In their excellent podcast Mac Power Users, Katie Floyd and David Sparks talk about everything that helps you to become a true Mac power user. In episode 251 they are joined by Gabe Weatherhead to spend an information-packed hour purely on DEVONthink. Gabe is a long-time DEVONthink user and has also done a great a series of blog posts on our software. Thank you all three for this great show! (more)

DEVONthink allows you to get a URL for any document or group stored in your databases. Select the item, then choose Edit > Copy Item Link. Then paste this link into any other suitable application, e.g. the URL field of an appointment in Calendar, a website field in Contacts, or the notes field of an OmniFocus task. (more)

In episode 128 of Brett Terpstra’s podcast Systematic, Joel Anderson, research lecturer in Philosophy at Utrecht in the Netherlands, joins Brett to talk about tagging:

It’s a nerdy subject that a lot of non-nerds are asking about these days, and one that I personally find fascinating. I hope you’ll enjoy hearing two people who’ve dedicated time and research to the topic debate the major benefits and pitfalls of tag-based systems!” … (more)

Recently we have posted a tip abouthow to quickly create a table of contents). However, sometimes it’s necessary to update a table of contents manually. This short screen movie shows how it works. (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)

DEVONthink and DEVONnote users tend to collect and organize excessively. This leads, inevitably, to databases with large amounts of items. A table of contents helps you stay ahead of the ever-growing pile. Select the documents for which you want to create a table of contents, then choose Data > Create Table of Contents. The application builds a nicely arranged rich text for you with links to all the other documents. (more)

Here’s a quick tip that is simple, but probably not so obvious. When you select Tools > Search or press Command-Shift-F in DEVONthink, it brings up the powerful Search window. Use the menu command or press the shortcut again and DEVONthink will open another search window. You can keep the results of one search while you start another, and another, … You can keep as many search windows open as you can mentally manage.

DEVONthink Pro (Office) lets you save files directly to the database using the watched Inbox folder. This folder is deeply buried in your Library folder but added to the Finder sidebar for easy access. It also appears in Open and Save dialog windows. (more)

When importing email, Apple Mail is going to provide the best performance as it supports native plugins. Other email applications require the use of Applescript to interact with DEVONthink and we can’t guarantee the performance, especially with large mailboxes. But if your email client supports an export to the UNIX .mbox format you can drag the exported .mbox file to the DEVONthink Pro Office dock icon to scan it for messages. (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)