Devonian Times Masthead

The DEVONtechnologies Blog

Go Beyond Google Searches

February 16, 2009

Joe Kissell from Macworld has published an article about serious (re)search on the Internet. Besides meta search engines he also mentions DEVONagent as a power solution:

If you’re doing extensive research, consider a high-powered tool such as Devon Technologies’ $50 DevonAgent. In addition to being a stand-alone Web browser, it’s a full-featured research tool. DevonAgent lets you create complex searches that include Boolean operators, proximity terms, and filtering—spanning not just a few search engines but as many as you like. (more)

OCR is Back — and Better than Ever Before

February 13, 2009

After two weeks without OCR, we have now finished our workarounds that circumvent the PDF bug in the ABBYY engine and just released public beta 3 of all editions of DEVONthink as well as of DEVONnote. (more)

OCR Seeded to Beta Testers

February 11, 2009

We have finished the main work on the by-pass circumventing the bugs in the ABBYY OCR engine that kept us from releasing it to the public two weeks ago. We have just posted a beta to our beta tester group and are now preparing to release a new public beta as soon as we have received enough hopefully positive reports from our beta testers.

Status Report on OCR

February 5, 2009

Just a quick update on our progress on the OCR side. While ABBYY was unable to reproduce the bug that affects the conversion of a multi-page PDF into separate images, we have now written a by-pass that does this before feeding the data into the OCR engine. This has also other advantages, e.g. the ability to run OCR also on very large documents without running into memory problems. We are now writing the new thread handling that we need for this workaround and hope to begin internal testing tonight or tomorrow morning. (more)

A Word on OCR and Why It's Missing

February 2, 2009

Last Friday we had to release DEVONthink Pro Office 2.0 public beta 2 without an embedded OCR engine – which is truly annoying for you and us.

Starting with version 2.0 of DEVONthink Pro Office we are moving from the IRIS engine to the ABBYY FineReader engine which produces way smaller PDFs, is more accurate, and much smarter to embed into our application. Where the IRIS engine was an external program remotely controlled by DEVONthink, the engine provided by ABBYY is a true framework that we can directly embed and control. You will see this soon in a much improved ‘OCR Activity’ panel and no other OCR windows popping up for every page. (more)

DEVONthink and DEVONnote: Second Public Beta

January 30, 2009

Just in time we have released the second public beta of DEVONthink (and DEVONnote). This beta comes with many enhancements, e.g. simple PDF editing abilities (splitting files, merging files, copy/paste for PDF pages), a new RSS preferences panel, and a more responsive web interface that now also displays QuickLook previews if possible. In addition, DEVONthink Pro Office nearly also came with a brand new OCR engine but technical difficulties with embedding the engine properly forced us to delay this feature but we will deliver it as soon as we and ABBYY are able to find the problem. Read more about the update on our news page. (more)

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

December 22, 2008

All of us here at DEVONtechnologies wish you and your family a pleasant and peaceful Christmas time. May it be a time of peace and reflection for all of you, wherever in the world you are, whatever religion you believe in, and whatever culture you are part of. (more)

We're Back

January 7, 2009

Just a quick note that we’re back from the Christmas holidays. A Happy New Year and a great start into 2009 to everyone!

Steven Johnson on DEVONthink, Again

January 29, 2009

New York Times author and book writer Steven Johnson, who wrote about DEVONthink in a fabulous article in the New York Times in 2005, has just published another great article on Boing Boing mentioning DEVONthink, “How to write a book”: … (more)