More than two years ago I wrote about a little menulet that I really like: Spirited Away. It automatically hides applications that you haven’t used in the last minute and so keeps your desktop decluttered. Unfortunately it’s already a bit dated. Nial Giacomelli to the rescue! He has written Houdini which also hides unused apps but, despite his company name Ugly Apps, comes with a much more elegant user interface and the ability to set the individual hiding intervals for each app....

If you are a user of the popular productivity application Alfred you might like this workflow created by our forum user danielsh. You can navigate your databases or create new notes with just a few keystrokes.  Here’s what the author says about it: With Alfred’s new feedback system for workflows, you can navigate through your databases and find the group you’re looking for, then enter a space and start typing your note. If it’s much in demand, I’ll add things like...

Recently we had to pull the freeware application Grid from the App Store. Grid allows you to position windows using your keyboard and an on-screen grid. Unfortunately Apple’s strict sandboxing rules no longer allow third-party apps access to e.g. the Accessibility kit which Grid needs to move the windows. Grid’s author, Rob Rix, has now made the app open-source and published it to GitHub. Feel free to download the source code and participate in its development.

If you so scientific research it is likely that you often take reading notes and, maybe, you are also using a bibliography manager such as EndNote. Forum user Nicolae Turcan has created a smart template to facilitate this. Install it from DEVONthink’s or DEVONnote’s Support Assistant (open it from the Help menu and follow the link at the bottom to the extras page). Thank you, Nicolae!

What method to use for capturing thoughts is a highly subjective subject: some write outlines, some just a simple text, and some prefer mind maps. DEVONthink supports text and very simple outlines (e.g. using rich text lists), but not (yet) mind maps. Some options are: - MyThoughts - MindNode Pro - NovaMind Pro - Mindcad Incubator - Inspiration Some of these apps come either with a Quick Look plugin that allows DEVONthink to preview them when you add them to...

John Gruber’s Markdown is a popular way to write text in a simple text editor and have it formatted nicely. You can do this with HTML, too, but Markdown uses simple formatting marks that also look good when you view it without a Markdown renderer. If you work with Markdown in DEVONthink Brett Terpstra’s app Marked (available on the Mac App Store) make it even better: It allows to edit Markdown-styled text with a live preview. With Marked installed right-click...

If you are using your iPad a lot and want to save any web page to PDF and save it to DEVONthink To Go, you might want to have a look at Save2PDF. A tip from our forum user whshep: With Save2PDF, I can get most of that work done without leaving the iPad. I choose “Print” in Mobile Safari, which saves the web page as a PDF and opens it in Save2PDF. I can then rename it (if necessary),...

Just a quick note that Ammonite has been updated to version 1.6. The new version can replicate results to a group in DEVONthink, shows the number of results in the window title, and can keep the search string when removing tags from the query. Ammonite is a stand-alone HUD (head-up display) giving quick access to the contents of your DEVONthink databases from any other application. Note: DEVONtechnologies has no affiliation with soma-zone.  

A while ago we worked with Take Control Ebooks to bring you Take Control of Getting Started with DEVONthink 2 as an addition to our built-in documentation. We asked Joe Kissell to write the ebook as he is not only an avid DEVONthink user but also a great tech writer who knows how to explain things to non-techie people. Now Take Control Ebooks have published a new book by Joe Kissell: Take Control of Your Paperless Office. Here’s what the publishers...

Just a quick note that Ammonite 1.5b1 adds searching by date, searching by file type, and the possibility to use complex queries. Ammonite is a stand-alone HUD (head-up display) giving quick access to the contents of your databases from any other application. Note: DEVONtechnologies has no affiliation with soma-zone.