With Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard Apple broke scan support not only for DEVONthink Pro Office but for all third-party applications using the Image Capture framework. We have been working with Apple on the issue but still to no avail. We have now signed an agreement with the Berlin based scan software maker ExactCode and behind the scenes we’re both working hard to get the scan support in DEVONthink Pro Office back on-line again. Stay tuned!

We have just posted updated for all editions of DEVONthink as well as for DEVONnote. The new releases include a number of bug fixes, bring compatibility to the latest version of the Fujitsu ScanSnap Manager, and come with all the scripts on board that I have already published here a while ago. Read more on our news page.

Global warming and climate change affect all of us. If you don’t just want to wait for it to happen, you can at least show that you care:

Created to take a stand against the greatest threat our planet has ever faced, Earth Hour uses the simple action of turning off the lights for one hour to deliver a powerful message about the need for action on global warming. This simple act has captured the hearts and minds of people all over the world. As a result, at 8pm on the 29 March, 2008 millions of people in some of the world’s major capital cities, including Copenhagen, Toronto, Chicago, Melbourne, Brisbane, Tel Aviv and Manila will unite and switch off for Earth Hour. (mehr)

After two days of hard HTML and CSS work, our new forum software is now online.The new version 3.0 of phpBB does not only add many useful features for both users and administrators but is hopefully also a bit more spam resistant than the earlier versions. Please note that we have also moved the forum’s address so if you had bookmarked the board’s direct address or suscribed to its RSS feed you should update your links now.

Journalists and bloggers: Don’t miss our updated Press Center. I have added a self-service option for our PR distribution list so that you can subscribe or unsubscribe to our press releases yourself now. A new form makes it easier for you to request not-for-resale licenses for your publication. And, of course, you will find all our recent and older press releases here as well as materials such as box shots, screenshot packages, and our company logo in print-ready resolution.

For me as a studied librarian yesterdays announcement made by the Brockhaus publishers was the news of the day: The Brockhaus, Germany’s best-known encyclopedia, will no longer be published on paper but go online only. In addition, the new business model will be solely based on advertising. This move ends the over 200 year old Brockhaus old tradition of a printed high-end encyclopedia — but may also be solution to counter the decreasing sales of the printed edition. As Brockhaus directly competes with the Wikipedia, the differentiating factor needs to be quality and reliabilty, which will be tough though. (mehr)

If you are, like me, working almost ten hours a day with your Mac, you’re repeating the same hand movements over and over again. If you’re susceptible to RSI (repetitive strain injury; more accessible info here) try the litte utility AntiRSI.

Last week I came across an interesting backup and archival solution: JungleDisk. It uses Amazon’s S3 storage and makes it available as a local WebDAV disk. You can use it to make regular or incremental backups, or use it for longer-time archival, e.g., of your documents. And if you’re worried about your privacy: JungleDisk encrypts not only the transmission but also the files before uploading. The main difference compared to other online storage services is, however, that Amazon S3 charges not for a fixed storage size but per GB of used space and per GB transferred. Rates are as low as 15 US cents per GB and month. The ‘disk’ is never limited to a certain selected size. Check it out. (mehr)

Brenda of Changing Tides talks about how she is using del.icio.us for bookmark management and how DEVONthink Pro helps her too. Whether one likes online bookmark management services such as del.icio.us including the de-facto publishing of one’s own web surfing profile, or not, it is a perfect method to have all bookmarks available at all times, in all browsers, wherever you go. (mehr)

Annard Brouwer, our Maltese developer, was recently interviewed by Sims, who also lives in Malta and blogs about living and working on the mediterranean island. He also asks Annard about what it is like working for DEVONtechnologies. (Unfortunately Sims’ website is no longer online.)