Author: Paul Foeckler

Scheduled downtime on Tuesday for some of Mendeley Web

Paul Foeckler2 Comments

[UPDATE 2:42pm: all services are back up and running as usual.]

The growth in researchers discovering and using Mendeley continues to humble us. We have outgrown what our current data center can provide, so now we are expanding into a new one. Unfortunately, this means that some services will be put on hold while we make these upgrades.

Services that may experience downtime starting at 1:30 am PST (9:30 am BST) on Tuesday, July 13 are search and article pages. We anticipate that these will be unavailable for two to six hours.

Client syncs or uploading metadata to Mendeley will NOT be affected during this upgrade.

From all of us, thank you for using Mendeley and changing how research is done.

Paul Foeckler | Co-founder and CTO

Mendeley Desktop v0.9.5 released

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 Desktop v0.9.4 released

Paul Foeckler31 Comments

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.

Reminder – Mendeley ‘Open Office’ this Friday!

Paul Foeckler

This is just a quick reminder of our ‘Open Office’ event this coming Friday 18 Sept from 5pm onwards – in case you haven’t seen our previous blog post from last week: we’d like to invite London users to come in to our office and chat to us directly in order to share their general feedback and their suggestions as to what they’d like to see improved in Mendeley. Drinks and snacks will be provided.

If you’re interested in coming along, please email anne@mendeley.com.

We’re looking forward to seeing you!

Mendeley invites you to ‘Open Office Friday’

Paul Foeckler6 Comments

Since we are getting closer to releasing version 1.0, we were discussing how to get even more detailed feedback from our users than we currently get through our support system.

Being able to chat with you guys face-to-face would obviously be best so we said: lets try it and do an ‘Open Office Feedback Session’. Meaning that everyone who is interested can drop in to our offices in Clerkenwell and talk to different members of the team and tell us face-to-face what you like to see improved or added to Mendeley. You can also bring your notebooks and show us directly what’s not working for you or which feature you would like to do differently.

Mendeley office

Your feedback is very valuable to us so as a thank you we would serve drinks and snacks at our office which we could even have on our roof terrace if the weather will allow it, probably not – lets face it :).

If you’re interested, please drop us an email at community@mendeley.com. We’re looking forward to meeting you!

Improved Google Scholar lookup

Paul Foeckler1 Comment

Just a quick update: the Google Scholar lookup in Mendeley Desktop will now return improved document details. We’ll continue to work on improving this but if you have got any suggestions let us know and we’ll look into it.

As for other updates we are currently testing a portable Windows version of Mendeley Desktop which we’re hoping to release this week. We are also planning to finish all “behind the scenes” work for the next major release this week as well. More bug-fixing is needed though so the next version will probably be out around mid September.

Mendeley Desktop v0.9.2.1 released

Paul Foeckler15 Comments

On our way to improved stability this is an update which addresses several problems with the search/filter feature, crashes in the PDF viewer and missing menu items. Its older brother Mendeley Desktop v0.9.2 beta was available for a week but we decided to add one more fix and hold back this blog post. The auto-update is now set from v0.9.1 beta to v0.9.2.1 beta directly.

So which bugs did we address specifically:

  • Fix search index becoming out of date and not returning all relevant documents when using search/filter feature
  • Fix crash when selecting ‘Delete Documents’ in File menu with no documents selected
  • Fix ‘Remove From Collection’ and ‘Restore Documents’ actions missing from File menu
  • Fix ‘OR’ queries in search filter not working
  • Fix ‘Delete Document’ toolbar action appearing twice when right-clicking context menu in documents list
  • Fix non-latin characters in CSL (Citation Style Language) files not being rendered correctly
  • Fix sticky notes being listed in reverse order in right-hand panel in PDF viewer
  • Fix ‘in trash’/’not in trash’ status for documents not being synced correctly for documents in collections
  • Clarify licensing of the Word/OpenOffice.org plugin code and update copyright text in Help -> About dialog, make licensing information easier to find on Mac
  • Add command-line option to ignore SSL errors
  • Fix auto-update download progress bar not being visible
  • Make auto-update download cancel-able
  • Fix a problem when migrating from 0.6.5 to 0.9.x if the user had created more shared groups than collections in My Library
  • Fix syncing error if a document’s title was set to a non-empty whitespace string in Mendeley Desktop
  • (Windows) Allow a custom storage location for Mendeley’s data to be specified in the registry
  • (Mac) Fix Find Next/Previous buttons being visible in PDF viewer when no search term had been entered
  • (Mac) Fix problems with settings migration from 0.6.5 to 0.9.x

As always, if you have suggestions for improvements please let us know by visiting our feedback forum. If you encounter any problems using Mendeley or have questions to ask please email support@mendeley.com.

