We have been working on improvements to the importing of information from your existing libraries and documents into Mendeley for our next release.  Highlights include:

Automatic import of PDF files from selected folders:

The feature most requested by our current Mendeley users is support for importing from whole folders (rather than having to select individual files) and automatically monitoring folders for new PDFs and any other format supported by Mendeley.

The next release will include this feature across all 3 platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux)

Improved display of time since import:

In citation and table view, the time since a document was imported is now shown and you can now sort the document list by this field.  The ‘Recently Added’ folder now sorts by date added by default.

Smoother import:

The user interface is now more responsive during large import operations and the total import/automatic extraction progress is now shown in a single progress bar at the bottom of the screen.

Improved Bibtex import and export:

• We now remember the citation key and document type from the imported Bibtex library and use it when exporting modified documents back to Bibtex, regardless of whether Mendeley has its own equivalent document type.
• Better handling of the various author, editor and translator name formats supported by Bibtex
• Support for cross-references and @string entries

Improvements to the RIS and EndNote importers and exporters:

Mendeley is now more tolerant in its input handling of these filetypes and is able to import documents to Mendeley and then export back to that format again with improved fidelity.

If you have any questions or comments about importing into or exporting data from Mendeley then let us know!

As has been mentioned before, we’re currently hard at work on version 0.6 which is an almost total rewrite of the previous version. We’ve cleaned up the database structure to make it easier for us to maintain and add cool new features.

Of course, we want all your existing data to be kept totally intact. And here’s where you can help…

To help us ensure this goes smoothly, you can send us your mendeley.s3db database which you’ll find here:

• Windows Vista:
  

  C:\Users\<Your Name>\AppData\Local\Mendeley Ltd\Mendeley\

• Windows XP:
  

  C:\Documents and Settings\<Your Name>\Local Settings\Application Data\Mendeley Ltd\Mendeley

• Linux:
  

  /home/<your name>/.local/share/data/Mendeley Ltd./Mendeley/

• MacOS:
  

  Macintosh HD -> Users/<your name>/Library/Application Support/Mendeley/

We’ll use the databases to test that data is migrated across successfully.

Please send your mendeley.s3db files to: steve.ridout@mendeley.com

Thanks!

(If you don’t want to send us your data - that’s fine. After you upgrade to the new version it will transfer your data on your local machine. Right now, we’re just after data for testing.)

I think I learned something today! As a non-software engineer, I was always puzzled beyond measure when I asked our developers to change just a minor interface detail - such as, “shift this icon up a few pixels, change the color of this frame” - and was told that this would take days upon days of work.

Today, Rob explained to me what the reason was. An interface element that you see on the screen, e.g. a toolbar, might look like it’s drawn up from a single, coherent piece of code. In reality, though, it could be cobbled together in the background from many different parts of the code that don’t have anything to do with each other. Thus, changing one pixel on the screen could require a rewrite of two huge portions of code to make them fit together.

So I said, “ah - now I get it. It’s like shadow sculptures!”. If you look at this picture, I think you’ll understand my point:

Shadow sculpture by Tim Noble and Sue Webster

If you’re a software engineer, of course this is old news. But I found it an interesting analogy! Nevertheless, as Mike pointed out in the previous post, our upcoming release (beta 0.6.0) has absolutely shiny, beautiful, well-structured code under its hood when you shine a light on it!

New About Dialogue and it’s even closable on Mac! How on earth did we get to this point?

Let me tell you a story…

Since my last post the Mendeley Desktop team has been very busy indeed!

Our “rewrite of some of the internal Mendeley code” has turned into a rewrite of almost all the code.

Why are we rewriting our code you may ask? Like many other small companies, Mendeley started with their software being written by external contractors. By the time I started in May 2008 a significant amount of code had been written which was then ported to Linux and Mac. What started life as a prototype had turned into a product which was then released to the world when we hit open beta. This means we lacked a solid architecture, any real documentation, coding standards or unit testing.

In the past few months the team has rewritten basically everything except the metadata extraction and the Citation Style Language parser (although these two have both been improved also and will probably be incrementally rewritten for further releases). As a result, we now have a much smaller, easier to read, unit-tested, documented, faster and just plain better codebase by any software engineering metric you would care to throw at it. My slightly obsessive insistence that the team meets the coding standards document and our continuous integration tool has resulted in a far higher quality product.

You might be asking why on earth you should care about everything I said above. Well the answers are in the features/bugfixes that you’ll see in the new release:

• Better performance and lower memory usage
• Adding sub-groups
• Folder monitoring
• Encrypted data transfer
• Only uses standard HTTP ports (i.e. 80 and 443) and uses your system proxy settings
• Less interface slowdown on network/import operations
• A closable “About” window on Mac, as featured at the top of this post (No, I’m not joking. To close it in 0.5.9 or below, press Escape)
• More native and more usable user interface
• More traditional Mac packaging

Anyway, I hope that is enough to get you excited about the next release. We will be retaining feature parity with 0.5.9 (i.e. no features currently existing in 0.5.9. will be dropped in 0.6.0) and 0.6.0 will fix a lot of outstanding bugs with 0.5.9.

