A preview release of Mendeley Desktop 1.7 is available. This release makes it easier to use custom and 3rd-party citation styles, includes an updated plugin for citing your Mendeley documents in Microsoft Word 2011 for Mac and includes a number of improvements to search.

Citation Styles

• Easier sharing and installation of custom and 3rd-party styles. Go to View → Styles → More Styles → Get More Styles , paste a link to a style in the box and click ‘Download’. You can also drag and drop citation style (CSL) files into the styles dialog.
• We have refreshed the available library of citation styles from the citationstyles.org repository. This adds many new styles.

Updated Mac Word 2011 Plugin

The Mac Word plugin has been updated for Word 2011 on Mac. The updated plugin has a more obvious UI for inserting citations and bibliographies. It is also much faster when refreshing medium to large bibliographies.  Word 2008 is still supported, but it will continue to use the earlier plugin which is accessible from the ‘Script’ menu in Word.

Search

Internal search has been overhauled in this release.  Many of the changes are internal to improve consistency, performance and stability.  There are a number of user-visible changes:

• Search is now incremental across full text and metadata.
• Search is faster and more stable when searching many large PDFs.
• More consistent behavior between full text, document details and citation editor search.
• Search now finds and shows matches for the search keywords in all metadata fields.
• Improved handling of boolean queries (with AND, OR and ‘-’ (NOT) terms).
• Spelling corrections will now include suggestions from the full text as well as document details.

Other Improvements

• The look and organization of the menus and toolbars have been streamlined on Windows and Linux.  The Mac version had a UI overhaul in the previous release, so we thought it was only fair to give a little love to the Windows and Linux versions.
• Improvements to import of RIS files generated by RefMan
• Updated tab-switching shortcuts that are more consistent with web browsers (Chrome, Firefox).
• Improved performance for BibTeX sync and batch metadata edits.  We’ve also fixed a number of causes of UI ‘hiccups’ (sometimes referred to as lag) when using the app.
• Import suggestions. Mendeley Desktop will notice when you tend to import PDFs from the same locations repeatedly and will offer to automatically import other articles from the same folder.

As always, we really appreciate help from early adopters helping us get the next release into shape.  Please download the preview and let us know if you find any issues.  You can report any issues on our support forum .  You can also suggest improvements our UserVoice forum.

For the full list of fixes and improvements, please see the release notes.

The final version of Mendeley Desktop 1.6 is here.  Please see our announcement of the preview release for a list of the improvements in this version and this gallery for screenshots.  In addition to the features in the preview, other enhancements added for the final release include:

• Improved search in the PDF viewer.  Opening a PDF from the search view in My Library will start a search for the phrase in the PDF, search results wrap around when clicking Next / Previous, we display the number of matches and we no longer dim the whole page when highlighting matches.
• Support for LibreOffice on Windows and improved detection of available LibreOffice / OpenOffice versions for Windows, Mac and Linux.  Please note that on Mac the plugin only supports LibreOffice.
• Under Tools -> Options -> Connection, there is a ‘Use system connection settings’ checkbox in case you need to use custom proxy settings with Mendeley Desktop for any reason that are different to those used by Internet Explorer or Safari.

Many Windows users have asked for a version of Mendeley Desktop which can be installed and updated on systems without administrator rights.  There is now a customized installer (this is for 1.5.1, but it will update to 1.6 after install) which will install and run Mendeley Desktop from your home folder.

Thanks to everyone for the feedback on this release, please keep it coming in!  You can vote for improvements on the feedback forum and get help with any problems on the support forum.

One final note, there are no changes to the supported platforms in this update but for the next release, Windows users will need Windows XP Service Pack 2 or later (if you’re reading this and you’re not sure, it is very likely that you already have this) and Linux users will require Ubuntu 10.04 or equivalent.  On Mac, we hope to support OS X 10.5 for a little longer, but if you can run Snow Leopard or newer, we’d suggest doing so.

A preview release of Mendeley Desktop 1.5 is available.  Improvements in this release include:

• Re-worked Windows Word plugin which adds support for 64bit Word 2010, improves document refresh performance, fixes several plugin installation problems and should help to improve stability.
• The Undo/Redo buttons in Word 2010 can now be used to undo or redo changes made with the Mendeley plugin.
• Several improvements to EndNote, RIS and BibTeX import/export
• Compatibility with Ubuntu 12.04 (this also fixes problems under recent Fedora and OpenSuSE releases)
• This preview release automatically syncs changes from Mendeley Desktop to Mendeley Web.  We may change this before the final release.

This is a preview release, so if you have a deadline coming up, please stick with the stable release.  Otherwise, we appreciate help in testing preview releases, especially the Word plugin changes in this update.

Download: Mendeley 1.5 Preview

Release Notes: Release notes for 1.5

Feedback:  If you have any problems with the preview, please report them in our support forum.  Please note which version you are using.

For developers, the code for the OpenOffice / LibreOffice plugin is now hosted on Github and this includes a set of Python APIs to use Mendeley’s Word processor integration.

A preview of Mendeley Desktop 1.3 is available to test.  You can download it here and see the release notes here.

This update makes it easier to open PDF files in Mendeley Desktop and also lays the groundwork for improved integration between Mendeley Desktop and the research catalog on Mendeley.com.  Internally, we have been spring-cleaning the software to reduce memory usage and improve stability.

