Fast Company magazine published a fascinating article about inventions that help you remember everything, starting with Vannevar Bush’s Memex and ending with — DEVONthink! The article is not available online, but you can get a copy of Fast Company magazine issue November 2006 at your local newsstand, or you can contact the publisher here.

Did you know that you can use custom group and document icons in DEVONthink? It works just the Mac way: Copy any image that you want to use as the icon of the item; best suitable are images of a square form with a transparent background. Then select the item in DEVONthink and open the Info panel (Tools > Show Info). Select the item’s icon and paste your graphic. It can’t be any easier, can it? By the way: This works exactly how it also works in the Finder. Custom icons are perfect for making an item stand out.

What are these guys doing all the time, you may think? Just sitting on the balcony, drinking way to much tea, and shooting photos like the one below? W-R-O-N-G! We have been working really hard to bring you new, exciting things! What about this one: We have just sent the very first copy of DEVONthink Pro Office to our faithful team of beta testers — May the Preventer of System Crashes be with them! Based on DEVONthink Pro, it comes with a number of useful additions for your everyday work: … (more)

We have updated all our DEVONapps, from DEVONthink Professional through DEVONthink Personal and DEVONagent to DEVONnote. The updates bring the latest changes we have made to our DEVONtechnology as well as tons of small user interface improvements, and, of course, fixes for bugs and glitches.

The text editing engine of Mac OS X comes with a nice hidden feature: a built-in mini outliner that is also available from within DEVONthink. Open a rich text (!) document in a separate window by double-clicking it. On any blank line, type Option-Tab to create a bullet-point. Hit Return for the next item and so on. Additional Option-Tabs will increase the indentation; a Return on a blank list line will decrease it. It uses hyphens to indicate list items by default. Right-click or control-click to choose all kinds of list styles. Isn’t the Mac cool?

If you often need to add new documents to a specific group in your DEVONthink Pro database, you could drag the file to the DEVONthink Pro icon in the Dock, then bring the database window to the front, and manually move the document to the group into which it belongs. Here’s a convenient shortcut: Open the Groups panel (Tools > Show Groups). It floates above all other windows and gives you access to all groups of the currently open database. Drag documents onto groups in the Groups panel to import them and double-click groups to open a window for it in DEVONthink Pro.

DEVONthink Pro databases are technically packages, folders that appear like a single file. When you simply copy them to another volume as a backup, the Finder always copies the whole thing. And so even do some backup applications, even though only parts of the database have changed. Try ChronoSync. It has the option to treat packages like files which allows it to peer inside the packages and only update the files that have actually changed. Command line fans will want to have a look at rsync (part of Mac OS X,) which intelligently copies only those parts of one or more folders that need to get updated.

DEVONthink Pro Office power user b.3 has discovered a nice way of searching his database directly from Launchbar. He uses the embedded web server and directly searches the database by passing a pre-constructed URL. See his posting in our user forum. Thank you for this power tip, b.3.

Sometimes, file permissions go bad and leave ‘locked’ or ‘used’ files behind. If this happens to your DEVONthink Pro database, the application will continue to claim that the database is in use. If you are savvy with file permissions, use either the Finder’s Info panel or the Terminal to correct them. Make sure to adjust the permissions of all files in the package. A trick that also seems to work in some cases is to duplicate the database in the Finder and open the copy instead.