In The Atlantic, Nicholas Carr writes about the inpact that media of any kind has on the way we think, from the invention of the printing press to the Internet. Being four (!) pages long, the article puts itself clearly into the opposite position to what it defines as how the Internet distributes information: ‘in a swiftly moving stream of particles’. Definitely worth reading. (more)

Just a short note that we have released DEVONagent 2.3.1, a maintenance update that brings a large number of smaller improvements in all areas, from updated search engine plugins, scanner plugins, and default search sets to better advertisement and index spam filters.

Even after reading so much about Twitter, I am still unsure about what it can be useful for. Looks like a mixture between blogging, instant messaging, IRC-style discussion groups, everything together cooked up in a pot and carefully stirred. The AcademHacK blog gives a few firsts shots about one can use Twitter professionally, but what do you think? BTW: I have opened my own account, but still experimenting.

At the moment, I am trying to build a network of consultants who help users of DEVONthink and DEVONagent in their area with setting up the applications, integrate it into their workflow, and share the little tips and tricks that squeeze the most of the apps. If you are working in the IT field, consider yourself savvy in DEVONthink and DEVONagent, and would like to share your expertise with a user when needed, please feel free to get in touch with me.

As the President of a US company I just had to visit our local copy of an American Wild West festival. For a couple of days wanna-be cowboys and indians lived in tents, worked in small craft shops, operated a stylish saloon — and had a lot of fun! Click the image to the left to see the Swabian/German/English menu 🙂 … (more)

If you want to import a batch of scanned PDFs without converting them to searchable PDFs right away, e.g. because you want to run the time-consuming OCR process later, you can easily do so. Import the files, e.g. to a group “To OCR”. Later, make sure to check Preferences > OCR > Original Document > Move to Trash, select all the documents, and convert them in one batch using Data > Convert > To Searchable PDF. This replaces the selected scanned PDFs with searchable copies and deletes the original file in one batch.

If you are searching with DEVONagent Pro you may get results in multiple languages because especially technical terms are often the same in English, German, even French. To avoid confusing both yourself and DEVONagent Pro’s AI with [insert whatever language you don’t understand here] gibberish, use the built-in language filter. Maximize the search window so that the toolbar is visible, then switch to the Settings tab. Select your language of choice from the Language pop-up menu to restrict searched to that language and uncheck Ignore Diacritics if you want to search for words with umlauted or accented characters. This setting is temporary, you can also add this to any search set.

If you like using roman numerals for naming items, you may not be satisfied with Mac OS X’s ability to sort tem correctly. Our power user ‘kalisphoenix’ has posted a nice workaround in our online forum that uses Unicode characters, each one representing one roman numeral. You can easily copy the numerals from the posting and paste it wherever you need them.

Even though DEVONthink and DEVONagent do a good job in managing the information overload, sometimes it’s the simplest solution that makes the day :-)

Today I had a success experience with DEVONagent that nicely shows where our software really shines, and so I wanted to share it with you. We have an aquarium now for a couple of weeks and three days ago a few of our fishes began to first show signs of “eaten” fins, then they died. Therefore I used DEVONagent today to find out what is wrong with them. Both our pet shop guy and our booklets had their suspections but, working for DEVONtechnologies, I had to start researching on my own, too. I used the following query and the standard Internet (Fast Scan) search set: … (more)