Today we’re very pleased to announce the latest update to Mendeley for iOS.  This release brings a refined user interface, that is designed to feel at home on iOS7 and above, but still retains the familiarity and usability of the previous design.  It’s currently rolling out slowly on the app store, but should be available worldwide in the next few hours.

What’s new

• Refined user interface
• Look up word definitions while reading PDFs
• PDF Filenames output correctly when exporting to other apps
• Fixed errors when importing PDFs from other apps
• Fixed problems where annotations sometimes wouldn’t sync, or were lost when made off-line
• Improved sync speed and general app stability

If you like the new version, please help us out and leave a rating or review on the app store.  It helps us out immensely.

iOS Version Support

Unfortunately, this is the end of the road for our iOS5 users, so if you’re one of the few people on an iPad 1, we’re really sorry.  You’ll be able to use the previous version of the app if you have them installed already, but it’s lifespan will end later this year when we retire the old APIs that it uses.  If you can justify it, the iPad Air and iPad mini’s are worth the upgrade.

This version supports iOS6, but the number of users who have this installed has dropped significantly since iOS 7.1 was released (far quicker than we anticipated), so you can expect support for iOS6 to be phased out within the next 3-6 months, and definitely when iOS 8 is released.

What’s next?

We will continue working hard to bring you great updates, as quickly as we can manage.  We can’t get too specific yet, but we are taking all your feedback seriously, and the app will continue to improve a lot over the course of this year.

We want to make it easier to import documents to your library with metadata lookups, web importer support and the ability to manually add references and folders.  We also want to improve search and filtering options, improve annotation capabilities further, and improve the experience for users who are new to Mendeley.

Android

(Because you’d yell at us in the comments if we didn’t give an update) 😉

We’ve now hired a lead Android developer, and are still hiring additional developers for that team.  Design has been ongoing for the last couple of months, and development will begin in the next couple of weeks, and we’ll be keeping an open dialog with the community about our progress.  Please understand that we won’t be rushing out an app quickly.  This would result in a poor quality experience and no one wants that.  Based on our experience with iOS, we are expecting to deliver something towards the end of this year.