When importing email, Apple Mail is going to provide the best performance as it supports native plugins. Other email applications require the use of Applescript to interact with DEVONthink and we can’t guarantee the performance, especially with large mailboxes. But if your email client supports an export to the UNIX .mbox format you can drag the exported .mbox file to the DEVONthink Pro Office dock icon to scan it for messages. (more)

If you are working at lot with PDF annotations the Mac application Highlights is for you. You can use it not only to manipulate annotations but also to extract annotations from documents and send them directly to DEVONthink Pro (Office). In addition it offers plenty of more export options including sharing annotations by email and saving them as Markdown. (more)

The name of your DEVONthink databases doesn’t really matter. While it matters to you in terms of helping you to identify what is in it, the real identity of the database is found in its UUID (universally unique identifier). You can think of it like your social security number (in the US) or your passport number. You could change your name, appearance, location, etc. but this number always represents me. (more)

We often have users asking this question: “I have a shortcut to the Global Inbox in the Finder’s sidebar. How do I get a similar shortcut to my other databases’ inboxes or groups?” The answer is, unfortunately, “You can’t, at least not easily”. (more)

DEVONthink supports already a multitude of file formats from plain text to Markdown and PDF. For everything else it uses the available Spotlight metadata importers to extract text for its full-text index. Quick Look helps it to display a file’s contents on the screen. The true beauty of Spotlight and Quick Look lies in their plugin architecture. If there’s a plugin for a file format the system can search and preview it. And so can also DEVONthink. (more)

Names. Names should allow us to quickly identify something at a glance. Tiger. Yeah, I know what that is. 2012 Taxes. Got it. 4d0f1bfec91ff2472.doc… wait, what?!? To make things easier we can create a more specific name, like BankOne VISA - January 2018 Statement - PAID - 2018-01-15.pdf This is certainly more clear but such long filenames may not fully display in all applications or on smaller form factor devices. And word-wrapping can sometimes add to the confusion. (more)

Sometimes you are working along in DEVONthink and realize you want to check out something in the same group, or maybe a group in the same hierarchy. Command-click the name in the title bar of a document window to show a dropdown of the hierarchy the file resides in. Clicking one of the locations will open it in a new window leaving your current window open behind it. (more)

The built-in spell checker in OS X is quite handy and available from within all Mac apps including DEVONthink. But there are many times when it thinks you’ve misspelled something when you know you haven’t. And while it may be nothing but a cosmetic annoyance to see the dashed red line under a word, you may want to teach the spell checker a thing or two. (more)

Getting your articles from Instapaper to DEVONthink automatically isn’t straightforward, unfortunately. Power user and former DEVONtechnologies crew member Annard Brouwer has written a great little script that takes a CSV file exported from Instapaper, converts it using Numbers, and imports the cleaned up result to DEVONthink Pro or Pro Office. (more)

Some of you have expressed the desire for a hotkey to show or hide the DEVONthink Sorter. Instead of waiting for us to implement yet another hotkey, you can easily do it yourself.

Now you can start and stop the Sorter as your leisure. Note that you can use this to start and stop e.g. the Web Sharing server in DEVONthink Pro Office, too. Also, note that this method can be used in applications other than ours. You just need a menu item that toggles between two states. (more)