The Devonian Age Continues -- Hard on the heels of last week's review of DEVONthink 1.8 comes version 1.8.1, offering the capability to index a document on disk without also importing it into the database; this meets my criticisms that the database is unnecessarily large and that deleting an original document to save disk space risks losing the data. Also, DEVONthink now displays the contents of linked files if the format allows (e.g. text, RTF, image); unfortunately this removes a feature I liked (you could edit the database "text" of a linked file), and searching in comments is broken, so this is actually a step backwards in my view. It's a 2.7 MB download and is a free update for registered users.

<http://db.tidbits.com/article/07575>
<http://www.devon-technologies.com/products/ devonthink/editions.php>
<http://www.devon-technologies.com/download.php>

At the same time, DEVONtechnologies introduced DEVONthink's "little brother," DEVONnote. It is limited to the basic two-pane view of the database, with a list of documents in one pane and the contents of the current document in the other. It lacks display of images and PDF files; however, it still functions as a text and RTF editor (and images can be included within an RTF document), it can include links to files on disk, and it can display Web pages. DEVONnote lacks DEVONthink's new capability to index without importing, and the advanced search tools such as finding similar search terms, displaying word lists, and supplying keyword lists. But it still has DEVONthink's extremely fast basic searching, along with searching for similar documents and classifying based on similarity of grouped documents. It could be a bargain at $15 until the end of April ($20 after that). [MAN]

<http://www.devon-technologies.com/products/ devonnote.php>