Devonian Times Masthead

The DEVONtechnologies Blog

DEVONthink 3.0 is Officially Here

September 12, 2019 — Eric Böhnisch-Volkmann

End of April we released the first public beta of DEVONthink 3. Since then we published seven betas and received a lot of exciting feedback (as well as many less exciting bug reports). We used the time to iron out many of the unevennesses that accompany every major product upgrade and to fix the issues that you and we encountered.

Today we finally released DEVONthink 3.0 officially.

For the Impatient

User Interface

As the most obvious change, DEVONthink 3 brings a completely overhauled single-window interface including support for dark mode. The extended sidebar gives you access to your databases, favorites, smart groups, smart rules, and filters as well as to a new reading list, import options, and more. Inspectors present metadata about documents and groups, offer AI assistance, and let you set reminders or search within the document.

Capturing text, audio, and voice notes, screenshots, or web clippings becomes much easier with the redesigned Sorter. More subtle are the numerous changes to the search engine which now better supports Asian languages, indexes also PDF and RTF attachments, and highlights search hits more precisely. Its enhanced search language allow you to use prefixes to run complex searches without touching the mouse. Focus the displayed items on tags, dates, marks, or geolocation using filters.

Office & Teamwork

If you’re working in an office environment DEVONthink 3 brings you a new 64-bit optimized OCR engine that supports multiple CPU cores, Asian languages, barcode detection, and multiple output formats. Add custom imprints to images and PDFs including placeholder text and Bates numbering.

The rewritten web interface gives your coworkers or clients access to your databases even when they’re not using a Mac. User accounts and per-database permissions let you define what web visitors see and can do. TLS support makes sure all connections are encrypted.

Other improvements include geolocation metadata, ratings, and custom, typed metadata that you can add to all documents and, of course, search. When importing documents, you can let DEVONthink convert metadata to tags, and tag images automatically using machine learning.

Markdown and HTML documents can be edited side-by-side with a rendered preview, sheets with tabular data support specific data types and have a form view. Formatting and editing bars keep frequently used tools at hand and adding cross-references has become more versatile with improved WikiLinking and support for the square bracked syntax. DEVONthink 3 now also supports EPUB ebooks and, useful for research, collects highlighted search hits and metadata for you into summary documents.

Automation

Last but not least, we have massively extended DEVONthink’s automation options for version 3. Smart rules perform actions based on events and search queries, where events can be anything from a scheduled time to the arrival of a newly imported document. You can also attach one-time or repeating reminders to any document. They support several alarm options including running scripts. Insert dynamic data in templates, imprints, or smart rules without requiring any programming skills.

Of course, DEVONthink 3 brings also many under-the-hood enhancements. To name just a few: better file system integration for indexed files, better background processing, e.g. for email archiving, indexing, or generating thumbnails, and an improved overall performance.

Editions & Download

DEVONthink 3 is available in three editions for different needs and budgets: regular, Pro, and Server. We have sent DEVONthink Personal and DEVONnote into well-deserved retirement. Click here to learn more about the new product lineup.

The ebook Arbeitsbuch DEVONthink (in German language) has been already updated for DEVONthink 3, a new version of the Take Control of DEVONthink ebook is the works and will become available in due course. In addition, the latter will be free for all customers.

Download DEVONthink 3 for free from our website. It can be used for 30 days or 150 hours of runtime, whichever is later, before it requires a valid license code for one of the three editions. It then adjust its feature set according to the entered license.

If you purchased DEVONthink or DEVONnote 2 on or after February 1st, 2019, you’ll receive version 3 free of cost or discounted, depending on the purchased edition. You can check your eligibility in your customer account.