Global warming might not be easy to stop but if you want to send a personal signal that you care, consider joining Earth Hour and switch off your lights for one hour this Saturday to cast your vote. This project is supported by the United Nations, the European Union, the UEFA, the Olympic Commitee, and many more.

Nils Raschke, a German high school biology teacher, writes a blog about all things teaching biology and more. Last week he published a nicely written piece about how he is trying to cope with the paper flood: … (more)

Dealing with privacy issues becomes more and more part of our daily lives the more web sites and businesses collect our personal information. We respect your privacy and handle the information you give to us with care. Please feel free to check our privacy policy directly on our web site.

Steven Berlin Johnson is an avid advocate for DEVONthink. In another recent article in the Prospect magazine he wrote about copy-and-paste writing and using software as part of the creative process:

The software [DEVONthink] also acts as a kind of connection machine, helping to supplement your own memory. The results have a certain chaotic brilliance. In my last book, for instance, while researching Joseph Priestley’s experiments with oxygen, Devonthink reminded me of a wonderful passage from Lynn Margulis’s book, Microcosmos, which talked about the way excess oxygen, created by early photosynthesis, became one of the earth’s first pollution crises. I had read the passage years before, but forgotten it entirely. The programme remade the link, and opened up an line of inquiry that ultimately resulted in an entirely new chapter. (more)

In the presumably hopeless attempt to separate between the official DEVONtechnologies news and my personal replies and comments I have just switched this blog’s auto-tweet function to our company’s corporate Twitter account. If you are following me but want to receive official news, too, please follow @devontech (and if you only want to read those, feel free to un-follow me, of course).

Long-standing readers will know that I like to work in local coffee shops and cafés. This January the first Starbucks opened in my area, about 20km north of Stuttgart, Germany. So I just had to try it — see the picture below. Reasonable coffee, agreed. But: WiFi was not yet operational and Starbucks in Germany does not offer it for free but you need to either pay by the minute or have a T-Mobile or T-Online subscription. Dear Starbucks, welcome to the 21st century — time to reconsider this antique concept. (more)

This morning a 17 year old boy killed ten pupils, three teachers, and three other people in his former school in Winnenden, less than 25 kilometers from where I live and work, north of Stuttgart, Germany. Me, my wife, and our children are spending this evening disturbed, watching the news and talking about the unbelievable.

From time to time I tend to share a nice comment from a fellow user. This week, power user and Windows convert Stephen Barnes sent us this email:

I have now been using Devonthink Pro for a couple of months, having moved over from the Window environment. I would just like to say that the move to using a Mac has been fully justified by Devonthink alone. What a lovely program you have! On the Windows side I used Info Select for years, then Paperport, and then UltraRecall. Devonthink is much more pleasurable to use than any of those products. Thank you for such an excellent piece of software. (more)

Quick notice: We have just released an interim update to DEVONthink Pro Office 2.0 that brings a large number of improvements to the embedded text recognition that we did not want to hold back until public beta 4 because it fixes many known issues.

Chad Black wrote a series of articles in his blog about DEVONthink and other Mac applications for history and humanities research.

Devonthink’s classification, search, and AI infrastructure is a step in the right direction. For people who work mostly with the every-growing mass of information available online, the ability to import, auto-classify, and connect disparate pieces of info is very cool, particularly as the internal structure of your database becomes increasingly tight and predictable. (more)