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)

New York Times author and book writer Steven Johnson, who wrote about DEVONthink in a fabulous article in the New York Times in 2005, has just published another great article on Boing Boing mentioning DEVONthink, “How to write a book”: … (more)

So far the DEVONthink and DEVONnote 2.0 public beta launch went pretty well, which is, I think, a good sign :-) But we are currently under heavy load from all the various enquiries, from bug reports to upgrading questions. So if you sent us email and have not yet received a reply — please be patient. We’re answering one question at a time but we will answer all of them.

We have promised that we would release DEVONthink 2.0 as a public beta before Christmas, and that is just what we have done today. All three editions of DEVONthink as well as DEVONnote are immediately available for downloading as 2.0 public beta. We have also updated all product pages as well as the feature comparison for all editions. Read yourself what’s new in DEVONthink 2.0 and DEVONnote 2.0 and have a look at our short news article, too. Finally, don’t forget to actually download the trial. (more)

We’re just preparing beta 4 for our tireless beta testers with many minor changes including the new icon set. Time to direct your attention to some of the substancial changes we have made to DEVONthink 2.0. (more)

While our beta testers are dissecting the current beta 2, I’d like to share some more information about the upcoming new version. This week: The new file formats that you can work with in DEVONthink 2.0. (more)

I promised to keep you all updated on the progress we make with DEVONthink 2.0. Today I am proud to tell you that we have just seeded the very first beta of DEVONthink Pro Office 2.0 to the closed beta testers group. Some features are still missing, especially interface-wise, but it’s already stable enough and useable. And while we continue adding the planned functionality it’s now up to our great beta tester community to put it through its paces.

DEVONthink Pro Office 2.0 - what’s happening? Well, we hope to release very soon the first public beta but in the meantime here are a few prelims to whet the appetite!

This week: DEVONthink Pro Office 2.0 — built-in web server completely revamped. (more)

If you want to add additional information to a document in DEVONthink, that’s what the Comment field is made for. You can find it in the info panel that opens with Tools > Show Info or by pressing Command-Shift-I (we didn’t choose Command-I like in the Finder as this would collide with ‘make selected text italic’). Best of all: Comments are searchable.