DEVONthink 4.0 Public Beta

My first job after graduation was at Tektronix. Everyone there in engineering used Tektronix Oscilloscopes, which had extensive user manuals. However none of our oscilloscopes came with them. Was this some internal cost cutting move? No, they just expected everyone to be so familiar that they wouldn’t need the user manuals. This wasn’t a good assumption with a growing part of the company developing products other than oscilloscopes.

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You are a better man than me! :grin:

I was sad to read this and can’t help but think there was some glitch in the ticket system in those instances you mention. I have great trust in DEVONtech’s support, and to verify that this trust is well-founded, I just logged into my support accounts, where I found 72 tickets over the past 9 years. I re-read a dozen or so, and each one ended positively, with a kind response from Jim or Eric or Christian or Alan, even once from the legendary Bill DeVille, always either helping me solve my issue, or telling me it’s already been fixed and will be included in the next update. Plenty of my suggestions (usually little things) have been incorporated or at least given fair consideration. The forums are great too. I trust their team, and think they take good care of their users. This is a big reason why I’ll very likely buy version 4 once it’s out of beta.

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@dgbeecher I still have faith in the Product DEVONthink. I have already upgraded to version 4 pre release. But that doees not stop me from losing faith in their support. I have more faith in the community support from this forum. Lot of helpful people here.

To be honest my issue was answered by @cornchip here in this forum.

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Forgive me: I haven’t read through all 145 posts or anything, and I haven’t used Devonthink.

One area of interest for me is web archive. Currently, I maintain a subscription to Pinboard for this, but Pinboard is not my favourite service. Does DT make it easy to download web pages for offline use later? How does it save those files?

I have googled this, but I haven’t found a satisfying answer anywhere. Sorry if it’s in an obvious place that I’ve missed. It seems DT might be great for PDFs, but I don’t have a lot of PDFs to save as reference materials. Just lots of websites.

Here’s a screenshot of the dialogue box that pops up when you clip something to Devonthink using the Safari extension. As you can see, it will save the page in a number of formats. You also have the option of naming the file yourself and adding a note.

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PS to my earlier post: Do you use Obsidian? Obsidian now has an excellent web clipper that will save web pages as markdown files with active links. Within Obsidian you also have the option to download the images on page so they will be available in the future should the web page itself disappear. If you don’t want or need all of Devonthink’s functionality, but would like to store web page content for future use in files that are transparently available in Finder, this might be an option for you.

I really like GoodLinks, but have started using Obsidian more and more as the place to store web content that I suspect I’ll need to access in the future. If need be, I can convert the markdown file into any number of formats using a tool like Marked 2. Since I’ve indexed my Obsidian vaults in Devonthink, I can access them there as well.

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And I’m doing exactly what @krocnyc is doing in Obsidian with Bear. There’s one little oddity about Bear that I’ve seen: there are multiple webpage options. One of them has the tracking (tracking is visible by a bunch of extra numbers after the “?” in the website address) and the other one doesn’t. I pick the option that doesn’t have the tracking.

Going back to DevonThink, I’ve always wondered what the format of “formatted note” is.

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It’s HTML under-the-hood.

I have used—and loved—Bear but ultimately had to abandon it because 1) I am old and think in folders rather than tags and 2) I’d rather not tuck my notes away in an app’s database. But those two things aside, it’s a beautiful app.

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It does, but if you’re like me the choices will give you a headache at first.

  • Single page PDF is actually a pretty good way to save a site if the content is most important.
  • Webarchive is probably best if you want images and CSS saved locally and to re-open the site to see how it looks. It doesn’t save offline JS/current state.
  • Markdown works well if you just want some of the text and you’re going to pare down/summarize later.
  • If you want to archive a whole site, DT has built in wget with options and will crawl/download everything (similar crawler to pinboard’s.) It won’t convert asset links to local like webarchive.

An option to automatically save in multiple formats would be nice. I can sort it out later if space becomes an issue. This is how Archivebox works.

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@snelly In addition to a great web clipper, DT will automatically OCR PDFs when you import them, and DT has a fantastic file conversation feature.

Thank You - 20 chars

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It’s kinda too bad the JS doesn’t get saved. Like, the way it’s listed here (through no fault of your own) implies that this is an asterisk to a bullet point, but try disabling javascript in your browser and see how it goes. Half the images are gone!

Anyway. Kind of a bummer. PDF sounds like the way to go, but that’s not really what I want to keep. I want to basically wget and store the index file, the CSS, and JS.

Use wget ant put output in DEVONthink if that scratches your itch.

It does wget all front-end assets and images; it just doesn’t rewrite the html to reference the local copies like you might want. At least, I haven’t seen the option to do this. And it doesn’t snapshot the current state/UI of JS execution. Singlefile is the most reliable method I’ve found for that.

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Yeah, this might be the way to go for me if I decide to start archiving all this stuff more seriously. For whatever reason, I’m not sure I would have thought to do this.

@cornchip hadn’t heard of Singlefile before. Very neat! Good to know. Thanks!

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I hope you become addicted to SingleFile so you can join me in periodically annoying @DEVONtech_Jim about adding the format to DEVONthink. :slight_smile:

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