Our friends over at TidBITS, one of the longest-running Internet publications, have set up a new membership program to support their excellent news service. By joining as a member you do not only support the editors but you also get access to some cool benefits like an ad-free view on the website, a full-text RSS feed, early access to new articles, and great discounts on all Take Control ebooks and Mac software like LaunchBar, 1Password, and … DEVONthink, DEVONagent Pro, and DEVONnote. Visit TidBITS, become a member, and save 25 percent on your apps!

Cool tip from one of our users: the US $1.99 app TurboScan turns your iPhone into a mobile scanner. Using the Open in… mechanism you can even send the created PDFs to DEVONthink To Go.

Last week we explained why one could want to exclude groups or even whole databases from tagging in DEVONthink or DEVONnote. In addition both groups and documents can be individually excluded from classification, see-also, and search. Nice, but why would you do such a thing? (mehr)

DEVONthink and DEVONnote treat groups and tags, basically, the same but display them different. That means that if Exclude Groups from Tagging is unchecked in a database’s properties, the group(s) in which an item is filed also appear as tag(s) attached to it. When assigning tags to an item other groups are proposed as tags while you’re typing. If you like this behavior you can quickly file a document in multiple groups and later find them either by their tags or in the respective groups representing the tags. (mehr)

The first Advent is approaching, here in Germany the first Christmas markets have already opened, and people are decorating their homes for Christmas with hundreds of beautiful and warm lights.Time to remind ourselves that we should be grateful for all the good things that happened to us in the past year. So wherever you are in the world, I wish you and your family a wonderful Thanksgiving week. Enjoy the upcoming Christmas season!

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. (mehr)

Mac blogger Macdrifter recently started a mini series of postings about how writers work and which tools they use. He started with blogger and multimedia designer Brett Terpstra. For his research Brett uses DEVONagent Pro and DEVONagent Express. (mehr)

While tags and groups are technically the same, their different way of presentation can be more flexible, especially in large DEVONthink knowledge collection spreading out in many directions. Using the tags bar (which you show and hide with View > Show/Hide Tags) you quickly add single tags to documents or remove them. Automatic completion makes adding already known tags easy. (mehr)

Just in time for the Christmas holidays in many parts of the world we have released a number of maintenance updates for all editions of DEVONthink, DEVONagent, and DEVONnote.

Download the apps from our download page. To directly update your copy open the app and choose Check for Update in the app’s application menu (the one labeled with the application’s name).

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. (mehr)