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.

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 a quick note that we’re back from the Christmas holidays. A Happy New Year and a great start into 2009 to everyone!

All of us here at DEVONtechnologies wish you and your family a pleasant and peaceful Christmas time. May it be a time of peace and reflection for all of you, wherever in the world you are, whatever religion you believe in, and whatever culture you are part of. (mehr)

I already told you a number of times that we’re currently focused fully on getting version 2.0 ready for the public beta phase. So DEVONthink, DEVONthink, is all we’re thinking about. Need a proof? This is what accidently created itself (no kidding!) lately when I was making pancakes. I’m considering this a good omen. (mehr)

If you happen to celebrate All Hallows’ Eve in your place in the world, we all wish you a happy and scary Halloween!

PS: If it’s a bit quiet here on the blog — we’re all busy to get DEVONthink 2.0 ready for beta :-)

It’s been a while since my last update on the development status of DEVONthink 2.0. We have continued to work on it silently but full steam ahead. We’re now very close to reaching the internal beta phase so I have posted a quick update to the development status thread in our announcement board.

As I had posted here before my vacation, we were not just visiting Chicago, IL, and the wonderful Lake Michigan in the last three weeks, but we also invaded Bill DeVille’s log cabin. We spend a wonderful and relaxing week with literally tons of great barbecue. Staying miles away from any civilization somewhere the Indiana forest has … challenges to it … but we mastered. And, I finally found out why we only get good marks for our customer support and so few complaints: See what I spotted on Bill’s mantelpiece. (mehr)

Our forum user Maak (thank you!) has posted a picture in our user forum that I just had to publish here. Maybe we should try to get this for our shop? :-)

The Fossil Washbasin Will Hypnotize You Into Being Late For Work.