Among the changes in this release:

• You can now open PDF files directly in Mendeley from Windows Explorer / Finder / Nautilus (this also means that it is now possible to set Mendeley to be the default program to handle PDF files if you wish).
• In the Mac version, you can now drag and drop PDF files onto the Mendeley dock icon.  You can also drag and drop links to PDF files from your browser onto the dock icon and Mendeley will download and open them.
• Memory usage when importing PDFs has been reduced and file downloads during sync will be faster for many users.
• Several problems running Mendeley on very recent Linux distributions (Ubuntu 11.10 and Fedora 16) were fixed.  Under Fedora 16 you’ll need to use the –force-bundled-qt command-line argument in order for the software to run.
• A number of sync bugs relating to folders in groups have been resolved.

Known Issues:

• Mendeley does not automatically appear in the ‘Open With…’ list in Windows Explorer.  It needs to be added manually.  We will resolve this before the final release.

This release is backwards compatible with the previous 1.1 release.

Please leave any feedback related to the new release on the feedback forum.  You can also tweet @mendeleysupport or email support@mendeley.com

Update (30/09/11):  Unfortunately we’ve had a small number of users report a connectivity issue with the Mendeley Desktop v1.1 release on some Windows systems which we did not encounter during testing.  Our developers are working hard on a reliable solution to bring you the best experience possible. A Mendeley Desktop v1.1.1 release resolving the issue will be rolled out sometime in the next few days.  Until then, we’ve removed the v1.1 download from our servers, and encourage you to use the previous Mendeley Desktop v1.0.1 release instead.  We apologize to those of you affected – we will release the fix asap.  Thanks for your patience.

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Mendeley 1.1 is now available. There are several notable improvements to the citation insertion functionality, as well as significant under-the-hood bugfixes and speed + appearance tweaks. You can read the full release notes here.

Highlights

• Mendeley now peacefully co-exists with Track Changes in MS Word.
• Inserting citations and refreshing the document is much faster.
• Watched folders now work much better on the Mac
• Check for Duplicates decisions are now persistent

Interface tweaks include better performance of web content in the desktop client and smaller download/update sizes. Many old UI issues have also been resolved.

Please download and update to Mendeley 1.1 now.

Mendeley Desktop 1.1-dev4 is now available for testing.  The main changes from the previous preview are:

• The Word plugins can now be used alongside the ‘Track Changes’ feature in Word.

If you are using 1.1-dev1, you can update to dev4 by starting Mendeley and accepting the auto-update prompt.

If you are using a stable version of Mendeley, you can get the preview release from the downloads page.

In addition:

• Auto-updates are now smaller
• A number of bugs affecting the interoperability of Word documents containing citations added using the Zotero 3.0 Beta have been fixed.
• Better handling of corrupted citation fields in Microsoft Word
• Fixed a problem with the Microsoft Word plugin not appearing in the Script menu after installation under Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard)
• Mendeley no longer follows shortcuts or symlinks to other folders when searching for PDFs using the ‘Watched Folders’ or ‘Add Folder’ tool.
• Fixed a bug that could result in folders not being restored properly after restoring a backup.

Known issues in this preview:

• Mendeley Desktop may not start automatically after updating from 1.1-dev1 on older Windows systems.  You will need to restart it manually.

For a full list of changes in 1.1, please see the release notes page.

We have updated the citation styles available in Mendeley Desktop from the main repository for CSL styles.  This adds 514 new citation styles and includes updates to many others.  You can browse and update styles from within Mendeley Desktop by going to View -> Citation Style -> More Styles.  Updated styles will have a blue ‘Update Available‘ label next to them. Click on the style and then click ‘Update Now‘ to install the updated citation style.

If you have developed new citation styles and you want to make them available to Mendeley users, please submit them to the CSL repository.

A preview release of Mendeley Desktop 1.1 is available.  This release includes several performance improvements in the Microsoft Word plugins alongside a number of stability and usability enhancements.

You can download the preview from the right-hand side of the downloads page.

You can give us feedback on this release in the feedback forum, the comments in this post or via our support form.

• Improved the performance of inserting citations and refreshing documents using the Word plugins (these mostly benefit the Microsoft Word for Windows plugin, but there have also been improvements to the Mac Word plugin).
• Pressing the ‘Delete’ key now removes the selected document from the current collection, instead of moving it to the trash. Pressing Shift+Delete moves the document to the trash and Ctrl+Shift+Delete removes it completely.
• Folders in the left-hand pane are now collapsed on startup.
• When a pair of documents are marked as not being duplicates in the ‘Check for Duplicates’ tool, that decision is remembered on the computer on which it was made.

• Fixed a problem which could allow multiple copies of Mendeley to run at once.
• Fixed Bibtex sync not updating the corresponding Bibtex files when documents are added to or removed from folders.
• (Mac) Reduced watched folders resource usage and fixed crash when watching a folder containing a large number of sub-folders.
• (Windows) Fixed Mendeley not being able to close Word automatically when needed on 64bit Windows.

Compatibility

• There are no compatibility changes from the previous release.  In the event of problems with the 1.1 preview, you can revert back to 1.0.

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