It’s been a while since my last update on the development status of DEVONthink 2.0. We have continued to work on it silently but full steam ahead. We’re now very close to reaching the internal beta phase so I have posted a quick update to the development status thread in our announcement board.

There’s a lot of discussion about ‘cloud computing’ and storing your data ‘in the clouds’. Some new applications are based on this paradigm and are either built ‘in the cloud’ or use a servers cluster for synchronizing multiple clients and for giving web access to your data. While we clearly see the necessity for synchronizing a database between two or more Macs and maybe iPhones, we’re still unsure about what implications full web access to your documents has. My top issues are data integrity and data safety. (more)

Just a quick note that we have published maintenance updates for all editions of DEVONthink as well as for DEVONnote. You can find all details on our news page as well as in our newsletter.

In a great article Dr. Greg Mulhauser of Counselling Resource reviews DEVONthink Pro Office and its use in a therapist’s practice. Dr. Mulhauser explains what DEVONthink is, who needs it, and how a therapist can use it for his work. Read his excellent review here.

Today we released DEVONthink Pro Office 1.5.3 as well as updates for DEVONthink Pro, DEVONthink Personal, and DEVONnote. We’re re-introducing Image Capture based scanning including grayscale and document feeder support so you now have the choice: Image Capture or TWAIN?

When Mac OS X 10.5 ‘Leopard’ came out, it broke our scanner support based on the system’s Image Capture framework. We had been in exchanges with the Developer Technical Support and their Image Capture team at that time to find out why our capture function worked on Mac OS X 10.4.x but not on 10.5. To no avail. After a frustrating six months we moved on and licensed ExactScan Capture which is now embedded into every copy of DEVONthink Pro Office. This works with all TWAIN scanners but breaks with some scanners that are only compatible to Image Capture, not TWAIN. (more)

Naming the documents that you put into your DEVONthink database can be a science or even an art in itself. Some prefer to use some systematics, other precede the documents with the current date (something I used to do but have long abandoned) , and even others simply try to describe the contents of the file. For most documents, however, a good name is already there: the headline of the captured article. To quickly rename the document, select the headline or whatever text passage you would like to use, right-click or Control-click, and choose Set Title As from the contextual menu. (more)

Mark Shead asked a number of people how they would advise creating a filing system from scratch. Then the readers of Productivity501 voted for the best one. Of course, this also involved the use of DEVONthink when it comes to effectively organizing electronic documents or getting rid of paper. (more)

If you want to import a batch of scanned PDFs without converting them to searchable PDFs right away, e.g. because you want to run the time-consuming OCR process later, you can easily do so. Import the files, e.g. to a group “To OCR”. Later, make sure to check Preferences > OCR > Original Document > Move to Trash, select all the documents, and convert them in one batch using Data > Convert > To Searchable PDF. This replaces the selected scanned PDFs with searchable copies and deletes the original file in one batch.

If you like using roman numerals for naming items, you may not be satisfied with Mac OS X’s ability to sort tem correctly. Our power user ‘kalisphoenix’ has posted a nice workaround in our online forum that uses Unicode characters, each one representing one roman numeral. You can easily copy the numerals from the posting and paste it wherever you need them.