ePub and Mobi (the Kindle format) are solid file formats for electronic books. But they are harder to handle than, e.g., PDF or plain text as they are designed for reading on an ebook reader. They are not really suited for using them inside other applications or for long-term archiving. (more)
Writing copy text that’s easy to read is, well, not easy. Especially Germans like me tend to build long nested sentences. Fortunately there are simple mechanical tools like, e.g., the Automated Readability Index. It counts the sentences, words, and letters in a text and returns an estimate on how difficult it is to read. The number it spits out correlates roughly to the US grade level. (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)
DEVONthink user and scientist Jim Falk has created a great little app to help him with his research work. The Mac app named FlunkeyFox facilitates using DEVONthink Pro (Office title: Learn more about DEVONthink Pro) together with Microsoft Word. (more)
Our good friends from Fournova in Stuttgart, Germany, have released the brand new version 2.0 of their Git client Tower. We use Tower ourselves for our code repositories and I’ve been beta-testing Tower 2 for a couple of weeks now. If you’re a developer you should definitely check it out.
Just in case you’re a developer like us and you still have troubles getting acquainted with the fabulous Git version control system: The Fournova people — good friends of us — have set up a great introduction to Git including learning ebooks, videos, and online trainings. Click here to check it out.
Out-of-the-box DEVONthink displays and searches many file formats including PDF or Office documents. For files it doesn’t understand it uses Quick Look and Spotlight to make their proprietary content usable. With these two free plugins you can add the .epub file format to your system. As soon as you’ve installed the plugins, DEVONthink shows at least book covers, finds books by their content, and converts them to plain text. (more)
Backups are something that every computer user is supposed to do but nobody really enjoys doing it. Apple’s Time Machine makes it a lot easier, at least when you have a second hard disk or a Time Capsule. However, if you’re like me and you don’t want to clutter your desk with yet another piece of hardware you might like Haystack Software’s Arq. (more)
If you’re often “printing” web pages as PDF to your DEVONthink database, you might enjoy the following hack: The little bookmarklet switches a web page shown in your web browser (definitely works with Safari and Firefox) to design mode, making it possible to edit it on the fly before printing. Edit as you like, the changes are, of course, not saved to the originating web server. Don’t worry, reloading the page brings it back in all its beauty. (more)
Keyboard Maestro allows you to automate things in almost any Mac app and assign it a shortcut. Even cooler is that when you assign the same shortcut to multiple macros Keyboard Maestro shows a head-up display with a list of all macros with this shortcut for you to choose from. (more)