Comments on: Mendeley Desktop 1.7 Preview

By: Freiheitsfreund

Freiheitsfreund — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 23:48:43 +0000

Thanks a lot Rob for helping me for the time being. I can now use version 1.7 final with your manual patch to use the old word plugin. I am looking forward to also being able to use the new word plugin as soon as you issue the next update.
So far, I hope, all my error logs etc. help you track the resisting error in 1.7…

By: Freiheitsfreund

Freiheitsfreund — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 11:53:14 +0000

I was quite happy to see today, that the update for mendeley 1.7 was rolling out through the official update channel. However, it installed and then… the problem which was already discussed here for the test version is not solved. The plugin for MS word for mac does not install. This is a real problem and I think, an update with such a bug should not be distributed via the official update channel! Please tell me if you have any suggestions.
I have just issued the following email over the official mendeley contact form:

Hi,

I had already tried the test version, announced on your blog. My user name there is “freiheitsfreund”.
Now, today, Mendeley has automatically updated to 1.7 via the official update channel.
This version still is completely unusable for me. The word plugin will not install and gives me an error message. Word is closed. I am using MS Word for Mac newest version with all updates on Mac OS X mountain lion newest version with all updates, all adjusted to German as language.
Now, I had to roll-back to 1.6 via time machine, lucky to have a backup.

Please inform me what to do and if you can solve the problem.
I fear, many people will experience this annoying problem. The word plugin, at least for me, is one of the most important core functionalities of mendeley!

Best regards

Arian

By: Rob

Rob — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 14:31:59 +0000

Hello Gwyneth,

I think that’s actually a mistake. Mendeley Desktop 1.6 and later was supposed to have been built as a dual 32/64bit app. The supporting libraries have been but not the main app itself. Internally, it looks like nobody noticed.

By: Rob

Rob — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 14:14:06 +0000

Hello Sylvère,

Thanks for looking into the problem on your Mac. I’ve fixed this for the next preview so that we ask Word for the path to the Startup folder instead of assuming a fixed path relative to the folder where Word is installed.

By: XC

XC — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 13:07:12 +0000

Great improvement.
Will you integrate in-program pubmed search and download in this version?
Would you mind add print function in PDF viewer?

By: Gwyneth Llewelyn

Gwyneth Llewelyn — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 11:28:34 +0000

I wonder why Mendeley Desktop for the Mac is still 32 bits? Couldn’t you do a build for a 64 bits?

By: Boris

Boris — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 21:54:22 +0000

Last comment, promised. It is actually working the way described above. Alternatively on could temporary create the folder, and change to path of the StartUp Folder in the Word settings. If you don’t see the new menu, you have to activate it under the menu “Ansicht”->”Symbolleisten”

By: Boris

Boris — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 21:43:24 +0000

Sorry, was only working because i double clicked on the template itself. Please don’t publish my former entry…

By: Boris

Boris — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 21:34:21 +0000

To fix the German Mac office temporary, you can simply create this new folder by hand, run the install script from Mendely and finally move the Mendeley.dot file to its designated folder…

By: osm

osm — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 09:22:09 +0000

Good to see you are working on improving search. This is definitely an area where Mendeley is behind other reference managers. Whilst you are at it, could I suggest you

1) Ignore diacritic marks such as accents in searches (i.e. if I search for Poincare, the search should find publications by Poincarè). Or at least provide a user preference option for searches to behave this way.

2) Make it possible to restrict searches to a range of years

3) Provide thorough instructive documentation on how the logical operators are supposed to be used in Mendeley.

4) Provide thorough instructive documentation explaining how to properly do author searches. For example, I may have a bunch of articles by JF Bloggs. On some articles the author is entered as “Bloggs, J F”, in some as “Bloggs, Joe F”, and in others as “Bloggs, J.F.” On pubmed, a single author search for “Bloggs JF” would find all these variants regardless of whether the paper contains the full name or just initials, but I can’t tell if there is a way to get Mendeley to find them all in a single search.

Personally, I would also very much like to have the ability to re-order the search results by clicking on author, title, or year columns and save searches as smart folders but I imagine that would require much more work for you to achieve and so is not something we will get in the near future.