Press Release
DEVONthink 3.0 Beta 4
Coeur d’Alene, Idaho — DEVONtechnologies today releases the third beta of DEVONthink 3.0 for Mac with another wave of improvements and fixes. It improves the annotation workflow, adds more additional information to summarized highlights, and enhances the reading list. This beta also improves smart rules and placeholders, DEVONthink’s premier place for automation. Many details changes to the user interface remove friction across all workflows from renaming items in the sidebar to reordering columns in the inspectors and new contextual menu commands. Beta 3 also brings many cosmetic improvements and bug fixes.
DEVONthink is DEVONtechnologies’ document and information management solution. It supports a large variety of file formats and stores them in a database enhanced by artificial intelligence (AI). Many document formats can be directly viewed, edited, and annotated. A powerful search language finds documents in an instant, smart groups keep them always at hand.
Sophisticated organization tools, AI-based techniques that handle even the largest collections, and numerous integration options make DEVONthink the work environment of choice for researchers, lawyers, and educators. Smart rules, flexible reminders, and deep AppleScript support allow automating even complex repeating tasks. And with its fast, reliable, and secure synchronization users keep their data available on all their Macs. DEVONthink To Go for iPad and iPhone completes the DEVONthink ecosystem.
- Keep your data together in one place
- Scan your paper, archive your email
- Let artificial intelligence help you organize your data
- Automate tasks with smart rules and reminders
- Sync your data to all your devices, fast and secure
- Share your data with anyone, whether they use Mac or PC
New in DEVONthink 3.0 Beta 3
The third public beta of DEVONthink 3 brings another wave of additions, enhancements, and fixes.
A new command for the Annotations & Reminders inspector inserts selected text including a back link into the annotation as a quote. Documents on the reading list can be comfortably moved to the trash after reading. Smart rules, DEVONthink’s premier new place for automation, can now be created from smart groups. New placeholders insert hours, minutes, or the clipboard contents.
The new version of DEVONthink 3 lets users rename groups and other items in the Navigate sidebar without using the contextual menu. Other contextual menus it extends with convenient shortcuts for often-used commands. Encrypted PDFs, databases, and sync stores show an icon to indicate their encryption status.
Beta 3 also improves the ways users create global and local smart groups. It also allows reordering of the columns in two inspectors, and renames some commands for clarity. The Editing and Navigate sidebars get better Accessibility support. Wider margins in editable text views such as for plain text or Markdown documents, improve legibility. Working with sheets of tabular data becomes easier, too, especially when navigating large tables and when switching between form and table views.
And finally, DEVONthink 3.0 beta 3 brings many fixes and cosmetic changes, e.g., for the Sorter, dark mode, and more. It further improves its already extensive AppleScript support, the reliability of the built-in web server, and the overall performance and stabilty.
New in DEVONthink 3.0
The long-awaited third DEVONthink generation debuts, quite literally, hundreds of new features and improvements.
As the most obvious change, DEVONthink 3.0 brings a completely overhauled user interface including support for macOS Mojave’s dark mode. It follows a modern single-window design that integrates many elements that used to appear in separate windows.
An extended sidebar gives access to 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 the user set reminders or search within the document.
DEVONthink 3 is the most feature-rich upgrade we have ever published. For the new DEVONthink generation we revisited every aspect of the app, from the user interface to search, from the office functionality to automation. And we added what we found missing.
Eric Böhnisch-Volkmann, President of DEVONtechnologies
Capturing text, audio, and voice notes, screenshots, or web clippings becomes much easier with the redesigned Sorter. It also allows finding groups in all open databases for adding files or data from other apps via drag-and-drop. The Sorter is available as a menu bar extension or a tab docked to the side of the screen.
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 allows prefixes for mouse-less specific searching, and filters quickly focus the displayed items on tags, dates, marks, or geolocation.
For the office environment DEVONthink 3 brings a new 64-bit optimized OCR engine that supports multiple CPU cores, Asian languages, barcode detection, and multiple output formats. It’s now possible to add custom imprints to images and PDFs including placeholder text and Bates numbering.
The rewritten web interface gives coworkers or clients access to the document databases even when they’re not using a Mac. User accounts and per-database permissions give fine-grained control over 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 can be added to all documents and that is, of course, searchable. When importing documents metadata can be converted to tags, and images can be automatically tagged 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 into summary documents.
Last but not least, DEVONthink 3 massively extends its automation options. 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. Users can also attach one-time or repeating reminders to any document. They support several alarm options including running scripts. Placeholders insert dynamic data in templates, imprints, or smart rules without requiring any programming skills.
We have always believed in enabling the computer to free up the user’s time for what’s really important. DEVONthink 3 holds true to this tradition with new powerful but easy to use automation tools for every workflow. If it can’t be automated with DEVONthink 3 then it probably can’t be automated.
Eric Böhnisch-Volkmann, President of DEVONtechnologies
Of course, DEVONthink 3 brings a large number of 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.
DEVONthink 3 is available in three editions for different needs and budgets: Standard, Pro, and Server.
System requirements
- OS X El Capitan or later
Availability and Pricing
DEVONthink 3 can be downloaded for free from the DEVONtechnologies website. The public beta does not require a valid license key but to use email archiving and text recognition beyond the trial limits it needs to be properly licensed. After the public beta phase DEVONthink 3 will require a license key for one of the three available editions which can be purchased starting today:
- DEVONthink 3: US $99
- DEVONthink Pro 3: US $199
- DEVONthink Server 3: US $499
DEVONthink 3 is currently not available in the App Store but will become so after the public beta phase. The former DEVONthink Personal and DEVONnote editions have been retired.
More information
Customers find more information about our apps on the DEVONtechnologies website. Eric Boehnisch-Volkmann also posts news, opinions, previews, and public betas in the company blog Devonian Times.
Links:
About DEVONtechnologies:
DEVONtechnologies LLC creates end-user and server applications for the Mac and iOS platforms that enhance productivity, organization, and user experience with unique artificial intelligence technology. All applications are focused on both ease of use and satisfying the needs of even the most savvy users. The underlying DEVONtechnology is a flexible and versatile foundation that can be used for a large range of purposes from databases, data mining, and information retrieval to human-computer interfaces.
DEVONtechnologies LLC was founded 2002 and incorporated 2004, and is today headquartered in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, USA.
All Material and Software © Copyright 2019 DEVONtechnologies LLC. All Rights Reserved. Apple, the Apple logo, Macintosh and macOS are registered trademarks of Apple Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries. Other trademarks and registered trademarks may be the property of their respective owners.