DEVONthink Pro Office power user b.3 has discovered a nice way of searching his database directly from Launchbar. He uses the embedded web server and directly searches the database by passing a pre-constructed URL. See his posting in our user forum. Thank you for this power tip, b.3.
We have just posted updated for all editions of DEVONthink as well as for DEVONnote. The new releases include a number of bug fixes, bring compatibility to the latest version of the Fujitsu ScanSnap Manager, and come with all the scripts on board that I have already published here a while ago. Read more on our news page.
DEVONthink Pro databases are technically packages, folders that appear like a single file. When you simply copy them to another volume as a backup, the Finder always copies the whole thing. And so even do some backup applications, even though only parts of the database have changed. Try ChronoSync. It has the option to treat packages like files which allows it to peer inside the packages and only update the files that have actually changed. Command line fans will want to have a look at rsync (part of Mac OS X,) which intelligently copies only those parts of one or more folders that need to get updated.
Finally, we have updated all editions of DEVONthink as well as DEVONagent and DEVONnote for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. And, we have added a few more improvements and new features. Read the news or download the updates. These updates are strongly recommended for all users already working with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Attention users of Mac OS X 10.3.9: All new releases require at least Mac OS X 10.4 or later.
Sometimes, file permissions go bad and leave ‘locked’ or ‘used’ files behind. If this happens to your DEVONthink Pro database, the application will continue to claim that the database is in use. If you are savvy with file permissions, use either the Finder’s Info panel or the Terminal to correct them. Make sure to adjust the permissions of all files in the package. A trick that also seems to work in some cases is to duplicate the database in the Finder and open the copy instead.
I just wanted to let you know that we updated DEVONthink Pro and Pro Office to version 1.3.3. See our news page for more information on the update.
Just a quick note that we have updated DEVONthink Personal and DEVONnote to version 1.9.10.
The second season update this summer is DEVONthink Pro (Office). It adds minor improvements to almost all areas of DEVONthink Pro and Pro Office. DEVONthink Professional Office 1.3.2 supports MailTags 2.0 notes, allows to set the resolution and the compression of PDFs, and connects to ExactCode’s ExactScan software. Both editions allow you to set the background color of rich text documents, support grouping of found documents directly from within Classify and See Also drawers, and read Finder and Spotlight comments when sync’ing an indexed folder. The Dashboard widgets look way more attractive now, too.
If you need to get table-like data into DEVONthink Pro or out of it, nothing easier than that. From, e.g., Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice export your data as tab-separated or comma-separated values (.tsv, .csv). Import this into DEVONthink Pro and it will automagically appear as a sheet. To get a sheet out of DEVONthink, select it (not the individual records) and choose File > Export > As Files and Folders. It will get exported as tab-separated values that can be read by all spreadsheet applications on any platform.
If you receive a file that you cannot open because you don’t have the right piece of software at hand, or if you want to convert a file in a proprietary format for importing into DEVONthink, have a look at Zamzar, a free Web-based file conversion service that converts diverse document, image, audio, and video formats.