38 thoughts on “Mendeley Desktop 1.0 Development Preview Released”

1. Can’t wait to test the stable version. With regard to the PDF viewer and the annotations/highlights we made to PDFs, is there any reason those won’t appear in Adobe when opening the PDFs? Isn’t there a way to change the annotations/highlighting features so that they appear in other PDF reading applications?

2. The PDF viewer remember positions when tabs are closed, but is Mendeley capable of remembering which PDFs were open between sessions (like chrome and FF remember tabs)? This, to me, is the most annoying thing about Mendeley.

3. Initial feedback: upon installing the new version, it announced that it could not locate Word on the system and therefore cannot update the plugin. I updated it manually by copying the plugin into Word’s startup folder, but Mendeley kept complaining until I told it to remove the plugin, which is managed easily enough, and then re-installing it manually (because the option did not appear in the Mendeley options menu).
   In Word, there’s a delay when first going into the references ribbon. This is not a huge problem, but it seems when trying to open a DOCX file with citations in it when Word isn’t already loaded, this causes Word to crash. If I first load Word then open the file from within it, it works fine.

4. And now it turns out every time I start Mendeley it pops up an error message saying Word plugin cannot be updated because Work cannot be detected – even though it allows me to UNinstall the plugin…

5. great new note view! thank you for that

6. dubi – Thanks for the rapid and detailed feedback. I’ll make sure support gets notified about this.

7. Great New features, especially the subfolder feature is very cool. I have already loads of papers on my account, the subfolder & dublicate feature helps me to oragnize way better.

   If you improve the iPad app in the same way like the desktop version, I would never print out a publication again…

8. Great! I was waiting for this and I will try it asap. Just one question: when you talk about OpenOffice, can you assure the same behaviour with LibreOffice?

9. Enrico, the plugin does work on Ubuntu 11.04 with LibreOffice. Let us know if you run into trouble.

10. Will v1.0 support MS Word 64bit?

11. I’m really enjoying the new features, but I’ve encountered a couple more problems:

    Duplicates:
    When changing details in duplicates, Mendeley crashes sometimes for no apparent reason.

    I’ve encountered cases where multiple items were incorrectly identified as duplicates, but when I tried accessing the files attached to them, Mendeley has mixed them all up. I seem to have lost a couple of files this way. Nothing which isn’t retrievable, but still annoying.

    I have two items, one an edited volume and the other a chapter from that volume. For some reason Mendeley keeps flagging them as duplicates of each other. When a couple of files are manually flagged as not duplicates, the software should be able to remember that and not flag them again in the future.

    Sub-folders:
    Maybe I’m just missing something, but once I put a folder into another folder, there doesn’t appear to be any way to make it a primary folder again. I think there should be a way to do so.

    I noticed when a folder has sub-folders, all items in all sub-folders appear when I look at the primary folder. This makes sense, but there should be a way to view only items which are in the primary folder and not those which are only in the sub-folders.

12. Hi Enrico,

    At the moment, OpenOffice and LibreOffice have not diverged enough to cause us too many problems. However, if they do diverge significantly over time we might have to re-think how we handle them – particularly with regards to testing.

13. Love the new features!

    Sadly it crashed the second time I ran it. This came out: http://pastebin.com/Qh3PT111

    (using Gentoo Linux, if that matters)

    So I reverted to 0.9.9.2 with the instructions described in this post, and although I could recover the database, it seems that Mendeley “forgot” where I had the PDFs of the papers… Am I missing something?

14. I echo dubi’s comments about sub-folders and wish to add:

    The chain of folders/sub-folders defaults to fully expanded when launching the program (i.e., all folders and subs are visible). This defeats the purpose of having sub-folder functionality, which is to hide folders not currently in use in order to save space in the library pane.

15. Hi Matthias,

    I’m afraid Mendeley Desktop 1.0 will not support 64bit versions of Office 2010. Apart from a few minor additions, this preview is feature-complete.

    Hi Patricio,

    Did you restore the backup from the archive directory or let Mendeley recover your data from the web? In the latter case, PDF file links will only be restored if your files were synced with Mendeley Web – you can still revert to the backup in the ‘archive’ directory in this case.

    Hi Dubi,

    Thanks for the feedback, we’ll have a think about the best way to do this.

16. Hi,
    It’s great to have a new version of Mendeley!
    I found one bug when using citations on Word 2011 (Mac). Any special characters (accents, umlauts, and even apostrophes!) get mangled. For example, when citing a paper from O’Shea, I get
    [O8217Shea 2010]
    instead of
    [O’Shea 2010]
    which was what I got with the previous version.
    good luck getting version 1.0 out!

17. Strange bug I just encountered: in previous versions, when citing an edited volume (i.e., a book with no listed authors, only editors), Mendeley would know to cite it as “(Editors Names [year])”. Now, however, it just gives out “([year])”. This problem is only with in-text citations. In the reference list it correctly lists the editors instead of an author.

    Took me a while to figure out why my documents suddenly had all these years randomly mentioned without names next to them…

18. I would like to see the ability to type diacritical characters the same way they are entered into word. These include
    1) crtl+’+a = accented a
    2) crtl + shift + ~ + n = n with a tilde
    3) crtl + shift + : + o = o w. umlaut
    etc, etc, etc. In my experience, these are the fastest ways to enter diacriticals. Incorporating this into future versions would make Mendeley much more useful for those of us who use languages that include diacriticals.

