Today we release maintenance updates for both generations of DEVONthink.
Let’s start with DEVONthink 4.1.1. It brings support for new AI models including Anthropic’s Claude 4.5 Sonnet and Google Nano Banana, as well as for Ollama Cloud. All Perplexity Sonar models include vision capabilities and DEVONthink now goes to great lengths to protect against prompt injection attacks.
Other improvements include, but are not limited to, detection of empty pages when clipping PDFs, more comfortable cross-linking, and the option to modify a document’s searchable text via chat or scripting. Safari and Share extensions load more reliably on macOS Tahoe. Version 4.1.1 also uses 90% fewer resources for versioning and it automatically adjusts CPU and I/O load during sync to your Mac’s battery and thermal state.
For DEVONthink 3 users, version 3.9.16 inherits some of these improvements, like the detection of empty pages when clipping PDFs, improved sync performance, and automatic adjusting of workload to reduce resource strain.
And finally, Joe Kissell has updated the Take Control of DEVONthink 4 ebook that you can download for free from our website. Version 1.1 updates the book for DEVONthink 4.1 Europa covering the new Quick Look plugin, the expanded AI image generator, enhanced editing capabilities, and the new AI-based script assistant. It also mentions the DEVONthink To Go 4 beta.
You can find a complete list of all improvements by choosing Help > Release Notes inside the applications. We recommend these updates to all users of DEVONthink for Mac. Get the appropriate version for you by using the application’s update function or from our Apps or Legacy Versions pages. You can find an overview of what’s new in each feature release here.
There is one new feature that I am trying to understand how it works, would you mind giving an example?
“When you select a local or global smart group or smart rule in the Navigate sidebar, DEVONthink now uses the targeted group as the destination for new items and grouping selected items.”
Let’s say you have a smart group searching only in one group for documents created today. Then e.g. Data > New > Plain Text… creates a new text in the searched group if the smart group is selected in the sidebar.
I realize many attributes can’t or shouldn’t be changed automatically to match the ones in the target group - for example, creating a text file if the target group contains a condition item = Applescript - and of course the Data >… action fails silently.
Sometimes though, it would be nice to be able to change an attribute such as a label, e.g., the smart rule says files modified today that are label red. Is there a way I can make the label of the new member red automatically?
