This posting by Mark Shead on Productivity501 is a bit older but worth reading when you’re planning to go paperless: “Components of a Paperless Office”. You may want to replace the ScanSnap S500M with the current models S300M and S1500M, though :-)

If you are still using an older version of DEVONthink or DEVONnote, for example because your Mac is running Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger we have now, again, made the PDF documentation available for all 1.x versions of DEVONthink and DEVONnote.

Many of you are already using a Fujitsu ScanSnap together with DEVONthink Pro Office. But if you don’t and you’re living in the United States, we have something for you: Starting today you can buy DEVONthink Pro Office bundled with the ScanSnap S300M or S1500M in our online shop as the ‘Paperless Office Bundle’. Happy shopping!

Just a quick note that we have just released DEVONthink and DEVONnote 2.0 public beta 5 with new features, e.g. a new iPhone web application, many improvements (also under the hood), and bug fixes.

DEVONthink is based from the ground up on artificial intelligence (AI). And like with natural intelligence the results it delivers is based on a variety of parameters. With DEVONhink 2.0 public beta 4 we have added more control over how the AI behaves. To improve the predictability of the AI results, open DEVONthink’s Preferences, General tab, and adjust the Mood slider from “Moody” to “Stable” (see the picture). Choose the setting that best fits your needs. (more)

Just a quick note that we have just released DEVONthink and DEVONnote 2.0 public beta 4 with new features, improvements, and bug fixes.

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)

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)

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.