Chad Black wrote a series of articles in his blog about DEVONthink and other Mac applications for history and humanities research.

Devonthink’s classification, search, and AI infrastructure is a step in the right direction. For people who work mostly with the every-growing mass of information available online, the ability to import, auto-classify, and connect disparate pieces of info is very cool, particularly as the internal structure of your database becomes increasingly tight and predictable. (more)

Sometimes people are asking for our business hours. While our headquarter is in beautiful Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, USA, most of us live someplace else in the world (we’re one of the world’s smallest fully globalized companies). But this Summer, when I visited our support hero Bill DeVille, we visited the Fig Tree Gallery & Coffee Shop which solves this conundrum so elegantly that we have decided to take over their official business hours. See the picture above. (more)

DEVONthink and DEVONagent, like many other Mac applications, make heavy use of toolbars. The tools give you immediate access to frequently used functions such as for navigation, switching views, creating and deleting items as well as searching. But there are many other tools available for you that you don’t see on a first glance. (more)

Joe Kissell from Macworld has published an article about serious (re)search on the Internet. Besides meta search engines he also mentions DEVONagent as a power solution:

If you’re doing extensive research, consider a high-powered tool such as Devon Technologies’ $50 DevonAgent. In addition to being a stand-alone Web browser, it’s a full-featured research tool. DevonAgent lets you create complex searches that include Boolean operators, proximity terms, and filtering—spanning not just a few search engines but as many as you like. (more)

After two weeks without OCR, we have now finished our workarounds that circumvent the PDF bug in the ABBYY engine and just released public beta 3 of all editions of DEVONthink as well as of DEVONnote. (more)

We have finished the main work on the by-pass circumventing the bugs in the ABBYY OCR engine that kept us from releasing it to the public two weeks ago. We have just posted a beta to our beta tester group and are now preparing to release a new public beta as soon as we have received enough hopefully positive reports from our beta testers.

Matthew Bookspan of TheAppleBlog has just published a comparison between DEVONthink Pro Office and Evernote Premium. Matthew did a great job working out the differences between the offerings and comes to this conclusion: … (more)

Just a quick update on our progress on the OCR side. While ABBYY was unable to reproduce the bug that affects the conversion of a multi-page PDF into separate images, we have now written a by-pass that does this before feeding the data into the OCR engine. This has also other advantages, e.g. the ability to run OCR also on very large documents without running into memory problems. We are now writing the new thread handling that we need for this workaround and hope to begin internal testing tonight or tomorrow morning. (more)

Last Friday we had to release DEVONthink Pro Office 2.0 public beta 2 without an embedded OCR engine – which is truly annoying for you and us.

Starting with version 2.0 of DEVONthink Pro Office we are moving from the IRIS engine to the ABBYY FineReader engine which produces way smaller PDFs, is more accurate, and much smarter to embed into our application. Where the IRIS engine was an external program remotely controlled by DEVONthink, the engine provided by ABBYY is a true framework that we can directly embed and control. You will see this soon in a much improved ‘OCR Activity’ panel and no other OCR windows popping up for every page. (more)

Just in time we have released the second public beta of DEVONthink (and DEVONnote). This beta comes with many enhancements, e.g. simple PDF editing abilities (splitting files, merging files, copy/paste for PDF pages), a new RSS preferences panel, and a more responsive web interface that now also displays QuickLook previews if possible. In addition, DEVONthink Pro Office nearly also came with a brand new OCR engine but technical difficulties with embedding the engine properly forced us to delay this feature but we will deliver it as soon as we and ABBYY are able to find the problem. Read more about the update on our news page. (more)