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. (mehr)

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. (mehr)

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.

Chad Black wrote a series of articles in his blog about DEVONthink and other Mac applications for history and humanities research.

Devonthink’s classification, search, and AI infrastructure is a step in the right direction. For people who work mostly with the every-growing mass of information available online, the ability to import, auto-classify, and connect disparate pieces of info is very cool, particularly as the internal structure of your database becomes increasingly tight and predictable. (mehr)

After two weeks without OCR, we have now finished our workarounds that circumvent the PDF bug in the ABBYY engine and just released public beta 3 of all editions of DEVONthink as well as of DEVONnote. (mehr)

We have finished the main work on the by-pass circumventing the bugs in the ABBYY OCR engine that kept us from releasing it to the public two weeks ago. We have just posted a beta to our beta tester group and are now preparing to release a new public beta as soon as we have received enough hopefully positive reports from our beta testers.

Matthew Bookspan of TheAppleBlog has just published a comparison between DEVONthink Pro Office and Evernote Premium. Matthew did a great job working out the differences between the offerings and comes to this conclusion: … (mehr)

Just a quick update on our progress on the OCR side. While ABBYY was unable to reproduce the bug that affects the conversion of a multi-page PDF into separate images, we have now written a by-pass that does this before feeding the data into the OCR engine. This has also other advantages, e.g. the ability to run OCR also on very large documents without running into memory problems. We are now writing the new thread handling that we need for this workaround and hope to begin internal testing tonight or tomorrow morning. (mehr)

Last Friday we had to release DEVONthink Pro Office 2.0 public beta 2 without an embedded OCR engine – which is truly annoying for you and us.

Starting with version 2.0 of DEVONthink Pro Office we are moving from the IRIS engine to the ABBYY FineReader engine which produces way smaller PDFs, is more accurate, and much smarter to embed into our application. Where the IRIS engine was an external program remotely controlled by DEVONthink, the engine provided by ABBYY is a true framework that we can directly embed and control. You will see this soon in a much improved ‘OCR Activity’ panel and no other OCR windows popping up for every page. (mehr)

Just in time we have released the second public beta of DEVONthink (and DEVONnote). This beta comes with many enhancements, e.g. simple PDF editing abilities (splitting files, merging files, copy/paste for PDF pages), a new RSS preferences panel, and a more responsive web interface that now also displays QuickLook previews if possible. In addition, DEVONthink Pro Office nearly also came with a brand new OCR engine but technical difficulties with embedding the engine properly forced us to delay this feature but we will deliver it as soon as we and ABBYY are able to find the problem. Read more about the update on our news page. (mehr)