After a couple of dev preview releases we now released a new official version of Mendeley Desktop. As highly requested by our users this release includes LaTeX support and Zotero integration just to name some of the improvements. See a complete list of changes below:
[UPDATE 02/10/2009]: Still working on updating the Linux repositories.
New Features:
- Option to manually or automatically import documents from Zotero.
- Automatic library backups and easier restoration of backups.
- Added support for multi-word institutional author names such as groups or organisations.
- Improved LaTeX integration. Add option to automatically create and update a set of Bibtex files from your library and added ‘Copy LaTeX Citation’ menu entry to copy ‘cite{BibtexKey}’ text to clipboard.
Improvements to Existing Features:
- Improved performance and reduced memory usage when syncing large amounts of data from and to Mendeley Web.
- Quicker startup after importing a large number of PDF documents.
- Make several additional actions in the Document Details tab undo-able: “Search by Title”, “Details are Correct”, and edits with multiple documents selected.
- Added more citation styles, as well as an interface to search for styles.
- Added separate per-collection options to control whether files are uploaded to and downloaded from Mendeley Web.
- Added a safe-guard against older versions of Mendeley Desktop being used with a more recent database.
- Added a cache for speeding up the opening of PDFs within Mendeley Desktop.
- Identified and fixed a number of issues related to scrolling PDFs.
- Improved the stability when rotating a PDF, and viewing attached highlights or annotations.
- Switching to fullscreen mode should now take you to the most recently viewed page in the PDF, instead of the first page.
- Include the URL of a reference when using the Word/OpenOffice plugins to cite a webpage.
- Enable manually marking a document as needing review.
- Better handling of linebreaks when copying text from the PDF viewer into the abstract field.
- Windows: Allow non-administrator users to install the Word plugin.
- Reduce the time taken to check for availability of Neo/OpenOffice on Mac.
- Display a warning when entering a citation key manually which is already in use.
- Support for searching for keywords in specific fields using ‘fieldname:keyword’ syntax has been extended to all plain text fields.
- Show progress information whilst exporting documents.
- Introduced sanity checking to ensure that any sync that would delete large amounts of documents are intended.
Bug Fixes:
- Fixed various crashes and other glitches in the PDF viewer.
- Fixed various bugs in the file organiser which could cause file copying/renaming to fail or lose link between file and Mendeley document.
- Remove documents from collection instead of moving them to trash when Delete key is pressed.
- Windows: Fixed an issue with the Word plugin reporting “Combobox not found”.
- Fix freeze when downloading large numbers of documents from Mendeley Web.
- Fixed a crash that could occur during the sync process.
- Fixed problem where fields that had been cleared in Document Details tab were not synced correctly with Mendeley Web.
- Fixed crash when viewing some copy protected / DRMed PDFs.
- Fixed DOI or ArXiv ID lookups failing in some cases with valid identifiers.
- Added support for inserting citations as superscript, or subscript, where appropriate with the Word and OpenOffice plugin.
- Fixed import of multiple URLs and non-numeric pages fields from RIS files.
- Fixed export of line breaks in notes and abstract field to Bibtex format.
- Correctly handle adding notes to multiple documents simultaneously.
- Gracefully detect the version of OpenOffice available and handle plugin installation accordingly.
- Fixed a number of issues with file renaming and the File Organizer.
- Highlighting of search keywords in results did not work if search query was quoted or ended with a trailing space.
- Fixed order of URLs in URLs field not being kept when closing and restarting program.
- Some fields (Cast, Producers) were never saved to local database.
- Fixed a character encoding bug when syncing collections.
- Older (PowerPC-based) Macs: Fix a bug with the PDF viewer, so PDFs are now displayed in the correct colors.
- Older (PowerPC-based) Macs: Fixed a bug that prevented exporting files to BibTex.
Feedback and Support
If you have suggestions for improvements please let us know by visiting the feedback forum at http://feedback.mendeley.com. If you encounter any problems using Mendeley or have questions to ask please email support@mendeley.com.
Mendeley Blog 
You’re the best! Upgrading right now.
Could you please also update the Linux repositories, there is still only 0.9.2.1 in there.
Cool. When will it be available on the Hardy repository ?
We are currently working on the Linux repositories and hopefully update them at the end of the day.
Still awaiting the linux repos update…
Hate to whine, but you did mention something about a portable option five weeks ago. I was kinda looking forward to especially that…
Hi Lars, apologies for making you wait. The portable version is almost ready and we are testing it now. However, we are also discussing to make this a part of the premium features (which will also include, among other things, more storage/upload space, less sharing restrictions, more access to research trend stats etc.). Please bear with us for another few weeks – it will come soon!
Uhm…I just downloaded mendeley a few days ago. How can I upgrade? Just install the new version?
Hi Val – yes, you can just download the new version and install it over the old one. We will also push it out via the auto-updater in a couple of days if you prefer to wait.
Good stuff, guys, thanks.
Looking forward to what you have in the Premium version, and hoping it’s going to be cheap, or at least fine-grained in price structure. As more data gets on the cloud, having to pay for multiple services that can’t be consolidated is becoming an increasing problem, particularly as most services (eg. Dropbox) have tiered pricing structures. That means most of us are paying for more storage than we use, which is fine for each service, but gets less rational if you use several. US$5 sounds like little enough, but multiples make a difference ..
