Author: Paul Foeckler

Server upgrade ahead

Paul Foeckler2 Comments

Just a quick update to let you know that we are in the process of upgrading our current server setup, which is struggling a bit lately. We’ll have much more processing power, memory, better reliability and and and … in short, the website and syncing will perform much better.

Also, another Mendeley Desktop update is on it’s way. This will fix most bugs which have been reported last week. More about that later.

Mendeley Desktop v0.9.0 released

Paul Foeckler25 Comments

This update introduces a lot of new features, including a PDF viewer, OpenOffice.org integration on Mac OSX and Linux, and many more. Interface issues, and a number of bugs are also addressed in this release, as well as improvements to the overall stability.

Just to give you a teaser – this is how it looks like to add notes to PDF documents:
Annotate PDFs

New Features:
  • Built-in PDF viewer for viewing PDFs directly in Mendeley Desktop
  • Support for annotating PDF files (syncing notes to and from Mendeley Web is planned for the next release)
  • Many additional online lookups (CrossRef, PubMed, Google Scholar)
  • Public document collections (reading lists) which can be embedded on other websites
  • OpenOffice.org Writer plugin for Mac OSX & Linux
  • Improved native user interface for Mac OSX
  • Individual synchronization and privacy settings for each document collection
  • Auto-save changes and undo functionality for quick document detail editing
  • Flagging documents as favorites
  • Marking a document as read, or unread
  • Detecting duplicate documents when importing library files or PDFs
  • Merging together document authors, tags, keywords or publications
  • Editing document details, or tags for multiple documents simultaneously
  • New “Trash” collection so you can restore deleted documents
Improvements to Existing Features:
  • Changes to the toolbar and terminology in light of usability tests
  • Better handling of documents with unconfirmed details
  • More robust synchronization between Mendeley Desktop and Mendeley Web
  • Search results are presented in a much easier to read format
  • Searching for documents now searches the document details, as well the PDF text
Bug Fixes:
  • Detect and handle duplicate citation keys being used when exporting to BibTeX format
  • Improved full-text indexing stability for search
  • Allow documents to be renamed without the file organizer being enabled
  • Clean up the formatting of exported citations
  • Handle tags and keywords properly when exporting to BibTex format
  • File organizer stability fixes
  • Corrections to various citation styles
  • Plus many more…

So no time to waste – visit our download page and give it a try, would be great to hear what you think! 🙂 Also, thanks a lot for all the feedback from our leadusers who helped us polishing this new version.

Please note: As part of the upgrade process, if you have an online account already, Mendeley Desktop will need to perform a full sync when it next starts. This may take some time depending on the size of your library. It is a one-off sync that is required to ensure compatibility with an upgraded sync method.

If you have suggestions how to improve managing research papers with the Mendeley reference manager please let us know by visiting our feedback forum. If you encounter any problems using Mendeley or have questions to ask, please e-mail us at support@mendeley.com.

Mendeley Desktop v0.6.5 released

Paul Foeckler20 Comments

After putting the installers on our website last week we now set the auto-update for Windows, Mac and Linux as well. This update adds integration with OpenOffice.org on Windows, fixes several file organiser problems as well as various bugs reported by users. Work is under way on the next update which will include an integrated PDF viewer and many usability improvements to the user interface.

New Features:

  • OpenOffice.org integration on Windows. To setup the OpenOffice.org plugin, restart Mendeley after installing the update and select Tools -> Install OpenOffice Plugin
    OpenOffice.org integration for Linux will be coming soon.

Improvements to Existing Features:

  • Conversion between LaTeX commands for accents and equivalent unicode characters when importing from or exporting to Bibtex
  • Add clickable link under URLs field to open current URL in a browser
  • Add link in Tools menu to install the website importer in your browser which lets you easily import citations from popular websites such as Amazon, Google Scholar and PLoS

Bug Fixes

  • Fixes for various problems when installing the Word plugin
  • Abstract field was not filled in when clicking PubMed lookup button in metadata tab
  • Fixed problem where file organiser did not always respect ‘sort into subfolders’ setting correctly
    on Windows
  • Fixed problem where file organiser could get stuck in an infinite loop, repeatedly copying the same files
  • Show more accurate progress information when organising files
  • Fix author extraction sometimes stripping out lower-case name parts such as ‘van’, ‘der’ etc.
  • Fixed problem on Windows where folder monitoring tried to re-import documents which had been explicitly removed from within Mendeley
  • After sorting the library view, the wrong metadata was shown in the right-hand pane
  • Improved RIS importer’s support for several non-standard fields
  • Fixed crash if a problem occurred loading the data files which support the metadata extraction algorithms
  • Export user’s notes to ‘annote’ rather than ‘note’ field in Bibtex to prevent the problem where the user’s reading notes could appear as part of the formatted citation in the rendered Latex document. Also import ‘comments’ field into the notes field in Mendeley.

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

Release update

Paul Foeckler4 Comments

A couple of days ago we released our latest update of Mendeley. Details about feature improvements and bug fixes of Mendeley Desktop v0.6.4 can be found in my last blog entry, but I thought I just mention some of the improvements in Mendeley Web:

  • Improved grouping in online library
  • Introducing a simple document search
  • Support of two new sites for easy import (SpringerLink and WorldCat)
  • Duplicate detection for bookmarklet import

Next on the list for Mendeley Web is introducing group and network pages which are overdue for a long time. We are also working on a new site design which we’ll announce in a separate post soon.

