For me as a studied librarian yesterdays announcement made by the Brockhaus publishers was the news of the day: The Brockhaus, Germany’s best-known encyclopedia, will no longer be published on paper but go online only. In addition, the new business model will be solely based on advertising. This move ends the over 200 year old Brockhaus old tradition of a printed high-end encyclopedia — but may also be solution to counter the decreasing sales of the printed edition. As Brockhaus directly competes with the Wikipedia, the differentiating factor needs to be quality and reliabilty, which will be tough though. (more)

If you want to add additional information to a document in DEVONthink, that’s what the Comment field is made for. You can find it in the info panel that opens with Tools > Show Info or by pressing Command-Shift-I (we didn’t choose Command-I like in the Finder as this would collide with ‘make selected text italic’). Best of all: Comments are searchable.

If you are, like me, working almost ten hours a day with your Mac, you’re repeating the same hand movements over and over again. If you’re susceptible to RSI (repetitive strain injury; more accessible info here) try the litte utility AntiRSI.

Naming the documents that you put into your DEVONthink database can be a science or even an art in itself. Some prefer to use some systematics, other precede the documents with the current date (something I used to do but have long abandoned) , and even others simply try to describe the contents of the file. For most documents, however, a good name is already there: the headline of the captured article. To quickly rename the document, select the headline or whatever text passage you would like to use, right-click or Control-click, and choose Set Title As from the contextual menu. (more)

Last week I came across an interesting backup and archival solution: JungleDisk. It uses Amazon’s S3 storage and makes it available as a local WebDAV disk. You can use it to make regular or incremental backups, or use it for longer-time archival, e.g., of your documents. And if you’re worried about your privacy: JungleDisk encrypts not only the transmission but also the files before uploading. The main difference compared to other online storage services is, however, that Amazon S3 charges not for a fixed storage size but per GB of used space and per GB transferred. Rates are as low as 15 US cents per GB and month. The ‘disk’ is never limited to a certain selected size. Check it out. (more)

Brenda of Changing Tides talks about how she is using del.icio.us for bookmark management and how DEVONthink Pro helps her too. Whether one likes online bookmark management services such as del.icio.us including the de-facto publishing of one’s own web surfing profile, or not, it is a perfect method to have all bookmarks available at all times, in all browsers, wherever you go. (more)

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.

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.

Annard Brouwer, our Maltese developer, was recently interviewed by Sims, who also lives in Malta and blogs about living and working on the mediterranean island. He also asks Annard about what it is like working for DEVONtechnologies. (Unfortunately Sims’ website is no longer online.)

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)