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.)

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!

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.

On Saturday, October 11th, 2008 between 12:01AM and 6:00AM (BST) our hosting provider will be moving our servers to a new data centre, so Mendeley Servers will be down for a couple of hours during this time. It shouldn’t take longer than 3 or 4 hours. Apologies!

Long time no blog, indeed. I had wanted to write more about the numerous workshops and conferences I attended, but I didn’t get around to it because we’ve been very busy here at Mendeley HQ. Among other things, we’re planning a new release of Mendeley Desktop soon. Without giving too much away, it will include a few long-awaited and highly-requested new features. Stay tuned!

So I’ve been looking for a way to sum up my recent travels. With total disregard for Blaise Pascal’s famous quote “I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time”, I concluded that Haikus might be a solution. Here goes:

In Soton I sleep
on Ben’s futon which fails, my
talk is all woozy

Said futon

Listening to Yaroslav’s talk

Moving on - my Science in the 21st Century haiku:

Waterloo WiFi
breaks during the demo yet
enthusiasm wins

Chad Orzel on Newtonian vs. Galileian science - our former landlord Michael Palin making another unexpected appearance

Collective mind-mapping exercise devised by Alex Pang

Panel with Steve Weinstein, Harry Collins, David Kaiser, Lee Smolin and impressively bescribbled blackboards

In short, I had a marvelous week at the Perimeter Institute. Thanks to Sabine for organizing such a great conference, to Mark and Eva for the many inspiring conversations, to Jen and Michael for inviting me over to dinner, to Chad, Simeon, John and Cameron for the nice evening at the brewery, to Katy for offering to help us develop data visualizations, to David and Paul for sharing their insights into the current US presidential election (and Paul giving me one of his Analog SF magazines so I’d have something to read on the plane), to Gerry for sharing his thoughts on social networking (and looking like Albert Einstein), and to Hassan for inviting me to contribute an essay about reputation systems in science to his upcoming book.

Firstly, thanks to all of you who have filed feature requests or flagged up bugs on our bug tracker, your feedback has been really useful.

After thinking about how to best accommodate your needs we’ve deciding to do a rewrite of some of the internal Mendeley code in order to get it running snappier and work better with larger libraries.

As a result of some work Fred has done on his music player we’ve decided that using Qt’s MVC framework maps extremely well to our needs and should bring us far greater performance when dealing with large libraries as well as keeping the code cleaner, better separated and making it much easier to write unit tests with decent coverage levels.

So where are we with this at the moment? Currently we have implemented most of the new non-GUI code with just our local/remote database code to finish. For those interested in this sort of thing, we are 100% documented with Doxygen (both private and public members) and have every class’s method unit-tested with around 85% test coverage.

Without revealing too much you should be excited about this and some of the new features that will see the light of day around the same time as the new, better-performing internal code. This will hopefully mean we can feasible support much larger collections than currently with a slimmer/faster application and quicker bug turnaround with less regressions than our previous releases.

Get excited, I am!

This release mainly includes bugfixes and interface changes pointed out and requested by our members. You can download Mendeley Desktop 0.5.8 here.

Current issues on Windows only

• Mendeley Desktop on Windows will claim to be the latest version. If it is version 0.5.7 or below, the message is a lie. We told it to tell the truth from now on.

So what has been fixed exactly since version 0.5.6?

• Fixed order of authors for an article
• Fixed high CPU usage on Windows when shared groups are visible
• Fixed several crashes which could occur in the client when responding to notification of upload/download errors from server
• Fixed authors edit field in Edit Metadata dialog being very small if there were a large number of authors
• Fixed auto-update on Windows XP/Vista if Mendeley was installed with administrator priviledges but run without them (mainly affects Vista users)
• Fixed several possible crashes in shared groups synchronisation
• Fixed problem where documents uploaded to both shared groups and ‘Publications I’ve Authored’ would appear twice in ‘Publications I’ve Authored’
• Fixed ‘Edit Metadata’ and ‘Remove Metadata’ buttons not being disabled if an article was selected and then hidden as a result of changing the filter
• Fixed articles deleted by a non-admin user in a shared group not appearing as ’suggested for deletion’ (with strike-through text) in other group members’ clients
• Fixed possible problem where wrong documents would be downloaded when syncing from online library
• Fixed documents uploaded to ‘Publications I’ve Authored’ not appearing if the document was already in the user’s Online Library
• Fixed grey text in Tags and Notes edit fields not disappearing immediately when clicking in them
• Fixed appearance problems with inverted themes (esp. under Linux)
• Fixed tags and notes emblem being shown next to articles which have no tags or notes after editing an article on the server
• Fixed Edit Metadata dialog prompting the user to save changes even if no changes had been made

What’s new?

• Faster startup
• Faster handling of library lists containing many articles
• More responsive user interface during login and up/download
• Faster synchronisation between Mendeley Desktop and Mendeley Web after clicking ‘login’ button
• Faster upload and download of articles from Mendeley Web
• Faster re-drawing of library list
• Faster document deletion from server
• Added ‘Sync’ button to refresh contents of Mendeley Web groups and Shared Groups documents instantly
• Added ‘Tutorial’ dialog which appears on first start to provide a simple introduction to using Mendeley
• Highlight document group under mouse when dragging an article from one group to another via the library tree
• Show progress during PDF upload
• Smooth per-pixel scrolling of library list
• Display list of changes when an update for the client has been found (available from version 0.5.8 onwards)
• More responsive user interface during document deletion
• Prevent duplicate imports of PDFs into My Library
• And many more minor changes…

So quite a bit has improved in the last three weeks but there is a lot left to be done. Even though Mendeley Desktop has become more responsive and quicker - speed is still our main priority. In the coming weeks major refactoring work is taking place which will allow much faster handling of thousands of library entries and faster communication to the Mendeley server. While doing this we will try to keep on fixing major bugs and implementing features.

Thank you to everyone who has been testing Mendeley and reported bugs and requested features. It has been a great help.