Month: July 2012

Mendeley Desktop 1.6 Released

Robert Knight3 Comments

The final version of Mendeley Desktop 1.6 is here.  Please see our announcement of the preview release for a list of the improvements in this version and this gallery for screenshots.  In addition to the features in the preview, other enhancements added for the final release include:

  • Improved search in the PDF viewer.  Opening a PDF from the search view in My Library will start a search for the phrase in the PDF, search results wrap around when clicking Next / Previous, we display the number of matches and we no longer dim the whole page when highlighting matches.
  • Support for LibreOffice on Windows and improved detection of available LibreOffice / OpenOffice versions for Windows, Mac and Linux.  Please note that on Mac the plugin only supports LibreOffice.
  • Under Tools -> Options -> Connection, there is a ‘Use system connection settings’ checkbox in case you need to use custom proxy settings with Mendeley Desktop for any reason that are different to those used by Internet Explorer or Safari.

Many Windows users have asked for a version of Mendeley Desktop which can be installed and updated on systems without administrator rights.  There is now a customized installer (this is for 1.5.1, but it will update to 1.6 after install) which will install and run Mendeley Desktop from your home folder.

Thanks to everyone for the feedback on this release, please keep it coming in!  You can vote for improvements on the feedback forum and get help with any problems on the support forum.

One final note, there are no changes to the supported platforms in this update but for the next release, Windows users will need Windows XP Service Pack 2 or later (if you’re reading this and you’re not sure, it is very likely that you already have this) and Linux users will require Ubuntu 10.04 or equivalent.  On Mac, we hope to support OS X 10.5 for a little longer, but if you can run Snow Leopard or newer, we’d suggest doing so.

Another science startup that's changing how research is done. An interview with Elizabeth Iorns of Science Exchange.

drgunn

I recently had the chance to sit down with Elizabeth Iorns of Science Exchange to talk about her company and her vision for accelerating research and development and making research more efficient and reproducible. I really wish Science Exchange had been around when I was finishing my PhD. It would have saved me tons of time and saved the lab money, too.

Special note:
Elizabeth and I are offering a free seminar series on making the transition from academia to industry. If you’re interested in having us speak at your institution, please contact elizabeth.iorns @ scienceexchange.com.Read More »

A tale of two researchers. How we're adapting Mendeley to meet your needs.

drgunn6 Comments

One of the most interesting things about creating software that’s used by millions of people is seeing how the ways people use your software agree with what you expected and also the unexpected ways that people use it. One somewhat unexpected thing we’ve realized is that there are (at least!) two distinct modes of use of Mendeley.


Image via ricephotos

Meet Jane. Jane uses Mendeley as a cloud research storage application. Jane is a graduate student who works mostly on her own and has created and participated in a few public groups. She uses groups mostly for the purpose of discovery of new and interesting research, but also to share what she’s found with others in her field, so public groups are best for her. She keeps her papers in Mendeley so that she can access them easily from wherever she is, on her Desktop PC or Linux machine at work, or her Mac laptop at home, which allows her to work on her manuscripts wherever she is. She sees Mendeley as an application which stores her reading history for easy retrieval and she appreciates the Mendeley Suggests feature to help her discover new research. Jane is a real research hound, needing to store over a thousand papers, and appreciates being able to buy extra storage. Most Mendeley users are like Jane, with or without the need for extra storage.Read More »