Tag: Steve Dennis

The New Mendeley for iPad and iPhone

stevedennis94 Comments

[Editor’s Note–We thought you’d like to know: this 2013 post is out-of-date. Find info on Mendeley’s current abilities here, and details about the 2021 sunset of the mobile apps here.]

We’re very proud to announce the release of the all new Mendeley for iOS. We’ve rebuilt the app from the ground up to make it fast, fluid and easier to use than ever before. It’s available today for FREE on the app store.

NewiPad

It’s been a long time coming.  We’ve listened to your feedback, and have taken our time to ensure that we’ve crafted a great product, that makes your research workflow quicker and much more efficient.

Features
  • Redesigned from the ground up to deliver the best possible mobile experience
  • Highlight important text and record your thoughts with sticky notes
  • Sync highlights and notes to Mendeley Desktop on Windows, Mac, or Linux
  • Sync wirelessly without interrupting your workflow
  • Easily tap-to-download full-text files
  • Fullscreen reading in any orientation
  • Explore papers related to the one you’re reading
  • Supports nested folders in your library and groups
  • Easily tag documents or add them to folders

Read More »

Mendeley Desktop Syncs Mapped Globally

Alice Bonasio

Mendeley Desktop Map

Here at Mendeley we have a hack day every month where our developers (and even the non-techy folk) try to come up with cool and/or useful projects. On one of those days, Carles Pina from our Desktop team thought it would be interesting to play around with the Google Maps API to visualize Mendeley activity around the globe. He took Mendeley Desktop sync apache logs, mapped the IP addresses to each geolocation using python-geoip, and then fed this into the Google Maps API to generate each keyframe.

As you play through the video – which covers about 2.5 days of Mendeley activity – each glowing dot represents a sync event, which then gently fades out over a few frames. The darker shade that moves across the screen shows the time between sunset and sunrise, and you might notice that the activity decreases at night, but that in places like the US East Coast – perhaps unsurprisingly – there are plenty of people burning the midnight oil. It seems that researchers in New York don’t really believe in sleep. Steve Dennis worked on making this beautiful video, with relaxing music provided by The Disconnect , and we wanted to share it with you. It is, after all, a video starring our users and showing how Mendeley is being used by researchers around the world, and around the clock.

We hope you like it, let us know what you think and if you have any suggestions!

The Mendeley Web Importer has just been given a facelift

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As you may know, the Mendeley Web Importer lets you effortlessly import articles from the web into your Mendeley library. It is a great tool for saving your research while you browse the many supported sites for later reading and citing.

web-importerWe’re happy to announce that a new version of the Web Importer has just been released with a much-improved user interface.  Additionally, as the Web Importer does not display in a popup window any more, you no longer have to worry about fiddling with your browser’s popup blocker settings.

If you already use the Web Importer, you will see the new updated interface right away (unless you have a really old version, in which case, you will be prompted to reinstall the Web Importer). New users can follow the simple installation instructions, and see how it really makes importing articles a breeze.

You can also save multiple articles at once from supported search-results pages such as Google Scholar, PubMed, Science Direct, and more.

multiple-results

This is going to be the first of the many improvements we will be bringing to the Web Importer over the next few months. Some other features we’ll be looking at will include improved full-text download support, browser extensions, mobile support, and wider support for different sites in general. As always, we really want to hear your feedback, so leave a comment below!

Mendelife – Meet Steve Dennis

Alice Bonasio

Steve Dennis

 

This week in our series of blogs about Team Mendeley we find out a bit more about our Lead Interaction Designer/iOS Product Manager Steve Dennis. When Mendeley was looking to expand its design team 3 years ago, our founders Victor Henning and Paul Föckler  approached Steve, who had moved to the UK from New Zealand just a month before… “they found my personal site through a science-hack-day I’d registered for. I started less than a week after first meeting Victor and Paul” he recalls.

Have things changed in Mendeley since you started working here?
Yes, for the better.  Everything is a lot more structured than it was 3 years ago, which allows for better planning, and ultimately better products for our users which is what matters.  Also free breakfast on Mondays is a pretty great addition!

What’s the best thing about coming to work at Mendeley?
Interacting with our users every day is what keeps me going.  Our users are friendly and very passionate about the product.

Do you have any pets? If not, what would be your ideal one?
If I had the option, it would be a baby monkey.  Riding backwards on a pig optional, but preferred.

What is the one website you can’t live without?
Is it ok to say Mendeley.com? Cause it actually pays for all my food…  Otherwise Twitter.

When you were growing up, what did you want to be?
A rubbish collector.  Then a stunt-man.  Then a computer tech.  So I became a Designer.

If you could acquire one extra skill or talent, what would that be?
Backend programming.  It would be amazing to be able to develop small product ideas in my spare time.

What book are you reading at the moment and why?
Re-reading Indy Young’s ‘Mental Models’, because it’s always good to keep this stuff fresh.

What would you change about the world if you could change one thing?
I’d make burgers healthy enough to be eaten every day, and plentiful enough for that to be sustainable.

What was the first record you ever bought?
Garbage’s first album.

What music is on your iPod at the moment?
First ten bands via shuffle: Machine Head, Ling Tosite Sigure, Beck, Puscifer, Sikth, Klone, Deftones, Three Trapped Tigers, Devin Townsend Project, and Twelve Foot Ninja.

Favourite food/drink?
The blood of my enemies… or maybe pizza.  I’ll go with pizza.

Your greatest vice?
Coke Zero.

Favourite film?
Fight Club.

Favourite place in the world?
Bed.  Location irrelevant.

Now for a serious one worthy of the Mendeley vision: If you could give unlimited funding and resources to one area of research, what would it be?
Any area that furthers space exploration, which, to be fair, is wide enough to touch on most research areas in some way.