Long-standing readers will know that I like to work in local coffee shops and cafés. This January the first Starbucks opened in my area, about 20km north of Stuttgart, Germany. So I just had to try it — see the picture below. Reasonable coffee, agreed. But: WiFi was not yet operational and Starbucks in Germany does not offer it for free but you need to either pay by the minute or have a T-Mobile or T-Online subscription. Dear Starbucks, welcome to the 21st century — time to reconsider this antique concept. (mehr)

This morning a 17 year old boy killed ten pupils, three teachers, and three other people in his former school in Winnenden, less than 25 kilometers from where I live and work, north of Stuttgart, Germany. Me, my wife, and our children are spending this evening disturbed, watching the news and talking about the unbelievable.

With DEVONthink Pro 2.x’s ability to keep more than one database open at the same time you might consider splitting your older huge all-in-one database. The most effective way to do this is:

Alternatively you can drag the items to the other database’s name in the sidebar. In this case the items will end up in that database’s local inbox and you can move them from there to the database’s top level. (mehr)

DEVONthink 2.0 uses QuickLook for displaying file formats that it cannot show directly, e.g. Pages, Numbers, or .eml email documents. While this allows DEVONthink to display all files for which a QuickLook plugin is available, many previews don’t allow you to select text, e.g. for copying it. This is where the plain text view comes in. Switch to the plain text view using the plain text view icon in the document’s navigation bar if available. (mehr)

From time to time I tend to share a nice comment from a fellow user. This week, power user and Windows convert Stephen Barnes sent us this email:

I have now been using Devonthink Pro for a couple of months, having moved over from the Window environment. I would just like to say that the move to using a Mac has been fully justified by Devonthink alone. What a lovely program you have! On the Windows side I used Info Select for years, then Paperport, and then UltraRecall. Devonthink is much more pleasurable to use than any of those products. Thank you for such an excellent piece of software. (mehr)

Quick notice: We have just released an interim update to DEVONthink Pro Office 2.0 that brings a large number of improvements to the embedded text recognition that we did not want to hold back until public beta 4 because it fixes many known issues.

Chad Black wrote a series of articles in his blog about DEVONthink and other Mac applications for history and humanities research.

Devonthink’s classification, search, and AI infrastructure is a step in the right direction. For people who work mostly with the every-growing mass of information available online, the ability to import, auto-classify, and connect disparate pieces of info is very cool, particularly as the internal structure of your database becomes increasingly tight and predictable. (mehr)

Sometimes people are asking for our business hours. While our headquarter is in beautiful Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, USA, most of us live someplace else in the world (we’re one of the world’s smallest fully globalized companies). But this Summer, when I visited our support hero Bill DeVille, we visited the Fig Tree Gallery & Coffee Shop which solves this conundrum so elegantly that we have decided to take over their official business hours. See the picture above. (mehr)

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. (mehr)

Joe Kissell from Macworld has published an article about serious (re)search on the Internet. Besides meta search engines he also mentions DEVONagent as a power solution:

If you’re doing extensive research, consider a high-powered tool such as Devon Technologies’ $50 DevonAgent. In addition to being a stand-alone Web browser, it’s a full-featured research tool. DevonAgent lets you create complex searches that include Boolean operators, proximity terms, and filtering—spanning not just a few search engines but as many as you like. (mehr)