You guys seem pretty good at thinking in terms of inter-operating with other services on the data sharing level; how about thinking about sharing rented storage? Or maybe that’s a bridge too far at this stage …
All of my broken DOI lookups (mostly for The Journal of the American Chemical Society) are still broken. All of them resolve fine when I paste the number into the doi.org web form. eg. 10.1021/ja01464a029
“[UPDATE 01/10/2009]: We are hoping to update the Linux repositories later today.” should be updated…
Hi Matt, regarding the DOI lookups: This is not a fault of Mendeley Desktop, it’s actually related to the DOI lookup service we use. For a select few DOI’s, lookups do not return successfully. Apologies that this in an inconvenience to you.
I’m dying over here waiting for the linux repos to be updated!
so do I…
Sorry guys, I’ve just been informed that it won’t happen today unfortunately. But let me assure you that Fred is doing his best. He thinks he manged to get the Qt4 right but still waiting for it to finish compiling. Once this is done we need to build Mendeley against it and then test if everything works fine on lenny/hardy/jaunty/interpid (32 and 64bit). Pretty much no chance to get all this done today. 😦 I keep you posted!
Given the versioning numbers I am getting a bit concerned to be honest…I really want to use Mendeley, but in order to do so, I must be able to use it properly with LaTeX. This has been an important step, but getting bibtex in is still tricky (the basic stuff works just fine, but once you add links or other things such as titles with special {} uses the basic LaTeX support just doesn’t cut it. Now that we are so close to v1, I fear (based on comments I read in the Mendeley forum by other LaTeX and BibTeX users) that Mendeley won’t really be an option for folks like me who have pretty high sunk-costs in their respective bibtex databases. But it’s getting there, for sure. Keep up the good work! More integration – as with CitesULike and Zotero is the way to go, not yet another island with lock-in.
Update on the linux repos?
And what abot the atutomatic update of older versions?
Hi,
We’re considering adding some more bugfixes before activating the automatic update system – as for the apt repositories, we’ve had to change the builds of Qt we use for compatibility with older distributions (such as Hardy and Lenny, which don’t include Qt 4.5). This has been the main thing I’ve been working on since Thursday when we discovered some more issues with them.
We believe the issues are now resolved – unfortunately, we use the openSUSE build service for our debian packaging, which currently has some issues, and we’re unable to build the packages until these are fixed upstream.
We’re really sorry for the delay on the linux packages, and I can assure you we’re trying as hard as possible to get them to you as soon as we can.
Hi Guys
Big improvement! However, I see you guys are getting in a muddle over change control: witness you twice have had to sneak in bug fixes just after a release and you’re having trouble with the Linux builds. There’s a lot to be said for keeping functionality releases and fix releases well apart – I know it’s easier said than done, especially when trying to release concurrent OS versions, but it really is better to delay new function if it isn’t ready. I feel for you: I had a whole mess of Unix versions, Windows, Sun, Linux and MVS to keep aligned, as well as OS specific sub versions. We never released any of them until they were all ready, or we’d deliberately leapfrog releases to keep the support workload to a dull roar. I sometimes released a point release of the previous version with the same maintenance as the new version: this would often flush out where the bugs really were. For every user with their tongue hanging out for functionality, there are three who will use your tongue to hang you with if you don’t let them stay a release or two behind, hoping your more adventurous users will hang them selves on any nasty buglets first.
Hi Alan,
Thanks for your feedback and I think you have a fair point here. We weren’t to happy with that as well and are planning to have a release candidate preview build of bigger releases first which we promote more intensively so users desperate for new features can have a go. The optional auto-update is only set after the stable release is out for a couple of days and no big issues are reported to us.
We will always try to release Win/Mac/Linux generic at the same time but the repositories can still have a slight delay, even if there are no problems like now (still issues currently – updates will be posted on twitter.com/MendeleySupport).
Why not just package a statically-compiled version for all of the debian/ubuntu repositories until dynamically compiled versions are tested and available?
There’s several reasons:
– We use Qt4 under the LGPL; this makes it very inconvenient (though not impossible) to legally ship statically linked binaries.
– Running with static vs running with dynamic builds have different issues; we don’t want to create more bugs.
– In general, we’d like to keep the number of builds (and therefore, versions we have to support) down; creating one build to replace with a second one isn’t something we’d like to do.
– It would increase the amount of time until you got proper dynamically-linked builds, as we’d also have to test the statically linked ones before releasing
We’re sorry for the delay in the Debian/Ubuntu packages; they should be quicker in the future, and they’re currently uploading – subject to any last-minute issues being found (or our office internet connection giving out :p ) they should be live within a few hours.
Finally… Linux repositories updated now!
Finally… thanks !
The pages are cached going ahead in the pdf, but not back! So scrolling back is pretty awful.
Also, still waiting for decent (basic even!) page navigation features (like go to last page).
Good points Mike, thank you. We’ll try to implement both of your suggestions for the next release.
Hi,
thanks for the update (pdf-viewer seems to be really stable now!).
I have just one little remark: Can’t export a pdf with annotation as soon as I highlight test in it (annotations are no prob). Definitely could do so with the old version. Only tested so far on Jaunty (64 bit), will test it on WinXP next week…
Cheers
Sebastian
Is the automatic update system activated? I seem to be running the old still and I would like to move my library to another computer.
Hi Sebastian,
Good to hear that you’re finding the PDF viewer much more stable. I have just looked into this issue of yours and it appears to be isolated to the Debian and Ubuntu packages we offer and only when you try to export a PDF with highlighting present. I have filed a ticket about this on our internal bug tracker and we’ll look into having it fixed as soon as possible.
Sorry for any trouble that thist may be causing.
Regards,
Mustaqil