Devonian Times Masthead

The DEVONtechnologies Blog

September 15, 2015

New School Year, New Databases

Classes are coming—sorry, we can’t stop it from happening—and with it: homework. And with homework come research and the need to organize information. Three simple approaches to using a DEVONthink Pro or Pro Office database for school: … (more)

September 8, 2015

Never Miss What's Going On at Your School

Whether it’s high school or university, there’s always a lot going on. And regardless if you are a parent or a student, you want to keep up on the goings-on at school. RSS is a simple technology (called a “feed”) that lets you collect news without visiting web pages manually. DEVONthink Pro and Pro Office allow you to add RSS feeds to a database and can help keep you up to date. (more)

September 1, 2015

Before You Buy That NAS …

When people are looking for ways to share data on their networks, they often run into a device called an NAS (Network Attached Storage). In contrast to external drives, these are actually file servers. (If an external drive is just storage, a file server is storage with a brain!) NAS are advertised as powerful and fast solutions to your data sharing needs, but is it completely true? (more)

August 18, 2015

Search that Screen Capture

Following up on last week’s post, if you are following along at home, we now have screen captures going directly to DEVONthink as PDF files. However, these PDF files are merely images, ie. not searchable. (more)

August 11, 2015

Annotate Screen Captures in DEVONthink

Have you ever used those fancy screen capture applications that allow you to annotate on a screen capture? When you take screenshots as PDFs you can easily annotate them in DEVONthink:

Now when you make your screen capture, you will end up with a PDF. Select the PDF in DEVONthink and add notes, arrows, even links. (more)

August 4, 2015

Routine Maintenance for Your Database

How many of us would drive our cars daily for a year and never get any maintenance done on it? No oil change. No tire rotation. No fluid checks or general inspections at all…? Odds are, I don’t think we’d be too surprised if the vehicle suddenly started behaving a bit strangely. (more)

July 16, 2015

Ready for El Capitan: DEVONthink and DEVONnote 2.8.6

OS X El Capitan became just available as public beta. Right in time, DEVONthink and DEVONnote 2.8.6 bring important compatibility changes for it. In addition, DEVONthink 2.8.6 supports images referenced in Markdown documents. When importing Bookends references, DEVONthink imports their keywords too. PDF text annotations created by other applications keep their appearance. They are only restyled as soon as you edit them with DEVONthink. (more)

June 16, 2015

Don't Use DEVONthink as a Junk Drawer

Sometimes, people do indiscriminate dumps (import or index) into DEVONthink or DEVONnote, imagining it to be a Finder or Spotlight replacement. This is really no more truly effective than the junk drawers we all inevitably have at home. And it leads to more false positives in searches and use of far more resources than it needs to. (more)

June 10, 2015

Don't Spread Yourself Too Thin"

In their company blog, Fournova publishes short articles from other software developers. They talk about how to build a sustainable business. This month it was my turn. I wrote about not spreading yourself too thin and getting caught in daily busyness instead of focusing on what’s really important. (more)