Posts Tagged → MCP

DEVONthink 4.3 and a Privacy-First MCP

DEVONthink 4.3 shipped last week, and the headline for me is a single feature. DEVONthink now has its own MCP server.

If you’ve been following along with the Robot Assistant work, you know why that matters. MCP is the connector standard that lets an assistant like Claude reach into an app and actually do something.

Until now, getting Claude to work with your DEVONthink databases meant exporting files or building your own bridge. Version 4.3 closes that gap. The new server exposes close to 60 commands, so Claude can search, read, and organize inside your databases directly.

What I appreciate is how carefully DEVONtechnologies built it. They designed the server with privacy at the center. You control both local and remote access. It redacts sensitive information before anything leaves your Mac. It respects items you’ve already marked as excluded from AI. And it blocks direct filesystem access to the database internals, so the assistant works through DEVONthink instead of around it.

There’s a new Exclude from Chat & MCP option too. Some databases simply shouldn’t touch an AI, and now you can flag a whole database at once. DEVONthink does this automatically for encrypted and revision-proof databases, which is the right default.

The chat assistant inside DEVONthink got the same attention. It now redacts a wider range of sensitive data, including phone numbers, credit card numbers, authentication tokens, and anything you’ve labeled as a secret, before that text reaches a language model. That protection carries through to the AI smart actions and the summarize and transform features.

Connecting an AI to your knowledge base is a real decision. A lot of MCP servers shipped over the past year without much thought about security, and the gap showed. DEVONthink clearly thought about it.

The rest of 4.3 is a solid update on its own. There’s a new Markdown engine that replaces MultiMarkdown and adds callouts, citations, captioned tables, and better CriticMarkup. Markdown documents now handle smart quotes and dashes natively. There are new desktop widgets for macOS Sequoia, a handful of improvements to the web interface for DEVONthink Server users, and a rebuilt PDF viewer with a table of contents, page thumbnails, and full-text search.

DEVONthink 4.3 is a free update for 4.x users and needs macOS Ventura or later. If you keep your files and research in DEVONthink and you’ve been curious about putting an assistant to work on them, this is the update that makes it possible. After spending a week with the update, I’m finding myself loading even more in DEVONthink.

Hopes for Apple MCP Support

In the latest betas out of Apple, we’re beginning to see hooks in place for future implementation of model context protocol (MCP) on the Apple platforms. MCP is a protocol originally engineered by Anthropic, making it easy to connect your LLM of choice to your favorite software of choice.

I’m currently experimenting with MCP connections between Claude and Notion and OmniFocus. It has really been transformative for my use of artificial intelligence to do what I like to lovingly call “donkey work”.

For example, I had it set up a database for me in Notion with a list of all the recent Apple events and then go find YouTube links for the individual event to add to a field in the database. This is work I could have done myself but desperately wanted to avoid. Having the robot do it in the background is exactly the kind of use of AI that gets my blessing.

Bringing this back to Apple, MCP connections between Apple’s productivity apps and a more powerful LLM could become quite useful if implemented in a way that users can trust. This also indicates Apple is more willing to go outside of its own sandbox to give users AI assistance on their platforms. If done with intentionality by Apple, I would love to see this become a reality.