We have updated all our DEVONapps, from DEVONthink Professional through DEVONthink Personal and DEVONagent to DEVONnote. The updates bring the latest changes we have made to our DEVONtechnology as well as tons of small user interface improvements, and, of course, fixes for bugs and glitches.

In the last four years people people kept asking if we have t-shirts, caps, mugs, or dog’s wear with our applications icons and our company logo. And as we are a customer-focused company, we try to keep them happy: We have just opened our own fun shop with gifts from textiles to paper notebooks. You can even get DEVONthink and DEVONagent U.S. postage stamps printed. Isn’t it cool?

The text editing engine of Mac OS X comes with a nice hidden feature: a built-in mini outliner that is also available from within DEVONthink. Open a rich text (!) document in a separate window by double-clicking it. On any blank line, type Option-Tab to create a bullet-point. Hit Return for the next item and so on. Additional Option-Tabs will increase the indentation; a Return on a blank list line will decrease it. It uses hyphens to indicate list items by default. Right-click or control-click to choose all kinds of list styles. Isn’t the Mac cool?

In the past I have published interviews with users doing interesting things with our applications in the irregularly published PDF newsletter called, of course, “DEVONtalk”. Now, with the blog and the HTML newsflashes a PDF newsletter looks strangely outdated. (more)

This month I’ve had a coffee with Matt Bontrager. Matt is the owner of Southpaw Data, LLC, a company that offers various services around the huge field of data management. Matt uses both DEVONagent and DEVONthink for his daily work. (more)

If you often need to add new documents to a specific group in your DEVONthink Pro database, you could drag the file to the DEVONthink Pro icon in the Dock, then bring the database window to the front, and manually move the document to the group into which it belongs. Here’s a convenient shortcut: Open the Groups panel (Tools > Show Groups). It floates above all other windows and gives you access to all groups of the currently open database. Drag documents onto groups in the Groups panel to import them and double-click groups to open a window for it in DEVONthink Pro.

I promised to add more mini tutorials to the DEVONacademy, and, here they are: Three more tutorials for DEVONagent that explain how to use the built-in Web browser, how to create your own search set, and how to use the heavily underestimated automation features of DEVONagent. Our Internet research assistant not only queries search engines and scans URLs to give you answers to your questions quicky and accurately, it can also do this completely unattended and notify you when its done, send you the results by email or, best of all, run a script that you can use to do whatever is possible with AppleScript. (more)

Marc Coïsson from MacResearch has recently published a nice in-depth review of DEVONthink Professional, focussed on how to use it for scientific work. Thank you, Marc!

Finally, after we have already published two video tutorials for DEVONagent, I have just uploaded our brand new video introduction to DEVONthink! Christian Meermann and Ed Vawter explain how to use DEVONthink’s user interface, how to create databases, how to write within DEVONthink with the built-in text editor, and how to use its unique artificial intelligence functions for filing, for organizing, and for navigating your documents.

We have just finished the second video tutorial for DEVONagent. It explains everything you need to know about search sets: what they are for, what they consist of, and how you can tweak them to your needs or how you can create your own search sets. You can even create sets that run unattended queries that completely automatically search the net for you and send you the results by email. Isn’t that cool?