Happy Easter! 🙂

Mendeley Desktop v0.6.4 beta coming soon, work on v0.7.0 started already

Paul Foeckler2 Comments

Just to give you a quick update on our development. Unfortunately we didn’t manage to release an updated version of Mendeley Desktop last week as originally thought. There were some stability issues on Mac OS 10.5.6 when importing a large number of documents through folder monitoring. We thought we better fix this now since it’s one of the first things many users will do when starting to use Mendeley Desktop. It turned out not to be that easy though since it only happened on Mac OS Leopard only and the bug was well hidden deep down in the internals of the app.

Anyway, it’s fixed now and QA is doing its best to make sure that there are no regressions in the new version and everything works as expected. Here is preview of some of the things that will change in v0.6.4:

Improvements to Existing Features:
  • Full text search is now available for PDF files attached to documents manually or downloaded from Mendeley Web
  • Word plugin is now much faster with documents that have a large number of citations
  • Export issue, DOI, URLs and several other fields to Bibtex
  • Export file links to Bibtex
  • Import tags (‘links’) from EndNote XML
  • When importing documents which are already in your library, add the existing documents to the current group
Bug Fixes
  • Fix HTTP proxy support
  • Fix possible ‘UUID Clash’ error when syncing
  • File organiser forgot the root folder after Mendeley Desktop was restarted
  • Allow files to be removed from documents after they have been uploaded to Mendeley Web
  • Files were re-downloaded on each sync if they contained characters which are not permitted in file names
  • Fixed problem where organiser would re-process the same files several times
  • Bibtex exporter could generate invalid citation key names
  • Fix auto-complete in manual document entry dialog
  • Metadata form would sometimes prompt for the user to save changes twice
  • Fix possible ‘XML POST’ error when importing documents containing XML entities in the notes field

For v0.7.0 we will continue working on metadata extraction, focus more on the interface and usability as well as try to include the often asked for internal PDF viewer. There are still some cross-platform issues to solve with the PDF viewer but we’re confident that we will have something ready to ship for v0.7.0.

Mendeley Web just reached the next level

Paul Foeckler3 Comments

Today we released a big update of Mendeley Web. Highlights are a new search which indexes all main profile information and sorts the results in a sensible way.

Search

A highly improved online library. Users are now able to manage their private groups, filter their documents, add documents to groups, and edit their notes.

Library

There have been a couple of bug-fixes and various other changes. It would be great if you let us know what you think!

Profile

Mendeley Desktop v0.6.1 released

Paul Foeckler1 Comment

This release is mainly a bug-fix release fixing the following problems:

  • Fixed various problems with synchronisation
  • Fixed automatic file-renaming
  • Fixed interface freezes during folder monitoring and file import
  • Fixed DOI lookup during automatic data extraction of PDFs
  • Fixed duplicate file import
  • Fixed filters view (bottom left of screen) showing all entries instead of entries specific to a group
  • Fixed File -> Export only exporting the last selected document instead of all selected documents
  • Fixed problems with migrating databases from Mendeley v0.5.9
  • Reduced pauses when working with folder monitoring tab in Preferences dialog
  • Created installation packages for Ubuntu and other distributions
  • Fixed various interface glitches
  • Improved tagging

Important:

  • If your library contains more than around 10,000 documents (including references) you might get an error while syncing. The local
    functionality of the client will continue to work.

Notes when updating from v0.5.9:

  • Windows only: After running the auto-update the actual installer starts when trying to run Mendeley again. After you have installed v0.6.0 Mendeley Desktop will be the new starting point.

Thanks a lot for all your feedback. If you experience any further problems please visit our feedback forum and we will try to help.

Thanks for your feedback – Mendeley Desktop v.0.6.1 is coming soon

Paul Foeckler

Thanks a lot for your feedback and bug reports for our latest Mendeley release! Since we’re still in early beta and actually having done an almost complete re-write of Mendeley Desktop this is extremely helpful and highly appreciated.

Just to give you an update on the current status: Most of the problems you reported for v.0.6.0 are already fixed for the upcoming release which is due next week. We will continue testing this week to make sure we fix the majority of current bugs – especially with synchronisation and responsiveness.

Just some more notes about the current status:

  • Unfortunately we didn’t have enough time to include the PDF preview in the Windows versions of Mendeley Desktop. This feature is only removed temporarily while we’re working on including a better cross-platform solution.
  • The automated DOI lookup during import isn’t working at the moment. This might look like the quality of the metadata extraction has decreased, but this is currently being reviewed and will be available in v.0.6.1 again.
  • Synchronisation has some problems with malformed XML data due to invalid characters in local databases. This is fixed for v.0.6.1.
  • Mendeley Desktop freezes when importing a folder. This is fixed – everything related to the import will be done in different threads in the update.
  • Opening the settings dialog on Windows takes a long time. This has been optimized for v.0.6.1 and should be a lot quicker and more responsive.

In case you encounter additional bugs please don’t hesitate to contact us and we will do our best to help. You can check further bug reports and feature requests in our feedback forum.