and much, much more …

Technology writer and columnist John C. Dvorak — not really known for supporting the Mac or Apple overwhelmingly — mentioned DEVONthink in his latest column “My Son Bought a Mac” in PC Magazine: … (mehr)

EasyFind 4.5 as released yesterday had problems running on Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. We fixed the problem by removing the new toolbar when EasyFind is started on Mac OS X 10.4. If you have this problem, please simply re-download EasyFind from our download page and replace your copy with the silently updated one.