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.

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.