I’ve had a consistent problem for months in that using the “PDF to DEVONthink Pro” for any Web page in Safari would send both Safari and DEVONthink Pro off to never-never-land. Console shows tens of thousands (no joke!) of error messages being generated. If you leave it alone overnight, you can get Safari back, but otherwise you have to force-quit.
In the process of troubleshooting other grimness, I disabled Saft on my MacBook Pro. Just for grins, I tested print-to-PDF. It works!
I miss Saft too much, so I’m going to re-enable it and try to remember to use Firefox for pages I might need to PDF… but I wanted to post this here in case it helps someone.
Mac OS X Services is a communications technology that can be used by Mac Cocoa applications.
For Cocoa-based browsers, pressing “Command-)” will capture selected text with the URL as a rich text note, including any selected images. That command also works in a similar way with Cocoa-based word processors. Take a look at the Services menu for DEVONthink to see other available options with other Cocoa applications.
Opera isn’t a Cocoa-based browser, so Apple’s Services ‘hooks’ are not available for it.
The built-in browser in DT is great for ‘heavy-duty’ captures of information from Web pages, as it provides contextual menu options to capture selected text/imagres, or HTML source, or a WebArchive of the page. Although it’s not a full-fledged browser, it’s very efficient for capturing pages from, e.g., a weekly journal such as Science – one can browse the new articles and quickly capture those of interest. I’ve got hundreds of bookmarks in my database for sites from which I routinely make data captures.
So I capture more than a hundred pages every week from sites that I routinely visit, and I like the ease of capture more than any browser other than DEVONagent, which provides similar capture options.
Suggestion: Give the built-in browser a try for sites such as journals or news sources. Opera would remain your default browser, but the DT browser can be convenient for some of your sites.[/list]
I’ve been using Services since the days of NeXTSTEP (which still has some UI tricks that I wish OS X would learn, but that’s another OT thread).
One reason that I think Services have never taken off in OS X is this limitation that they only work for some apps and not all apps.
Yojimbo gets around that nicely by having a global hotkey which brings up a regular text box.
When I’m using my Mac, I don’t want to have to think about which app I’m in. I don’t want it to matter if I am using Terminal or Opera or Firefox or BBEdit. I just want it to work, and by work I mean get out of the way.
Yojimbo does that.
I use Opera for 95% of my browsing (Firefox mostly for Google-related stuff that doesn’t always play nice with Opera). It has better ad-blocking than DA does, makes it easier to turn images/plugins/etc on or off (which matters a lot on my 26.4 dialup, which is the best I can get where I am!)
The point is that I’m already switching between two browsers which run all the time. Adding a 3rd is just… well it’s not very convenient at all.
A global input panel would be, and not just for browsers, but for all sorts of apps.
Print To DT works OK, and it works almost anywhere, so that’s a pretty good option.
No argument, but I’ve put together the set of tools that just gets things done fastest and easiest for me.
The ability to capture as PDF from any printable application is very useful. Apple’s ‘print to PDF’ currently doesn’t capture hyperlinks, which make that less useful, especially for capturing Web pages – I hope that’s improved in the future.