3.3 - Initial Launch and Add-ons

Okay, we've installed DEVONthink. Let's run it. 

I'm going to go ahead and click Command + Space to open up Spotlight and type DEVONthink. There it is. And I'm running it for the first time, so it's going to ask me for permission. We'll say, "Yes, go ahead and open it." And there's DEVONthink. 

The first time you open it up, it's going to give you this welcome splash screen. And you can turn that off, if you want, by clicking on this little button here. But I recommend you keep it open for a little while as you get started, because there's some great tips here, and it's got some links to some very useful information. If you click this button here, it jumps you straight to the tutorials. I showed you some of those on the website, but this also opens up some of the data in the application. And then there's the ability to install and update extras automatically. We're going to do that. So I'm going to click this button. And you see what I did that, a couple things happened. First, I got the DEVONthink log showing me that it just installed a bunch of extras. And I'm going to show you those in just a minute. The DEVONthink log is a little terminal window, in essence, that shows you what DEVONthink is up to. It's very helpful for troubleshooting or just seeing what's going on, and I'm going to cover this in a separate video. And then it also gave me a notification for alerts. I'm going to turn that off for right now. 

On the right side, you can subscribe to the DEVONthink newsletter. There is a tip of the day that comes through every day, which is useful. And then there's an extra of the day, which gives you the ability to learn about other things that they've got going on. I'll go ahead and close that now. 

And this is what DEVONthink will look like on your computer. I've got the Buy Now! button showing up here on the right corner because I haven't installed my license code yet. Fix that. You can click on that, and it will take you to the website to purchase it. Or if you already have your license code, just go up to DEVONthink and Enter License. And it opens this window for you, and you can go ahead and type in your license code. I'll do that right now. Alright, I've got my name and license code in. I'll click Register. And I've registered DEVONthink. Now the little reminder's gone from the upper-right corner. 

As part of the initial launch, I had DEVONthink install some add-ons. And I want to review those with you. You can find them here under the DEVONthink menu, Install Add-Ons. The ones that installed automatically are the ones that we did by clicking that box just a moment ago. 

And those include PDF Services that let us work with PDFs, and we're going to cover all of this stuff in subsequent videos, so don't worry if this sounds confusing. 

There are some Additional Scripts that allow you to access your DEVONthink information elsewhere in your Mac, or even save data straight to DEVONthink, which we're also going to cover later. 

There is that excellent ABBYY FineReader OCR engine, and this is part of DEVONthink Pro. When you have this OCR engine, that means DEVONthink can conduct optical character recognition on anything in your DEVONthink library. This is a very powerful feature. It runs in the background, and I love it.

There's also an Apple Mail Plugin where you can enter a specific keyboard combination in Apple Mail, and it will send that email directly to the DEVONthink inbox. I already have that installed because I've been using DEVONthink a lot. I installed a bunch of stuff to start the screencast, but unfortunately, I left that plugged in, so I didn't have to install it. DEVONthink saw it was there already. When you install DEVONthink for the first time, you'll likely see a checkbox right there. 

And finally, there's the Global Inbox in Save Dialogues, and I'm going to show you this in a later video. But DEVONthink puts an inbox in the Save dialog. And that allows you to drag any file to that inbox and have it show up directly in DEVONthink. 

All of these are very useful add-ons, and I recommend you install them automatically, just like I showed you earlier in this video. 

If you use Google Chrome or Firefox, you will also want to install the extensions for those. I primarily use Safari, so I'll be using the Safari extension, which I will also show you in a later video. 

There's nothing to install here. It's all installed for me already, so I'm just going to click Cancel. 

But that's the initial launch of DEVONthink and the installation of those key add-ons. That's not all you get with DEVONthink, though. They also have some additional extras you can set up in the application. We're going to cover those in the next video. 

Complete and Continue