After staying a few days more-or-less in bed with a bad cold, I just needed to go out again and add some joy to my morning routine of replying to customer email. Olivier, one of the numerous Italian ice coffee shops here in town now also offers free WIFI with its excellent coffee — so it was time to give it a try. I like it. And it always lightens up my mind to have a good coffee, see the pedestrians passing by, and enjoy the sun.

With DEVONthink Pro 2.x’s ability to keep more than one database open at the same time you might consider splitting your older huge all-in-one database. The most effective way to do this is:

Alternatively you can drag the items to the other database’s name in the sidebar. In this case the items will end up in that database’s local inbox and you can move them from there to the database’s top level. (more)

With Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard Apple broke scan support not only for DEVONthink Pro Office but for all third-party applications using the Image Capture framework. We have been working with Apple on the issue but still to no avail. We have now signed an agreement with the Berlin based scan software maker ExactCode and behind the scenes we’re both working hard to get the scan support in DEVONthink Pro Office back on-line again. Stay tuned!

DEVONthink 2.0 uses QuickLook for displaying file formats that it cannot show directly, e.g. Pages, Numbers, or .eml email documents. While this allows DEVONthink to display all files for which a QuickLook plugin is available, many previews don’t allow you to select text, e.g. for copying it. This is where the plain text view comes in. Switch to the plain text view using the plain text view icon in the document’s navigation bar if available. (more)

Global warming and climate change affect all of us. If you don’t just want to wait for it to happen, you can at least show that you care:

Created to take a stand against the greatest threat our planet has ever faced, Earth Hour uses the simple action of turning off the lights for one hour to deliver a powerful message about the need for action on global warming. This simple act has captured the hearts and minds of people all over the world. As a result, at 8pm on the 29 March, 2008 millions of people in some of the world’s major capital cities, including Copenhagen, Toronto, Chicago, Melbourne, Brisbane, Tel Aviv and Manila will unite and switch off for Earth Hour. (more)

DEVONthink and DEVONagent, like many other Mac applications, make heavy use of toolbars. The tools give you immediate access to frequently used functions such as for navigation, switching views, creating and deleting items as well as searching. But there are many other tools available for you that you don’t see on a first glance. (more)

After two days of hard HTML and CSS work, our new forum software is now online.The new version 3.0 of phpBB does not only add many useful features for both users and administrators but is hopefully also a bit more spam resistant than the earlier versions. Please note that we have also moved the forum’s address so if you had bookmarked the board’s direct address or suscribed to its RSS feed you should update your links now.

When you are looking for specific information on a web page, say email addresses, images, movies, Office documents, or downloadable files, DEVONagent Pro's Objects Drawer comes in handy. Open any web page in DEVONagent, from a search or directly using File > New Browser, and expand the right-hand sidebar. In the opened sidebar choose the type of information you want to extract, e.g., images, linked binary files, etc. DEVONagent immediately updates the list of found objects for the chosen type. Right-click any object to open it in a separate window, copy its link, or archive it in DEVONthink.

Journalists and bloggers: Don’t miss our updated Press Center. I have added a self-service option for our PR distribution list so that you can subscribe or unsubscribe to our press releases yourself now. A new form makes it easier for you to request not-for-resale licenses for your publication. And, of course, you will find all our recent and older press releases here as well as materials such as box shots, screenshot packages, and our company logo in print-ready resolution.

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.