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Wed, 27 Aug 2003
New Panther Seed
Panther 7B49 has been seeded to developers. There are no details about what changed in this build, but the release note mentions a possible issue with displays on 12" PowerBooks not waking from sleep.
DOUBLE IMPACT: DEVONAGENT AND DEVONTHINK
DEVONtechnologies releases the first public beta of the intelligent Internet search agent DEVONagent and updates DEVONthink to version 1.7.1. The DEVONagent Public Beta 1 is immediately available for everyone as a free download from www.devon-technologies.com.
DEVONagent 1.0b1 comes with a total of 15 plug-ins for querying a great variety of search engines and databases, scanning the Usenet, and much more. Also, crawler sets allow users to define their own lists of pages and scan them automatically with just one click. The NEAR operator, which is unique to DEVONagent and some super-high-end databases, dramatically improves the quality of the search results, and the integration with DEVONthink makes it easy to archive and organise the found information.
DEVONthink 1.7.1 adds tight integration with DEVONagent, features an automatic update check function and is overall faster. An improved database optimisation let's the application start up much faster, and some minor interface glitches and bugs have been removed.
Based on DEVONtechnologies' revolutionary DEVONtechnology, DEVONagent is the information finding tool of the next generation. It simulates the behaviour of a human web surfer scanning the Internet for a specific piece of information. Technically, DEVONagent uses a variety of searching techniques and collects the results from major search engines. Then it visits all the found web sites, downloads, analyses and weights them to find the most relevant pages, eliminating information junk (empty pages, HTTP errors, sites that don't contain the search phrase, similar or duplicate pages, or pages with too little information) automatically on-the-fly.
Especially useful for anyone visiting the same pages over and over again to see if there's something published about a specific topic is the brand new crawler. It scans through lists of interesting pages and reports only those dealing with what the user is looking for.
The final results are presented by DEVONagent in a plain list, sorted by decreasing relevance, together with a first summary of all paragraphs that DEVONagent thinks are the most relevant to the query. A double-click on any link opens the pages directly in an integrated web browser built upon the fast and rock-solid Safari engine (including Java, JavaScript, Plug-Ins and all the rest).
A second, more spectacular view shows a list with the most important topics related to the query and a digest instantly created for selected topics or based on the query. Ocurrences of the selected topics words are highlighted, the digest is editable and can be saved as plain text or RTF. Both views, page list and digest, are easily accessible through tabs below the toolbar. Also, selected pages can be exported as HTML, plain text or RTF/RTFD. In almost all cases, the results filtered and weighted by DEVONagent are much better that those returned by the standard search engines. Additionally, DEVONagent stores all or selected results in a searchable archive very similar to DEVONthink, DEVONtechnologies' current flagship freeform database and knowledge manager (commands to store selected pages or links to them in DEVONagent are also available).
Key features:
- Automatic querying of search engines
- Collecting, analysing, weighting and summarising search results
- Crawler to auto-surf your favourite web pages
- Dynamic digest based on intelligent topic list
- Automatic junk filter
- Integrated web browser based on the Safari engine
- Clean text-only preview
- Searchable web page archive
- Integrated with DEVONthink
- Highly multi-threaded, uses all core technologies of Mac OS X
- Flexible plug-in architecture
DEVONagent runs on any Mac with Mac OS X 10.2, 256 MB RAM and Safari installed. A fast Internet connection is recommended. DEVONthink 1.7.1 runs on Mac OS X 10.1 or higher. Both applications are available as a free download from www.devon-technologies.com.
The Great Cube Adventure
Surf-Bits.com has just published the first in a series of articles on finding, purchasing , upgrading and modding an Apple Cube.
A Better Finder CREATORS & TYPES 3.2 for Mac OS X
PUBLICSPACE.NET is pleased to announce version 3.2 of its "A Better Finder
CREATORS & TYPES" Macintosh Finder enhancement.
The new version allows the tool be started from the Finder by pressing the
Command-Control-C hot key combination. The hot key is also configurable
from the "System Preferences..." panel.
A Better Finder CREATORS & TYPES is shareware and cost $9.95. Upon popular
demand, we now also offer forever upgrades and licenses.
The new version can be downloaded from:
http://www.publicspace.net/ABetterFinderCreatorsAndTypes/
More information on "A Better Finder CREATORS & TYPES" is available at the
same address.
New Mac Peer-to-Peer Guide
mac-p2p.com is a new website that serves as a guide to Mac clients for Peer-to-Peer networks such as Gnutella, Fastrack (Kazaa), Bittorrent, etc.