Any known issues with macOs Sierra und DTPO?

We do not advocate doing this. For your data’s safety, we strongly suggest putting your databases in a folder in the root of your User Account, say ~/Databases or on an external drive, if space is limited.

PS…
And you want to talk about problems for developers?
dropbox.com/help/9269
and…
lifehacker.com/dropbox-isnt-play … 1786869080

Also, from Omni Group’s staff:

Actually, the issues are quite major in my case. I imported PDFs today via a folder action “import and delete” and since then DEVONthink crashed every time I try to click on one of those PDFs and some older PDFs as well. The PDFs are downloads from a website and are most likely not scans. Storing downloaded PDFs is one of my most vital use cases of DEVONthink and without it the software is nearly useless for me.

While waiting for some kind of bug fix, I will be patient and use DTTG instead, which at least works okay on one of my iOS devices.

BTW, my database ist located in the documents folder, but I do not have activated iCloud sync at any time.

Then I recommend that when the app creates a new database, the default location should not be ~/Documents.

Luckily I remembered the problems with syncing Dropbox before, so with Sierra, I have moved my databases out of the DevonThink default ~/Documents folder. But I am guessing this will catch a lot of users by surprise.

Can I request some clarity on the advice offered here please? Specifically the recommendation that databases should be put in a folder in the root of the user’s profile. DT’s own tutorial (“Database set-up”, published 15 April 2011) suggests the Documents folder as the location for databases.
Is this advice now obsolete for macOS Sierra, or is this only the case where the user enables syncing Desktop and Documents to iCloud? If I understand correctly it is only recommended in the latter instance. From posts on this forum, it seems that updating to Sierra turns this feature on automatically: If that is the case, what is the advice? I am in no rush to update, particularly in light of the Scansnap issue, but would appreciate some guidance from Devontech as to their recommended approach.

Bearing in mind the OS landscape was different in 2011, yes I would say that advice could be considered obsolete. I would suggest creating a folder for your databases in the root of your User Account instead of Documents. This way they would be in a safe place should you decide to turn on the disk management feature of Sierra, or if the next macOS release they decide it’s not a Users’ choice to make.

(And yes, if they decide to sync all our data without our choice, (1) we’ll have some more work to do, and (2) I will stop using Macs :smiley: )

Also … would it be okay to move my DevonThink databases to my home folder, instead of the root directory?

Yes, that’s what we’re suggesting: "in the root of your User Account". That’s the same as your Home folder. Sorry about the confusion.

Just to add in case it was not logged in PDF problems;

the functionality for cycling through the highlighted search terms in a PDF is also broken. Works ok in other documents, but greyed out in the PDF’s.

(I.e. the back / forward arrows In the tool bar above the quicklook view window).

Really hope this can be fixed as it is a key function for us…

Version 2.9.5 will fix this.

And what about the PDF preview&options?
2.9.5 as well or “some time later”?

Did you test DTPO with the Sierra beta?

Version 2.9.5 will fix most issues of the PDF sidebar too. What options do you mean?

Hi cgrunenberg,

would you or other staff-members kindly and simply answer those questions put forward here, namely:

For many of us DTPO is the trusted system of our workflows.

But all of the sudden important features are broken (e.g. handling and displaying PDFs) and thus reported as broken … and no-one of the staff-members so far (at least as far as I see) has stood up and stated clearly what to do and what not to do (in order to avoid data-loss e.g. due to scan-snap problems) and most importantly communicate reliable information when DTPO update 2.9.5 (which seems to be supposed to fix all this) is going to be available. It was to be released last month, i.e. September(!) - as some of the staff-members wrote in this thread.

So guys. Get your act together and tell us when DTPO 2.9.5 ist going to be available?

Cheers!

Devonthink was too important to me to risk an upgrade to Sierra until the .1 or .2 release. Glad I didn’t.

I have however installed it on one of my mac minis to test :frowning: Every app I have that relies on pdfkit for anything but display seem borked in some way. Most are unlikely to get fixed either because the cost of working around pdfkit’s bugs is not worth for the limited return for small developers.

I wonder if the changes to pdfkit came very late in the Beta or wasn’t properly documented because it seems to have caught every developer off guard (Fujitsu only warned of the problems the day before the final release.)

