With DEVONthink Pro 2.x’s ability to keep more than one database open at the same time you might consider splitting your older huge all-in-one database. The most effective way to do this is:

Alternatively you can drag the items to the other database’s name in the sidebar. In this case the items will end up in that database’s local inbox and you can move them from there to the database’s top level. (more)

DEVONthink 2.0 uses QuickLook for displaying file formats that it cannot show directly, e.g. Pages, Numbers, or .eml email documents. While this allows DEVONthink to display all files for which a QuickLook plugin is available, many previews don’t allow you to select text, e.g. for copying it. This is where the plain text view comes in. Switch to the plain text view using the plain text view icon in the document’s navigation bar if available. (more)

From time to time I tend to share a nice comment from a fellow user. This week, power user and Windows convert Stephen Barnes sent us this email:

I have now been using Devonthink Pro for a couple of months, having moved over from the Window environment. I would just like to say that the move to using a Mac has been fully justified by Devonthink alone. What a lovely program you have! On the Windows side I used Info Select for years, then Paperport, and then UltraRecall. Devonthink is much more pleasurable to use than any of those products. Thank you for such an excellent piece of software. (more)

Quick notice: We have just released an interim update to DEVONthink Pro Office 2.0 that brings a large number of improvements to the embedded text recognition that we did not want to hold back until public beta 4 because it fixes many known issues.

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)

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)

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)