An old friend of mine and fellow software developer, Hardy Macia from Catamount Software, passed away tonight after a long fight against cancer. We met just twice in person, once when we lived in Munich and he called in for an evening, and again when I drove up from Boston to his house, the “Train Station”. He showed me how life would be as an independent software vendor and I had him in mind when I quit my day job to run DEVONtechnologies. (more)

A few weeks ago we got contacted by Frederick Sarran from Scotland trying to raise funds for Balnagask Court in Torry, Aberdeen, a complex for Adults with Learning Disabilities (ALD) and Mental Health issues. From his website: … (more)

Yesterday, May 3rd, 2013, at 5 p.m. CET Dominik, the third child of Christian, our head developer, safely arrived after a nine month long flight through time and space. Mother and child are well and happy. The ground staff and all of us here at DEVONtechnologies congratulate the parents and welcome the new earth citizen!

If you make screenshots and find yourself dragging them to DEVONthink Pro or ProOffice every time, here’s a shortcut for you: You can change the Finder’s location for screenshots to any folder you like. Change this to the Inbox folder and the picture is imported immediately or at least as soon as DEVONthink Pro (Office) is being opened. (more)

BBC News today writes about what tags are and how they can be used to navigate notes, ideas, and other items. Technology reporter Ian Hardy also talks to our support specialist Jim Neumann.

The traditional “files and folders” way of storing our data is decades old. And while it does reward our brain with a sense of control and ease of accessibility, it’s certainly not perfect. As the file structure increases, documents several subfolders deep slowly get consumed, like a donkey in quicksand. That’s where tags come in. (more)

April 11 we updated DEVONthink and DEVONnote, this week it’s time for DEVONagent, DEVONsphere Express, EasyFind, PhotoStickies and XMenu. Enjoy new automation options in DEVONagent, search FoldingText files with DEVONsphere, and share files directly from EasyFind. (more)

From March 4 through 6 Cocoa developers gathered in then-rainy Leicester, UK, for NSConference 5. So Alan and me joined them and enjoyed socializing with friends from the US to Israel. And while we  learned about quite a few interesting ideas from other developers, from business to programming, we also acquired *truly *essential knowledge: how to make our own cocktails. To the right you can see Alan having fun preparing his very first Singapore Sling under the eyes of a professional bar keeper. I did a Cosmopolitan so I guess it was the unofficial “pinkish cocktail night”. Or did we just try to summon Spring? (more)

“Alles neu macht der Mai,” Germans are saying. We do it already in April! We have just released maintenance updates for all three editions of DEVONthink as well as for DEVONnote. The update improves the reliability of synchronization, clipping with the Clip To DEVONthink browser extension as well as the bookmarklets, and many other parts of the apps. If you’re using the new web interface of DEVONthink Pro Office you’ll like that we have made it a lot faster. (more)

Some people say that our apps are not “social” enough now with Facebook and Twitter being still the main trends in the industry. We listened and proudly present a brand new freeware app: CareTaker for Facebook. Never get your friends kicked out of your news feed again. Don’t get calls from annoyed friends telling you that you don’t like their posts. And all this without wasting even more time on Facebook. (more)

Today Google announced that they would shut down their online RSS reader service Google Reader on July 1, 2013. So if you are a Google Reader subscriber looking for an alternative you may not yet know that DEVONthink Pro and Pro Office are excellent news reader, too! (more)