To see what has changed in previous updates of Mendeley visit our release notes page.

And the winner is… Jonathan Peelle!

Paul Foeckler

Last month, we decided to reward loyal referrers who invited at least 3 colleagues via the Mendeley invite tool and entered them into a prize draw to win an ipod shuffle.

Last week we’ve randomly drawn the winner and it is…. Jonathan Peelle from Cambridge University! He is a postdoctoral fellow at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit researching speech and language processing in the human brain.

Here’s what he thinks about Mendeley:

Jonathan Peelle“There are three things that drew me to Mendeley. The first was the combination of desktop software and the web interface both of which are excellent and support the way I work. In particular having the web interface means my library is always accessible, wherever I am.

Second, the ability to share papers with co-workers is fantastic. It enables me to see what my colleagues are reading and saves me the trouble of typing in or searching for references they have.

Finally, being able to organize my articles by topic/folder and tags is very handy, and helps me to find those slightly more obscure references I’ve read and filed but then promptly forgotten.”

A big thank you to Jonathan and all other loyal users for spreading the word about Mendeley!

2 new full-time Mendeleyans

Paul Foeckler2 Comments

We are happy to announce two new members of the Mendeley family. While Carles Pina adds some Spanish flavour to Mendeley Desktop, Nicholas Jones increments the Southampton University headcount to three by bringing some award-winning expertise to the Mendeley Web table. In their own words:

Carles PinaCarles Pina is a software engineer at Mendeley. He studied computer engineering at La Salle – Ramon Llull University in Barcelona and thought working for Mendeley is a perfect reason to relocate to rainy London. Well, after growing up near Barcelona most cities feel ‘rainy’ he thinks.
 
In his spare time, he enjoys programming in C, Python or C++ maintaining projects like qdacco or contributing to other free software projects. He is also fascinated by attending computer meetings in general and loves traveling.
 
Nicholas JonesNicholas Jones is a software engineer for Mendeley Web. He studied Computer Science at the University of Southampton, graduating with a BSc in 2009. Whilst at the University of Southampton he won the Sir William Siemens Prize for “excellence and innovation on an individual 3rd year project” and the Netcraft Prize for acedemic acheivements in his 2nd year.
 
When not coding away at PHP and JavaScript, Nicholas enjoys trawling through social news sites such as Reddit, looking for interesting and invigorating items to read. Nicholas also has a keen interest in music and when not listening to it, may be found strumming away at his guitar.
 

Mendeley Desktop v0.9.1 released

Paul Foeckler3 Comments

This update addresses a number of issues with Mendeley Desktop v0.9.0.:

Improvements to Existing Features

  • Automatic Pubmed/Crossref title search during metadata extraction if no identifiers (DOI, ArXiv, PMID) are found
  • Hide the notification bar asking for login details when applicable
  • Improved the presentation of search results
  • Added tooltips to the document list for items that aren’t displayed in full
  • Improved detection and handling of unsuccessful responses from Mendeley Web during a sync
  • Increased stability of the internal PDF viewer (more work is to follow on this)
Bug Fixes
  • Enable lookups from Google Scholar to verify document details
  • Fixed a crash when account details were entered or changed
  • Fixed an issue with file links being lost for documents in watched folders
  • Fixed an issue where multiple copies of a note would be added when editing several documents at once
  • Fixed an issue that prevented exporting libraries as BibTeX format
  • Fixed an issue related to closing Mendeley Desktop during a document import
  • A small number of other minor bug fixes that affected the overall stability
  • Fixed a problem with the system PATH variable when installing the Word plugin

Besides releasing a new version of Mendeley Desktop we also updated our catalog of research papers, the people directory, public collection pages, and the online library.

Now you’re also able to import articles from APA PsycNET, IACR ePrints, and RePEc.

To see what has changed in previous updates of Mendeley visit our release notes page.