Already live via auto-update since last week but we just wanted to let everyone know about this minor update which amongst other things improves the look and feel of the toolbar on Mac. It also addresses several problems with annotation syncing, problems installing the Word plugin on some systems and general stability.
Further user interface improvements are planned for the next release so rest assured that this is just the beginning. Here is the complete list of changes for this release:
New Features and Improvements
- (Mac) Improved the look and feel of the toolbar on Mac.
Bug Fixes
- (Windows) Fixed ‘Invalid procedure call’ error when working with some Word documents which contain Mendeley-generated citations.
- Fixed several sporadic crashes related to the search and de-duplication features.
- Fixed several sync errors which could occur when syncing annotations.
- Fixed several crashes related to the Word/OpenOffice/Mac Word plugins.
- Fixed several crashes related to the notification bar.
- Fixed several crashes related to importing PDFs which are already in your library.
- Fixed annotation creation times being displayed incorrectly in timezones outside of GMT.
- Fixed sticky notes not being exported correctly via File -> Export with annotations.
- Added a limit to the number of citations that are extracted from a single PDF and reduce the number of citations extracted with poor-quality metadata.
- Reduced memory usage when handling large file attachments.
- Fixed ‘LinkToMendeleyVba2.dll not found’ message on some Windows PCs.
- Made database updates safer when installing new versions of Mendeley Desktop.
- Fixed the problem where Document Details hide/show toggle in menu did not always work correctly.
- Fixed sticky notes not being restored when restoring backups.
- Fixed annotation syncing problems when file organizer is enabled
- Fix a freeze during the ‘Downloading files’ syncing step.
- Preserve author ordering correctly when importing from Zotero.
- (Mac) Fixed crash when entering accented characters (eg. umlauts) in authors field in Document Details tab.
- (Mac) Included more detailed information in crash reports sent from Mendeley Desktop.
- (Mac) Fixed crash when importing some corrupted PDFs.
- (Mac) Experimental support for international versions of Microsoft Word for Mac.
- (Linux) Fixed README file being installed to /usr in Ubuntu version.
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 e-mail support.
Mendeley Blog 
I have a quite a big problem with this release [0.9.3 on xp sp3 x86]. I cannot access google scholar via the ”search by title” button regardless of the paper I want to edit.
No, I don’t have a captcha to deal with when going to google scholar via my browser.
Retrieving from Arxiv is fine and tremendously quick , ouch !
Anyway the google thing sucks a lot….
I recall it was previously mentioned that you used openSUSE build service to make the ubuntu and debian packages. Do you also have openSUSE packages? I would be willing to attempt that myself, but if you already use the build service would it be much trouble to add other distributions supported by the build service? I realize with dependencies etc it may not be as simple as just marking another checkbox in the build service.
Thanks,
Carl
Hi Carl,
We don’t have Fedora/openSUSE packages at the moment. We had a brief look at it a while back but because of the effort involved in sorting out dependencies and testing that the builds actually work, we decided we could not justify the time required. Instead we decided to do dedicated builds for Ubuntu/Debian and provide generic Linux builds as an alternative to cover the long tail of other distributions.
I think for Fedora and openSUSE rather than doing dedicated builds it would be better to write a script to take the generic version and package it as an RPM, or perhaps take a look at existing tools like zeroinstall.
Hey, good to know you have no interest in supporting the second most popular linux distro! Should have known better than to rely on closed software, now all my work for the last six months is basically gone. Awesome.
Hello Gregor,
Which Linux distribution are you referring to? As I said above, though we only do dedicated builds for Ubuntu/Debian, the ‘generic’ Linux version should work on most modern distributions. We are aware of problems on Fedora (which can be worked around, but we’ll look into making it easier to get it running out of the box).
If you need to get data from Mendeley onto a system which is not supported, you can do that via Bibtex/RIS export (provided you have another system that is able to run Mendeley available) or if you’re comfortable with SQL, from the local database itself.
Thanks for the info. I would be willing to attempt a dedicated build or script as you suggested if you have any further tips on that. I have no problem building/testing on my own time, and I run Ubuntu, Fedora, and Gentoo on different pcs, and frequently test out other distributions. I just happen to run openSUSE on my laptop for particular reasons and that is the pc I do most of my academic stuff on. Anyhow, thanks for providing a great app, I have introduced it to quite a few people, there is definitely a demand for the features it provides. I hate to sound cliche but it was pretty much exactly what I was looking for. I saw the ad on facebook after spending countless hours testing various apps on windows and linux to organize my chaotic collection of files. Keep up the great work, I certainly appreciate it. No big deal with openSUSE, I realize linux is evolving and expanding so quickly just keeping tabs on what is changing, much less actually kicking the tires would take up more time than anyone has. I would pick most linux distros over windows any day, and the diversity is wonderful, but for years the package management has been the only thing that bothers me.
Writing a proper spec file for Fedora is quite easy. You don’t even seem to be using anything else than the QT libraries.
If you want help in packaging Mendeley, just holler.
Hi Jussi,
Thanks for the offer. We made some changes to the ‘generic Linux’ builds since this blog post was written to make it easier to get Mendeley running on Fedora as well as improving system integration. Mendeley >= 1.0 should work ‘out of the box’ on recent versions of Fedora.
The issue with adding new types of package is not so much getting the package built in the first place but maintaining it – making sure that each package has had some basic testing and that it is updated along with the Windows, Linux and Mac versions on each release. Unlike most software that comes with Ubuntu or Fedora, we want users to be able to upgrade to the latest version of Mendeley Desktop without having to update their entire system.