academhack

No secret here, Devon is one of my favorite applications. One of my top can’t live without, reasons to work on a Mac programs. One of the essential features is it’s ability to capture and store data from the web. This has been relatively easy to do if you are working in Safari or other WebKit based browsers, but not so easy if you are someone who uses Firefox or Camino. But now there is a solution for those who want to easily store pages in Devon and not give up using Firefox. So here is the rundown of two ways to capture web info from Devon.

Using Take Rich Note

(This Only Works if you are using Safari, OmniWeb, or Shiira.)

This is how I do most of my capturing of data to Devon. You highlight the text you want, and select “Take Rich Note” from the services menu. (See the picture below.) Notice how there is also a keyboard shortcut for selecting this feature, so you don’t have to grab the mouse. Also note that the services Menu is usually not located next to “Help” as in the picture below. I am using something called HotService which places the service menu next to the Help menu, it is usually located under the application main menu (see second shot below). Since most of that data I want is just text, images and links, this method works well as the Take Rich Note preserves all of this and is a relatively small file size so as not to clog up my hard drive by needlessly saving all the adds and extras on a page.

But you will notice that if you are using Firefox and you try to do this, the option is grey (i.e. not useable). (See the picture below.) Never fear their is a solution that makes this process easy.

Bookmarklets

(This works on all browsers.)

When you download Devon from the site and install you will notice a folder next to the main icon that says “Bookmarklets,” and herein lies the key to success. What is a Bookmarklet? If you want a technical explanation you can click here. But for the purposes of Devon, think of it has having the ability to add “buttons” to your web browser that will send information to another application. This is how del.icio.us works for example (so you can just click one button and upload a link to the site). What the Devon bookmarklets do is add a button to any web browser that allow you to click on said button, and have the information added to Devon. There are two bookmarklets, and you will probably end up using both depending on what type of data you want.

Installing the Bookmarklets: This is actually a real simple process, and there is a forum discussion over on the Devon site. But I thought I would streamline the process and add some screen grabs.

1. Download Devon from their website. Even if you already have Devon installed you need the extras that come with the download, not the program itself.
2. Double click on the disk image, and then double click on the disk drive.
3. Depending on which version you are working with you should see a folder that says “bookmarklets.” This is what you want, open it and you should see to items inside the folder like this



4. Now open your web browser of choice (I am using Firefox for this demo but any browser should work).
5. Next drag each icon into the “Bookmarks Toolbar.” (See photo below.) If you can’t see your bookmarks toolbar you need to select it from the View=>Toolbars=>Bookmark Toolbars.



6. Now when you drag these into Firefox, Firefox names them renames them. So to fix this just right click (or control click) on the bookmarklet and select properties from the pop-up menu to rename.

If you click on the Archive button, this will send a complete archive of the page to Devon. This is larger in file size, especially if there are images involved, but you can access it offline, and search within the document. If you select bookmark it will merely send the address to Devon not the whole page. You will have to be online to see the information. You can however send just the address to Devon and next time you are using Devon load the web page using Devon’s browser and select Rich Text Note per the method above.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 3rd, 2007 at 8:46 pm and is filed under Devon, Web. You can follow responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your site.