Every app I have that relies on pdfkit seem borked in some way. Most are unlikely to get fixed either because the cost of working around pdfkit’s bugs is not worth it for the limited return for small developers.

Apple took one of the most stable frameworks in the OS and broke it :blush: (without seemingly documenting what they broke)I think its rather unfair to call out DT developers on this especially with the brilliant release of DTTG and when they have said they are working on a fix. I doubt the fixes are straightfoward from Christian’s comments on these forums and from what I have heard from other developers.

Frederiko

Version 2.9.5 will be available later today and work around the most important issues on macOS Sierra.

It’s a lot better to postpone stuff if necessary instead of shipping work in progress on schedule.

Thanks for the update.

First thing I noticed though is that it is no longer possible to remove single pages from a PDF; the menu item is greyed out.
I use this function quite often (I even made a keyboard shortcut for this).
Will this function come back anytime soon or will it be necessary to use preview.app for this?

This is one of the remaining known issues (see release notes), meaning that we’re still investigating this.

  1. This is a user forum.

  2. Generally, they kindly respond to actual technical questions. You do not have a right to an answer on this one. It’s irrelevant to you how they go about things internally, only the public facing outcome is of importance. Betas are shifting targets.

Furthermore it’s a trick question:

Answer “yes, we did” → so how did you miss this, what kind of devs are you?
Answer “no” → What kind of devs are you?

Answering this is a lose/lose situation for the DT folks.

Why are people upgrading critical production machines to Apple’s latest and greatest on day one, even week one? And they even get quite offended and scornful when something doesn’t work under an OS beta release.

While I upgrade iOS typically within a few weeks after release (when it is clear that there is no major “bricking” scenario, or a fatal incompatibility with my personal killer apps), OS X is much trickier and I wait it out to a “.1” release or so. Users with a large installed app base generally face numerous issues, not just DT. Some of the biggest offenders are sometimes Apple apps. With El Capitan, Mail was unable to migrate my 30 GB mail folder to the “new format”. Totally screwed up. I had to revert to the Yosemite install swiftly. After two months and some minor releases, that finally worked. Or the way the /usr/local/ folder was migrated in the Yosemite upgrade, causing update times of nearly a day for people with large TeX installations.

  1. First of, thanks for the update 2.9.5. However, not being able to remove/delete pages in PDF-documents within DTPO is something that needs to be fixed as quickly as possible.

  2. The Art of Q&A

Besides the mentioning of a somewhat broken PDFKit, I did not find an answer to the question cited.

cgrunenberg wrote:

Nothing wrong with that.

But since you informed us in the following link [url]Sierra]

that

people wonder … and from time to time: do ask questions. Nothing wrong with that either, I suppose.

→ It’s all about communication, folks – especially in a top-notch forum like this one.

Cheers!

The PDFKit code in the OS has been stable for a long time, and used by many Mac apps to create/view/edit PDFs. Changes to PDFKit in Sierra broke the some of the ability of many third party apps to manage PDFs, in some cases, as noted by Fujitsu, resulting in modification or even data loss in some previously scanned files.

Apple provided developers prereleases of Sierra as well as a public beta program prior to the final release, with many changes during that period including a second Gold Master version. Apple received feedback from developers and beta users, including problems with PDFs. IMHO, the feedback should have indicated to Apple that inclusion of the revised PDFKit code in the first release of Sierra would be premature. It resulted in too many problems for a number of apps, without adequate time to resolve them.

DEVONthink 2.9.5 is not a Sierra-only release. It remains compatible with recent versions of OS X, and includes a number of features useful to users still running OS X (as I am, until ScanSnap Manager is updated) as well as to users under Sierra. That means, with respect to PDFs, that it works with the previous code of PDFKit and the new code – which is important. It also means extra work for the developer. While many PDF issues in Sierra are resolved in this release, some issues remain.

Yes, communication is important. I always recommend reading the release notes for a new version of DEVONthink, and that is especially important in this case. Please look at Help > Release Notes in DEVONthink. (There’s also critically important information for those using Sync, related to the location of DEVONthink databases.)