Finally, we have updated all editions of DEVONthink as well as DEVONagent and DEVONnote for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. And, we have added a few more improvements and new features. Read the news or download the updates. These updates are strongly recommended for all users already working with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Attention users of Mac OS X 10.3.9: All new releases require at least Mac OS X 10.4 or later.

Sometimes, file permissions go bad and leave ‘locked’ or ‘used’ files behind. If this happens to your DEVONthink Pro database, the application will continue to claim that the database is in use. If you are savvy with file permissions, use either the Finder’s Info panel or the Terminal to correct them. Make sure to adjust the permissions of all files in the package. A trick that also seems to work in some cases is to duplicate the database in the Finder and open the copy instead.

I just wanted to let you know that we updated DEVONthink Pro and Pro Office to version 1.3.3. See our news page for more information on the update.

Just a quick note that we have updated DEVONthink Personal and DEVONnote to version 1.9.10.

The second season update this summer is DEVONthink Pro (Office). It adds minor improvements to almost all areas of DEVONthink Pro and Pro Office. DEVONthink Professional Office 1.3.2 supports MailTags 2.0 notes, allows to set the resolution and the compression of PDFs, and connects to ExactCode’s ExactScan software. Both editions allow you to set the background color of rich text documents, support grouping of found documents directly from within Classify and See Also drawers, and read Finder and Spotlight comments when sync’ing an indexed folder. The Dashboard widgets look way more attractive now, too.

If you need to get table-like data into DEVONthink Pro or out of it, nothing easier than that. From, e.g., Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice export your data as tab-separated or comma-separated values (.tsv, .csv). Import this into DEVONthink Pro and it will automagically appear as a sheet. To get a sheet out of DEVONthink, select it (not the individual records) and choose File > Export > As Files and Folders. It will get exported as tab-separated values that can be read by all spreadsheet applications on any platform.

If you receive a file that you cannot open because you don’t have the right piece of software at hand, or if you want to convert a file in a proprietary format for importing into DEVONthink, have a look at Zamzar, a free Web-based file conversion service that converts diverse document, image, audio, and video formats.

One of our users (thank you, Martin!) posted a few days ago that he notices that on the Author’s Note page (p. 414) in Michael Chabon’s new best seller novel, “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union,” Chabon writes: “This novel was written on Macintosh computers using Devonthink Pro and Nisus Writer Express.” Chabon won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2001 for his novel “Kavalier & Clay.” As we’ve not sponsored Mr. Chabon for putting us in there, we’re more than honored for the mentioning. If you are interested, here’s a link to his novel at Amazon (no affiliate link, just for quick reference.)

Why-o-ever it may happen, databases can go corrupt. Be it a damaged file system, a system hang, or, Heaven forbid!, a DEVONthink crash. But, no reason to panic. First, run Tools > Verify & Repair. If DEVONthink cannot repair the database or if you are sure that you’ve lost some data, it’s time for the internal backups. By default, DEVONthink keeps two internal backups of the database index files that you can revert to at any time. (mehr)

Innowen from DIY Planner has published a nice review of DEVONthink Pro. She nicely describes how she uses DEVONthink but does also mention the downfalls for her. Here’s her conclusion:

That said, if you need an excellent all-in-one research assistant/personal information manager on your Macintosh system, then DEVONthink is the one for you. It’s fast, reliable, is able to index, cross-reference, search, handles almost all file formats natively and makes coffee for you in the morning (okay, it doesn’t… but DTPro could do that if it wanted to) … (mehr)