Just a short note that we have released DEVONagent 2.3.1, a maintenance update that brings a large number of smaller improvements in all areas, from updated search engine plugins, scanner plugins, and default search sets to better advertisement and index spam filters.

If you are searching with DEVONagent Pro you may get results in multiple languages because especially technical terms are often the same in English, German, even French. To avoid confusing both yourself and DEVONagent Pro’s AI with [insert whatever language you don’t understand here] gibberish, use the built-in language filter. Maximize the search window so that the toolbar is visible, then switch to the Settings tab. Select your language of choice from the Language pop-up menu to restrict searched to that language and uncheck Ignore Diacritics if you want to search for words with umlauted or accented characters. This setting is temporary, you can also add this to any search set.

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.

In the old tradition of season updates, here’s the first Summer Update, this time for DEVONagent. Version 2.2 adds, among many other improvements, new features that can come in handy when working with many web pages at the same time or with Bonjour-advertised web services as DEVONthink Pro Office web sharing. Also check our the heavily updated scanners that way more reliably detect thumbnail galleries, images, documents, whatever they’re looking for.

DEVONagent allows you to search not just using Google, but with many more specialized search engines. For serious web research, you should use this possibility. Choose the search set that best suits your needs instead of just using the default ‘Internet (Fast Scan).’ To choose another search set (a parameter set for the next search run), select it from the little magnifying glass pop-up in the search field. (mehr)

Are you still typing “www.google.com” over and over into the address field of a DEVONagent web browser window just to quickly look up a vendor’s web address? Don’t do it again. There’s a smarter way: In DEVONagent, some plugins (which are basically interfaces between the application and the search engine) come with predefined keywords that you can simply type into the address field, followed by a query (in the search engine’s format; don’t enter one of DEVONagent’s more sophisticated operators here.) DEVONagent will send you query to the desired search engine and show the result page. (mehr)

I promised to add more mini tutorials to the DEVONacademy, and, here they are: Three more tutorials for DEVONagent that explain how to use the built-in Web browser, how to create your own search set, and how to use the heavily underestimated automation features of DEVONagent. Our Internet research assistant not only queries search engines and scans URLs to give you answers to your questions quicky and accurately, it can also do this completely unattended and notify you when its done, send you the results by email or, best of all, run a script that you can use to do whatever is possible with AppleScript. (mehr)