In episode 549 of their podcast Mac Geek Gab John F. Braun and Dave Hamilton pull out their favorite utilities and services and present them to you in a compact 1 hour 19 minute podcast. Ideal for your drive home in pre-weekend traffic. Around minute 7:31 they also mention our free find-file utility EasyFind. (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)

XMenu’s user-defined menu allows you to build you very own menu extra menu. You just have to add your own documents, apps, or scripts to its Custom folder. In XMenu’s Preferences first check the User-Defined option to make the menu appear. Right-click this menu, which appears with a gear icon, to quickly show its folder. It is always named Custom. Add and remove files to or from this folder to customize the menu’s content to your needs. (more)

We have already updated DEVONthink and DEVONagent with the necessary adjustments for OS X Yosemite. Today we’ve released DEVONsphere Express 1.8 as well as new versions of PhotoStickies and XMenu. DEVONsphere 1.8 adds support for Finder and Open Meta tags, Scapple files, and diagnostic reports. It also uses Open Graph properties of HTML pages and web pages to provide more accurate results. On OS X Mavericks and later version 1.8 indexes email messages again. The update also reduces DEVONsphere Express’ CPU usage and improves its performance and reliability. (more)

DEVONthink is the document and information manager for the Mac. Version 2.7.7 recognizes Apple’s new and shiny Swift source code files, retains more metadata than before when you export documents, and prefills the Save panel with tags for you. Many more small interface improvements make using the app easier. (more)

Last week we’ve released updates for our popular freeware services WordService and CalcService. Today Apple has approved them for the App Store, too. Now you have the choice whether you’d like to install them directly from our download page or from the App Store.

DEVONagent helps you find whatever you’re looking for using the search engines of choice. Version 3.8.1 gives you even more accurate results, skips Amazon results, and comes with updated MacUpdate plugin and Twitter Accounts scanner. In addition, DEVONagent Pro 3.8.1 executes menu scripts in the background now. So they no longer interrupt your important research work. The update fixes an incompatibility to DEVONthink 2.7.6, too. (more)

As the older among you may already know I cannot resist to sometimes post a nice comment we’ve received from a happy user. Last week the following message reached us:

Doing some work on an SMB server and we are having such difficulty finding anything. We tried bridge, even spotlighting the entire server. This is a Fortune 500 company and me and my boss gave up on IT and started using EasyFind. Just wanted to share my thanks and praise. We have started just saying, “Squirrel It” for short. Personally I would make a mini site off of “Squirrel It” but that’s just me. Thanks for your hard work. (more)

If you find yourself needing to mount remote volumes fairly often, here’s handy way to do it from XMenu’s User-Defined menu instead of littering your Desktop with aliases.

First things first… in XMenu’s Preferences, you’ll need the User-Defined menu On. Also, you’ll need to mount a remote volume or machine and ideally be showing drive icons on your desktop. (more)

Sometimes writing AppleScripts is monotonous. You end up typing the same thing over and over again. To this end we can buy a snippet organizer or we could use XMenu to assist. Here are two ideas to speed things up: … (more)