Tag: bug fixes

Mendeley Desktop 0.9.9 Released

Robert Knight10 Comments

Mendeley Desktop 0.9.9 is now available for Windows, Mac and Linux.  For existing users, you can get it by starting (or restarting) Mendeley Desktop and accepting the update prompt.

Highlights of this release:

  • The new citation editor introduced for Word on Windows in the previous release is now also available for users of  OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Word for Mac.  There is no longer a need to go back to Mendeley to select a publication to cite.  Instead you can just click Insert Citation (or press Ctrl + Cmd (⌘) + I on Mac) and type in keywords from the title, authors or publication of the work you wish to cite.

    • Open Office

    Mac

  • You can now export the sticky notes on a PDF as an annotation report in PDF format, with or without the content of the article itself.  When viewing a PDF in Mendeley, go to File -> Export PDF with Annotations.

  • Sharing PDFs with colleagues is now easier, whether they use Mendeley or not.  Select a document and click the ‘E-mail Documents’ button on the toolbar to send an article via email to one or more people.

In addition, there have been improvements to app startup time, citation formatting, RIS import, EndNote XML import/export and Linux desktop integration, plus bug fixes and stability improvements.

For more details, see the complete list of changes.

If you have a feature, change or bug fix that you particularly want to see soon, please visit our feedback forum and add your votes.

Ubuntu users: Mendeley Desktop 0.9.9 was released for Ubuntu/Debian last week.  Mendeley Desktop 0.9.9.1 has been released today to fix crashes specific to the Ubuntu version that some users encountered when the file organizer was enabled.

New Web Release: Twitter integration and API fixes

drgunn1 Comment

A useful way to keep your contacts up to date on what you’re doing online is to have services tweet out your activity. Now Mendeley will send tweets on your behalf if you add a publication to the “My Publications” folder or comment or like something in a public group newsfeed. You can activate this on your Account Settings page and pick and choose which activities you’d like to have tweeted on your behalf.
Twitter Integration

Another small but useful change is the addition of permalinks to activity feed items, making it easier to call attention to a specific item in the feed. You’ll find those attached to the date for each item. We’ve also made lots of under-the-hood fixes and improvements to the API. Please note that with this release, we’re also officially dropping support for IE6.

Mendeley Desktop 0.9.6.3 Released

Robert Knight8 Comments

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 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.

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.