Better RSS support?

DEVONthink Feedback
1

Hello

I read before that a better RSS support had already been requested inside Devon Think Pro.

But i would like to know if in the current beta RSS will evolve or is this the latest version (appearance) ?

My needs for a good RSS reader are strong. Having that function included in Devon think is nice, but it remains limited to me.

For now i must use an external reader and use some copy and paste tricks to have plain text and plain articles stored in my databases.

Devon think Pro 2.0 is sweet keep up the incredible work.

PHT

2

It’s more or less complete for 2.0final. Future enhancements are possible but depend of course on feedback/requests.

3

Thanks

I’ll wrap up some features request.

Pht

4

Maybe the RSS feature must be part of a new version of Devon Agent.

IMHO it seems more suitable to include a full RSS support within Agent for the search one can perform.

PHT

5

One improvement I’d like to see is the option to launch a URL from a news feed in my browser, in the background. I like scanning news feeds in DT but when I see something that looks interesting, I often want to open it my browser, and I would like to be able to open up a whole series of pages without constantly jumping back and forth between DT and browser.

If there’s a way to do this that I’m missing, please clue me in! Otherwise I could imagine a checkbox in preferences or a contextual menu command (as in Mail).

6

That’s the beauty of tabbed browsing. Command-click on a link and it will be downloaded in the background to a new tab.

7

That doesn’t work for me at present. Command-click opens the link in a new browser tab, but the focus switches to my browser. I want to be able to open links from DT in tabs in my browser, in the background, i.e., behind DT. So that I can scan through my news feeds in DT and open up everything of interest in my browser to read more carefully there.

I believe NetNewsWire, for example, has this behavior.

8

After disabling DEVONthink’s tabbed browsing, Command-clicking opens the URL in the default browser (and in the background).

9

Thanks! I would never have spotted this (obviously :wink: )

10

My comment of 17 February, 2009 about “the beauty of tabbed browsing” is related to the type of document being viewed in your database.

If I’m viewing an RTF/RTFD, bookmark (which opens a Web page if online). HTML or WebArchive document that contains links, Command-click on a link opens a new tab in the view window and downloads the link into that tab in the background, without changing focus.

The majority of my documents are RTFD, especially as that’s my favorite capture mode for downloads from the Web. Most of the scientific and policy journals I routinely prospect for content allow view of articles as HTML, and I capture them as RTFD. So the workflow I described works great for me most of the time, whether I start from a bookmark document to get to the current issue of a journal, or load a HTML view of a research paper that I will capture as RTFD.

It takes me a few seconds more to download a paper from Science Magazine as RTFD (including images), rather than as PDF. Why do I do that? First, the PDFs usually include extraneous material, portions of one or two other articles, that I don’t want. Second, my RTFD capture of the HTML version of a paper is richer than the PDF reprint format, as it often includes lots of links, including links to “extra” online content that’s not in the PDF version. Third, HTML capture would require me to be online to view images, and those would not be available if the page disappeared from the Web. Fourth, both HTML and WebArchive captures usually include extraneous material that I don’t want to capture.

I’ve described my personal eccentricities and habits. Works for me, but others are free to adopt entirely different eccentricities and habits. :slight_smile:

I’ve got other document types in my database as well, some of which also include links. Command-click on a link within, e.g., a PDF doesn’t work as I described in my previous post. To have Command-click work to download links in the background (but in your default browser, rather than in DEVONthink’s browser), switch off tabbing in DEVONthink, as Christian suggested.

11

Bill, your descriptions of your workflow are always very helpful. Thanks very much.

It’s very interesting to hear about why you prefer to work with RTFDs. I myself prefer to capture web content as PDFs, and the main reason is because then I have the information in a fixed form which I can’t readily change (for example, by accident). I’m a doctoral student in the humanities and feel more comfortable being able to point to a PDF and say “this document is a snapshot of what existed on the web at this place, on this date, and I neither added anything nor took anything away.” My normal workflow these days is to print PDFs from Firefox directly to DTPro. That’s because I don’t like the way DTPro captures PDFs without pagination–but that’s been discussed elsewhere. I set the printing options in Firefox to add a header/footer with date, URL, etc so that info stays with the document permanently.

I agree with you that a big advantage of RTFD is clickable links. I think PDFs printed from Safari also now have clickable links and I keep hoping to find a Firefox plugin that will make that possible.

Anyway, returning to RSS feed reading, turning off tabbed browsing in DTPro is a fine solution for me and thanks for helping me find it.

12

When I do capture PDFs from Safari or the built-in browser, I always choose paginated capture.

13

Bill, if you don’t mind clarifying one more time, when you say choosing paginated capture in the built-in browser, I’m wondering if you mean saving as PDF from the print screen? As far as I can tell, the “capture PDF” command always produces an unpaginated PDF.