How I Use DevonAgent Pro

DevonAgent Pro is a tool I use a couple of times per week for deep dive searches across the Internet. It’s a way to gather up hundreds of web articles, remove duplicates, and filter for the content I’m interested in. If anyone remembers a tool from many years ago called Copernic Agent, it mirrors some of that excellent functionality. Google is great when you want a quick answer, or a summary, or just need clarification on a topic. Most of the time, the information you need comes up within the first two pages of results such as a product review, name of a product, or link to Wikipedia. But, when doing research, or trying to dig deeper into a subject, you’ll notice that those first 2-3 pages of Google results are in many ways the same article summarized and repeated on different sites. DevonAgent can sift through those repeated results to give more concise information. Once articles are located, they […]

SummerFest with DevonThink, DevonAgent and Friends

Summer is here, quite literally a few hours away, so let the summer sales begin! To kick things off, DevonTechnologies has partnered with several other software vendors to offer SummerFest2020. It’s a great way to get a 25% discount on their products as well as some companion products that integrate very nicely and improve your research workflow. This would be a great time to get both DevonThink and DevonAgent. DevonThink goes far beyond note-taking to offer a complete document management solution. It has become the central hub of information on both my home and work Macs. I have text files, spreadsheets, task lists, Jira ticket notes, test plans, PDFs, RSS feeds, web archives, code examples and more all tucked away in there. It is a fantastic tool and I think I would be completely lost without it. DevonAgent is a must have for web research. And now that I have Adguard blocking ads within the DA browser, I’m using it […]

Integrating DevonAgent Pro with Alfred

DevonAgent Pro is one of the greatest search engine tools I’ve used and I want to integrate that power into Alfred. I want to use Alfred’s search bar to pick a search type and pass over the parameters. Turns out it’s not that hard, just not well documented. To make it all work, you need the following two commands: – x-devonagent://runPlugin?identifier=com.devon-technologies.images.plugin&query={query} – x-devonagent://runSearchSet?name=Deeper&query={query} The first command uses a DevonAgent Plugin to perform the search, the second uses a Search Set. To use these in Alfred, use the Web Search function under the Features tab. Enter the above command in the Search URL field. Also, select the option for Encode Spaces as %20. Now you can set up separate keywords to use different kinds of searches, which could be for images, deep dive searches, code searches, a specific engine, or anything else DevonAgent supports. To give a bit more of an explanation of the commands, we’ll start with Plugins. You can […]