    Thank you,
    Nathan

19. I could download and run this preview easily enough, but I do not understand how I go about “properly” installing it (on Ubuntu 64-bit).

    I mean, which directories/files in the install package go where in the system directory structure? If there are no rules, then what is considered best practice?

20. Hi,

    The merge feature looks really useful! However, I get one entry which is incorrectly labeled as a duplicate. Is it possible to merge the other 2 entries (which are correctly marked as duplicate) without removing the incorrect one?

    Regards, Reinier

21. I’m loving the tweaks! I’m using the Mac version, and I’ve noticed a couple of issues:

    (1) I can’t undo highlighting – if I accidentally click with the highlighter turned on and select a couple random letters, I’m stuck with it.

    (2) I’m not sure if this has been noted before (it was present before), but the window is very quirky. I’ve noticed that I can drag the entire Mendeley window through the Apple menu bar, which is not typically possible in OS X. I also have some programs installed (e.g. BetterTouchTool) where I use shortcuts to resize windows. They work for every application but Mendeley Desktop.

    (3) It would be nice to have some more keyboard commands, especially for entering/leaving Fullscreen mode and zooming in and out.
    (3.1)It would be better for the Highlighter keyboard command to select whatever you used last (Text Highlighter vs. Rectangle), instead of defaulting to Text. If I’m reading a non-OCR article in fullscreen mode, I always want the rectangle, and I otherwise will always want to use the text highlighter.
    (3.2) I’m not sure how difficult it is to exploit the pinch features of Apple trackpads to zoom in and out, as is implemented in Preview, Skim, and in fact most applications for Apple where zooming is relevant.

22. Hi Zach,

    > (1) I can’t undo highlighting

    This is a bug – will be fixed in the next preview release.

    > (2) I’m not sure if this has been noted before (it was present before),

    Yes, there are some known window behavior quirks with Mendeley on Mac. They will not be fixed in 1.0 but we will try to address them in the release after that.

23. Good to see updates have picked up again! I was disappointed not to see what seems a killer feature to establish Mendeley user base: a plain text/RTF citation scan () for maximum compatibility while adding citations to documents in any word processor.

    More on the feedback forum http://goo.gl/0U3Ca and elsewhere http://goo.gl/Khzkp

    In my humble opinion this could be a feature that sets mendeley apart from its competitors, at least in academia..

24. Thanks for the update. Really appreciate the new folders and duplicate checking.

    However, I’m having troubles running two Mendeley users on one PC account. It’s cool that the “Library Path” is stored in users settings, but you forgot to store the “Watched folders” path. End result: the two library get mixed all the time and the Archive feature does not work properly.

25. This seems to have the makings of a good update, but since installing it today I have encountered a serious problem.

    I’m using Word 2011 on OS X 10.7.0, and with the previous version of Mendeley I was using I could cite the references from my library easily using the script button on the toolbar. But since install u

26. This seems to have the makings of a good update, but since installing it today I have encountered a serious problem.

    I’m using Word 2011 on OS X 10.7.0, and with the previous version of Mendeley I was using I could cite the references from my library easily using the script button on the toolbar. But since installing, the “Mendeley” option has disappeared and reinstalling the MS Word plugin has not solved the problem, does anyone have any ideas? Thanks

27. Thanks for the impressions, Dubi.
    No support for 64 bit MS Office? Wow. Shocker.

28. Congratulations on the 1.0! It’s always a big milestone. I loved the developer preview versions and never had any issues with them, so I won’t see any changes.

29. Love the sub-folders and the duplicate detection. Thanks!

30. Hi Dave,

    There is a known problem with the plugin not appearing in the script menu in Word under Mac OS 10.7.

    Please see this thread in our feedback forum for a workaround: http://feedback.mendeley.com/forums/4941-mendeley-feedback/suggestions/2073709-missing-plugin-mac-word

31. Has italics in the title been implemented in this release?
    Even though Mendeley has so many benefits, I CANNOT recommend this to any in life sciences until this central feature is working.

32. Thank you for the update. Particularly happy to have a “check for duplicates” tool available now.

    It’s just a shame that, when presented with conflicting entries, only one of the entries is shown. It would be very useful to be able to see what the conflict is at a given entry, and be able to either pick one version or the other. The merging interface could use some improvements.

    In any case, it’s already quite helpful as it is. Good job.

33. Hey, thanks for this great update.
    I just want to come back to the very first comment from A. Hairir. I also wonder, if there’s a possibilty to save annotations/highlights within the pdf itself, so that it’s possible to read/see them in Adobe Acrobat or other PDF-Viewers? The other way around it’s a bit tricky, I can see the highlights made in Acrobat and I also the notes, but I just see the symbol, I cannot open and read them.

34. The issue with writing PDF annotations into the PDF is how to handle the collaborative annotations. The existing systems for annotation assume that only one person would be annotating a given document. We’re currently turning over a couple ideas, but nothing’s concrete yet.

35. That sounds really great. By the way is it now possible to print directly from the pdf viewer and do I have the possibility to fit the whole page to the window size of the mendeley-pdf-viewer?

36. What about to possibility of citing chapters or pages from a book? This is a fundamental requirement for academia and somehow it still not considered.

37. also a snapshot tool is strongly desired in the PDF viewer

38. Bug Report: when zoom the pdf view using ctrl+wheel, if I want to zoom back, part of the file can not be seen since the page has been moved to the left and outside of the application frame. this happens when the applicaiton window is not maximized.

Comments are closed.