Mendeley Desktop 0.6.0: Coming soon!

…besides improving the next version of Mendeley: Today I noticed that two particularly nice messages were pinned to the whiteboard in the developer room. So your encouraging comments are definitely noticed and appreciated - thanks!

(click for larger view)

The very first steps towards a plugin for Microsoft Word are done and we thought we’d give you an early preview. It’s the first alpha and has some known bugs, but most of the time it does the job.

Known issues (which will be fixed in the next releases) are:

• Large download filesize (14.4MB)
• Several Microsoft run-time environments are being installed before the Word plugin is installed
• The plugin will only work for the user who installed it
• Removing documents from your Mendeley library which you have cited in your Word document causes blank citations
• Standard undo doesn’t work as expected after Mendeley action (eg. changing the citation style of bibliography: undo changes back each entry one by one instead of all at once)

You can download the plugin on our download page. We would really appreciate your feedback and bug-reports to improve the plugin for our next release!

Here at Mendeley we’re all working towards version 0.6.0 which will be our next major release in November with a focus on stability and scalability, many interface tweaks, and some nice new features. Version 0.5.9 is a step in this direction but is still based on the old codebase. It will be available via auto-update - if your are using Mendeley Desktop v.0.5.8 just start the application and it will automatically detect the update.

Version 0.5.9 has many bug fixes, some new features (e.g. PDF file renaming according to a chosen schema like “Author - Year - Title - Journal.pdf”), and it will hopefully be joined by an alpha version of a Word plugin in the coming days. See the complete change list below:

Change list:

• New: Auto file renaming
• New: Account usage dialog
• Fix: Speedup opening of edit metadata dialog
• Fix: Possible crash when clicking keep document button (Linux)
• Fix: Size of edit metadata window
• Fix: New documents not appearing if references dragged into my library
• Fix: Possible crash when removing documents from online library
• Fix: Crash when linking an image PDF to manually added metadata
• Fix: Table view dragging not working properly
• Fix: Initial position of edit metadata dialog
• Fix: Reference list in table view
• Fix: Possible crash when closing application if uploads or downloads are in progress
• Fix: Changes to references not appearing immediately when closing edit metadata dialog
• Fix: Problems with shared groups syncing
• Fix: Position of shared group admin buttons in table view
• Fix: Fix PDF being locked after metadata extraction (Windows)
• Fix: Remove debugging output on startup (Linux)
• Fix: Text color of deletion suggested text in table view
• Fix: Tags, notes fields and reference list not being enabled when selecting documents in the library if Mendeley starts up in table view
• Fix: Slight improvements of the citation style
• Fix: Email automatically set for trac tickets
• Fix: Reduced Mendeley power usage while idle

We are happy to announce yet another addition to our web team:

——

Pankaj Naug is yet another strong addition to the Mendeley web team. It took him more than a month to write this text since he likes writing code more than writing about himself.

As a recent member of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, I’m marveling at their events calendar which strikes me as hands down the best entertainment programme in London (if you’re into scientific talks, that is). Two of the four lectures I’ll be attending in the coming weeks are part of the members-only, black-tie “Friday Evening Discourses” that were started by Michael Faraday in 1826 - isn’t that amazing?

One of the talks that I’ll unfortunately have to miss (because I’m travelling to Germany) is this one next Monday, 20th October:

Murder in Mayfair

London is an epicentre of medical advancement, from Edward Jenner’s pioneering work on vaccination to the world’s first heart and lung transplant. But London is also a hotbed of disease and demise and this event will take a look at the notorious murders and strange deaths in the capital. [...].

London has a rich and gruesome history of untimely demises. From the recent past we have the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, only a few minutes’ walk from the Royal Institution, who was killed by a radioactive teapot. 18 years earlier, Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov was dispatched with a poison tipped umbrella by Waterloo Bridge.

Or how about this one on 4th November:

The Making of Mr. Gray’s Anatomy

Gray’s Anatomy is probably one of the most iconic scientific books ever published: an illustrated textbook of anatomy that is still a household name 150 years since its first edition, known for its rigorously scientific text, and masterful illustrations as beautiful as they are detailed. The Making of Mr Gray’s Anatomy tells the story of the creation of this remarkable book, and the individuals who made it happen.

Wonderful, isn’t it? So, in the spirit of peppering this blog with Edo period, medieval, and Japanese monster anatomy, here are some more highly rigorous anatomic drawings I just came across:

Via Gizmodo.