Mendeley unpacked

December 16, 2009 Mendeley4 Comments

Last Friday we finally moved to our new office, just a few blocks down the road. That’s 4,905 sq.ft. of pure leg freedom (or 455m² to you metric people out there). Turned out the hardest part of the relocation was disentangling the team members, who have been piling up over the last few months, as Mendeley grows and grows.

Fitting all these people in our old 1,090 sq.ft. office had become quite difficult: Alright, place the new designer over here, seat the new data mining experts over there, cram in a bunch of developers in that corner and don’t forget to fill up any remaining space with interns.

Single-handedly, our very own Captain Cindy managed the whole relocation process within a mere matter of hours. Lured by corporate pizza, the whole Mendeley team pitched in highly motivated. Some ha-ha-funny guys even volunteered to carry the wireless network cables!

Our new neighbours kindly hosted a nice house warming party last Thursday. A big “Thank you” to the friendly people at IDEO and we happily accept your table soccer challenge.

Let’s hope that this time we can stay a little longer than just one and a half years.

You’re welcome to have a look:

Feeling boxed in?

December 10, 2009 Mendeley

boxed in Upload Space

When we first cleared out some room on our servers to allow you to upload PDFs to your private Mendeley Web account, we spared 500 MB per person, given that PDFs are usually around 1-2 MB, this enables you to store 250-500 PDF documents online. In response to requests (or should we say popular demand?) as well as bulging research collections, we will increase the storage space as part of a premium package in early 2010 (we are also working on more detailed stats, a recommendation engine and some other nice features).

For the growing number of people who really can’t wait that long (hats off to those of you who have already maxed out your accounts!), please write to support@mendeley.com with a request for extra space and we’ll be happy to pass out some freebies. It will be a temporary upgrade but you won’t have to switch to a premium subscription later. Once the premium features are in place and if you choose not to upgrade, you won’t be able to add any further documents to your web account (if it is larger than 500 MB), but your data will still be accessible and safe.

Shared Collections

Taking a similar approach with shared collections – which are currently limited to ten people – we quickly found requests rolling in for collections of a much larger size, mainly for departments and labs. So, we will raise the number of people who can access a shared collection as part of a premium package and in turn make the limits flexible. Again, write to support@mendeley.com if you need more shared collection slots within your department, lab, or research group. Send us your username (e-mail address), the name of the collection, and the number of people you would like to collaborate with and we can expand your shared collection to make it a bit more sociable for the festive season.

(Image by CwThomas43)

Mendeley at LeWeb '09

December 8, 2009 Jan Reichelt4 Comments

You’ve got some spare time this Wednesday and Thursday? Then come to beautiful Paris, do some Christmas shopping, and meet us at LeWeb ’09**. Yes, great news: Mendeley is one of the 16 finalists** and we are demoing Mendeley on Wednesday (and if we make it into the final-final then also on Thursday).

What is LeWeb ’09? It’s one of the biggest (if not *the* biggest) start-up competition for Europe’s start-ups to present their products and technologies to some of the most influential players in the market, and even Royalty** will be there! The high-profile judges include venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, and representatives from companies such as Sun and Microsoft.

Besides having the chance to present Mendeley and show what we are up to, it will be a great event to mingle with other companies and founders and share start-up experiences.

And who knows if we will be lucky enough again to follow up on our success of Plugg.eu’s “Start-up of Year 2009” and TechCrunch Europas “Best Social Innovation Which Benefits Society” awards? At least it will be a lot of fun!

Oh là là!

You’ve got some spare time this Wednesday and Thursday? Then come to beautiful Paris, do some Christmas shopping, and meet us at LeWeb ’09. Yes, great news: Mendeley is one of the 16 finalists and we are demoing Mendeley on Wednesday (and if we make it into the final-final then also on Thursday).

What is LeWeb ’09? It’s one of the biggest (if not the biggest) start-up competition for Europe’s start-ups to present their products and technologies to some of the most influential players in the market, including Royalty! The list of speakers is truly impressive, and the high-profile judges include entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and representatives from companies such as Sun and Microsoft.

Besides having the chance to present Mendeley and show what we are up to, it will be a great event to mingle with other companies and founders and share start-up experiences (and maybe get some free sandwiches).

And who knows, maybe we will be lucky enough to follow up on our success at Plugg.eu’s “Start-up of Year 2009” and TechCrunch Europas “Best Social Innovation Which Benefits Society” awards? At the very least, it will be a lot of fun! Oh là là!

Mendeley Desktop v0.9.5 released

December 4, 2009 Paul Foeckler13 Comments

The main priority is still to polish existing features by fixing a lot of usability issues and bugs. We also continue working on speed and stability and rest assured – work on the Mac Word Plugin has now officially been started. We’ll let you know as soon as we have an alpha version ready for testing.

Improvements to Existing Features:

Improved concurrent editing of documents by multiple users. Tags and keywords changes are now merged correctly and conflict resolution is improved.
Add support for disambiguating citations in Word and OpenOffice.
Improve the performance of bibliography generation and citation insertion in Word and OpenOffice.
Mendeley Desktop can now import PDF, BibTeX and RIS files which do not have the .pdf, .bib or .ris file extension. Mendeley Desktop will attempt to guess the type of the file in this case.
Support for importing .txt files which may contain references in various formats.
Support importing of month field from BibTeX where month name is not enclosed in quotes or braces.
HTML attachments are now indexed for full text search (note that this will not apply to existing attachments).
Show a wizard on first run offering to set up word processor integration.
Clearer formatting of dates in the table view.
Add support for superscript and subscript formatting of in-line citations.
Add a menu item to toggle the visiblity of the right-hand Document Details pane.
Support for additional fields and document types in BibTeX import and export.
Support for additional document types in RIS import and export.
Show different icons in the table view depending on the file type, number of files attached to a document and whether the file is stored locally or downloadable from the web.
Automatically enable the ‘Citation Key’ field in the Document Details pane when BibTeX syncing is enabled.
Support for importing file links from EndNote XML files (currently tested with EndNote X2, X3 XML files).
Add keyboard shortcuts for moving between tabs, creating folders and toggling the Document Details pane.
Clearer messages in the Word and OpenOffice.org plugins.
When importing PDFs through the ‘Watched Folders’ feature, the existing library is searched for duplicates of imported documents.
Improved performance of first PDF import after starting Mendeley.
(Mac) Mendeley Desktop offered to install the NeoOffice plugin even when NeoOffice was not installed.
(Linux) Add a README file to the generic Linux version of Mendeley Desktop.

Bug Fixes:

Fixed various hangs and crashes on exit when background services (such as the file organiser) were enabled.
The location of the Zotero database was not auto-detected if Firefox was not using the default profile.
Hyperlinks in PDF documents did not work reliably.
Fix crash when opening certain invalid PDF documents.
Removed non-working support for unchecking sub-folders of a watched folder.
Import documents directly into the ‘My Publications’ collection did not work.
Progress of syncing operations is now shown as a percentage instead of number of documents and citations updated.
Fix a bug where document addition date/times were stored in local time internally and would be incorrect after a timezone or daylight savings change.
The document type combo-box now updates correctly after a DOI/Arxiv/PubMed lookup.
Improved syncing performance.
‘Copy LaTeX Citation’ menu command now generates a citation key for the selected document(s) if necessary.
Application interface could hang whilst performing a database upgrade or repair.
Search index could go out of date causing documents which should match the search keywords not to be found.
Search did not always find all relevant full text matches.
Auto-update checks did not work properly in release candidate versions.
(Mac) The account password field was cleared when opening the preferences dialog.

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

Month: December 2009